3307.02.01 - NYND Days 28-29
01 Feb 2021Kori5758
Date: 3307.02.01Universal Galactic Time: 0648
Shipboard Time: 0048
Location: Lunar Hyperlight, Dryeou Flaae OM-W d1-4
I'm combining today's and yesterday's logs as yesterday was a travel day, so there is little of note to write about.
DAY 28
As with most of the major transitions on this expedition, we started this leg of the journey with a mass jump. I wanted to take out Microraptor as I've been missing the feeling of flying a Gutamaya ship and it's the only one we brought, even if it does retain a lot of the Core Dynamics design. Unfortunately, this jump was to be 27.1 Ly, which was just beyond Microraptor's range of 12.7 Ly even with a premium FSD injection. Luckily, Aleks was able to scrounge up an FSD booster from somewhere and quickly get it installed in time for Tsuki and I to make the rendezvous. I only hope it came out of one of our ships and he isn't "borrowing" equipment from others' again. We don't need another incident.
For once, we were actually one of the first to arrive. We were lucky to spot the group massing just as we took off from Lunar Hyperlight and didn't have to spend time chasing down the wing signal like before, to Tsuki's disappointment. Since she came along on such a small ship mostly to coordinate the wing, she opted to move downstairs to the living quarters under the cockpit. I suspect the lack of extra room on the Imperial Eagle's cockpit to be a larger part of the reason though.
Since Microraptor was outfitted as a racer, we left off some of the modules that many would consider essential, like shields, due to the added weight. We also needed to power down our thrusters as their enhanced performance comes at the cost of enhanced fuel consumption and we downsized the fuel tank to further reduce weight. A single jump could easily burn through half the tank and we didn't have enough to spare to keep the engines idling. We sent a wideband message to the fleet asking the other commanders to keep their distance to avoid accidental bumps that could cripple us that we would be unable to dodge. This seemed to only encourage a couple to get closer. Close enough to scratch the paint.
The Pelessaria thankfully returned to her position after just a couple of taps to say she could. She then got a taste of her own medicine.
As ships continued to arrive, I noticed that, for the first time, we had all four of the Gutamaya ships currently available to commanders present in our formation. Somebody also decided that the middle of the Gutamaya formation was the perfect place to park their Hauler.
With the last of the stragglers in place, Luna started the countdown and we were able to get Microraptor to just barely be able to engage the hyperdrive without the safety factors kicking in due to the distance.
Naturally, Microraptor sped ahead of the formation, even with me trying to keep the speed in check, and we were able to safely make it through witchspace and land back aboard Lunar Hyperlight to begin the journey to Pamplemousse.
After a few jumps, the crew was back aboard the Raxxla Express II and was prepped to detatch from Lunar Hyperlight to make the journey ourselves. It was barely over 1,000 Ly from where we stationed at for mining, so we could have easily flown there on our own (and we did make it most of the way there a few days ago before we got a patrol request from Canonn asking for us to deviate from our plotted route). It was a fairly quick trip, the only interesting thing we saw was a gas giant that was visibly compressed due to its high rotational speed.
We arrived at Pamplemousse a bit over ten minutes before Lunar Hyperlight did and were able to witness it arriving out of witchspace. We were positioned slightly to the side and had our night vision enabled, so it was interesting to see the lines from the night vision being drawn as it exited the portal as if it were an image that was slowly loading.
Saorise has also been having some success with CQC . Since she's connecting through my ship, it's my ranking that goes up and she just got us to Amateur. Looking at some of her after-match statistics, it seems like most people that she's going up against are either new players with ranks below 10 or veterans with multiple prestiges. This seems like it will be a tricky ranking to climb but I don't care about getting Elite on this ranking, I just want the CD-43 11917 permit.
DAY 29
Luna announced an exploration competition today. Every 100k credits that are earned from selling to the Universal Cartographics agent aboard Lunar Hyperlight earns 1 point and the top 10 photographs will receive 100 bonus points. Normally, I ignore contests like this; we didn't even take part in the mining one despite mining. However, this one is based on exploration and that is our specialty. We're off to a slow start though as Raxxla Express II was grounded for most of the day while Aleks tried to fix a thermal control issue. He fixed it enough that the ship could operate again and we made a short loop of the area.
Gilm observed that there are many visually interesting gas giants in the area and we stumbled upon one such planet ourselves. A white gas giant with a blue and pink pattern.
It seems Raxxla Express II is malfunctioning again though as we received a hail from Helios asking why we didn't stop by before leaving as apparently they were landed on a moon orbiting the very same gas giant. Our sensors never even detected that there was another ship in the system, Aleks is going to have to take another look over the ship tomorrow and do some more maintenance. We arrived at our destination with the next jump, a system flagged by Noraaka as interesting but they wouldn't say why. It became apparent as soon as we dropped into the system: it was a small, failed stellar nursery with several brown dwarfs and gas giants orbiting a single class B star. Most of the objects in this system also had rings, interestingly.
We returned to Lunar Hyperlight so that Aleks could begin his inspection while Kex, Tsuki, and I took Atelier Astra out for a quick spin. We were lucky to pick the direction we did because we hit gold.
A system containing an Earth-like world, a terraformable water world, a handful of terraformable high metal content worlds, and, most importantly, binary ammonia worlds. Binary ammonia worlds is one of the things we'd been after this entire trip as Luna has a bounty out on any undiscovered pairs. Sadly, it seems that this system was already visited.
A commander by the name of Itihi had already been through this system. Oddly, they seem to have taken the time to scan every body in the system but they moved on without mapping anything. Mapping burnout is a serious issue with deep space explorers and many start to skip mapping THMCs due to the sheer number of them but water worlds, ammonia worlds, and especially Earth-like worlds are usually always mapped by the first person to come across them. This Itihi must have been in a serious rush to get wherever they were going. We didn't want to risk losing the data for a system with so many valuable planets, so we decided to turn Atelier Astra around immediately and returned to Lunar Hyperlight. That system alone wound up being worth 9 million credits after the 25% fee for selling to a carrier. Imagine how much more we would have gotten if it was a first discovery and sold to a proper station?
END LOG