Imperial pride, shining bright in the deep black (Pt. III)
02 Dec 2018Extremofire
The foray into the black continues on. Still on our original course of seventy systems, we are trying to cover the most amount of ground whilst still staying on track with regards to time. The original desire to bond and relax has been replaced by a hurried sense of urgency, and each scientist is constantly analyzing the large amount of data the Oculus is collecting. If an anomaly is found, it will be no true hinderance to our deadline to return to it. Unfortunately, however, no such anomalies have been found.
Even still, it seems quite a few of our target systems match configurations found in the Universal Cartographics database, which is discouraging for Imperial Cartographics. It is impossible to determine whether or not a system has already been discovered by another explorer until we're actually in the system itself, as we have to relay the system configuration and data to UC, which will return a match if one is made. This has happened in a solid third of our systems so far, but our saving grace is that there still remains a general deficit of stellar data on O-type bodies, which we have amassed quite the library of. The new applications of pulsar emissions to frame shift drives and guardian technology are also under heavy investigation, so detailed analyses of neutron stars are in high-demand over at Imperial Cartography.
Unfortunately, it appears the constant exposure to black holes and pulsars has had some unexpected damage. The onboard computer on all ships has great difficulty plotting towards black holes. It is common knowledge that the frame shift telemetry suite targets a star and uses the star's solar signature as a homing beacon for hyperdrive. The premise works a little differently for black holes; the suite detects X-ray emissions for navigation instead. The computer isn't extremely effective at this as opposed to regular stars, however, and drop the ship off dangerously close to the event horizon, to a degree that one has less than four minutes to maneuver out of the way. Many an inexperienced explorer has fallen victim to the black this way, but an inexperienced explorer I definitely am not. Still, the constant bombardment of the ships' various modules with high gravimetric forces, stellar ejecta, and black hole radiation has created detectable imperfections in module integrity, and has highly magnetized the Alcbubierre emitter, which has reduced the effectiveness of the frame shift drive in supercruise noticeably.
We are spending the day landed on a moon in a relatively cool system so that we may degauss the drives, and conduct repairs. We'll resume our course tomorrow!