I was fighting with my spaceship, trying to escape the Interdictor’s hold by pointing my nose oriented with the escape vector that would let me out of the trap. I didn't know how long I'd been stalked through this deserted stretch of extra-nothingness, but another pilot had come up behind me and hooked me like a fish. My rocked violently and the hull started groaning and bang as someone hit me with a Frameshift Interdictor – the favorite tool of pirates, bounty hunters, assassins, and all-around jerks.
On this trip, though, my increasingly sullen reverie was shattered about 50 light-seconds from Jordan Stop. Yet I still come back, and still take satisfaction in striking a good deal, even though the only things to spend money on are bigger ships and weapons that let me do even more of the exact same kind of work. Sometimes I question why I'm playing something that sometimes feels remarkably like shift-work at a particularly boring store or factory. This is my life as a small businessman and part-time smuggler in Elite. All without worrying too much about getting chain-harassed by griefing pirates. I can take some scavenged illegal goods out to Jordan Stop and sell them for pure profit, and then pick up a load of precious metals and take it back to a wealthier, more central system and turn my small pile of money into a huge one. It's also largely ignored by other players, who tend to cluster along more popular trade lanes and ambush unwary travellers. It also does a brisk trade in gray-market and black-market goods, and there are never any cops around to scan your cargo and raise a stink. Why do I keep going back to Jordan Stop? It has some of the absolute rock-bottom prices for metals and minerals in Elite’s massive galaxy. Places like Jordan Stop are why I've started keeping a book within reach when I play Elite, and have had to start making new music playlists just to keep things fresh. There are no stars anywhere nearby, nor any other planets or asteroid belts. The space station is roughly 250,000 light-seconds away from the main star in its solar system, and even at faster-than-light speeds, it's a long, boring flight to get out there. I was doing "one last flight" before bed when I spotted a lucrative contract for a cargo run to Jordan Stop, a semi-legal mining outpost in the the absolute middle of nowhere. Elite encapsulated itself during one of my most recent sorties.
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