Space is cooooooold.
08 Jun 2016Lassombra
Sunrise... somewhere. 
I don't even remember where I am anymore. I'm in some system which was previously discovered but whoever came through before apparently scooped and moved on as the database didn't even know there were planets here. Either way, it was a decent place to stop last night so I could sleep. I found a safe place to land, didn't really think about what I was doing, or where, just a safe place to shut down. So imagine my surprise when I woke up and returned to the cockpit to see this:
You know what I miss most? Starport lounges. One story of some pirate I took down got me drinks for the night from all the local system pilots who had aspirations of joining the Pilot's Federation. How silly most of them are. The test isn't hard. A basic aptitude test is all it takes to get in. You don't even have to front the cost of your first ship, they'll loan you a sidewinder to get started! But there's this "untouchable" nature that we seem to get the moment we secure membership.
I've only been outside the bubble a few days, but it already feels like I'm living a second life. There is no politics out here, no station feeds, I don't even know what is going on in the galaxy. I haven't been in a station since I finished fitting my exploration ship. I didn't even really say good bye, I just took off, telling people that I wanted to see Sagittarius A* for myself. But out here, I've got no one to talk to (except you dear reader who might eventually read this log entry). Space is lonely.
Oh well, time to get a move on. I have to scoop some fuel and then continue on my route.
It is kind of scary just how close to a star you have to get to scoop from it. It's times like this that I'm thankful for the light filters installed in my canopy glass. Imagine how much your eyes hurt staring into Earth's sun. Now imagine being a few hundred meters away. Whoever invented automatically filtering canopy glass is literally my hero right now.
Scooping is a simple process. You fly up close to the star, inside it's Corona. Your fuel scoop automatically engages, and uses electrical charge to draw in free hydrogen atoms. My scoop can fill my 40 ton fuel tanks in 36 seconds. That's a little over 1 ton per second. That's a lot of hydrogen, but to get that much, you have to get in really close to the star. As you get further out towards the edge of the corona, the amount of hydrogen flying free is reduced dramatically. I like to park at a sweet spot where with all systems but my engines, life support, scanners and fuel scoop off, my craft cools fast enough to keep my system temperatures at 54% of the safe range.
Well, scooping is complete, and this system is now fully explored, let's head out!
I'm not going to bore you with the details, but I made a lot of jumps (I'm at 8 I think today) without so much as a single system worth mentioning. Then I got here. I don't remember what system this is but it is huge. There are three stars here, a binary system within a binary system. The brightest star, which my nav-computer used to get me here is part of a binary pair, which orbit each other. What makes it interesting is that binary pair together make up one side of a binary pair with another star, a class L red giant! When that star collapses into a class M it will be amazingly bright, but for now it's not dense enough to generate as much as the star I arrived at. These stars orbit each other almost 16k light seconds apart. That's not a small system. A normal binary system is in the area of 3-7k. On the other hand, travelling across this system I'm going to get some serious speed.
Over 600c! Not bad. Of course, because it's frame shift, it doesn't feel fast. No relativity, none of that. Frame shift drive leverages the natural effect of gravity to pull space together and sort of "folds" space. It gets it's name from the fact that you end up effectively shifting the entire frame of reference by which Newtonian physics apply. In short, my thrusters move me through space as normal, but the Frame Shift Drive changes what that space topology is like. Because it operates on such a small scale though (in the area of less than 30 milliseconds away from my ship) it's really hard to see the effect. I've seen ships in super cruise which look kind of like a comet - the light of their thrusters being distorted as they trail away - but other than that, you really can't see any difference to flight in normal space. Still, it's cool to say that I got some serious speed going.
After exploring the more distant star of this crazy system, I was getting hungry. Knowing that I had at least an hour or two of scanning ahead of me, I decided to take a break now. So I shut down my frame shift drive. Incidentally, I don't know why, but it was never designed to handle high speed shutdown, so shutdown is inhibited when flying at any kind of warping factor that moves you faster than around 1 megameter per second (that's 1,000 Kilometers for those who don't know). So I slow down, and because I'm always thinking about fuel, I shut down everything but the life support.
By the way, space is cold.
Anyways, most commanders told me before setting out that I didn't really need to shut down everything whenever I wasn't flying because the ship doesn't burn fuel that fast when just sitting in normal space. But to my mind the difference between 600 kilograms an hour and 40 kilograms an hour is big. Assuming that I have 6 meals between scooping, that's an entire jump! No matter what they tell you though, MREs don't taste anything like the real thing! I am stocked up with enough rations for a year out here. I don't know if I can handle a year's worth of rations. I don't care what anyone says, people have needs not met by rations!
At least there's a real beauty to the local star shining through the frost. Oh well, time to head out.
I've finished exploring this system, and since the next scoopable star is several jumps away, I figure this might be a good time to power down for some sleep. I really should try and make closer to 20 jumps a day if I'm going to make it there this month, but somehow I think things won't go that quickly.
I've found a nice planet to land on. It's an ice world, so it'll be cold, but my cabin has a powerful space heater, so I'll be comfortable. Just.. don't go outside, there's no atmosphere, so no heat is retained...
I decided to launch a camera drone to get a few shots of my landing:
Landed and shut down.
I think it's time to sign off. Hopefully tomorrow will be a bit more interesting.