Awesome / Elite Dangerous

• Just a few days after the game went live, somebody had done a bit of research and managed to find the Voyager I probe right where it would be in the year presented in the game. Yes, they hunted down a small object in the middle of open space several light weeks from Earth. A moment of awesome for both the devs putting it there and for the player who found it.
  • On a similar note, several people have visited Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the core of the Milky Way.
• Whenever a capital ship jumps into the battlefield, you will get chills. And if it's on your side, you'll cheer, beacuse the massive battleships can solo the entire CZ if you give them adquate support.
• The game even getting made at all. Up until the Kickstarter for the game was announced and funded, Elite IV was practically a byword for Vaporware, and yet it wound up getting fully Kickstarted and now has at least 2 Expansion Pack ('s) as well as an Xbox One port!
• Early in 3300 an entrepreneurial explorer named Erimus Kamzel wound up making a trek from the Pallaeni System out to the other side of the Milky Way Galaxy. The end result, known as the "Distant Stars" operation, wound up catching the attention of Frontier Developments themselves and made GalNet as well. Then, not less than a year later, Commander Kamzel and a group of more than 1000 other Commanders decided to make the journey again - titled the Distant Worlds Expedition.
  • 52 Commanders high-wake out of Sagittarius A*, as part of the Distant Worlds Expedition. It got mentioned by PC Gamer!
  • Distant Worlds 2, led by the aforementioned CMDR Kamzel and Dr. Kaii, ended up becoming the single largest expedition in the game's history. How many players? Over 15,000. The group also ran two Community Goals enroute to Beagle Point that resulted in the construction of a Starport near Sag A* called Explorer's Anchorage, now officially the farthest inhabited human station and a major hub for people exploring the opposite side of the galaxy.
• CMDR Xdeath and Canonn Interstellar Research managed to locate the Guardian ruins very soon after 2.2 was released by simply calculating the positions of the nebulae in the sky!
• CMDR Malibu spent a real life month jumping 375,000 light years just to have their route draw the game logo on the galaxy map. Seen here
• Throughout most of 3306 and 3307, the operation "Turning the Wheel" was a BGS manipulation experiment that attempted to allow The Dark Wheel to expand away from Shinrarta Dezra all the way to Sol, in hopes that doing so would trigger some sort of response from the BGS, or just Frontier in general. A year's worth of efforts against uncooperative player factions and the BGS itself, moving through system after system and claiming a sizable path through The Bubble, saw them reach Sol's doorstep, but The Dark Wheel was sadly unable to actually expand into the Sol system, with speculation ranging from Permit-Locked System issues to a hardcoded block placed by Frontier.
• And in 3308, as the mysterious anti-Thargoid crusader known as Salvation was revealed to likely be a surviving member of Azimuth Biochemicals, Operation Wych Hunt (so spelled due to Salvation's true name, Jacob Wycherly) began to operate in a system where Salvation was building an anti-thargoid superweapon. Despite all three Superpowers having fleets in orbit, and an unauthorized permit lock on the planet where construction was taking place, a collective of commanders took it upon themselves to try and drive Azimuth out of business, via manipulating the BGS to push them out of systems, targeting their surface bases specifically for raids (since murders under a faction's watch also count negatively in the BGS), and by active assault on any players moving goods for them - an extremely rare instance of gankers receiving praise for their griefing. Unlike Turning the Wheel, this initiative was so impactful it got mentioned in GalNet, effectively making this resistance movement canon. Their BGS manipulation even proved so effective that Fdev had to tell them outright that a "narrative lock" had been placed on Azimuth Biotech's home system of T Tauri so they could not be driven out, due to how badly the faction was faring. This ended up backfiring against Fdev, however, as the operation turned its full, undivided attention to Azimuth's secondary base in Maia, burning them out of the system. By the time of Update 13's arrival, Azimuth was suffering retreats from all systems not its own. And in T Tauri, where they were hardcoded as a permanent presence, the faction's abysmally low reputation forces them to be locked in a permanent civil war with the Minor Factions that would otherwise have stamped them out completely, allowing enterprising commanders to farm them like cattle for credits.