The recent 40th anniversary celebration of the Elite franchise came along with a sale on special ruby-red skins for various ships. They weren't cheap - 10k ARX each if memory serves - but I ponied up a stack of real money to buy ARX to get several of them. One of them was for the Python Mark II which is the first of the Supercruise Overdrive native ships, shown here. I feel a special kinship with the franchise as I have been playing it for 40 years in its various forms. In 2025 the current iteration Elite Dangerous will turn 10 years old itself.

A Black Friday sale on cosmetics was another place for me to spend a lot of ARX on suit and weapon skins, drawing me down to almost zero. I was finally able to get a tough-looking military-style skin for my Dominator suit, also shown here.

Frontier has done an excellent job of adding content to Elite Dangerous in 2024 and I was happy to give real money to reward them for it. After all, without a subscription fee all they have to maintain the servers and keep paying developers are sales of ARX after the purchase of the game and Odyssey expansion itself. All these things cost money, and if we want them to stick around we need to support them.