I'm a 36 year old IT Systems Administrator by the name of Chris in the SW Suburbs of the Minneapolis/St Paul area in MN.
I'm married with three kids (eleven if you count the furry kind), with an obsession for American made mid-engined two seat plastic sports cars manufactured in the mid-80s.
I've been playing Elite for a couple of months now ever since someone gifted the game to me in January.
I have a lot of experience with space/flight sims starting with Descent and working my way through the classics such as Tachyon: The Fringe and the Wing Commander series.
As an IT Guy, I tend to run a bit more of a business grade system at home with my computers and networking. While my main PC is capable of gaming, it is a bit dated in hardware, limiting me to a slightly laggy 720p 32" central display for my Elite gaming. I can blame the rest of my Cisco ASA/Aerohive/VMWare based network for my PC limitations.
Regardless, I am an avid gamer, playing everything from Minecraft, TF2 and Cities Skylines to tabletops, card games (Cards Against Humanity anyone?) and various NERF war type battles with my kids.
I enjoy Elite:Dangerous, but dislike running purely in Solo mode.
I do not have the skills to battle head to head against other players, and got tired of being interdicted by player pirates in Open mode during my initial introduction to the game.
When I discovered Mobius, I joined up immediately. I have been playing in the group for a month or so, but only now have I signed up for the forum.
For the last week or so, I've been running with Roxas, Tranq and a few others doing trade runs as a wing.
With my little Asp's teeny little cargo capacity, trading with the big haulers these guys have has been very helpful to me.
I'm about 5 million on the positive side of broke, and have a long ways to go before I can upgrade to anything bigger than the Asp, but I'm having a lot of fun with this group of guys.
My flight setup currently consists of an ancient SideWinder Force Feedback 2 USB and an EDTracker with the MPU-9150 unit.
I LOVE the EDTracker, but have been having minor issues with it lately. I attribute those issues to the computer chair I am using, which is made from a seat from the aforementioned plastic mid-80s sports cars, which have speakers in the headrests. The magnets are goofing with the EDTracker's calibration.
Voice Attack, along with Astra is part of my arsenal. I just need to figure out how to make Astra less "chatty". She interrupts all the time with various "May I speak?" messages. It is kind of a pain in the backside.
Recently, a friend directed me to an Arduino project that allows me to convert my Arduino MEGA into a 256 Button/Toggle/Axis joystick. Because of this, I'm in the middle of building a flight cockpit for the game. I haven't made much progress beyond a proof of concept with about 15 buttons/toggles and a couple of analog sticks for manual thruster control, and a quick home-made hotas throttle control.
When I get the funds, I'll continue with my build and start documenting everything.
My hope is that the E:D devs will add the ability to manually address nearly every command in the game, such as Wing Beacons, etc.
Whenever I'm in the Teamspeak server, I'm in the game.
Look me up and add me.
CMDR: Syn Thesis
