A pair of Elite: Dangerous pilots have reached "the real galactic roof," a point 1884 light years above the "galactic plane" that has previously never been seen. They were able to accomplish the feat thanks to a newly-added feature that enables players to temporarily boost their ships' jump drives by flying through plumes of energy emanating from white dwarf and neutron stars. Although more accurately, it was due to a mistake in how that feature was implemented.
Flying through the plumes was meant to confer a 25 percent boost in engine power, but because of a "number mixup," as Frontier's Zac Antonaci explained in the E:D forums, it ended up being "way more powerful than was intended," to the tune of a 300 percent boost. That led to discussions about setting up "neutron super-highways" throughout the galaxy, but that got bogged down, as group efforts sometimes do, and so Dr. Kalii put his own plan into action.
"After perusing the galaxy map for awhile I found a potential route to a very interesting place. It just needed a pretty big jump range, about 40 to 50 light years, from what I could tell," he explains in the video. He purchased an Anaconda, tricked it out appropriately, and then roped his friend Erimus into the adventure. "To cut a long story short, we made it. We reached a place that has only been dreamed of until today."
It's a great story, but what's really cool are the new possibilities for gameplay that it unlocks. As Dr. Kaii says in the video, the erroneous boost is "ushering in a new era of exploration" in the Elite universe, and should be treated as such. "It marks a change in the approach to exploration. Now, many places are unlocked, but if you go, you can't come back."
Fortunately for those intrepid explorers who want to boldly go where no one was gone before, Frontier is paying attention. When the mistake first came to light, Antonaci said it would be corrected in the next beta, but executive producer Michael Brookes later said that "after reading the feedback and much discussion," white dwarf stars would be reduced to a 50 percent boost but neutron stars would, at least for now, be left at 300 percent.
Thanks, RPS.
