History YMMV / EliteDangerous

* SugarWiki/FunnyMoments
** A poll was released to the community asking what they would like to see as a new Rare Commodity in the game. The community's response? A mug bearing the inscription "I made it to Hutton Orbital", sold at - you guessed it - Hutton Orbital, also known as "The furthest SpaceStation out from a system's jump-in point", being .22 LY from Alpha Centauri A. The devs kept their word, and a community goal was put in place to haul scrap to the station to make the mug. [[SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome Cue almost 3,200 Pilots hauling more than 2,470,000 tons of scrap to Hutton - often at a loss! - and getting the goal to its fourth tier, even in defiance of a player-instigated blockade.]] Truly, the one thing that drives the universe is {{Irony}}.
** The "Bobbleheads" reveal video is a fairly silly clip showcasing the triumphant return of bobbleheads to the game (something that hadn't been seen since the beta), beginning with [[MundaneMadeAwesome "Also Sprach Zathurastra"]] before cutting to a ''mariachi song''. You can view the silliness[=/=]insanity [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwNOuEVMobs here.]] Heck, most of the stuff related to Bobbleheads tend to be hilarious - "many wobbly bobbles", anyone? They include:
*** [[CreatorCameo One of Lord David Braben in a Pilot's Federation flightsuit]] (which ''mortifies'' him to no end).
*** Stylized Male and Female Pilot bobbleheads.
*** A full set of letters, numbers, and symbols so that you can taunt your enemies with neat little dashboard knickknacks that say things like "SUCHSALT" or "BOUNTIES!".
*** And, in the spirit of the holidays, a Christmas Tree.
*** Ones featuring the leaders of each Powerplay faction have been teased - so yes, you can carry a little piece of the Emperor or President Hudson with you one day.
** The Frontier Store features merchandise for the game, which tends to be fairly straightforward. [[https://www.frontierstore.net/usd/merchandise/elite-dangerous-logo-socks-black.html And then you get to the socks,]] whose store page references a fairly famous {{meme|ticMutation}} within the fandom. Those socks are good enough to eat!
** Use of a docking computer seems to work by the station operators controlling the computer, and thus the ship, remotely. [[NeverMyFault Naturally, said station operators still yell at you for speeding and colliding while autodocking.]]

* SugarWiki/HeartwarmingMoments
** In honor of Leonard Nimoy's passing, the SpaceStation orbiting the planet Vulcan in LHS 3006 was renamed to "Leonard Nimoy Station" by fan request.
** In another example, a young commander had been dealing with his real-life mother dying of natural causes and pinged Frontier Developments with an offer to sell everything that he had and spend all of his ingame credits - or even pay real-life currency - to rename an uninhabited system in Imperial Space to "[=MacBrayer=]'s Rest" in honor of her. While Frontier didn't rename an entire system after her, they did choose an uninhabited planet in the BD+26 2184 system (described as "a rather unusual planet" by the devs) to call "Kathy [=MacBrayer=]". You can read about it [[https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/3jdc2t/frontier_helped_me_out_after_mother_passed_away/ here.]]

