Confounded Sensors!
10 Sep 2020Ceti Fox
I had just finished doing a bunch of data mining at that old Jameson crash site, and climbed on to the bridge of The Ceti Lupo after tucking in the SRV, and I was thinking I would grab a quick bite to eat, and relax in the cabin. Maybe catch up on the latest news floating across the wav. Of course, I wanted to conserve power--I'm a bit anal retentive about power management on my ship--so started my routine of typical systems to go on standby. One of the things I normally do not skimp on is the sensor array. Too many very bad people out there (if you can call them "people") who want to do very bad things. Parked on a planet or moon, you are never more vulnerable. So, what I normally do is put the sensors on high-range, and then set the AI to bug me if anything causes a blip.
But I nearly shit myself when I saw a Federal Gunship appear virtually out of thin air. I mean, I watched the damned thing pop straight up in front of my ship from behind the ridge...as if it had been parked there. Of course, I knew it hadn't been because that was the direction I had come from as I cruised in to find a suitable landing spot. What the flipping hells had happened? Sure, my sensors are stock, and I had them running at the normal medium range. They should have picked that ship up before the thing played peek-a-boo from over the hill. But my sensors did not register the gunship until it rose in front of me.
As menacing as that thing was, they paused for a few moments and then boosted up into orbit. So much for a nice, relaxing evening. Now I'm breaking out my diagnostics to discover what the hells went wrong. I'll have the ship's AI do a deep scan of the software and firmware in case somehow they got corrupted. Meanwhile, I'll have to do an EVA to look at the actual sensor array cluster. This is bullshit. A brand new ship. I've only had the thing a couple of weeks. If it wasn't somehow user error, there's gonna be hell to pay.
And, crap...my stomach really is growling now. Oh, well. Get to it.