Welcome to Top Shift, an semi-regular Elite: Dangerous broadcast which consists of tutorials, hints and tips and dumb challenges you can do within the game.

I'm Colin, otherwise a known as Cmdr PhoenixDfire, the name of my first D&D character over 30 years ago. From that, you can probably guess that I am old, called a 'Forum Dad', grumpy gamer and a player of the original Elite back in 1984. I've played every version of the original Elite, Frontier and First Encounters, so you can imagine I went a bit mental when Elite: Dangerous was announced. Space sims were always my favorite genre. Played most of them from Wing Commander to FreeSpace 2, which is why they call me the chief archivist on Lave Radio (which we try to broadcast every Tuesday at 20:30 GMT). Although, don't expect me to be a total fan-boy. There a few things I haven't been happy about in the past and I've called Frontier out it before (Horizon's original price point for example, even though I've got a lifetime pass). My favorites of the genre has been Tie-Fighter, I-war (and I-War II) and Privateer, which I considered better than Frontier and First Encounters at the time (Sacrilege I hear you cry). They've all been replaced by Elite Dangerous which I'm a DDF Kickstarter backer of, so please don't tell my wife how much I spent on this game.

you'd like to support this channel and want to buy some Elite Stuff, please click on the Link. On the PC I also have been known to use;- 1. [Elite Dangerous](http://click.linksynergy.com/fs-bin/click?id=M9lWZvJePCs&offerid=366990&type=3&subid=0) 2. [ED Tracker](http://www.edtracker.co.uk) 3. [Voice Attack](https://voiceattack.com) 4. [Trinus VR](http://trinusvr.com) 5. [Riftcat](https://riftcat.com)

I'm using either;- * XBOX One. * PC 1. i5 Processor 2. GeForce GTX 760 3. 8 GB Ram 4. Nexus 6P (for the VR stuff)

Not really Rules, more like guidelines. 1. I don't really mind being insulted, shot at or griefed but if you could come up with a funny insult instead of just swearing shouty guff, that would be grand. 2. This is a late night broadcast (in the UK), so parental advisory. 3. Any raciest, sexist, homophobic, alt-right and gamer gate like trolling will be a straight up and permanent ban (OK, That is a Rule, I'll give you that one). 4. Don't ask about Star Citizen. Although I'm a backer of that, I'm not going to play it until they've got something equivalent to the Elite: Dangerous Beta. I want to give it a fair shout and not base my opinions on something that's not ready. 5. Don't ask about No Man's Sky either. Never played it, and from what I've heard about it so far don't want to either. From what I've heard quite disappointing. A lot of E:D detractors where crowing that NMS would kill of ED and I was very relieved when it didn't happen. 6. I might Lie a lot.

Colonia is a new 'Bubble of Civilization' in Elite- Dangerous. It's based around Jacques Station, which misjumped on it's way to Beagle point (the furthest point of the galaxy from Sol), and has been growing steadily for the last six months. It's still a mind boggling 22,000 ly away from Sol and Earth and I plan to do it using my spare x-box Commander in the 'Shiny Sidey', a Sidewinder with am A rated Jump drive which can reach between 15 and 16 ly. People reckon it will take about 120 hours to do it in a normal ship, so lord knows how long it will take me if I only do a few hours every week. There are about 5 or 6 outposts to stop at on the way but I must be mental. As the X-box commander has had to start from scratch, I'm still at least a 1,000,000 CR short before I can set off (those advanced Discovery scanners are expensive), So I reckon it will be a while before I can set off. Sometimes I might just be flying the Main PC account, just for a break. ;-)