3307.02.11 - NYND Day 40
10 Feb 2021Kori5758
Date: 3307.02.10Universal Galactic Time: 2015
Shipboard Time: 1415
Location: Lunar Hyperlight, Thaile HW-V e2-7
Fight night is tonight and Luna has already been slamming her head into the bulkheads in frustration. There's apparently some confusion over what time it actually starts. We never synced the shipboard times, so everybody's are different. Luna giving the start time based on her shipboard time led to a bunch of different commanders all trying to figure out what time that it is for their shipboard time. Some have also had to drop out of the tournament early due to getting the time wrong. And then there's the issue with people missing her announcements. Luna announced that it would start sometime between 1600 and 1800 (2200 and 0000 UGT) and she was officially opening registrations. Despite the announcement, several people kept asking her what time it would start. So she made more announcements. And people still kept asking. I wouldn't put it beyond her to manipulate the brackets to personally shoot at specific people after that.
Meanwhile, Aleks had finished his inspection of Fumante and gave me the green light to take it out for a test flight. This is actually the first time I'm flying this ship. I had to make some minor adjustments to the firing groups but everything else seemed in perfect order. I locked onto the closest storm cloud and set off with Aleks in the copilot seat to verify that everything was indeed clear for combat.
I had previously investigated these clouds while waiting for Lunar Hyperlight to arrive but that was in Eighth Veil, a Clipper. Fumante being a Cobra meant it was thrown about much more easily by the turbulence due to its much smaller size. The turbulence may present an issue with disabling flight assist to do quick flips. Without the automatic correction, Fumante wobbled dramatically until I reenabled flight assist. It's not a large enough issue to disorient a pilot but it will make it trickier to end a maneuver at the correct angle and get the guns on target. I feel sorry for anybody that's going to try and use fixed weapons tonight. Thankfully, all of ours are gimballed. They should have less of an issue hitting their targets and our test showed no issues with firing them.
Up next was the scariest part of this test: withstanding lightning. To do this, we had to actively try to get hit by a lightning bolt. We noted on our previous trip that lighting tends to occur in the same areas, so we watched for a pattern in the strikes and then headed that way. Our observations today matched our previous ones, with some extra information. There are pockets of electricity that linger in one are of the cloud before eventually dispersing and another pocket forming elsewhere. The pockets were visible as areas of frequent, small lightning bolts accentuated by occasional larger bolts. I took us into the storm while Aleks monitored the ship's systems and their reactions to the lightning. As was expected, the shields began draining rather rapidly from the constant barrage of minor hits. Then we got hit by a large bolt.
The hit caused the ship to rock before flight assist cancelled it out but it took out the last of our shields and caused some damage to the hull. Aleks told me to get us back to Lunar Hyperlight immediately as the loss of the shields meant each of those seemingly little lightning bolts acted similar to lasers. They were eating through our hull. It's a good thing these clouds are unable to mass lock ships and I was able to get us into supercruise before our hull dropped below 80% integrity. We set back down Lunar Hyperlight moments later and Aleks immediately started his repairs to get Fumante back to peak fighting form. The fights should start in the next few hours.
Date: 3307.02.11
Universal Galactic Time: 0203
Shipboard Time: 2003
Location: Lunar Hyperlight, Thaile HW-V e2-7
We ran into some minor problems just as everyone was lifting off to head to the storm cloud. Aleks noticed on the preflight check that the ship's pitching was less responsive then it should be. He tried to make some frantic attempts at quick repairs. I told him to just leave it until I get back. It will make some maneuvers more difficult but the other option is being disqualified for being a no-show. I fortunately had a bye for the first round, so I was able to make it just before my first match started. It was to be against Hana in their Sidewinder, Glow Cloud-1. Normally, a Sidewinder would be little threat. However, this was my first time flying this ship in combat and I have little combat experience. I had faced Sidewinders before in CQC, so I had some idea of what to expect. The greater range of customization offered to commanders meant they could have plenty of tricks up their sleeves that I would be unprepared for. The rules of the fights forbid engineering though, so that at least eliminated some of the nastier ones.
In the end, the Cobra essentially being a direct upgrade from the Sidewinder overwhelmed it. Amusingly, I did not end up finishing Hana with my guns. Instead I accidentally rammed her on an attempted joust. That was something I was hoping to avoid tonight as my main source of damage last fight night was ramming. Looking at the fight on the bracket that would determine who I faced next filled me with dread. It was Luna vs Nosrik and, from what I could see of their match from where I was, Luna was winning. Luna was in her Viper mk.IV, Lunar Aclhemy (because she can't come up with any better names and just recycles the same one constantly), and Nosrik was in their Cobra mk.III, Fanfaron. Winning was relative in that match though, since both still had above 70% hull integrity. After the longest bout the entire night at roughly 30 minutes, Luna did indeed win. After a few repair limpets, we were setting up our bout.
