Going Walkabout: A journey to the furthest reaches of the galaxy
03 Aug 2020Seth Bradwell
Note: This series of posts will be mostly OOC although I may use parts of this in future stories. These next few logs will be documenting my epic trek to Beagle Point and on to Oevasy SG-Y d0, from which I have successfully returned to the Bubble three days ago.I have long considered going a long way from civilized space and taking up exploring, and three months ago I did just that, kitting out a Diamondback Explorer of which I have bestowed the name Lief Erikson (misspelled as Eriksson during the voyage, which I corrected on returning to the Bubble) in honour of the legendary Viking explorer. The Lief Erikson has been engineered to max out jump range as much as possible (just short of 58.5 Ly with a full tank), with almost any module that could be made more lightweight being engineered to be so using the Engineers available to me at the time. Unfortunately during my initial journey, I was careless when riding into a neutron star jet and ended up in dropping out of supercruise in the jet, and try as I might, I couldn't get out before my ship was destroyed, 10 days of exploration for naught and what's more I was only 10,000 Ly from the Bubble. This left me pretty disheartened but I was determined to make up for that, so the next day I got back in the pilot's seat and set back off into the black. It is this second attempt that I will be cataloguing in this series. Indeed the registration of my ship, STS114, pays homage to STS-114, which in 2005 was the first Space Shuttle mission after the loss of Columbia two years previously. Unlike my first attempt I spent a lot of time away from Elite, particularly after I got to Beagle Point, since endless jumping is boring but I still wanted to get to the Bubble intact this time so didn't feel like hanging around in space - rationalising that I could always return once I had properly recorded proof of doing "the Big One". So in the end it took me three months to get back to the Bubble, paying extra close attention to how I neutron boosted, developing a technique where I always got some distance from the neutron star (and its exclusion zone) before entering the jet. So, let us begin...
Since exploration distances are usually marked by how far away they are from Sol, which still remains roughly the centre of the Bubble and still holds a special place in the hearts of humanity across the galaxy, regardless of whether they are in the Federation, Alliance, Empire, or elsewhere, it seemed fitting to start my journey with a look at the planet Earth, where all of humanity originated from. So this is where it all starts:
The first point of interest I was aiming for is Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at the very centre of the galaxy, which is just over a third of the way there. After my previous failure I was just contented with getting to Beagle Point and would consider other destinations as and when I felt like it, so I did very little actual exploration before then, with my first image after Sol being another iconic black hole, the Great Annhilator:
Just over eight and a half hours from departing Sol I reached the absolute centre of the galaxy, and for all the hype the sight was indeed an impressive one:
This is a good point to end this particular log, more details on my journey will be forthcoming soon. I will leave you with this landscape from an ice moon in a system just under 3000 Ly from Sagittarius A*, which illustrates the sheer density of stars this close to the galactic centre.
