CMND Log 033: Shadow Luna
19 Apr 2019Switch Killington
Been a couple weeks since last log entry. Couple reason, firstly having the squadron to chit chat with while flying helps with the space madness. Secondly, I crashed my ship directly into a planet. It happened soon after my last log update, at least if I recall correctly. I was about 30 jumps away from Poseidon's Rest, the designated Squadron basecamp for the halfway mark of the mapping project. I was well ahead of schedule and had the start of a nice pile of exploration credits. The system was nothing but HMC worlds with a single atmospheric one. The system was striking, it was a white star and that light really lit up the atmospheres of the planets, so they shown really brightly, but the one lone landable planet caught my eye.
The planet was huge, well, relatively speaking for a HMC world. But I found the pattern of craters rather... titillating. It looked like a butt hole. Q later accused me of being fixated, an acusation I couldn't dispute as I was flying a ship with the ID: PAWG-3. I had to land in one of these holes, so I started my descent on the biggest crater.
On descent I noticed glide dropped me out lower than usual, but it didn't really bother me. I was too busy looking at the interesting changes in the soil, as I got closer there were dark, black spots on the surface. I was trying to determine if they were shadows from outcroppings or the soil itself. I was preparing for one of my super pro elite landings when I noticed my ship wasn't responding. Less than a hundred meters up is when I finally glanced at the gravity reading and saw that it was 3gs. I sighed, it had happened again. Got distracted by a nice butt and landed me in trouble. The Gs weren't dangerous, but I knew it was too late to get my descent under control. I still hit the boost to try to correct it, but I hit hard and the Bee's readouts went dead immediately. "Eject, eject, eject."
<No image because I was exploding at the time>
I woke up on a medi-transport heading back to Anchorage. As I said earlier, my squadron was in the area, as well as the rest of the fleet. It was a well traffiked area and someone picked up my beacon and I got my ticket back to civilization. I had all the insurance padwork done during the trip so I had a ship waiting for my at EA as soon as I stepped of the transport. I bought some of the salvage from the old wreck and did a few more tweaks to this new ship. Well, I suppose I should say "new" emphasis on quotation marks. Ditsy Bee was always flying stripped down and tweaked up, so the insurance pretty much would only pay for used and junk parts, which there was plenty. No shipyard meant there wasn't an abundance of new parts or ships, and no one to build you one either.
Now I was far being the fleet, so I had to make up for lost time. And data, though my data lost was probably only about 50 mil, so not much but a good start to something greater. I cracked open a few of my third party mapping programs and tried to get me to Posidon's Rest in the shortest way possible. The ship's onboard computer wanted to do it in 440, but those were rookie numbers. Gotta get them jumps down. I tried Spansh, which is the new hotness everyone's been talking about.
It... well I wasn't impressed. I imagine it's useful when going to from the bubble to Colonia but out here in uncharted territory it wasn't as effective. It only maps discovered neutrons, you see. And it goes from neutron to neutron, requiring manual plotting of your course constantly. It dropped a 440 jump trip down to I think it was 150, which seems like a great, until you learn you have to boot up the navcomp every jump, about 120 times, and that it doesn't plot fueling stars so you gotta do that manually too. I could see myself getting into a good rhythm and just forgetting, then getting stranded somewhere with no fuel. I like the fuel rats but I don't want to meet them. Instead, what I did was I used Spansh to find the nearest neutron star, then I plotted a course to the nearest neutron star to Poseidon's Rest. Came back with a nice slim 220 jumps that I banged out over a couple days. Was caught back up with the squad by the weekend, in time to goof off at our basecamp.
Then it was business as usual. I'm currently at Waypoint 11, ready to go into the black. I've been playing control tower at the basecamp on Shadow Luna and also doing some quick exploration runs. My luck has been rather trash since the crash, since leaving EA I've scanned hundreds of systems and only have maybe a dozen Water worlds to show for it, if that. And not a single earth-like. It's troubling, especially since the Abyss has so few worlds I'm not expecting to really 'discover' anything out there around Beagle Point. Currently holding position at basecamp.
