Engineer Run Take 2
26 Aug 2022Challenge
Having picked Wyrd as a home system, I picked up a DBX. Of course that meant a shakedown cruise. I wanted to go out to Deciat to chat with Farseer so I set out to map anything worth the effort as I went. Paid for gas packing commodities into the limited hold space. Had about 2.5 million worth of scan data before I was halfway there. I was carrying military grade cloth from a high tech outpost thinking to drop it at a military installation. Even found one owned by a friendly faction. Came in steep. When I dropped out of glide, horizontal separation between the installation and the Diamondback was pretty short, but I had altitude to lose. Almost into comm range and alarms start going off. I'm trespassing, I'm fined, A bounty, I'm ...
...Waking up on board The Champion of Piety MegaShip Detention Center, Crucis Sector EQ-Y b4. At least I had a newly minted replacement Explorer -- even if with the deductible.
So Take 2.
I thought about taking the original course. One system on that course is only a short 5 jumps away from The Champion of Piety. I even made the first jump in that direction before I decided it was fuelish to go backward. I did that more in frustration over the data loss than for any more serious reason, I decided to start mapping my way to Deciat again. Now that I've mapped the planets in Skardee, I'm rather glad I did. It isn't really all that outstanding from a spectacular oddity or anything. What was surprising was that the three innermost planets are close enough to the Primary that I was scooping fuel as I scanned them.
Approaching a body in orbits farther out from the star is pretty straight forward; point at planet, move into range, slow down, map, check box, rinse and repeat. It gets a little more complicated when the target ball of rock orbits inside the coronasphere of the star. I launched two heat sinks just getting deep enough in to fire drones. It took a long time to get there, and firing a second got the out of range message. I picked up speed to catch up, got the ship is cooking message, fired off another heat sink and pulled away from the star.
I put on some speed to get ahead Skardee while checking for damage (nothing of note) and reloading the heat sink launchers. Since Skardee I is orbiting faster than the maximum speed for a drone to fire, getting in front of it, along its orbital track, and waiting for it to run into me sounded like a good plan. Good timing is essential. Planets move pretty fast in this close. Total of 7 heatsinks used.
Skardee II and III were easier, but there were still a few things that gave a bit of a challenge. Two was a bit further out along the plane so it wasn't moving as fast, but it was still too fast for me to feel comfortable with locking out my ship controls this close to a fiery mass. So I ran out ahead, got in front, and almost got hit by it. It was still moving faster than a planet should be...
It was the first time in a while that I found a need for the Orbital Plane tracks. Would have slammed into the blue line if I hadn't seen it coming.
Skardee III was in front of me when I pulled away from the near miss with its sister. Mapping went like clockworks. I landed to take a short rest and do some ground exploring. Found some geysers and picked up a couple of mats -- nothing spectacular, nor even worth noting, really. Next morning (ship's time) I lifted. As the FSD kicked in the fuel scoop notice came on. When it turned off, I jumped to my next stop: Ngobriglia