Entry 24: Veil Expedition, Bark Mound Studies
30 Mar 2020Worldbuilder92
Current System: LBN 623 Sector FW-W d1-100Veil Expedition Day 3
Checkpoint 1 Reached
Nira set our first checkpoint as this (comparatively) small, deep-purple nebula roughly 500LY from the bubble; unfortunately, his checkpoint was a single star with no planets in orbit, so I had to do some hunting for a nearby system to land on. Fortuntely, this system has several planets to land on for camping, and wouldn't ya know it... bark mounds on the moon of the 2nd planet.
So... I've been studying bark mounds for several weeks, and the main issue I have with them is that, to my eye, it seems like Canonn's official verdict on the biology of the mounds seems to clash with how the mounds behave. Canonn lists them as a fungal life form, yet that implies they would be decomposers; however, the bark mounds tend to only occur on lifeless, airless worlds, as far as I've seen. Therefore, I've come to a new hypothesis that the bark mounds have been misidentified.
And it seems I'm now no longer alone in this thinking. After ranting to my fellow fleet pilots about my theories, it seems I've won them over enough that they want to help me start an in-depth study of bark mounds to submit to Canonn Research Institute in the future, culminating in my trip to Colonia to sample the first mounds discovered there. Admittedly, this was unexpected, but I'm now happy to reorient my plans with more purpose to them! I mean, heck, if it satisfies my and others' curiosities, why not follow the data cookie trail?
As such, today marks the official beginning of the Bark Mound Sampling project... I'll find a better name for it later. So I've taken samples of the bark mounds on the moon here, and I'll be logging them in a spreadsheet along with any others I find in the future. Here's hoping something fruitful comes from this.
...I wonder if Canonn accepts randomly-submitted research papers...