Going Walkabout: Hitting the Neutron Highway
02 Nov 2020Seth Bradwell
I steadily close the distance on the Bubble, making use of neutron star jet boosts to efficiently cover the galaxy, pausing to fire up the AFMU and compensate for the strain that neutron boosting puts on the FSD. Normally it is safe and I have done it hundreds of times, but it only takes one slip up and you could end up in normal space in the jet cone, and in spite of all your valiant attempts, it is purely down to luck whether you can jump out before your ship is destroyed. Here is a decent guide to trying to escape that situation. However, as I found to my cost earlier, it is far safer to avoid being caught in the exclusion zone whilst in the jets in the first place, so since my ill-fated first try I have made sure to get a good distance from the exclusion zone before entering the jets. I particularly take extra caution when I encounter a neutron star that looks particularly "angry", with their jets blazing out to sweep across to either side of your ship, as illustrated below:
Image courtesy of CMDR Bradkbrown, location Phaa Phyloi UP-G d10-1157
In such a situation I pitch my ship perpendicular to the jets and slowly edge away from the star, only risking the jet boost when I have covered reasonable distance from the star. The reason I am bringing up neutron stars is because several of the neutron star systems I encountered during this part of the journey turned out to be quite unique. Normally you would be lucky to find anything other than rocky or ice worlds orbiting a neutron star - though I have heard of earth-likes orbiting those poignant remnants of stars far more massive than Sol, bathing everything around them with ferocious levels of radiation and entrapping worlds with an incredible gravitational pull which is only matched by black holes. How an Earth-like can exist in such a system when such worlds would have been mostly likely destroyed in the supernova that created the neutron star is a mystery to me.
I didn't see any Earth-likes orbiting a neutron star - though I did see the occasional water world orbiting a companion to a neutron star. However I did encounter a neutron star which had a Class F orbiting it at a mere five light seconds distance away, which I dared to scoop from:
A picture of the two stars together, the light from the Class F almost obscuring the neutron star:
Oh and yes, I did jet boost from there. However the Universe hadn't done with revealing such freak occurrences to me. Splojeia YA-F d11-484 is a system which has a neutron star with two very closely orbiting class M stars at 4 and 48 ls distance respectively.
Next on my travels was a planetary nebula which gave the galaxy a greenish tinge and at its centre was, yes, a neutron star, although the gas cloud obscures it somewhat from this shot from the surface of one of the planets: Stuemie MY-R e4-8657 aka B Perestrello:
If you thought that this would be it for unique neutron stars, you would be very mistaken - as I next came across Egnairs AA-A h72 or Marion, a ringed neutron star which also happened to orbit a black hole:
I will finish this entry with something different, the Sky High Nebula, which can be found at Egnaix CW-H c12-4 - noted for being one of the highest nebulae above the galactic plane, which provides a commanding view of the galactic disc alongside the nebula:
