THE QUEST FOR 1,000,000LY - LOG #6
09 Nov 2020Stellas Incola
After the worrying loss of my SRV, described in my previous log, along with my ship's ineptitude at not crashing into mountains whilst I was in the SLF, the next leg of my circumnavigation trip through the remainder of Achilles' Altar, then Lyra's Song and Tenebrae passed thankfully without incident.I made my way along the outer side of the Perseus Arm and around the end at a reasonable pace, occasionally slowing to scan any system that piqued my interest. I didn't need any jumponium thankfully, as the star density appears to be higher here than at the end of the Outer Arm. There seems to be a fair few water worlds in this area of the galaxy too, more than I can recall seeing as frequently in my travels elsewhere. That's probably just my skewed perspective though, given the amount of jumps I've put in over the last couple of weeks. Nearing the end of the arm, I also chanced across three or four systems with Notable Stellar Phenomena that I wasted no time investigating.
For the most part they had a couple of types of huge ice crystal structures in their Lagrange clouds, resembling gigantic snowflakes, some also had a hint of colour like pink or yellow. Nothing strange there. My ship's temperature plummeted and the windows frosted up as I drew closer during my scan. There were shards of ice and a thin cloud of ice particles surrounding each one, all twinkling in the starlight. Beautiful.
On the panel I noticed a cluster of signals to the right of my ship, just outside the range my scanner could resolve and turned to head over. As I got closer the signals steadied and I locked on to one. There in front of me was a conical structure, almost carrot like, concentrically ringed along its length with a number of bioluminescent... 'skirts' that slowly pulsed blue in the blackness. It was quite large, possibly 50-60m long and otherwise generally grey/brown in colour. There seemed to be no reaction to my approach, so I figured it was relatively harmless. I scanned it and the ship's computer told me it was a Candidum Rhizome Pod. I had never seen one of these before, either in my previous explorations or anywhere else. I smiled, happy to have found something which was at least for me, a first.
Despite also being just over 110,000ly into my circumnavigation, I felt like I was coping with the isolation relatively well. If I was to cast my mind back to when I undertook Distant Worlds 2, the things that I remember helping me with the outward journey were firstly the other CMDRs and their chatter on the comms panel to keep me company between weekly meet ups, and secondly having the journey out to Beagle Point broken up into manageable chunks. This was really brought to light as I travelled home along the Sagittarius-Carina Arm completely alone, and the space madness began to creep in. By the time I got back to the Bubble after three intense weeks of 'jump, honk, scoop' I was ready to fly straight into a star on purpose. To be fair, by then I had been away from civilisation for about five or six months and I was really looking forward to docking in my home station once more. This journey has only been around six weeks up to now so there's still plenty of time for me to throw my Remlok suit off and go drifting around the ship shouting 'Raxxla! Raxxla!'
To take the learning from DW2, I've been keeping the sections of route plotting to around 3000-3500ly at a time, which usually gives me about 50 jumps or so to work through before I plan the next section. I remember plotting 15kly routes in the Phantom I took on DW2 and becoming very disheartened at the 250-270 jumps that lay before me. Allied to that, if I'm feeling a little lonely I can tune in to the always lively comms of my fellow Fuel Rats who through their collective....let's say 'eccentricities' keep me very much entertained and feeling like I'm in touch with humanity (ratmanity?) despite the distance. You never know, there may be a distress signal from a stricken CMDR somewhere out here that I just happen to be closest to as well! Galnet's recent re-invigoration also keeps me abreast of the news back home. Listening to some of the bulletins though, sometimes I'm glad I'm all this way out in the black. Back to my journey though...
CMDR Shnyrik's DSSA fleet carrier Deus Vult! hangs above the rings of an icy moon in Ooc Fleau GG-F d11-0. Its parent planet, AB2 is a ringed Class I gas giant, unremarkable except for it's utterly vast outer ring system. It makes for an amazing and very welcome vista when approaching to dock. I settled the Tuksumgryndin on pad 03, breathed a sigh of relief and dropped down into the hangar. I had data to sell and an SRV to buy! A few minutes later and 240m credits to the better, and with a new SRV sitting all shiny in Chase Yellow paint in the Anaconda's hangar, I decided to pause for an hour or so in the mess facilities to enjoy the food and the view across the rings to the distant gas giant which was slowly sliding behind the icy moon as it set. Feeling sanguine about the rest of the trip after that I went back to my ship to look at the route along the inside of the Perseus Arm and plotted a course for the crossing into Hawking's Gap onto the Sagittarius-Carina Arm, with the long haul up to Beagle Point my next test. We'll see how well my tactics help me to stay sane in the coming weeks...
Time and date of journey start: 13:10 UTC, September 27th 3306.
Hyperspace distance travelled at journey start: ~749,000ly
Total Hyperspace distance travelled to date: 862,770ly