Funny / Elite Dangerous

• 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 Space Station 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. 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 "Also Sprach Zathurastra" before cutting to a mariachi song. You can view the silliness/insanity here. Heck, most of the stuff related to Bobbleheads tend to be hilarious - "many wobbly bobbles", anyone? They include:
  • 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. And then you get to the socks, whose store page references a fairly famous meme 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. Naturally, said station operators still yell at you for speeding and colliding while autodocking.
  • The auto-dock process also plays, of all things, Blue Danube to serve as "elevator music" for the procedure.
    • Which is itself a Running Gag in the Elite franchise; and is funny simply for the fact that it canonly means docking computers have been using Blue Danube during docking in-universe for centuries.
    • Probably a shout out to this scene from 2001
• Relatedly, the Type-9 brakes for no one. As the joke goes, "right of way is determined by tonnage." ^note The Type-9 Heavy is the fifth-heaviest ship in the game at 850 tons. The unfortunate Type-6 and Cobra Mk III are 155 and 180 tons respectively
• In a Reddit AMA, David Braben confirmed that they have people working on atmospheric landings, planetary life and the ability to walk around in future updates. The first reply is someone asking "Source?"
• Any time an NPC pirate is dumb enough to try something in the no-fire radius of a station. Guaranteed to elicit a chuckle, if not a laugh.
  • Or when a pirate, ranked as harmless and with an unshielded sidewinder, demands that you drop the cargo in your A-rated, fully engineered Anaconda.
    • Curb-Stomp Battle in 3..2..1..
• "Control, that's a negative on reported pirate activity. Looks like we just interdicted a wedding barge"
• Pretty much anything the Fuel Rats do generally qualifies as Awesome, but a particularly unusual incident occurred when the client required rescue not because of a lack of fuel, but because their SRV had somehow managed to achieve escape velocity - presumably under it's own power - and was floating off into space with no way of getting back, with the incident only being rectified when the responding Rat physically shunted the poor thing back into the planet's gravity well. The rescue solution resembled nothing so much as the universe's most expensive game of Breakout.
• While the response is justified in universe due to how lethally dangerous it would be in real life (imagine a propeller plane running circles over a crowded airport runway) hanging out in your ship over vital docking/landing infrastructure is simply called “Loitering” and it can be worth a few laughs to hear the station intercom reminders that loitering is authorized to be resolved with lethal force
• Due to missions having random elements thrown in, you can end up in situations like an elite pirate kill team being sent after you for your cargo of.. 40 units of fruits and vegetables.
• Two streamers associated with Operation Wych Hunt, Selene Stardragon and MiniCeleste, both happen to be V-Tubers. After the Proteus Field backfired in the worst way possible, both opened their streams after with an I Told You So rant aimed at Salvation. While Selene's was straight-forward, Mini hung a hilarious lampshade on her choice of avatar, admitting the galaxy would've been better off if the superpowers had listened to (what she refers to as) a talking plush bunny.