First Major Trip - Part 2: Canyons and Angry Things
28 Aug 2020Torrle
CMDR Kipeo and I stayed at the space potato for a while, but there really wasn't much to do in the system, so we headed out in search of more unique finds and interesting sights on the way to Colonia.
Oh, wait, that reminds me, we're not actually going right to Colonia, but headed toward Sagittarius A* instead, and hitting Colonia on our way back.
Should be fine.
I can be a little anxious about not touching down in a station after a long period of time, especially if I've got a bunch of first discoveries waiting to be spent, but there's still lots of ammo left in my AFMUs.
Should be fine.
One of the first stops that CMDR Kipeo found was a planet with some ridiculously deep canyons. The entire planet looked like a pink wrinkled mess from orbit, and only got more extreme the closer we got.
I don't generally like showing off the the HUD, but here's a particularly deep canyon, well over 15km deep where we were, and some parts being even deeper. Would have been nice to see this during the day, but the planet has a rotational period of 4 days, so ... one more thing to check out on the way back, perhaps!
One of the systems (Lysoorb FW-N E6-15) had two T Tauri stars in orbit, both of which had pretty large rings. This star's rings alone clock in at over 18 trillion metric tons .. and until just now that sounded like a lot, and I have no idea if that's average or impressive, but it's a pretty big number. The unit is in "MT" .. metric tons? ... I'll have to get back to you on that.
This angry red planet was only 6 Ls from the parent star. I think if I was that close to big sphere of hot death all the time, I'd be angry too! It'd be wild to land on a planet like that, but I'm sure our ships would just melt on contact with the surface.
By this time, we'd cut the corner through Norma Expanse and into the Inner Scutum-Centaurus Arm, doubling the number of sectors I've visited!
One of these days, I'm hoping to visit them ALL.
Our last jump gave us a bit of a startle, as we waked in a little too close to a black hole. CMDR Kipeo got emergency dropped, and I somehow got flung away from it, a ways across the system. By the time I got close enough again, Kipeo had just gotten free, but you can see how close he still is, about 1Mm!
Light does strange things around a black hole, and within its influence I was starting to get strange recursive light patterns from the nearby nebulae, which was pretty, but disorienting.
That's enough excitement for now. No major first of any other close calls to speak of, even though we covered more ground than last time. The gas giants in this system had some nice looking rings and landable moons, so we took some time staking out a camping spot with a fantastic view.
I'm glad I had a microwave installed in the lower cockpit of my Asp. It sure is coming in handy, although I know I'll still be smelling stale popcorn for days.