Elite Dangerous 026 Col 285 Sector WL-L c8-40
Read Hub - Verne's Garden - Hardy's Keep - May Enterprise - Israel Vision - Wolfe Sanctuary
The Grand Tour, PAGE 26
NOTE: All 138 facilities built in this system are listed (and shown) in order of distance from the sun. At least, according to the in-game architect’s view. There's a total of slightly over 18 hours of video, so the video, and the descriptions, are broken into smaller portions across multiple posts.
Some descriptions were written by myself, some with the help of AI. I've personally edited all of them, so if you must blame someone, blame me. :^)
10J Orbital 00
Read Hub
Scientific Outpost (Prometheus)
DOCK: Medium
Read Hub celebrates the pure and timeless act of reading itself — the gateway through which imagination, knowledge, and wonder flow.
In the vast universe of science fiction and beyond, reading has always been humanity’s most powerful technology. It allows minds to travel faster than light, experience impossible worlds, and connect with ideas across centuries. From the earliest pulp magazines to the greatest novels, reading has been the foundation upon which science fiction was built and shared.
Reading launched my curious young mind onto a lifetime journey of enjoyment, learning, and refuge. When Covid took my mother-in-law in 2021, it also took my ability to read and comprehend at a glance, plus the ability to visualize full color and and limited motion images while reading.
Mom is memorialized in this system (and another) as Georgie Girl.
Reading, once effortless, has been a struggle since Covid. At first I had to sound out each word with the next word, string them together and try to find meaning. With a job at the newspaper focused on advertising, legal notices, and obituaries… not being able to read quickly, and with comprehension, was an issue.
I began skipping lunches, working late off the clock, all the while slowly losing ground as I was trying to re-learn everything. Not only work suffered, but also entertainment. I was out for a month with Covid, wasn’t sure I’d live, not sure if I cared.
Afterward, aside from losing my skill for reading, it was impossible to play my favorite games, Elite Dangerous being at the top of the list. In the course of ONE month, it all became overwhelmingly incomprehensible.
For several years, my reading was on the level of simple point-of-view stories designed for ‘young readers.’ My memory and cognitive skills were severely limited, and trying to read was depressing.
Rather than a pleasure, it was a constant reminder of what I’d lost. Couldn’t give it up, but had to carefully choose… simple… plots and stories. It was like starting all over again in school.
We all talk about Elite being a grind… but the real grind personally was the years spent trying to relearn lost skills.
One of my happiest moments was the day I opened up an August Derleth anthology and realized I could read his convoluted stories and follow the plot once again. Slowly, having to re-read many sentences and paragraphs, but that was a huge landmark. (I mentioned this in the Derleth segment also. Bear with me please. Hitting that landmark was the first time I had real hope in years.)
An even happier occasion occurred in late 2024; I’d improved enough that it occurred to me maybe I could relearn how to play Elite Dangerous.
I was right, but it took from End-of-October 2024 to February of 2025. It involved writing in-depth notes, creating spreadsheets, studying, forgetting, learning, and re-learning things that used to be second nature.
I still forget things too easily. If I don’t play daily, basic things fade away quickly. It helps to work on one specific loop at a time. For months now, that loop has been Colonization. I keep copious notes and guides open in a journaling program (Obsidian, it’s been essential.) My favorite thing is to write a personalized short guide to anything I do, and keep those open in tabs, like a browser. Doing a detailed system and planetary scan is a great example. I can’t store that in memory. Every time I need to do a detailed scan again, I have to follow my guide. It’s a bit overwhelming, but anything that can be done step by step at my own pace, I can generally grasp long enough to use my notes.
Monique is very proud of my determination to read, and keep improving. She also believes, as I do, that re-learning how to play Elite, and doing so daily, has been a major reason I’ve had so much improvement.
Again, can’t say enough good things about Obsidian. It’s not just journaling software. It allows links between one note and another, like online links from one site to another. Over the past 3 years, I’ve written (or copied, at times) over 5,000 pages of notes, memories, guides, and interlinked them thoroughly. It’s like a neural network map of my brain. Obviously, there are gaps that are just gone; but if a memory comes to mind, it’s important to stop everything and write it down before it’s gone again.
