Ludicrous! The Drakhyr Rally

“A challenge for those who go. A dream for those who stay behind”

Thierry Sabine

Thierry Sabine had a vision. After becoming lost in the desert during a much smaller rally, he thought it would be a great idea to run a 10,000km race through some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet. Terrain that would try it’s utmost best, and often succeed to ruin and destroy any vehicle driven on it. Atmospheric conditions more than any driver can bear, stupidly hot during the day, and freezing cold at night. Hazards that can cause serious injury or even death. And the racers had to put up with all this extreme risk and serious discomfort for the best part of two weeks as the distances involved were ludicrous.

A race where just finishing feels like winning.

Yet the scenery was spectacular!

But this isn’t a rally blog, it’s a gaming/music blog, and only the game Elite Dangerous at that. So, how are we going to create a race which in any way at all mimics the ludicrousness of the Dakar Rally? What we need is someone crazy enough to create a long, gruelling, difficult race where just finishing feels like winning. What we need is our very own Thierry Sabine.

Well, we have someone very like that!

And his name is Alec Turner.

Welcome the the Drakhyr Rally!

Soon after the Trailblazers update became available for Elite Dangerous Turner began colonising the system of the Hyades Sector ZU-Y d68 system. What he ultimately wanted was to place two planetary surface settlements or ports close enough together as to make it viable to race SRVs between them. He hit a big snag, however. The closest distance you can place two settlements together on a landable body when colonising a system is 200km. A little too far, he thought, to expect players to enjoy driving between them as it would take the average player three to four hours of monotonous frustrating gameplay to complete. Surely only SRV drivers with masterful flyving skills would bother to even attempt it, and there are too few of those.

“Hey! Wait! What the Braben is flyving?” I hear many of you wail?

Ok! Well, it’s where we take a Scarab, as it can’t really be done with a scorpion, and only really on a suitably low mass planetary body (around 0.1g). It is the art of taking great leaps forward in your scarab and using the time in the air to utilise the scarab’s thrusters to accelerate. Each bounce should, where possible, take advantage of any small hill peaks or rocky humps to use as a “kicker” to help launch the scarab, helping its thrusters gain further altitude. The more time the scarab spends in the air, the more acceleration it can accumulate. The harder the scarab comes down on the ground, the more stable the bounce will be.

Of course, this is quite a tricky skill to master. Scarabs are not easy to drive under such low gravity. The probability of spinning out on any bounce is very high. And if a kicker isn’t hit perfectly, it can cause the scarab to bounce directly up rather than at a nice 45 degree angle to the ground, thereby completely negating any acceleration you might have accumulated. But, if done well, and consistently over a dozen or so bounces, a scarab can reach speeds in excess of 200m/s

Yeah, you read me right. That’s as fast as some spaceships! Of course, the risk of complete obliteration is very, very high at these speeds so it pays to go considerably slower but still, once mastered, it is quite a glorious way to travel.

And that’s the thing – once mastered. Judging when you’re going to hit a kicker just right takes experience, lots of experience, as does being able to right yourself mid-air to face in the right direction when a kicker spins you around. As does judging exactly how much boost your engines have to be able to reach a particular kicker or to know if you should rise over a cliff or to bounce just before it. Lots and lots of variables that only experience can teach you. It’s an art that takes a lot of time, and even more patience to be able to execute with any real efficiency.

Alec decided to build these two settlements anyway on the body 4b. A suitably low g atmospheric moon. One called “Camp Bucky” a deliberately unfinished settlement close to one mountain and, 250km away, across another mountain range (later named Mt. Sabine) and next to another huge mountain, a spaceport. Now, on the face of it, 250km is a ludicrous distance to ask the average player to race an SRV. But your “average” Elite Dangerous players are quite happy to put up with long travel distances, and, amongst us humans, there are those who are driven to put themselves under unbearable toil to race ludicrous distances through actively hostile terrain. I’m not sure when Turner put two and two together to see the similarities between the race he was proposing and the Dakar rally, but he named that Spaceport “Drakhyr Point”

And thus, the concept of the Drakhyr Rally was created.

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I remember, once Alec had announced the race, and long before an actual date had been decided upon, taking my Mandalay and flying at low altitude from Camp Bucky to Drakhyr Point. The scenery was stunning. Breath-taking, even. But it was going to take a long, long time to travel in an SRV.

Loose rules were formed to do with calling your ship for repairs occasionally, or even having more than one SRV so they can be swapped when running low on fuel. The day/night cycle on the planet was rather off kilter (17.3 day rotational period) as well so Alec had to carefully calculate a date for the race to ensure we would be racing in full daylight.