* SugarWiki/MomentOfAwesome
** Just a few days after the game went live, somebody had done a bit of research and managed to find the Voyager I probe right where it would be in the year presented in the game. Yes, they hunted down a small object in the middle of open space several light weeks from Earth. A moment of awesome for both the devs putting it there and for the player who found it.
*** On a similar note, several people have visited [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A* Sagittarius A*]], the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way.
** Whenever a [[MileLongShip capital ship]] [[BigEntrance jumps into]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q28DDLwMpo the battlefield]], you will get ''chills''.
*** The game even getting made at all. Up until the Kickstarter for the game was announced and funded, ''Elite IV'' was practically a byword for {{Vaporware}}, and yet it wound up getting fully Kickstarted and now has at least one ExpansionPack as well as an UsefulNotes/XboxOne port!
*** Early in 3300 an entrepreneurial explorer named Erimus Kamzel wound up making a trek from the Pallaeni System out to the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy. The end result, known as the "Distant Stars" operation, wound up catching the attention of Frontier Developments themselves and made [=GalNet=] as well. Then, not less than a year later, Commander Kamzel and a group of '''more than 1000''' other Commanders decided to make the journey again - titled the Distant Worlds Expedition.
*** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we7ko-jDWNc 52 Commanders high-wake out of Sagittarius A*.]] It got mentioned by PC Gamer!
* NightmareFuel
** Some of the noises you can hear in Hyperspace can be [[HellIsThatNoise unnerving]], to say the least; especially when you take into account the fact that [[InsectoidAliens the Thargoids]] are definitely in the game (though not implemented yet).
** A lot of the game's NightmareFuel revolves around the mysterious Unknown Artefact and its ilk.
*** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxxZB9ytxQw This video,]] showcasing the Artefact in all its glory. It's obvious {{Foreshadowing}} for the Thargoids, and [[HellIsThatNoise the sounds it makes are absolutely bizarre.]]
*** Some military convoys you can find in Unidentified Signal Sources have unique NPC Chatter mentioning weird things occurring with their ships, such as power fluctuations or making their crews feel uneasy. And if you manage to get their cargo transports to drop their cargo, an Unknown Artefact pops out.
*** It was believed that they were responsible for the disease known as the [[MeaningfulName Cerberus]] [[ThePlague Plague]], since they tended to appear in systems where the plague had shown up. It's especially plausible if you know what happened to the Thargoids in Frontier: First Encounters: [[spoiler:they nearly went extinct due to Humans infecting them with a nasty virus with a near-perfect fatality rate.]]
*** Carrying one in your cargo bay is dangerous since they tend to damage your ship's modules, including your Frame-Shift Drive and Life Support.
*** They're beginning to congregate around the Pleiades for unknown reasons, which has a lot of players worried since a SpaceStation is also going there.
*** [[ParanoiaFuel They are scanning any ships that run across them.]] Why is unknown, but it's certainly not for aesthetic reasons.
*** And worst of all? While Unknown Artefacts are worth a good chunk of money on the BlackMarket, selling them causes power failures and system shorts on {{Space Station}}s eerily similar to those your ship probably went through getting them to human space.
*** It is heavily speculated that the Unknown Artefacts are partly to blame for the disappearances of the starships ''Starliner Antares'' and ''Spaceship One'', the latter of the two being a Federal Battleship that was being used by the President of the Federation at the time - President Halsey.
*** Shortly after Horizons launched, a few players noted that the Unknown Artefacts were pointing towards the Merope system in the Pleiades. Investigation of the system proved fruitless until someone investigated the third moon of Merope's fifth planet. After some prowling about in an otherwise nondescript canyon in his SRV, he discovered an organic structure of most undeniably alien origin, now known as a Barnacle. While the alien Meta-Alloys it's provided have proven useful in restoring functionality to several {{Space Station}}s that had been affected by the Unknown Artefacts, it's unknown whether or not the Thargoids - or ''whomever'' put the Barnacle there - are going to react so kindly to humankind's exploitation of it. The Barnacle also scared TheFederation enough that they actually put a ''[[MileLongShip Farragut-class Battleship]]'' above it and effectively blockaded it.
*** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8lpiN6lgTo This]] is the Unknown Artefact's cousin, the Unknown Probe; another object of alien origin and of the same origin as the Unknown Artefact. [[HellIsThatNoise The sounds it makes]] are even ''freakier'' than the Artefact's due to them sounding like something straight from Alien {{Hell}}, it points towards a system near Barnard's Loop and the Orion Molecular Cloud, and if you put it and an Unknown Artefact together, it releases an {{EMP}} [[InterfaceScrew that seriously messes with your HUD]]. The sounds it's making have a significance similar to the sounds that {{Portal}}'s radios make, in that there's hidden information stored in them. While Portal's radios contained images with plenty of {{Foreshadowing}} for later events in the second game, the Unknown Probe's sounds only contain [[http://i.imgur.com/9uBAkwo.jpg one image,]] which looks like some sort of navigational computer input for an unknown star system.
*** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5xW240lJ30 Don't fire your Discovery Scanner near an Unknown Probe,]] either, because not only will it fire off an {{EMP}} that will screw with your ship [[spoiler:but it will also try and communicate with you.]]
*** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UaaGw66Q1B8 This interview]] with Lord Braben at Gamescom 2016 shows his usual energetic and fun-loving self, [[https://youtu.be/UaaGw66Q1B8?t=1m27s but then the feed glitches]] [[TheFourthWallWillNotProtectYou and cuts to]] a tense camera pan over a desolate stellar battlefield that would not look out of place in an Franchise/{{Alien}} film. [[spoiler:Speaking of Alien, the very last seconds of the pan also give us our first glimpse of an ''actual Thargoid spaceship.'']]
*** Frontier also released an ARG that could only be caught by pausing the alien feed at the right moment, just as it cut back to Lord Braben. It started with a binary code that, when translated, said, "To find us, look for a bounty hunter. To find more clues you'll need pre-logistics support in a system with one star, two belts, three rings and enough radiation to turn you green. The hunt begins the 28th [of August]." This wound up referring to one of the Pre-Logistics stations TheFederation built between human space and the Pleiades nebula to support convoys headed to Obsidian Orbital in Maia; at the date the aforementioned Bounty Hunter, as well a Trader and an Explorer arrived at the station and gave players riddles and clues that eventually led to players coming face-to-face with the first Thargoid ship ever seen ingame. Even though it had been crashed at its location for a long time and had been abandoned for what seemed like years, it scared TheEmpire enough that they decided to station a ''[[MileLongShip Majestic-class Interdictor]]'' above the crash site.
** Unidentified Signal Sources can sometimes lead to unpleasant surprises if you go in unprepared (no Thargoids, though). You never know if you'll come across the site of a battle or a group of Pirates in [[BossInMooksClothing Anacondas]] waiting to jump you.
** The launch trailer for ''Elite: Dangerous - Horizons'' has a moment where some poor schmuck in an SRV runs across a field of rocky outcroppings with objects emanating a SicklyGreenGlow... then finding himself coming face-to-face with an alien structure - the now-famous Barnacle of Merope 5c.
** There are some fan works that can be truly freaky in nature, such as [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShHvHOtdeKw this fan-made video]] wherein a player in an Adder runs across a distress signal while in Hyperspace before jumping into a system where some truly bizarre noise can be heard to give the impression that he ran across the Thargoids (while never actually encountering them!); or [[http://i.imgur.com/VgN6wqc.gif this]] gif which features a rather [[SarcasmMode pleasant]] surprise when you look back in your ship in the Oculus Rift.
** In a non-alien related subject, the depiction of [[UsefulNotes/BlackHoles black holes]] and dwarf stars within Dangerous. When jumping in to most systems, you're greeted by the warmth and brightness of a star, while a system with one of these things is, in stark contrast, [[NothingIsScarier dark and uninviting]]. YMMV, naturally.
*** There are also LightIsNotGood moments when entering a system with a neutron star, which are very small and emit stark white light, but they still radiate a significant amount of heat in a radius much larger than their actual size, and unless you start pulling away ''immediately'' after you enter the system, you'll get yanked out of supercruise and have to endure a lot of heat damage escaping the neutron star's gravity well.

