The Gap Expedition - Crossing The Hook
13 Mar 2020Ren Solsen
I didn't hold high hopes about that "Le passage de Tenebris" route. For all her qualities, Danna wasn't a seasoned explorer before joining The Bridger. She has won the route stick in a face-slapping contest back at Morgan's Rock from a known local drunk. Who knows from where he got it from. The first surprise was that some of the stars on the route were actually plottable. We checked a few systems and it started making some sort of sense. The route was old, required a decent amount of jump range but nowhere near what The Bridger can do. What the heck! I thought. Danna is getting me in trouble again.
I have done injected boost jumps before. One here and there, a couple on a route to a faraway star. As we glue the pieces together we noticed the order of magnitude was completely different. Over 2,5kly across, The Hook would take us close to 30 injection boost jumps.
It was hard, I can tell you that. Luckily we managed to Plot a few new stars between points that would have been out of reach for the old explorer. For the most part, was plotting one star at a time.
We decided to empty the fuel tanks to a manageable minimum. It got us around 76ly. How scary it is to be on the true black with your fuel gauge pointing to empty.
For the first injection jumps, we had to relearn the process. Get the materials from the material bay, synthesise the right mix, try not to mess up and break the FSD or worse... We repeated the process some 20-25 times in what took weeks.
Each successful jump we celebrated being alive. Then checking all systems again, spend days on the galactic map, prepare the boost, and again the fear that the void would finally reclaim us.
I am sending this log to tell you we survived. We reached Perseus's Arm safely and we landed in a moon in order to harvest materials.
The Tungsten paint job held itself beautifully and now its time to take a small break and mine for Germanium and Arsenic before heading back to the extreme space of Tenebrae and towards Magellan's star.