The Gap Expedition - From Eock Prau Nebula
03 Mar 2020Ren Solsen
As I seat here, landed on planet C2, watching the nebula's greens and reds on the sky and the orange barks dotting the grey surface, I was ready to start my midpoint log. You see, the idea of this expedition was to cross the Gap in all its extent and then to start heading back hitting a string of research locations. More on that in a minute.For the first waypoints, the objective was basic exploration. We jumped through Coalsack and Autumn nebulae, took readings, photographs, composition samples. Beautiful sceneries that were a great warmup for what was coming. By that point, Danna was bursting her personal bubble space and we were barely starting.
Next point was to study the Amphora Plants at Blo Eurl. For all that I have travelled I had never seen them. To prepare we set a planetary camp in a landable terraformable planet a few jumps from the codex location. The Amphoras were amazing, unlike other biologies they seemed more organic but yielded less material than barks. We followed several strings of systems nearby in order to find undiscovered locations with no success.
After we were done with it we headed to the Qing Long Caverns, the expectation was to find the deep canyons and see if they supported life. We found much more as we made camp at what shall be known as Camp Walrus in orbital body AB 4 a geo-site 9. The purple colours of the nebula were outstanding. A proper stop before stars start running low and we try to enter the Gap.
With objective 1 (the Amphora plants) crossed, we headed to objective 2 (The Hawking's Gap abandoned settlements). We went through all of them, collected data and materials but something strange was going on. A lonely sidewinder was spying on us in site Alpha, while a bunch of Imperial Ships were around next to one of the others. According to the released records, we studied back in Jameson Memorial the mission was to find suitable earth-like worlds. We found one in each side of Lip-Shu Hollow, with no sign of being visited by men or probes.
Now things were getting interesting, objective 3 was to cross the actual gap. We started on the Gamma site and headed towards Pueliae Nebula at the edge of the region. Star quantity was getting low and more often than not we didn't achieve full jump range. It was over 10000ly of scarce jumping points until the nebula, but soon we should start heading back. Our minds were starting to echo the messages of the messages left behind by the poor souls of project Dynasty. The nebula itself was good, again we took the test battery and start getting ready to turn around, as planned. However, it was clear that the gap we were not done with the gap.
We have crossed it through the Hawking's Gap region, but it continues all the way through Dryman's Point. We opened the codex and study a new route. A proper end for the crossing would be the Eock Prau Nebula and on our way, we could study the mysterious Peduncle Trees and seed pods. We did find several locations for the trees, both discovered and undiscovered before us. We researched them closely and found that the pods give a jet-propelled boost to escape if an object gets close to collision with them.
Again, as we seat here, we are battling what to do next. Is it finally time to head back to course or do we follow a crazy idea Danna got from one of her drinking buddies back in Morgan? Do we try to reach Tenebrea and Magallan Star? Crossing the arms in here is nothing more than legend.
Danna goes and browses her things for some weird and old route stick labelled "Le passage de Tenebris" with several waypoints for crossing what is known as "The Hook" between Sag-Carina and Perseus's Arms. The data is partially corrupted and it is unclear if it can be plotted. Is this a joke? With valuable research data on the ship, the last thing we need is a wild rabbit hole of a treasure hunt.