Jacques Recon and Resupply - Day 47 - Arrival, transit, and thoughts in-system.
19 Aug 2016James Hussar
Well, that took a lot longer than I anticipated. Between the severely limited jump range and a few prolonged stops along the way it took a bit over a month to get to my destination. Jacques station - or as the locals call it "Eightee'deedee'dee'sevnsevnfoh'cee'ee'too" (80 DD-D 774-CE-2). No, the locals call it "Jacques" no matter what the station designation is back in the bubble. It's a completely unremarkable station, to look at it, except for the fact that it i the single most distant human settlement in known history. Barring The Missing, and gods know where they might be, if anywhere at all, this is the farthest oasis of humanity. Ever. Yes, we've been farther out, but this is a home away from home.
The station is fully operational, in terms of services. I got here a little too late to make a difference in that - I brought a large load of meta-alloys with me to help patch things up, but others got here before me. Smaller cargo holds but larger jump ranges. At least now Jacques has a nice bank of meta-alloy for the future. Upon arrival, I was immediately in good standing with the station management. I suppose one has to be, having trekked all the way out here. I sold my argo at a profound loss. Over 2 million credits less than I paid back in Maia.
I also turned in several large data caches that I found in the systems immediately outside the bubble, as well as several occupied escape pods that I found about half-way to here on a deserted rock I just on a lark decide to explore. I don't know who is in those pods, but hopefully they're well.
I also turned in the exploration data for the path that led me here. The short jump range means I visited many more systems than most of the vanguard pilots already here, and because I can't pass up interesting systems, I had a lot of detailed surface scans to turn in. A whopping 47 million, all told. Upon turning in the data, Jacques FTL comms array connected to the Pilots Federation servers and netted me a quick promotion to Ranger, and then, by the time I was done logging my travel, another promotion to Pioneer. I'm not sure what good that does me - there are no missions here to capitalize on the rank - but it's bragging rights back at the bar once I'm home, if nothing else.
Since arrival, I've refitted the ship for some mining. I've traded the extra fuel tank and the secondary field repair unit for a refinery and a prospector controller. I;ve been hanging out in the two resource extraction sites, and have netted nearly a million credits in bounty vouchers, without even trying. I don't know how they do it, but there are pirates here. They must have compromised their transponders and fly rogue on one, and land at Jacques on the other - posing as innocent traders. It's a clever scheme - since we're so far away fro authority, Jacques has a booming black market, so stolen goods are easily disposed of - but it irritates me. After the time and trouble I took getting here, I really feel for the poor saps who made the journey in T6 or T9 or Keelbacks, only to be blown out of the sky by some miscreant looking for an easy score.
Mining is good here. I've spent maybe two hours and filled my cargo bay - limited by my exploration kit to be sure, but 128 tons is nothing to scoff at - with mostly gold but also platinum, palladium, a few tons of painite, and even a dozen or so tons of osmium. Osmium is not as common here as I recall it being back home, but Jacques has an appeal out for it and while the per ton price is nothing special, once the appeal runs out, there's a bonus in it for everyone who takes part. A dozen tons has landed me in the top 25% of contributors to the appeal, so I must be doing something right.
Honestly, I haven't even tried any of the other ringed planets in the system, and there are several. All I did was leave the large rocky rings where everyone seems to be mining and headed into the small inner metallic ring of the planet the station orbits. The densest outer part of the inner ring gave me great yield. I wish I could pick up a T9 here because while there are pirates, they seem focused on the RES areas, and I'm sure I could to better with a bigger hold, more limpets and more than two controllers. I've mined pristine rings near home, but these are completely virgin.
As for the last leg of the trip, or few, there isn't much to tell. About half-way to Jacques I picked up an FTL transmission with a firmware update for the detailed surface scanner that allowed me to more closely inspect the mineral composition of all landable planets. While nice, and while I did take advantage of it to more carefully chose where to hunt for rare minerals, it's still largely a matter of luck. I was hoping this patch would help me pinpoint specific materials, but no such luck. I really don't know what the challenge is. I know several of the engineers working on the scanner systems personally, and I know that they're able to tell individual pieces of cargo apart from several kilometers away, and if they can tell the % composition of a planet's crust they have to have more discrete measurements, but still, they can't pinpoint meteorites of other natural formations on the surface just yet. Oh well, At least I enjoy driving around in circles interpreting that stupid wave scanner. I know we could do better, but I suppose it will take a bit more time to get there.