Bit by bit, I’m getting back things that were lost. And with the links, there’s a logical structure so re-finding something in my notes is usually pretty simple.
I’ll be turning 66 next month (Correction, I HAVE turned 66.) By now, memory/cognitive issues from Covid are inextricably blended with simple “getting older” issues. Things are slowly becoming more difficult again.
Elite helps keep my mind active, but there’s always the fear that someday the servers will go down for one final time, and not come back. Either that, or I’ll finally hit the point where the ability to understand, remember, and keep playing Elite will fade.
In an effort to create lasting memories of the fun I’ve had playing Elite, and the personal progress it's meant, I spent the past 6 months colonizing this system – Col 285 Sector WL-L c8-40. Nearly another month just creating the videos of my "Grand Tour."
And now, writing this station-by-station guide to what each name means to me. Grok and Gemini (my 2 favorite AIs) have helped tremendously. My writing, like my reading, has suffered. But it's also improved. Some of these descriptions are completely mine. Many from the AIs I've heavily edited to put my spin on it. And some... have only had minimal editing. It depends a lot on my mental energy.
If I get stubborn and keep working after energy for concentration and focus is gone, then I tend to let Grok or Gemini slide by with minimal editing or make very bad mistakes.
You can probably tell those times. I usually can.
It’s unlikely anybody besides myself will read this incredibly long, boring series of blog pages. That’s okay. This is part of my plan, to help keep my personal memories of creating something meaningful. If someone reads it, that’s cool; but it’s not essential to the plan.
When this write-up is done, I’m going to take a Grand Tour of the entire system. All 138 facilities. I’ll be using a Cobra Mk V, custom-built for the job. With the Cobra, no matter how small the facility, if it has docking, I’ll be able to land. The entire process will be recorded on video, in sequence from nearest the sun, to farthest.
NOTE: Already built the Cobra, already took the Grand Tour, make the videos, edited the videos, wrote the text... At this moment, I'm still uploading the videos, assembling the blogs, and doing this last pass for the editing. The project is nearly over...
The videos will go on YouTube, not so others can see my boring adventures… but so I’ll always have access to these memories, even if something catastrophic were to happen to my computer or hard drives. These bios will go here in my blog, to link with the matching videos.
That, in itself, will be enough to entertain and occupy me for quite some time. And when it’s done, I’ll have a bank of videos and blogs, that will always be available from any connected computer, to remember. When Elite as a game, or my ability to play it, is gone, I’ll always have a reminder of the incredible fun and amazing recovery that Elite made possible.
READ HUB is for every reader who stayed up late turning pages, every dreamer who found refuge or inspiration in words, and every curious mind that used stories as a launchpad into the stars. And for everybody who struggles in one way or another, found escape, and hope for the future, in reading.
10J Surface 00
Verne’s Garden
Agriculture Settlement Small (Consus)
DOCK: Small
See Verne Outpost, 10D Surface 00, for the full description.
10J Surface 01
Hardy’s Keep (was Corner)
Military Settlement Small (Ioke)
DOCK: Medium
David A. Hardy (born 1936) is the longest-established professional space artist in human history. Decades before space probes sent back high-resolution photos of distant worlds, Hardy was mathematically calculating what planetary surfaces would look like and painting them with stunning, realistic precision.
His vibrant astronomical scenes graced the covers of sci-fi magazines like Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Hardy collaborated with astronomer Patrick Moore to create illustrated astronomy books like Challenge of the Stars (1972). He even designed the iconic mechanical Martian tripod art for early iterations of The War of the Worlds.
Hardy's lifetime of work was so vital to how humanity visualizes the cosmos that in 2003, Asteroid 1998 SB32 was officially named "Davidhardy" in his honor.
