An elite explorer's first visit to Sol
25 Aug 2018Thunktone
3304 August 2509:13
Just left the Betel war, yes the one from the news, to visit the Solar System for the first time. I took some time to bask in the sun that gave our species life before docking at Daedalus. I brought the wrong ship, my Viper Mk3. So I've sent a request for Jameson Memorial to send my Orca. I'm going to spend some time seeing the sights, so I might as well travel in style.
11:09
I took my Orca down to the surface of Mercury just now and spent a little time riding around in my SRV.
The tourist beacon I landed by told me about some Federal history, and I proceeded to explore some nearby wave signals.
I found a couple of probes on the surface. One looked like an antique to me, but someone had stored classified data on it.
I also came across a mine with a pirate Anaconda parked nearby. I honestly don't know if it was a legal operation. I was rewarded for destroying the skimmers, but I got a bounty on my head for blowing up the turrets.
11:21
Would you just look at the atmosphere on Venus. Carbon Dioxide according to the map but if I remember correctly there are clouds of sulphuric acid down there. I wonder what that would do to a lightweight hull?
11:34
I know it's a cliché, but I just had to take the cheesy old "earthrise" shot. My ship refuses to land on Moon, don't know why. If you're thinking the name Moon sounds childish, just remember that this is the first one our ancestors knew about.
11:42
I bet they feel safe down there! This is a Farragut class battlecruiser. And that continent on Earth below is "South America", which I've never heard of. Maybe one of the tourist beacons will tell me something about it.
11:47
So apparently the Federation used to be called "the United States of the America's". I guess South America was one of those?
11:53
There must be billions of people down there. I wonder how many have never left? I hear the poverty is appalling, but I bet it's a nicer place to be stuck than Forward Horizons.
Africa is down there somewhere. I know that continent, that's the one where we started. It looks like we'll spread across the galaxy faster than it took to spread across this one planet.
I just met a pilot called CMDR Nowacki. Mostly Harmless and flying a Sidewinder, but he unlocked his Sol permit a lot quicker than I did. Different priorities I guess.
12:05
Docked at Li Qing Jao. I was looking the wrong way on approach at landed myself a 4 grand repair bill. I'm going to stop here a while before moving on to Mars.
12:34
Didn't stop as long as I planned. Earth may be "the cradle of humanity" but Mars is the planet I really want to visit. Capital of the Federation, can you imagine what they get up to down there?
I think that island is called Olympus Mons, but the tourist beacons aren't really telling me what I want to know. Except that I was surprised to learn from one of them that Mars was terraformed!
12:45
There's an official tourist beacon about the alien artifact they wrote about in Sagittarius Eye. And I thought they were just making stuff up!
12:59
Mars High is swanky! Almost looks Imperial. I don't think I fit in here but I'm going to see if there's any good work for a pilot.
13:11
Here's Jupiter, the biggest planet in this system. I guess that means it was the biggest known once.
13:14
I was headed down to Schottky Reformatory on Callisto when I was distracted by this enormous splash crater. I've travelled over 200,000 Ly and this is the biggest I've ever seen.
13:35
I'm on my way to Schottky now. Found some canisters on the way. Not worth much but it was legal salvage so I've cleared it up.
13:52
This is Jupiter's closest moon, Io. Yellow moons like this are pretty common, it's probably sulphur dioxide frost.
13:57
I had to go around the gas giant to get to Europa. A tourist beacon marks the site of some cryogeysers, but it was too dark to get a good picture of those. I jumped over 4 km with one, but that is nowhere near my 10.4 km personal record.
14:33
The next planet out is Saturn. I'd been told the rings were especially beautiful, but I've seen better.
14:42
Personally, I prefer the rings of Neptune. There's a stark beauty about them, I can't think of a time I've seen such large gaps between rings. I could fly my Orca right through without dropping out of supercruise.
I found some of Core Dynamics's special composite materials on a wreck near here. Now which engineer said they could do something with these?
14:48
Triton. They're keeping something from us down there. My guess is that that's where the FCI does all their biological and chemical weapon development. I orbited as close as they'd let me but, of course, I saw nothing.
15:07
Here's a lesson for you CMDRs, always fit A rated escape pods! How lucky was this fool who I found orbiting Sedna?
15:14
Just came down to the surface of Sedna and my scanners immediately picked up a point of interest. Now I just have to get out there in my Scarab and find out what it is.
15:26
Got a bit over excited there. It was just a bit of cargo, probably a pirate's stash since I saw no wreckage.
15:33
Found where the cargo must have rolled from. Four sentry skimmers guarding an escape pod. Who stashes escape pods hundreds of thousands of light seconds from the nearest station?
15:38
Spotted a Sol Nationalist Adder as I took off, which led me to this little outpost. I'm guessing I shouldn't know about this place. Pilots from various factions were hovering over for a few seconds, or minutes, before flying away.
15:55
So that's Sol. I'm sure there's a lot more to find here, and I hope to visit the surface of Mars some day, maybe Earth too. But for now, I think I'll move on. There's a whole galaxy out there and humanity was stuck in this system for far too long.