Some of us also formed teams with special rules for team vs team racing. Now, initially Cmdr. Sulu was in a team with Alec and myself but he seemed to have been hit by a Thargoid shutdown field whilst travelling down some stairs or something and ended up in a coma. Thankfully, after a lot of scares, which had us all very concerned, he finally seems to be on the mend and is making the first cautious steps toward being his old self. When I speak to him next I shall vehemently recommend he utilise his anti Thargoid shutdown field device when descending any size of stairwell in the future.

Kevin the Stabber stepped in as the race day approached which returned our team to a membership of three. Alec and I had also been deliberating over a name for our team. I thought of maybe, “Team Sulu” after out absent friend whom we were all very worried about, but Alec came up with a far better suggestion. One of the last things Sulu said to Alec in the Buckyball discord chat was, jokingly, we should name our team the “Drakhyr Dumbnuts”.

It was a no brainer!

---

Being a master flyver, Alec had very helpfully created a series of four instructional videos to help us with our racing. And extremely helpful they indeed were! After practicing some of the exercises, I felt I was ready to see how far I could get.

It was very frustrating. I couldn’t string more than two jumps together without wiping myself out completely, and then having to start all over again. Plus the terrain, especially at the beginning, didn’t lend itself too well to getting going after a big crash either. I tried a few more times, including a run along with Alec Turner himself, where I exploded spectacularly after around 30km.

Then I thought it might be a good idea to run half the distance, dock with my ship halfway, park there for the night then drive the remainder the following morning. And that, actually, saw me improve a little bit. I was able to string a handful of jumps together, although I had to land perfectly each time because I still couldn’t recover in mid air from being spun around. I would just have to land, stop and begin the process all over again.

I never really felt I improved too much after that, and my time looked like it would be around the three and a half hour mark. For the next two mornings I didn’t really have much time to practice the course so I just practiced, over and over again, the mid air manoeuvring exercises in Alec’s first tutorial and left it at that.

Potential racers flocked to the Buckyball discord inquiring about the race. One even had the audacity to describe it as “ludicrous”! But of course it’s ludicrous. If it’s not ludicrous, it’s not Buckyball! Even Cmdr. Psykit, who had a quick flyover in her Panther Clipper Mk II exclaimed in the Drakhyr Rally discord chat, “JESUS CHRIST THIS IS A LONG RACE!”

I had managed to “book” the living room tv (in case you don’t know, that’s where I play Elite Dangerous) way in advance in order to run the race. I logged in at 15:00 BST (14:00 UTC) and was immediately invited into a team so I could instance with those on the ground. I flew down to Camp Bucky, launched my scarab and immediately dismissed my ship. There were already several racers there, including Alec Turner and Kevin the Stabber, and so I had a little wander around the camp before setting myself up for the start. I pointed directly toward Drakhyr Point while the more experienced racers had to take the course slightly to the left over the peak of Mt Sabine, roughly a third of the way toward the finish. I was glad I didn’t have to tackle that!

Disappointingly, neither my in game camera controls, nor my windows recording software was working so I couldn’t get any of the shots I was hoping for. I so wanted to get a shot of all three Drakhyr Dumbnuts lined up ready to go. I was really hoping the Buurs would show up as if there’s anyone you want to steal screenshots of Elite Dangerous events from, it’s the Buurs! I needn’t have worried. A little later, the baritone resonance of Cmdr. Buur came sounding over the voice chat just as his Asp Scout camera ship buzzed above the camp.

And, at this point, I must thank The Buur Pit (Cmdr Buur and Rheeny) as well as Alec Turner and Cmdr. Baromir of the Loose Screws for sending me screenshots or allowing me to use grabs of their movies of the event.

During the hour and fifteen minutes before the start the excitement grew exponentially. More people joined voice chat asking to be let into the main instance. More and more SRVs and camera ships began impatiently milling around the starting line. News came through that Project Simstarr would be racing the whole route in his full motion sim rig. How long was he going to take? Would he even make it? A start time of 15:15 UTC was announced and Alec gave a small speech thanking everyone for coming and expressing his very pleasant surprise at the size of the turnout. Fifty two racers had turned up and were ready to go! He gave some inspirational quotes from Ayrton Senna and the wonderful “Please don’t make me do this!” from the absent Cmdr. Sulu.

Then, as the countdown from ten began, our team all typed a “FOR SULU!” into the local chat box.

And the sky erupted into a firework explosion of scarabs.

It was spectacular! All those SRVs plus several support and camera ships. All roaring off either into the air after hitting their first chosen kicker or sending up clouds of dust as their wheels bit into the dirt. I think about twenty five or so in my instance. You really had to be there!