** A lot of the game's NightmareFuel revolves around the mysterious Unknown Artefact.

** The launch trailer for ''Elite: Dangerous - Horizons'' has a moment where some poor schmuck in an SRV runs across a field of rocky outcroppings with objects emanating a SicklyGreenGlow... then finding himself coming face-to-face with something heavily implied to be a ''Thargoid spaceship''.

* FriendlyFandoms: With ''VideoGame/StarCitizen'' and ''VideoGame/NoMansSky'', while also being rivals. David Braben and ''Star Citizen'''s creator, Chris Roberts, have encouraged this attitude, while Sean Murray's basing ''No Man's Sky'' on ''Elite'' has helped in that alley.

* Just a few days after the game went live, somebody had done a bit of research and managed to find the Voyager I probe right where it would be in the year presented in the game. Yes, they hunted down a small object in the middle of open space several light weeks from Earth. A moment of awesome for both the devs putting it there and for the player who found it.
** On a similar note, several people have visited [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sagittarius_A* Sagittarius A*]], the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way.
* Whenever a [[MileLongShip capital ship]] [[BigEntrance jumps into]] [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Q28DDLwMpo the battlefield]], you will get ''chills''.
** The game even getting made at all. Up until the Kickstarter for the game was announced and funded, ''Elite IV'' was practically a byword for {{Vaporware}}, and yet it wound up getting fully Kickstarted and now has at least one ExpansionPack as well as an UsefulNotes/XboxOne port!
** Early in 3300 an entrepreneurial explorer named Erimus Kamzel wound up making a trek from the Pallaeni System out to the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy. The end result, known as the "Distant Stars" operation, wound up catching the attention of Frontier Developments themselves and made [=GalNet=] as well. Then, not less than a year later, Commander Kamzel and a group of '''more than 1000''' other Commanders decided to make the journey again - titled the Distant Worlds Expedition.
** [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we7ko-jDWNc 52 Commanders high-wake out of Sagittarius A*.]] It got mentioned by PC Gamer!

* ThatOneLevel: A lot of wide-orbiting binary, trinary, or multiple-star systems get this treatment, as there are often starports in orbit of planets that orbit such systems' 'B', 'C', 'D', etc. stars and thus can be anywhere from 15,000 to 500,000 Light-Seconds away from the jump-in point - a distance travelled in ''supercruise'', not ''hyperspace'', meaning you could sometimes be sitting there for ten to fifteen minutes just closing the distance; however, it's '''Hutton Orbital''' in Alpha Centauri that gets this treatment the most, thanks to being the most remote starport in all of human space (not by distance from Earth, since it orbits Proxima Centauri which is a little over 4 Light-Years from Sol, but rather by distance from the jump-in point, being .22 Light-Years from Alpha Centauri A, or about six ''million'' Light-Seconds; again, a distance that has to be traversed in ''supercruise'', rather than ''hyperspace'').

** Get hit in the canopy while your shields are down and you will start to hear some ominous cracking sounds. The sparking and popping of your ship's consoles when you your hull takes a lot of damage is rather alarming as well.

** "[[{{Mondegreen}} Friendship Drive charging.]]" [[note]]{{Mondegreen}}s of the ship's onboard AI are fairly popular among fans, this one (of "Frame-Shift Drive charging") being the most popular. Others include "Landing gear attractive" ("Landing gear retracted") and "Target shields are fine" ("Target shields offline").[[/note]]
** "If Frontier confirms x then I'll eat a sock." [[note]]When Frontier said something big was going to be annouced at Gamescom 2015, Website/{{Reddit}} user tfaddy [[https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/3f4nn3/why_planetary_landings_wont_be_announced_at/ jokingly said that he'd eat a sock if the announcement turned out to be planetary landings]]. Come Gamescom and the ''Elite: Dangerous - Horizons'' announcement trailer and the statement became synonymous with TemptingFate in the fandom. (And tfaddy [[NeverLiveItDown hasn't heard the end of it...]])[[/note]]

** "The Fuel Rats - we have fuel, you don't. Any questions?" [[note]]The slogan for the much-beloved player group known as the Fuel Rats, who help other players who would otherwise be stranded in space without fuel free of charge. Frontier eventually gave them their own Minor Faction in the game called "The Fuel Rats Mischief", based out of the entirely appropriate [[PunnyName Fuelum]] System.[[/note]]

** "If Frontier confirms x then I'll eat a sock." [[note]]When Frontier said something big was going to be annouced at Gamescom 2015, Website/{{Reddit}} user tfaddy [[https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/3f4nn3/why_planetary_landings_wont_be_announced_at/ jokingly said that he'd eat a sock if the announcement turned out to be planetary landings]]. Come Gamescom and the ''Elite: Dangerous - Horizons'' announcement trailer and the statement became synonymous with TemptingFate in the fandom.[[/note]]

*** And worst of all? While Unknown Artefacts are worth a good chunk of money on the BlackMarket, selling - or even just carrying - them practically ''anywhere'' results in them shorting out systems and causing power failures - be it on a SpaceStation or your own ship.

