3307.02.10 - NYND DAY 39
10 Feb 2021Kori5758
Date: 3307.02.10Universal Galactic Time: 0624
Shipboard Time: 0124
Location: Lunar Hyperlight, Thaile HW-V e2-7
The folks from Apex dropped off Fumante and Stinger II sometime while I slept. Stinger II was a little dinged up but nothing Aleks wasn't able to get quickly fixed up. Fumante getting here also means I'm all set for the upcoming fight night in the neighboring storm cloud, apparently some of the other commanders might not be so lucky. I overheard at least one person asking Luna what time it will be as their ship isn't scheduled to arrive until just before. With those two ships all set, the only other thing that needed to be done this morning was to set a course. This was also Aleks, Kex, and Tsuki's first time aboard Eighth Veil and Aleks seemed glad to have a Gutamaya ship to work on again (he's adamant that Microraptor doesn't count as it's practically a Core Dynamics design) while Kex seemed to disapprove of its svelte appearance. I'm not sure if it's due to the more Spartan design of Federation ships or the fact that Clippers do not have a coffee machine on the bridge.
After flipping through a couple patrol requests from Canonn and POIs from the Galactic Mapping Project, we decided on heading out to a nearby stellar remnant field called the Halo Stars, with the region name being linked to Thailiae JH-M d7-3. As we were setting out, we received a message from Helios asking us to check what distance the Three Worlds nebula disappeared from view for his own experiment of the day. We were already out of sight of it, so all we could note was that it was under 180 Ly until we returned. The description for the field noted that there was an S class star in the area but, due to data migration issues with the star map database, we were unable to get the system name or even distance and direction. Thankfully, Tsuki managed to come up with a workaround in order to locate the system and she flagged a few notable stars she saw in the process. Perhaps Randomius Factoria decided not to help us out anymore today though, we found few worthwhile planetary bodies throughout the trip. The only ones we came across were a couple of water worlds (not terraformable) and a handful of THMCs.
We were a little more fortunate with stars though. A couple of the systems Tsuki flagged contained Herbig Ae/Be protostars. We managed to find three Herbigs today thanks to her efforts, which is more than we've found total to date. One was already discovered but the other two were completely unexplored.
By this time, we had entered the stellar remnant field and it quickly became clear that Eighth Veil was in poor shape to navigate the area with our current outfitting. As it was, Eighth Veil could make about three max distance jumps on a full tank before desperately needing to refuel. This area being a stellar remnant field meant it was full of unscoopable neutron stars and white dwarfs. Thankfully, Tsuki was able to route us so that we were able to refuel at a main sequence star whenever we were close to running out, which was often. However, Tsuki did end up making one critical mistake. The star we wound up at was an MS class instead of the S class we were looking for. This actually turned out to be a stroke of luck as it was somehow missed by the Sagittarius-Carina mission who passed within roughly 200 Ly of it, allowing us to claim it as our first First Discovery of a carbon star type.
Tsuki managed to find the actual S class star, Thailiae MN-T d3-5, after a bit of manual searching on the galactic map and we started the trip back by routing back to Lunar Hyperlight through that system. I decided to refer to the system as Mints due to the MN-T in the name and the main star being an S class. Upon arrival, Kex noticed that there was actually a trinary set of THMCs orbiting the B star of the system and for some reason none of them had been previously mapped. The first discovery tags on the system indicated that several people had passed through this system but all had skipped mapping anything in the system even though they were all under 10 kLs from the arrival point, which is nothing for most explorers. It just meant more data for us, hopefully we'll manage to break a billion by the time we return to the Tavern, we're getting so close!
We unfortunately did not find anything else of note between Mints and Lunar Hyperlight. We thought it wise to return to Lunar Hyperlight to sell off our data and secure our first discoveries before gathering data for Helios. Setting back out, I had Tsuki plot a course for a nearby cluster of stars that were in my estimated range for where Three Worlds should become too small to make out and there were enough stars to fine-tune the distance by jumping between them. We observed that we could no longer make out the nebula beyond 137 Ly.
Interestingly, the points where he noticed the nebula disappearing at varied depending on direction. He concluded that it likely was due to the relativistic Doppler effect and the direction of travel of the nebula after the supernova that spawned it. My forte is history, so I can't comment on it but Kex forwarded it to their Canonn buddies, so we'll see what they say.
We returned to Lunar Hyperlight to repair the damage Eighth Veil took from getting thrown around by neutrons all day and to draw up some plans. I thought aloud about how we should figure out how to fit an extra fuel tank in Eighth Veil and was in the middle of puzzling out how to rearrange the internals when Aleks carted in a fuel tank. I have absolutely no idea where he managed to get one, we didn't bring any extras and those aren't exactly something that's left lying around. He assured me he paid for it but I know Luna decided not to stock any modules, so who exactly did he buy it from?! Regardless, we managed to make it fit at the cost of having to remove the repair limpet controller and downgrading the SRV hangar so that it can only hold one instead of two SRVs. Kex also came up to me with a list of sites that merit investigation that he dug up from deep within Canonn's archives that don't appear on any other lists that I've seen before and they may or may not have since been worn down by time. Looks like we'll have our hands full when we get back to the Bubble.
END LOG