This proved to be my most difficult fight of the night. Luna took full advantage of her Viper's greater agility and used hit and run attacks to try chipping away at Fumante. Whenever I managed to pin her down, she would then try and fly as far away as possible to allow her shields to recharge. I'm not as reliant upon my instruments as some other commanders though, so even though she managed to get far enough away to break the target lock, I kept catching up by tracking her visually.
She eventually caught on that running away wasn't enough. I kept flipping around too quickly for her to get behind me for long and flying backwards to prevent her from overtaking me too, so her usually method of outmaneuvering her opponent and shooting them from behind wasn't working. She eventually resorted to hiding among the peduncle trees. She would switch on silent running in order to evade me or using them to break line of sight before running away. She managed to get the drop on me a few times but others I was able to spot her before she managed to attack by watching for her to pop up on the comms panel before targeting her and using the sensors to orient myself. There were also a few instances where my flips caused me to end up backing into a tree that I couldn't see.
Eventually I managed to chase her down during one of her retreats to recharge and a lucky ram, and possibly a lightning strike from what I heard over comms, dropped her down to 1% integrity and she surrendered. I find it funny how each match today was a fair fight before ending in a ram that caused me to win. Afterwards Luna credited my victory to mostly that flip that I had learned from playing CQC as it prevented her from being able to safely attack me. It's a good thing she never noticed that I was having some issues with the flips where the ship would not register me trying to pitch it up for a few seconds occasionally and pitching it down was completely non-responsive. Flight assist was also acting up and occasionally immediately deactivating or being slow to disable, which lead to some jerky maneuvers.
I checked the bracket again to see who my next possible opponents were. The on-going match to determine it was between Jeros in his Cobra mk.III, Enforcer and Xavriel in their Diamondback Explorer, Snapdragon. From the comments I was hearing about their match over the comms during mine, it seemed like Jeros had the upper-hand as Enforcer was built as a shield tank. When I actually tracked them down to watch it, the tides seemed to have changed. Once Xavriel got through Enforcer's shields, Snapdragon used a weapon which I had never seen used before to make short work of the hull. A scan of Snapdragon before our match started indicated these were remote release flak launchers. I had only ever heard of those being used as an AX weapon, never for a regular fight. Xav seemed to have heard Luna's comments about my jousts and made sure to keep his distance and force me to come to him. I managed to get Snapdragon down to about 60% hull but each time my shields dropped, the flak shells would quickly drop my hull and do quite a bit of damage to my internals as well. I was forced to make an emergency jump back to Lunar Hyperlight to repair after being defeated.
By the time I managed to get back, Xav had already defeated HalfFireFortress and their Diamondback Explorer, The Anubis, and won the tournament. I technically tied for 3rd place but really I should have been in 4th with Winston taking 3rd as they had one more victory than me due to my bye. Winston vs HalfFire was also so close of a fight that it required the use of an instant replay to determine the winner. Apparently some of the other commanders had placed their predictions for who would be in the top 4 and I had appeared on a few of the lists. I'm not sure why as I don't do combat often, I'm only ranked as Novice currently. This was my first actual fight since probably last fight night back in 3306.
With the conclusion of fight night, all that's left for this expedition is the last mass jump on Saturday and one last stop before arriving back home at 59 Virginis. Aleks is occupied with trying to repair Fumante but the rest of us have some spare time. I asked Kex to pull up the patrol requests from Canonn and asked Tsuki to plot a course through a few of them. She also managed to find a Wolf Rayet NC star. It seems to already be discovered but that's another thing checked off the codex. This trip should let us test out the new loadout for Eighth Veil although it's likely we won't return to Lunar Hyperlight until tomorrow evening.
Date: 3307.02.11
Universal Galactic Time: 0655
Shipboard Time: 0055
Location: Deep space, Thailiae GN-R d5-19
Our first destination was a system orbiting a B class star whose planets were suited to be home to bioluminescent anemones (also known as space pumpkins), Thaile FB-W e2-8. The planets reported to host the pumpkins immediately stood out as all three were ringed. Kex also noticed that two of the planets/moons orbiting a brown dwarf at the edge of the system were terraformable but unmapped. Our initial analysis of the worlds showed an obvious reason why the discoverer may not have visited the surface: each had gravity of over 2G. One of them was even at 3.3G. For safety reasons, we decided to shorten this survey up. The mishap with Raxxla Express is still too fresh in our minds. We planned to only investigated the signals marked with the highest and lowest number on our system and opted to save the terraformables until last. We also got a 3rd reading on the planet 1 as Luna asked for a picture after we had already left.
We intended to continue on to the next patrol system before setting down for the night. Unfortunately, Eighth Veil's discount nature once again is making itself apparent. We had some issues getting the FSD to charge while on those high G planets. It needed three attempts to actually start charging and then it had trouble detecting the escape vector, causing an overheat. Now it seems to be malfunctioning entirely. We've dropped out of supercruise roughly seven jumps from our destination to attempt repairs. With Aleks back on Lunar Hyperlight, it's up to Kex and Tsuki to get it working again. It may be a while before we can get back underway. In the meantime I'll go over the footage from my fights earlier with Saoirse.
END LOG