3307.02.07 - NYND Day 36
08 Feb 2021Kori5758
Date: 3307.02.07Universal Galactic Time: 0313
Shipboard Time: 2113
Location: Lunar Hyperlight, Thaile HW-V e2-7
We rendezvoused with the fleet at 1846 UGT and this is the last time I'm buying a ship at the highest discount I can find. Turned out the data storage on this one was faulty and Aleks only just now got it working again, so I can get back to writing these log entries. That's what you get for going out of your way to find a cheap ship I guess.
Roughly four days ago, Saoirse and I decided to try buckying Stinger back to the Bubble before meeting back up with the rest of the crew and the fleet at the Three Worlds Nebula. Unfortunately, I had lent her my copy of Salomé's biography recently and she got the idea to try forcing a misjump because "the only way to go from here is closer to home" and a misjump allowed Salomé to exceed her ship's jump range. This is why she never passes her Pilot's Federation exams, she's lucky we didn't wind up stranded part way to Andromeda! Fortunately, we actually wound up right where we needed to go: the Bubble. Stinger's systems were fried though and, with Aleks back on Lunar Hyperlight, we were forced to buy a new one in order to fly to a different station to upgrade to a better ship. We found an Imperial Clipper for cheap at one of those shipyards run by dodgy Sirius Corp folks and we figured we were getting a deal because he didn't seem to know exactly what he had because he kept referring to it as an Empire Trader.
We decided to name the ship Eighth Veil, after Salomé's Clipper, Seven Veils, due to how we wound up needing to buy it in the first place. We also picked up a Cobra for cheap in the same shipyard, named Fumante after an old Solar military unit, the Cobras Fumantes, and contracted a pilot from some new company called Apex Interstellar Transport to fly it to Lunar Hyperlight so we can use it in the upcoming fight night. We knew the flight to the Three Worlds Nebula to meet up with the fleet would be long, so we decided to only make a couple stops before heading out. We stopped in Prism, home system to Salomé, as it seemed fitting for Eight Veil's maiden voyage and had a short layover in Saoirse's home system of Tabaldak as it was relatively nearby. This is where the issues with Eighth Veil started. The lights in the cockpit would randomly set their intensity to maximum which, combined with the highly polished interior, proved blinding.
Another issues that is possibly my fault is I clipped a nacelle on the mailslot while docking and ever since, even though the station maintenance crews insist nothing is wrong, there have been random engine throttle fluctuations. In normal flight, this presents little problem. However, the fluctuations can override the standard deceleration sequence of locking the throttle at 75% forward seven seconds from the destination, causing an overshoot.
We decided to stop at the recently discovered penal colony, Serene Harbour, to grab the logs that have been setting Canonn's communication channels all abuzz. Saoirse did not seem particularly thrilled with visiting, I supposed she must have heard plenty of stories of places like this during her time in whatever cause she fought in. Strangely, while I was able to obtain the colonies logs without an issue in an SRV, they were overwritten during the transfer to Eighth Veil with files relating to something called Project Mycoid. The contents of the new files seem to be related to files we had previously recovered from Jameson's crashed Cobra. We cannot figure out how to restore the original files though, we may have to make a second trip back here to download them again. Provided Imperial Intelligence doesn't destroy the site before then.
The flight to the Three Worlds Nebula was fairly uneventful. We found a couple valuable planets but nothing that's really worth noting. The nebula itself had some interesting sights though. It took us a little while to figure this one out but apparently there is an optical illusion where to some the nearby Eta Carina and NGC 3199 nebulae appear to be inside the Three Worlds Nebula. Tsuki probably would have been able to tell us immediately but Saoirse and I had to check all the nearby systems until we found one that aligned with the star we could see was directly in front of the cloud and then followed that out to the actual cloud. Initially, we thought those nebulae were too far away to be the ones we were seeing but apparently it just stands out more in the blue of this nebula instead of the usual black of space.
In the nebula system itself, we noted two notable stellar phenomena. An investigation of both of these revealed lagrange storm clouds. These are among the rarest sights in the Milky Way, the fact that both NSPs are storm clouds instead of just one indicates that there is something about the makeup of the system that causes them to be electrified. Within the storm clouds, we located a particular type of tree instead of the usual crystals. This is the only place in this region the codex lists these trees, so we cannot tell whether they are just native to this region or if it is because of the unique environment that they formed. We also located similar anomalies to the ones we found at Magellan's star. The blue light of these anomalies among the dangerous and limited-visibility environment lead me to think of them as similar to Will o' Wisps, spirits that would lure travelers off the roads to their demise among the swamps of ancient Earth.
The entry for this system in the star mapping project indicated that the first explorer to venture out here claimed to see some sort of structures on the planets that give this nebula its name. We could not observe any such structures but the entry also gave the coordinates for a location known as the Armchair on one of the planets currently approved for landing. As we approached the coordinates, the reason for the name became obvious: it is the valley between two mountains. It took us a little while to find a spot we could actually set such a large ship down in, but we eventually managed. We landed around either sunrise or sunset (hard to tell when you first land on a planet) and drove the SRV around for a little bit before deciding to settle down for the night.
When we awoke, Lunar Hyperlight had still yet to leave Pamplemousse, so we decided to do a little exploring to kill some time. Without any better objectives, I plotted a course for a nearby Wolf Rayet star that somebody from FleetComm had come asking about over at Canonn a while back. Nearby being a relative term, of course. It was actually about 4,000 Ly away. Without any thing better to do aside from follow upon every single patrol request from Canonn in the region, we set off for GCRV 7815. Most of the systems we passed though weren't notable, except for one: Pyroifooe RE-F d12-23. This system turned out to be home to a trinary set of terraformable water worlds and there was a fourth in orbit around the same barycenter.
I have only ever heard of one other similar system and it was deemed notable enough to be given a name by the Galactic Mapping Project. This was the only thing of note before reaching GCRV 7815. The system itself is notable for historical reasons but we confirmed something else within the system: a brown dwarf named Gracie's Light. Why there is a named system so far from Sol and why a Class Y of all stars remains a mystery but some digging done by Luna after sending the data back to the fleet seems to indicate it is some sort of memorial to a child struck down by a series of diseases but continued on long after doctors expected her body to give out. Why it is out here so far from the Bubble we still don't know.
Our trip back to the Three Worlds Nebula was once again uneventful. The most exciting thing was coming across a field of Amphora Plants in Thailiae OJ-P d6-11 but once again our ship's bargain nature reared its head and the SRV's guns decided not to fire in order for us to collect any materials from said plants. We returned to the Three Worlds Nebula and powered down in order to wait for Lunar Hyperlight to arrive. Luna's navigator continued to enjoy cutting it close and entered the system a few megameters from the core of a neutron star. Regardless, we docked to meet up with the rest of the crew and turn in all our data and let Aleks loose on the ship to begin repairs. We somehow managed to earn well over 100 million credits from our data even after all the extra taxes the Universal Cartographics agents like to slap on for turning it in on carriers. Tsuki informed me that she made a minor breakthrough on the code we received a while back. The random 7 in the middle seems to indicate the number of letters the text needs to be shifted and doing so reveals the last part of the message to spell "thargoid". The rest of the text is still unreadable but Tsuki believes the part she has decoded is some sort of key that will let her decode the rest once she figures it out.
END LOG