Traveller's notes. Part 2. The outskirts ot the Perseus Arm
29 Oct 2018Shnyrik
Like I've mentioned before, I was going to visit a glowing gas giant in the end of the Perseus Arm, and then go through the Monoceros Passage to the Rift.But at that time I suddenly started to suspect, that taking iClipper (even with new magic xeno-toy connected to it's FSD) was a bit too self-confident. So I turned the nose towards the Seagull Nebula, where the farthest shipyard in this region is located.
I know this place since the good old days in the Imperial Trade Fleet. It has always been a pirate-infested cloaca. Those scums (bearing proud name of Black Flag Gang) from time to time tried to pretend civilized people and moreover they even dared to claim that their dirty piece of rock was named Hell Port not because it actually is hell, but after some ancient Hungarian astronomer from the Old Terra -- Maximilian Hell.
Here it is. Again, the picture is from early days, but believe me this stuffy den didn't change a bit since then
As soon as I entered the system, I found four fighters on my tail: three eagles and a sidey. They must have been really in despair to even try to hunt Imperial Clipper with such forces. It has always puzzled me: how do those bandits earn their living that far from all known trade routes? A few unlucky explorers going to the Outer Rim just can't be enough to support such a big settlement with shipyard and as many as 15000 thugs.
I stretched my arm to bring down all the wrath of imperial justice on their dumb heads and wipe those miserable mistakes of nature from the face of the Galaxy. One more second and a small finger movement would release a volley of indomitable fire from the mighty shard cannons that would in the Emperor's name smash them to the molecules... but then I thought that spoiling relations with Black Flag Gang just before using their shipyard was not a very clever idea, actually. So I made a loop around the local star to shake them off.
At the Hell Port local so called "manager" immediately tried to sell me a surprisingly new exploration Krait with some suspicious stains all around the cockpit. But I had something much better on my mind: some time ago I left my DBX HMS Rifter at that rock and it actually was still there. With 72 ly jump range I could feel much more confident on the outskirts of the Galaxy.
So I could finally plot the draft route of the future expedition:
The idea was to start from Hell Port, move through the Perseus Arm to Terra Madre (Hypiae Aip KX-I c23-1) to look at the terraformable rocky world, then visit the glowing gas giant, then turn back and look at the borders of locked NGC 2286 Sector, looking for possible gaps not noticed by previous expeditions (spoiler: they had done their job well and I didn't manage to find anything
) and then go to the Monoceros Beacon.So, only a few weeks of non-stop fuel scooping and here is my main target: glowing gas giant at EAFOFF LN-Q D6-0.
Now I had to go a bit back in the direction of NGC 2286 Sector.
But at that time through the magic of FTL communications (have no idea on what principles that thing works, so I hope it doesn't break while I'm so far from the nearest workshop) CMDR Edelgard von Rhein shared coordinates of an insanely rare thing: system with moons inside rings.
At the Old Terra they used to say "seven miles is not a detour for a mad dog", so how could only a pair of kLys be a detour for me?
And here I am on orbit of a small nameless mars-like world looking at Y-class brown dwarf Schee Phio AW-C D82 body 11 in all it's glory:
Those red dots are actually inner moons.
My next stop was Phroea Hype CM-C d24. If Schee Phio was one of the aims of my journey, this one I met completely by accident. Still I can't call it my discovery for the system had already been tagged by the same CMDR Edelgard von Rhein.
According to the system map body 8 (class I gas giant) has three rings. One brownish (rocky), one white (icy) and the last one sparse and dark (consisting of small ice particles also). That last ring is supposed to be incredibly huge: the inner radius is 2 202 282 km. and the outer -- 8 777 544 km.
The outer radius of the second ring is 248 740 km.
The semi major axis of the first moon's orbit is 395 689 km.
The semi major axis of the third one is 1 311 526 km.
So the first three moons are inside the third ring and the fourth one (with semi major axis of 13 927 299 km.) is just outside it.
However as I flew closer things got a bit more complicated. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't find the big ring. According to the system map it is somewhere in the middle of this picture. The selected moon on the right is the outer one and moons on the left are the inner ones.
I know that those sparse dark rings are sometimes barely visible. That's why I've tried to fly several times in supercruise through the space where the ring should possibly be. However I still didn't manage to hit anything.
Fortunately, my FTL communications were still online, so I called His Royal Majesty Hengist Duval's Imperial Rings Research Institute (also known among commanders by short name FDevs) and one of the specialists told me, that I was not the only and not the first one asking this question: "Thanks for your report - This looks to be working as intended. Stay safe out there o7"
The ring consists of dust particles that are too sparse to be seen or to affect my ship in supercruise. However the scanners of my HMS Rifter are powerful enough to confirm that the ring is still there. So I believe it still counts as +1 to my collection