Discovery-wise, I've made one more. I've been fascinated by life-bearing gas giants on the way here. I've scanner nearly every one the long range scanners identified, unless it was too far to super-cruise to, but too close to jump to. The idea of life finding a foothold in so alien a habitat just compelled me to invest the time in a closer look every time I could.
In one particular system I found something I had never seen before. It was pure luck as a landable moon rich in Polonium was orbiting very close to the planet and I over shot it, grazed the atmosphere and happened to have my scanners on full detail still from a prior and utterly dead system.
Giant lifeforms, many times the size of my Anaconda, just floating along, carrier by the winds of their world. They most resemble jellyfish of Earth in appearance, except that they're the size of a Coriolis station. Biologically though, they're very, very different. They're virtually lichen, or that's what my limited biology background suggests. They're a hybrid of two, maybe more, species of radioplankton. One is hardy and durable, and constitutes the outer layer. It has a slow metabolism and a rugged hydrocarbon membrane, almost like a fungus. The other is more delicate and would likely be killed off by the ionosphere if it were exposed directly to it - but it exists on the inner surface of the fungus. The fungus creates an outer bubble and the inner layer is photosynthetic, and radiosynthetic, and metabolyses the hydrocarbons that pass through the outer layer into hydrogen gas, energy for itself and the outer species, and carbon crystals. This metabolic process keeps the entire creature afloat in the atmosphere, and a small orifice at the bottom of the animal dumps the carbon and excess hydrogen when the animal wants to descend.
I saw indications of these things in a few other systems as well, so this was not a singularly unique occurrence. Once I'm back in the bubble I'll have to contact Canonn and Palin Research and give them my notes. I'm sure they'll want to follow up on this.
Yes. Giant jellyfish that shit diamond dust. They sink down into the murky atmosphere at night and fill up on hydrocarbons, then they rise up during daytime and use their local sunlight and planetary Van Allen belt radiation to break these down and feed. It's a completely new form of life, as best as I can tell. They're not animals but hybrid constructs. The computer simulations I ran suggest that they were once very thin sheets of microorganisms, precipitated onto clouds of hydrocarbon-rich gas, which the convection currents of their atmosphere perturbed into mostly spherical shapes. They do not breed, per se. They multiply by embolism, sort of like the hydra on Earth. They grow large and eventually bubbles form here and there, pinch off, and drift off as a new colony. They're simultaneously as primitive as bacterial films, but also vast and massive like the largest cities. I can't speculate on their life-cycle, if the concept even makes sense, but carbon dating of the ones I observed suggests individual colonies live at least thousands of years, and sprout new colonies almost daily. That rate of growth suggests a gas giant's atmosphere should be teeming with them, and yet it wasn't. System after system, they were certainly present and easy to find if you knew what to look for, but not so numerous as their multiplication and growth rates, and ages, suggest. Something must be keeping their numbers in check but I saw no indication of what this something might be. I don't know if they have a natural predator that co-evolves with them - which might make sense in one system here and another there, but not consistently. Maybe there are nominal astronomical events that eliminate them frequently enough to keep them from saturating their atmospheres. I have no idea. They're almost exclusive to gas giants with rings, so maybe there's something going on there. No clue.
Anyway, I have enough data to fill several large caches on this topic, and a few more of astronometrics and system drift data. Some of the systems I traversed were not where they should have been. A few were a few dozen light years out of place meaning our databases are imprecise for stars this far out. I've sent my actuals back to the bubble for calibration. This isn't unusual because there are plenty of unmapped gravitational anomalies all over space, and I'm wondering if the aggregate error over distance is what knocked Jacques off their intended trajectory. Yes, people keep talking about aliens, and finding barnacles, artifacts and probes strongly suggest there are in fact aliens, but space is vast. There's plenty we don't know that is completely inert, not alien and not intelligent, and can sorely mess up your day in witchspace. So, while I believe we'll make contact with aliens soon, I am also skeptical, and think Jacques trip was interrupted by a passing neutron star or a clump of dark matter more likely than by an intentional alien interdiction.
I'm sure we'll all find out soon enough about aliens and whatnot. My immediate plan is to spend a bit more time here in the Jacques system. Map the place. Mine a bit in all the rings just to get something more on record than just scanner data, explore a few hundred light years this way and that, check out the local nebulae, and then to head back home. At present, the trip home should take me first below the waterline of the galaxy. A few wingmates have let me know there are many neutron stars just a day's solid burn south, and since I didn't see a single one of these monsters on the way here, I'd really like to. My curiosity and their value to some special interests, like a specific Engineer or two, should make for as lucrative a cache of data getting home as I saw getting here.
For now, that's all.