So this has got to be one of the silliest things I've ever done in a Video Game...
View attachment 50919
Hutton Orbital is a remote outpost that orbits Eden, which in turn orbits
Proxima Centauri. Proxima Centauri is part of the Alpha Centauri system which is the closest system to our sun. Now in Elite, when you jump to system you always end up arriving next to the most massive body in that system. Unfortunately this can mean that in systems with more than one star you can end up a long way, sometimes a very, very long way away from where you want to get to. In the case of Hutton Orbital this long, long way is 0.22 LY which translates to a journey time of ninety (90) minutes of real time in supercruise!
Last month Frontier set up a competition to create a rare good. These are commodities that are generally available in small quantities, but can be sold for a huge profit if you take them far enough away from their point of purchase. There are a few parts of the galaxy where a number of these rare goods can be found in close proximity and they tend to be a magnet for scum and villainy. Anyway, some bright spark thought that it would be funny to have a rare good at Hutton and that the way to make it would be for the players to transport scrap there, the most worthless commodity in the game. Even more bizzarely the community then voted this idea as better than nine other far more sensible new rare goods. This new good would be called the Hutton Mug, made out of the scrap from foolhardy spacefarers who ventured out to Hutton Orbital and forgot to top up the fuel tank of their ships...
I'm not entirely sure what possessed me, but I thought I might as well take part just to say I've been there once. In the end I went eight or nine times and enjoyed quite a bit of banter with other players en route and at Hutton Orbital itself. Fortunately once you've got your ship pointed in the right direction you don't actually have to sit at the controls for 90 minutes. I got my ship's computer to knock up some very realistic simulations of early 21st century chores while I was travelling, I think I even got a lawn mown...
There was a great community spirit about the whole, incredibly silly, escapade for the most part. Some of the players set up a
radio station specifically for the goal and some players even ran in convoys from one of the closer scrap yards. There was also a surprising amount of civility when it came to queuing at Hutton Orbital, clearly a British game..! I said the spirit was great for the most part. Towards the end of the goal (we had a week to transport as much scrap to Hutton as possible, the more scrap that was delivered the more mugs would be available to buy) one of the player pirate factions decided to piss in the bath tub. They declared a blockade of Hutton and started to attack traders who were trying to deliver the scrap. So this one of those moments where you have to stop and think. We've got a video game where people are flying 90 minutes of real time to deliver scrap, probably having to wait and queue at the other end. Then we have other players who are flying 90 minutes just to kill and destroy other players, and so waste that other players 90 minutes. Ahh, the human spirit. Anyway, the didn't catch me
