 This is Witchspace news for Friday the 13th of December 2019 I'm CMDR Buur In this weeks news, Elite Dangerous is turning 5 years old and F-Dev is giving stuff away Frontier begins its countdown to Christmas and F-Dev is giving stuff away Primetime casual goes behind the scenes and will have a roundup of community news Remember to hit like and subscribe and click the little bell icon to get notifications You can also join us on the Buur Pit Discord server And you can become a supporter of this channel through Patreon or YouTube membership Links to everything you need are in the description below 5 years ago on the 16th of December 2014 after some years of black development And then a successful Kickstarter project Elite Dangerous launched for the PC To celebrate the game's 5 year anniversary F-Dev have announced some special events And a free paint job is also available for the Cobra Mark III If you participate in the current community goal that ends on the 18th of December There will also be a special celebratory live stream from Frontier on the 16th of December Starting at midday UTC where they will be looking back at the game and the community over the last 5 years Graphic Fidelity in video games moves on very quickly But Elite still looks beautiful and you often forget that you're looking at a 5 year old game But even so after 5 years it's not unreasonable to expect the game to get somewhat of a reworking from Frontier And as we've speculated before it's possible that that may in part at least be what the big 2020 update is about I think it's fair to say that the last 12 months have perhaps not been the most illustrious or easy in the game's history With delayed updates and features and unresolved bugs in the game it has created an understandable amount of bad feeling from the community With fixes and beta tests expected prior to the delayed launch of carriers the next 6 months are going to be a fascinating time at least We then have the run up to the end of 2020 and the big scheduled update and whatever the game's future is beyond that Here's hoping the next year is more positive for the game we all love Frontier began their traditional countdown to Christmas event today Each day that commanders log into the game between now and the 25th of December will see an ever increasing amount of free arcs in game currency deposited into your account These free arcs are over and above the 400 free arcs that you can earn every week from just playing the game Logging into the game this morning for example saw 100 arcs arrive in our accounts To ensure that you've got somewhere to spend those free arcs Frontier are also releasing some of the more exclusive elusive paint jobs between now and Christmas And they'll be available for a limited time during the event While I think of it just a quick public service announcement the double federation rank and federation ship discount event is still ongoing until the 16th of December Don't wait if you want to take advantage of that Cast your mind back about a month ago and you may well find your mind rocketing towards the surface port of Margulis depot in the 61 virginis system at hypersonic speeds in normal space By way of a reminder serial difficult German man and friend of the channel commander prime time casual has today released his final video of the year In this retrospective of the events of the 9th and 10th of November he gives some fascinating facts on the what and the why of the speedball 3 event And an equally fascinating look behind the curtain at how the event came together Including an on-camera interview with the delightful Nola prime the developer behind the speedbot discord bot that collated and managed some of the admin for prime time over the weekend long event Easily one of prime's best videos it's also one of his funniest as always linked below And here's this week's community roundup As we mentioned last week the annual operation IDA holiday hall starts tomorrow They're kicking off the event which runs until the 5th of January with a one and done effort to repair a station inside 24 hours The event starts at 1500 UTC and IDA have asked that participants be ready at any of the three refineries in the HR827 system with a hold full of beryllium for when the target station is announced The Buckyball Racing Club's latest event Total Recall 3 starts on the 14th of December and runs for a week Maybe that should have been called Total 3 Call, eh? Missed opportunity Haha, you're welcome The event sees participants landing at a selection of surface ports driving for 7.5km and then recalling their ships aiming to get the fastest time at the end of the circuit Just as the Buckyball event ends on the 22nd of December there's the new SRV race around a set track at Scully Powers Progress Surface Installation Planned by Commander Mad 7 at the Danger Zone Galactic Archive Discord We filmed this race previously, it's always fun to watch and participate in, there's links below for you to get involved A couple of useful nuggets came to us via Commander McGran of the AXI this week Firstly a super useful and easy to read infographic that breaks down the variants of Thargoid Interceptor that we currently know about and how to recognize and tackle them Also the AXI has been conducting a survey into the spawn rates of non-human signal sources in the Pleiades region if you want to go hunting the gloopy alien meanies You'll find links below to the infographic and the AXI Discord themselves who are an invaluable resource The stellar photography and videography fan art group known as SPVFA or SPIVA to their friends are 2 years old this week Check them a follow on Facebook if you're not doing so already to populate your timeline with some gorgeous curated screenshots and genius elite themed Photoshop work And finally the now quarterly journal of all things elite Sagittarius Eye went live this week with their professional magazine quality collection of interviews, articles and screenshots that all just happen to be elite in universe and free Links to all of this stuff and everything we've talked about this week are as always below That's it for now barring any massive announcements or events that's also it for the year from which space news and what a year it has been Commander Rene and I would just like to take this opportunity to say a massive thank you to you for subscribing to and following this channel We wish you and yours nothing but good things for this seasonal time of the year however you choose to spend it and we'll see you all in 2020 with whatever that may bring Until then thank you so much for watching 07 Commanders, follow the Greens on the way out and do keep clear of the toast rack We very much look forward to seeing you next time