Outy Banjo's 1 Billion Meter Flight

...So it all started in the wee hours yesterday morning while I was working on an auto anti-orbiter. It's supposed to be a feature of my soon-to-be-released program, called Escape. It's designed to detect orbit, return you, and offer you a non-physical vehicle to sit on upon return. Well, my prototype worked very well after testing it against my comercially-available orbiter called Astro. This HUD generally does 3 million meter orbits.

While the most powerful orbiters available on the market range from 1 to 10 million meter orbits, I had a desire to test it against something more powerful. I started off by juicing up an Astro HUD. To test the height of the modified Astro HUD, I turned off my anti-orbit prototype for a height test.

Well, a 34.5 million meter flight resulted. Here's where I lost focus on my project as I looked at the current figure and said: "One BILLION..." I haven't done the math to accurately measure exactly how much more powerful my new uber Astro prototype was over the commercial version, but it's somewhere in the range of 1,000 to 20,000(On paper).

Ok, so even before testing, I know that this is going to blow the crap out of me...So I make a little moon speech. The moon speech took several screenshots, so we'll just sum it up with a little Neil Armstrong quote:



*Clears throat and wipes away tears* Ecccphrm. Ok...



Here, we see Outy making final checks to his modified, uber Astro HUD just prior to flight. Pardon the look. My attatchments are all messed up from the previous 34.5 million meter flight.



I look like this on a good day.

Ok, so up, up and away.



I'd have to say, the first 20 million meters is always the weirdest. At 10,000+ meters, your avatar begins to vibrate violently. At 1,000,000, you vibrate more intensely, with the shape of your avatar resembling steps, like the kind you'd walk up. <--- Please pardon that preposition there at the end. Now, liquid, thin, virtical strands of your avatar slip up and down. Once you hit 20,000,000 meters, your client slows down on the unrendering of previous renderings of your avatar which is already pretty sloppy to begin with by now, painting the screen with virtical lines resembling the color of your avatar and clothing.



At around 30,000,000 meters, I lost my body completely and was nothing but a pair of eyeballs. I continued to fly, ascending at a rate of 56,666 meters per second(Yes, that is the actual number, rounded down from a whole lot of 6's past the decimal).

I eventually made it to 343 million meters which had taken so far - 1 hour, 32 minutes. I continued...

At 657,518,208 meters - 3 hours and 9 minutes in, I suddenly stopped! Neither going up nor falling. I'm not sure as this was only one, isolated test, but either the effect of the uber Astro HUD prototype timed out, or the push falloff(LSL term for rate of push force decrease vs. range) finally calculated out to 0. Though very impressed at the power of my prototype, this was not enough. I'd come too far. I spent the next 15 minutes making a self-pusher which I'd hoped would carry me the rest of the way.



4 hours and 16 minutes in, and after only a few stops to make the self-pusher more effeceint, I had achieved an altitude in excess of 800 million meters. This is perhaps the best view of the whole journey.



Nearing 900 million meters, the stars began to flatten into horizontal lines and blink in sequence.



VICTORY! After a 5-hour journey, I had boldly gone where no avatar had gone before!(?)



I resumed for another 10 million meters, and stopped to test some stuff out. This picture sums up the journey rather well, as I zoomed in on my eyeballs, the only part of my avatar left, floating in space in front of a surreal sky, neither rising, nor falling. Without commas, large numbers are sort of difficult to read. That's 1,010,994,688 meters.

To give you a better grasp of that number, that's 627,585 miles. If compared to Earth standards, that's 445,023 miles past the Moon.

I tried a few, experiments, not expecting much. I used a poofer. Nothing. I Could move in very laggy, delayed, 2-meter increments, though, I could only tell that I had moved by seeing my coordinates change. I couldn't seem to pan the camera vertically. Even in mouse-look, I could only pan horizontally. Then, believing that it wouldn't work, I made two landmarks that actually took and displayed the altitude correctly. Unfortunately, they only took me to 765 meters(Object creation max altitude) at those coordinates when I tried them out upon my return.

It was a great ride, and no, the uber Astro prototype that I used to achieve the initial 657 million meter orbit will not be made comercially available. You may wonder why I have done this. Why have I spent so much time and resources to accomplish this trivial task?

CHEAP COMMERCIAL PLUGS BABY!

Be sure to look for my upcoming HUD, Escape which will be available in O Scripting stores as well as SL Exchange, and SL Boutique. Also, check out my stores:

O Scripting - Cristat 179, 24, 34
Outy's Particle Paradise - Epione 131, 181, 80

Below is my log from the flight, for those interested:

Heh. I should have documented by trip to 2 million. I basicly covered my entire body with 10m spheres, nearly every attach point. Each sphere pushed up at maximum.. I got to 2 million in like 20 minutes

That is very cool, and good info.

Btw, when can we start buying land on the moon or other planets?

This is awesome, man. Congratulations.

I have no idea what they used, but in Rausch I have been orbited instantly to over 500,000,000 meters more than once. About half the time it was such an instant change that it crashed my client.

I've been orbited once, it was kinda fun, my skin was all wobbly.. after i got bored I just tp'd to my home..

It would be so cool if LL put some scripting that when someone reaches an incredable height there would be like a few planets like Mars or a comet ...

hehe yeah, and maybe the griefers will have so much fun orbiting themselves they can leave us alone for a while?

Dude, I told you before... lay off the hallucinogens.

In particular, the purple microdot will FRY YOUR FREAKIN BRAIN.

P2

Nice work, Outy!

My god... it's full of stars...

The world needs More Cosmonauts.

Great work, Outy!!

This is the only post of yours that I have ever understood, Dave.

That Tron thing is going to happen to you.