My start was dreadful. I spun out on my first bounce and most other first bounces after that. It was becoming impossible to even get going. I watched in dismay as the other scarabs disappeared over the hills and began to swear under my breath. Damn this bloody race. I was going to finish it even if it took me until midnight! It wasn’t too much longer, however, before I gained a little more consistency but it was nowhere near as fast as I was hoping for. It was tough, though. I would constantly misjudge kickers and hill tops and would either be sent soaring vertically up into the air, thereby losing all momentum, or I would smash straight into a cliff. And I had already managed to bullseye a remarkable amount of rocks. It was a good thing Alec had allowed premium hull repair synthesis as we raced or I’d have been a DNF in the first half hour. The mistakes kept coming, and my language degraded further. I’d only managed the first sixty kilometres before reports of people finishing were coming over the voice chat and by the time I’d reached about halfway, around and hour and a half after the start Alec Turner, who had finished ages before, had come to find me and film my progress for a while. It was really nice to have company but instancing was completely creaking by this point and it wasn’t long before he vanished from my scanner.

I was becoming tired. I was becoming frustrated with myself. My legs tensed with every descent toward a kicker and would be followed with either a sigh of relief as I soared beautifully back into the sky or a muttered obscenity as I came crashing and spinning to a halt.

And this had been going on for an hour and a half, possibly longer.

Now thirty minutes of further frustration. I had called my ship on the hour to repair. and the break felt like it was pulling me away from the race, the second call on the second hour felt like the respite I needed. I sat there in the SRV hanging in its docking bay, part of me beginning to wish I could just fly away.

NO! Absolutely not! I was going to finish this damn race even if I ended up hitting every boulder from here to Drakhyr Point. Deploy SRV. Dismiss ship. It was comparatively flat here, time to choose a kicker and floor it.

Up. Boost. Boost. Tip Forward, Boost. Choose a likely kicker. Down, down. POFF! Back up! Higher! Tilt forwards. Boost. Boost, Next kicker. Down. POFFF! Yes! Up higher, and higher. Boost. Boost. Kicker! That one! Steady! POOFFF! Yes! Up! Up! Boost! Up! More speed! Hiltop….c’mon! POOFFFF! YES!

Somehow it was beginning to click. I managed to pick up quite a bit of speed but span out after six or seven bounces. But, boy that felt so, so good.

I managed to string together more larger groups of bounces. Now elation replaced the frustration, determination replaced the fatigue. And I began to notice just how beautiful this course was.

I was paying far less attention to the remaining distance now. I piloted my little buggy over mountains, along through steep, shallow valleys and hurtled over rocky plains. Still spinning out every so often, yet it didn’t matter. I could even right myself mid air, now and speed toward the next kicker. This is how to explore the surface of distant worlds. Flying over in a ship is fine, but there is a certain disconnect from the landscape, I feel. And just driving an SRV normally takes far too long to fully take in and appreciate the changing scenery around you. But this? This is glorious! Distant hills appear on the horizon and soon they are rushing beneath you. And that noise! That prooofff as you hit a kicker or hilltop perfectly and it catapults you back into the sky, conserving all the speed, giving you altitude and a good choice of the next target.

Soon I could see the spires of Drakhyr Point. I announced my distance to the finish into the voice chat, around thirty or forty kilometres I think. Still spinning out now and again, but the end was now in sight.

The race, however, had one more trick to play as I eagerly rushed toward the finish line. The service tunnel has two wide lanes separated by a central railing. For some bizarre reason I decided far too late to glide in on the left lane, completely misjudged my approach, hit the railing square on. And stuck.

Boost. Nope. Full reverse. Nope. Spin over. Nope, not that either. Oh no! I can’t self destruct here. Not after all that way. All that effort. I just wiggled, spun, throttle back and fore and, somehow, managed to get free, sprinting into the yawning tunnel as 18:15 UTC appeared on the clock. Bang on three hours. I felt like I had just won the race. I was elated!

It was over. My armpits were drenched with sweat and my legs and upper arms were on fire. I recalled my ship. Boarded it. Flew to the Garden waiting quietly in orbit. And logged out.

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It took a little while for the results to come out, so let’s see how everyone did..

