Expedition to the Galactic Core: Day 10
23 Mar 2019Protoculturejunkie
I left the Norma Arm yesterday and am currently in the Empyrean Straits. I have already found several ELWs and neutron stars as well. As a result of the later, my progress towards Explorer's Anchorage has been significantly boosted. The only trouble I seem to have is sometimes after I plot my course if I reenter the galaxy map it wants to plot a different, and much longer (jump-wise) route. I have been correcting this issue by doing a short route to a neutron star that's more or less along the way. When I do that and replot after getting the jet-cone boost the map seems to find the fastest way again. Due to this I have been pausing my journey once I get to a system with a neutron star in it when I need a break from travel.Using this method I did find something interesting yesterday. It was a grouping of seven uncharted neutron stars all practically next to each other. The two farthest apart were roughly 25 light years from each other. The others were clustered in between the two of them. I was surprised that I found so many so close to each other, as I had expected not to see that until I had entered the Galactic Centre region. I was more surprised though by the fact no one else had turned in any data on them yet. I had passed through a few charted neutron star systems along my route and figured such a tight grouping of them would have attracted another commander's attention by now. Hopefully my luck will hold up and no one beats me to a station in the next couple of days.
Also using the previously mentioned method I did happen to spot something out of my way that caught my eye. It was an aura effect that sometimes appears on the galaxy map around a star. I had seen this before, once in the Inner Orion Spur, just outside the Bubble, and once in the Outer Orion Spur. Both systems had the parent star as one of the blue classes, and had additional stars in them. Now at the time I had spotted this new star I had the filter set to just neutrons and the first two blue star classes, as I was looking for a faster route to my destination. I started filtering back in the scoopable star classes to see what the star was and nothing popped up. I then cleared everything and then activated the Wolf–Rayet as I thought it might have been one of them, but it wasn't. After messing with the filter a bit more I discovered it was a protostar. Because it was so far off my current course I decided to just bookmark it for now and hope that no one beats me to it before the next time I come out this way.
For now I have landed on a moon orbiting a gas giant in a neutron star system. I have calculated it will take me 44 jumps to get to Explorer's Anchorage. I'm thinking I'll just look for a few more neutron stars along the course to help narrow it down. When I looked at it before shutting my systems down for the night it had me only hitting one other neutron star along the way. I'm fairly certain that there will be a few more, likely off to the sides, that I can hit and help get that number down further.