** The Frontier Store features merchandise for the game, which tends to be fairly straightforward. [[https://www.frontierstore.net/usd/merchandise/elite-dangerous-logo-socks-black.html And then you get to the socks,]] whose store page references a fairly famous {{meme|meticMutation}} within the fandom. Those socks are good enough to eat!

** The "Bobbleheads" reveal video is a fairly silly clip showcasing the triumphant return of bobbleheads to the game (something that hadn't been seen since the beta), beginning with [[MundaneMadeAwesome "Also Sprach Zathurastra"]] before cutting to a ''mariachi song''. You can view the silliness[=/=]insanity [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwNOuEVMobs here.]]

*** And worst of all? While Unknown Artefacts are worth a good chunk of money on the BlackMarket, selling them practically ''anywhere'' results in them shorting out systems and causing power failures - be it on a SpaceStation or your own ship.

** "If Frontier confirms x then I'll eat a sock." [[note]]When Frontier said something big was going to be annouced at Gamescom 2015, Website/{{Reddit}} user tfaddy [https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/comments/3f4nn3/why_planetary_landings_wont_be_announced_at/ jokingly said that he'd eat a sock if the announcement turned out to be planetary landings]. Come Gamescom and the ''Elite: Dangerous - Horizons'' announcement trailer and the statement became synonymous with TemptingFate in the fandom.[[/note]]

** "If Frontier confirms x then I'll eat a sock." [[note]]When Frontier said something big was going to be annouced at Gamescom 2015, Website/{{Reddit}} user tfaddy jokingly said that he'd eat a sock if the announcement turned out to be planetary landings. Come Gamescom and the ''Elite: Dangerous - Horizons'' announcement trailer and the statement became synonymous with TemptingFate in the fandom.[[/note]]

* ThatOneLevel: A lot of wide-orbiting binary, trinary, or multiple-star systems get this treatment, as there are often starports in orbit of planets that orbit such systems' 'B', 'C', 'D', etc. stars and thus can be anywhere from 15,000 to 500,000 Light-Seconds away from the jump-in point - a distance travelled in ''supercruise'', not ''hyperspace''; however, it's '''Hutton Orbital''' in Alpha Centauri that gets this treatment the most, thanks to being the most remote starport in all of human space (not by distance from Earth, since it orbits Proxima Centauri which is a little over 4 Light-Years from Sol, but rather by distance from the jump-in point, being .22 Light-Years from Alpha Centauri A, or about six ''million'' Light-Seconds; again, a distance that has to be traversed in ''supercruise'', rather than ''hyperspace'').

** The announcement of the first ExpansionPack caused a massive one courtesy of its outrageous pricing model at a whopping sixty dollars; good for people who don't own Elite (as the expansion pack includes the base game), but horrible for anyone who already owns the game.

*** It was beloved that they were responsible for the disease known as the [[MeaningfulName Cerberus]] [[ThePlague Plague]], since they tended to appear in systems where the plague had shown up. It's especially plausible if you know what happened to the Thargoids in Frontier: First Encounters: [[spoiler:they nearly went extinct due to Humans infecting them with a nasty virus with a near-perfect fatality rate.]]

*** The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxxZB9ytxQw This video,]] showcasing the Artefact in all its glory. It's obvious {{Foreshadowing}} for the Thargoids, and [[HellIsThatNoise the sounds it makes are absolutely bizarre.]]

*** The [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxxZB9ytxQw This video,]] showcasing the Artefact in all its glory. It's obvious {{Foreshadowing}}>for the Thargoids, and [[HellIsThatNoise the sounds it makes are absolutely bizarre.]]