11 Orbital 00
May Enterprise
Satellite Installation (Angelia)
DOCK: NONE
Julian May was an absolute force in speculative fiction, celebrated for her ability to seamlessly fuse hard science fiction, human evolutionary biology, and mythic fantasy into highly structured narratives.
Her career in the genre began remarkably early when, as a teenager in 1950, she wrote a brilliant short story titled Dune Roller that was eventually adapted into a feature film. Despite this early breakout success, she stepped away from writing fiction for over two decades to focus on editing and researching for technical encyclopedias, an experience that gave her an incredible baseline of scientific knowledge. When she finally returned to writing fiction in the late 1970s, she used that research background to construct her masterpiece, the Saga of Pliocene Exile, followed by its brilliant companion series, the Galactic Milieu.
In her fictional universe, a small percentage of humanity began to develop powerful latent mental abilities like telepathy, telekinesis, and precognition. Rather than treating these as magical superpowers, May analyzed them with the precision of a biologist, exploring how a species transitioning into a telepathically linked society would suffer sociological friction and political upheaval. Her books detailed the bureaucratic and corporate infrastructure that grew around these psychic factions, showing how profit-and-power based organizations would abuse the people with abilities, and the power.
Her worldbuilding mapped out how humanity's chaotic mental evolution eventually caught the attention of the Galactic Milieu, a co-equal federation of highly advanced alien species who had been quietly monitoring Earth. May dedicated thousands of pages the intricate diplomatic, philosophical, and economic realities of a young, rough-around-the-edges human race overwhelmed by technologically superior alien civilizations. She showed that the true challenge of exploring the stars wasn't just building the physical rockets, but adapting the collective human consciousness to survive the scale of an already populated galaxy.
11 Orbital 01
Israel Vision
Communication Installation (Alethia)
DOCK: NONE
Dr. Werner Israel is an absolute heavyweight of real-world physics. His contributions to gravitational theory make him one of the foundational architects of modern astrophysics.
Werner Israel revolutionized the scientific understanding of black holes by proving the "No-Hair Theorem," which mathematically demonstrated that a collapsing star sheds all its complex irregularities as it crosses the event horizon.
He showed that no matter how chaotic, jagged, or magnetic a star is before its death, the resulting black hole becomes an object of supreme, mathematically pristine simplicity, definable only by its mass, spin, and electrical charge. He famously described the surface of a black hole as being as smooth and structurally uniform as a soap bubble.
This breakthrough completely altered how physicists map the geometry of space-time, transforming black holes from theoretical anomalies into predictable celestial entities.
Later in his career, Israel collaborated extensively with Stephen Hawking on advanced relativistic thermodynamics and cosmic string dynamics. His equations mapped out the physical conditions hidden deep inside event horizons, analyzing the inner geometric boundaries where space and time break down completely.
...Kind of puts our traditional trip to Sagittarius A* in a whole new light, doesn’t it?
11 Orbital 02
Wolfe Sanctuary
Communication Installation (Soter)
DOCK: NONE
Gene Wolfe (1931–2019) bridges hard-science industrial engineering with deep-space narrative mystery.
Before he became a full-time novelist, Gene Wolfe was a highly accomplished mechanical engineer who worked for decades in corporate manufacturing labs.
He is most famous in industrial history for helping design the complex mass-production machinery used to manufacture Pringles potato chips.
Think about that for a moment... his work gave us... enough Pringles to feed the world!
This deep engineering background gave his writing a unique, ruthlessly logical viewpoint; he understood exactly how gears, metals, and industrial processes worked. When he transitioned into writing fiction, he used that same mindset to create masterworks like The Book of the New Sun, a sweeping narrative set on a dying Earth millions of years in our future.
Wolfe’s writing completely redefined the boundaries of speculative fiction by introducing the concept of the complex, unreliable narrator. His characters rarely understand the true nature of the deep-space machinery or alien artifacts they encounter, leaving it to the reader to figure it out. His stories frequently feature generation ships, ancient automated resource hubs, and corporate space-farers in an indifferent, ancient universe.