Individual leaderboard

Commander name​	Team?​	Elapsed time​
Shaye Blackwood​	​	0:45:05​
duck0​	Elite Racers​	0:50:20​
Alec Turner​	Drakhyr Dumbnuts​	0:52:30​
Aymeric45​	​	1:16:34​
Sir Balthazar​	Elite Racers​	1:39:23​
Epaphus​	Team Chaos​	1:44:35​
Walter Wall​	​	1:46:20​
Kevin the Stabber​	Drakhyr Dumbnuts​	2:04:55​
OES​	Elite Racers​	2:23:16​
HappyMoonMonkey​	​	2:23:20​
Baromir​	​	2:26:58​
Martinjameson​	​	2:30:10​
VR247​	​	2:30:20​
Mike Kastilione​	TWH Racing Hussars​	2:30:27​
Dja​	​	2:33:56​
SH4R QI​	​	2:34:12​
Slamscape-X​	​	2:36:22​
Chig​	​	2:41:50​
H-VACKER​	​	2:45:44​
CPT BIALAR CRAIS​	​	2:48:45​
Dionysymbiant​	​	2:51:30​
Clayops​	​	2:52:21​
Koltync​	​	2:57:22​
Homborger​	Drakhyr Dumbnuts​	3:00:00​
Indigo​	​	3:01:15​
PCGN ED​	​	3:01:22​
Rocky Star​	Team Chaos​	3:01:40​
Conelrad​	​	3:03:00​
Istvaan-dicv​	​	3:05:39​
Kethrax​	TWH Racing Hussars​	3:08:48​
Aitolu​	​	3:13:40​
Stobi-Wan​	​	3:15:46​
Obl1v1ous​	​	3:29:39​
David Starlance​	​	3:49:28​
Cuptoman​	​	3:55:36​
SteveKing​	​	3:59:00​
BialoBrody​	TWH Racing Hussars​	4:11:08​
CEPR​	​	4:40:20​
Noah Truso​	​	5:35:29​
J.A. Valentine​	Neko Drivers​	6:36:00​
Danny Prior​	Neko Drivers​	6:36:00​
Jules Cain​	​	6:54:00​
Tobias Von Brandt​	Elite Racers​	DNF​
Official Space Cadet​	​	DNF​
psykit​	Team Chaos​	DNF​
Newell Turner​	Team Chaos​	DNF​
Doubleelforbes​	​	DNF​
Profane Pagan​	​	DNF​
Argyria​	​	DNF​
Mandrik​	​	DNF​
Clifftonian​	​	DNF​
SimStarr​	​	DNF​

Staggering! Fifty two racers! What an incredible event! Special mentions must go to those who took longer than three hours yet still stuck at it. Especially the Neko drivers, two cats sharing the driving duties in one SRV Scorpion, taking just six minutes short of seven hours to complete the race. Unbelievable dedication! Kudos Maximus also to Jules Cain, J.A. Valentine, Noah Truso, just in awe of your endurance. Also massive well done to the top three, Shaye Blackwood (of course), Ducko and Alec Turner for bagging the top three spots and I’d like to also congratulate my other team mate Kevin the Stabber for his excellent time.

Now lets look at the teams…

Team leaderboard

Commander name​	Elapsed time​	Team name​	Team time​
duck0​	0:50:20​	Elite Racers​	1:57:12​
Sir Balthazar​	1:39:23​	Elite Racers​	1:57:12​
OES​	2:23:16​	Elite Racers​	1:57:12​
Tobias Von Brandt​	DNF​	Elite Racers​	1:57:12​
Alec Turner​	0:52:30​	Drakhyr Dumbnuts​	1:59:08​
Kevin the Stabber​	2:04:55​	Drakhyr Dumbnuts​	1:59:08​
Homborger​	3:00:00​	Drakhyr Dumbnuts​	1:59:08​
Epaphus​	1:44:35​	Team Chaos​	3:20:24​
Rocky Star​	3:01:40​	Team Chaos​	3:20:24​
psykit​	DNF​	Team Chaos​	3:20:24​
Newell Turner​	DNF​	Team Chaos​	3:20:24​
Mike Kastilione​	2:30:27​	TWH Racing Hussars​	3:56:10​
Kethrax​	3:08:48​	TWH Racing Hussars​	3:56:10​
BialoBrody​	4:11:08​	TWH Racing Hussars​	3:56:10​
J.A. Valentine​	6:36:00​	Neko Drivers​	6:36:00​
Danny Prior​	6:36:00​	Neko Drivers​	6:36:00​

The Drakhyr Dumbnuts at second place! Just two minutes between us and the Elite Racers, with Team Chaos coming in third. Unfortunately Cmdr. Psykit of Team Chaos had to retire BBF (Barf Before Finish). Apparently, the race made her rather ill.

The real winner, if you ask me, is Simstarr. He may have an official DNF, but that didn’t stop him. He went back to the start in his scorpion, and tried again, He had a few DNFs, and every time he would go back to the start. I went to bed, woke up early the following morning. And he was still going! He finally finished over fourteen hours after he started. True dedication. And a real Drakhyr Hero!

So…what now? Well, I think I’ve caught the bug. I need practice, though, if I’m to even approach the skills of Sgurr, Shaye, Turner et al. My dream is to explore the galaxy, finding undiscovered, spectacular flyving nirvanas and to create time trials for other, exploration flyvers to find, try and wonder at. I’ll need to start small – there are a handful of much shorter time trials on EDCopilot I will be trying, and we’ll just have to see where we go from there.

As for the Drakhyr Rally, well, it will be held at least once per year from now on. Alec has made a time trail there and his quickest time is currently a breathtaking 31m 47s! Only a matter of time before those 260km are taken in under half an hour. And, it’s rumoured, other courses are being constructed.

Exciting times for endurance racing in Elite Dangerous.