Holiday Space Japes - Elite: Dangerous Smuggling Video

It's a bank holiday Monday in the UK, which means that the Rock, Paper, Shotgun crew is still writing news and articles about videogames, but instead of posting them here we're printing them off, feeding them directly into a shredder, and then deleting the source files. It's a cruel shame, but that's the world we live in.

Perhaps you still want some entertainment to get you through the day wherever you are, in which case here's a video of someone smuggling illegal goods into an Elite: Dangerous space station. It's nine minutes of interstellar stealth and pleasant space ship noises, with on-screen text to describe the tactics used at each stage, and it's brilliant. Space!

I wrote this post on Friday, which is why I've not fed it directly into a bin.

Elite: Dangerous's space police detect nearby vessels not only with their eyes, but by scanning for heat signatures. That means you can mask your ship by killing your engines and power and relying on inertia to drift past certain security measures, and leads to the thrilling moment above where the player, YouTube user Isinona, thrusts their engines hard, turns everything off, and drifts without control for a full ten kilometers in order to dock with the space station.

After a lengthy-but-efficient alpha process, Dangerous has now entered into beta and access is available for a chunky £50. It's definitely unfinished, so you should read about the game carefully before deciding to commit to buying it at this stage.

Space!