Expedition to the Galactic Core: Day 3
16 Mar 2019Protoculturejunkie
It brings me great joy that I can finally write this: I was fortunate enough to find an Earth-like world today! I had penetrated a great deal into the Hawking's Gap region when I had decided to adjust my route planner. I had been using just the fastest route with optional neutron/white dwarf boosting when I felt that I was jumping to too many Class M stars. I'm not sure if it was due to some sort of software update that causes long routes to plan more Class M stars into the route, or if this region of space has more Class M stars than the Inner Orion Spur, or it was just a weird quirk of randomness that had caused this. It was happening in the Outer Orion Spur as well. I ended up opening my galaxy map, scrolling over to the filter, moving the dropdown to the star classes, and deselected the Class M stars (it had previously been filtered to just the scoopable stars, white dwarfs, and non-sequence stars). Literally two jumps later I arrive into an uncharted system with the ELW I had been looking for. Perhaps fate will be kind to me and throw a few more my way during this journey as well. Another find I made today was something I likely would have never noticed without the Codex. I managed to find a moon that was terraformable. The only way I noticed was that the Codex did its little alert notification when you find something in a system you haven't found before. As I have made several journeys before the Codex I am now wondering how many I may have missed previously. To be honest, looking at moons to see if they're terraformable is something I hadn't considered doing before. Since it would be impracticable to go back over my previous jumps and rescan each and every system I've been to, I shall just have to remember to check all the moons I find from here on out to see if they're terraformable as well.
I have now touched down on another terraformable rock for the night. I currently estimate that I'm a third to halfway through the Hawking's Gap via the route I have set. I'm guessing that it'll take me at least another two days of travel before I enter the Norma Arm region, though, I must admit, I start to underestimate these distances once I'm dealing with locations outside the bubble.