Planets Move
06 Nov 2018Gatimũ Kamau
CMDR’s Log, 3304.11.6, Sol Calendar; We commanders are a rare breed.Smarter. Bolder. We protect, we supply, we support...and sadly, some of us delve into things far darker. We are independent flyers. We are data runners. We are Imperial and Federation Naval seamen and Officers. We are assassins and we are slavers. We burn down the villages with one hand and we put out the fires with the other.
And sometimes we're just plain stupid.
Sometimes we can spend too long on the bridge of our ships. Sometimes the cold and dark of the void can play tricks on a tired or excited mind. But we must, at all times, endeavor to be our best selves; especially when it comes to charting. We can't forget our basics because everything we bounce around through information hubs and word of mouth is heavily leaned on by others for their exploration and operations. And when you're alone in the depths of the verse flying by flawed or outdated information, you expose yourself to the very real possibility of finding yourself dead.
That being said, when you chart a discovery, please remember that you're not planet side on an Earth-like world and that you've had your navigation licencing for more than a day. There is no such thing in space as "go to the second star to the right and straight on til morning". Which is the space equivalent of "follow the dirt road until you come to the old tractor, turn left and go until you reach the pond with the dead tree". After all, right in space is relative to the axis your ship is on at the time you make the observation, not necessarily the angle at which another ship will jump in. (Not to mention that there are only about 1M stars to your relative right!)
I say all of that to say this...three of the Arks (generation ships) that we received information on insofar as their location is concerned used planets as their reference points. Not planets whose gravity wells they found themselves trapped in placing them in orbit mind you. These particular ships were thousands; sometimes tens of thousands of Ls away. Dead in space.
Planets move commanders. They move very, very slowly by human reckoning, but they do move.
Never say "go to X planet in Y system, set your nav computer to Z sector and supercruise for so many thousands of Ls. That may be valid for the time that you made your discovery, but as the planet moves along its orbit of its star, that information quickly becomes useless. My wife and I found ourselves shooting in the dark to basically try to "re-discover" these arks that suddenly found themselves "re-lost" due to this basic oversight. And let me tell you, it's nigh on impossible to find an object that, on a cosmic scale, is infinitesimally small, has no perceivable telemetry, no functioning transponder, no energy or frame shift wake and is as cold or colder than the space around it.
My wife spent the better part of the day searching the supposed and "guesstimated" sectors of one of the arks as I dug as deep as I could to find anyone who'd been intrepid and driven enough to do the necessary mathematical/scientific extrapolations to figure approximately where the planets in question were when the findings were reported years ago so that the arks could be located...or who just had enough time and a big enough wing to comb a star system.
As luck would have it, I found a single CMDR in a sea of us who were all searching for the same answer who I only know by the handle "Ezzy" who did the legwork and found these pieces of history once again. W all owe a debt of gratitude to CMDR Ezzy and his wing. Whoever you are, and wherever you are, if you're reading this, thank you. And as the sailors of Earth-that-was used to say, "may the winds always be at your back".
As I continue to document the generation ships on our "tour" of these sad sites, I too shall document the coordinates of these free floating tombs by their new (and far more accurate) points of reference...the entry stars of the respective systems they found themselves coming to rest in. So that any who see these public logs concerning these historical vessels in the intergalactic codex will know the best path to take on their pilgrimage to pay their respects...