How I Got Here: "Out Of The Frying Pan"
25 Jul 2022Columbuss
Commander Justin Estok. Stardate 25-JUL-3308."Hell isn't this hot..."
Capital ships tend to try to avoid each other. Even in an open conflict, engagements between capital ships is discouraged until there's no other choice. You won't find this information in any book you can get off of a shelf. This is why so much of the fighting, when two massive fleets collide, is done by the smaller ships. This is why you'll see the Cobra's and ASPS and Pythons carry most of the weight in any dust up. If you've ever seen a confrontation between capital ships, and lived through it, you know they only last a few minutes.
People who've served on capital ships can usually be spotted a mile a way if you know what to look for. It's their skin. It's hard and leathery. Discolored to an almost mocha like brown, despite their fairness.
Think meat smoker "dark", not sun tan "dark".
Think desert island "dark", not vacation "dark".
Darker skinned and lighter skinned people alike, their exterior turns hard and waxy. Very often, they'll have little or no body hair... but not by choice. No eyebrows is a dead giveaway. A bald head usually means they worked in the engine room.
The reason for this is heat. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to power these ships and even more to power their weapons. Even with top of the line heat dissipators, the extraordinary heat given off by these ships during combat will radiate the exterior of the vessel turning it into a literal oven. If you're in combat for too long, any liquid tanks with a low boiling point will start to burst. Stay too long and the electrical connections in your circuitry start to melt. Fire one too many shots, and your crew can literally be cooked alive.
While smaller ships give off less heat, the concept remains the same. Most ships come equipped with enough heat regulators and dissipation units to keep the ship bearable. However, when you're on the run in a derelict space craft who's heat dissipators have been removed by pirates and with just enough fuel in your power plant to jump a few times, it tends to get a little warm.
Ragina and I ended up two jumps away from Acamar, orbiting a medium sized star with our fuel scoop deployed, soaking up solar radiation. Any explorer can tell you, fuel scooping takes time. It takes more time when your fuel scoop was previously sabotaged and is operating at minimal efficiency. I know this, because Ragina knows this. When it takes three days to fill your tanks, with solar heat beating down on your ship and a power plant thumping with solar radiation, all while having to manually dump the heat every few hours, you run out of things to talk about.
"Hell isn't this hot..." she said, with both of us in our underwear, floating around in zero G, trying hard to avoid second degree burns from bumping into the bulkhead. Our skin was drying out. Any water in our bodies, we'd sweated out the day before. When your body is that hot, to the point where you're no longer sweating, you're so dehydrated that even moving your eyes makes your whole body hurt.
After three boiling days, the fuel meter read about halfway and we were able to spin up the FSD and super cruise away from the star. After manually dumping the heat over the course of another 24hrs, the ship was bearable enough to survive in. Once the temperature problem was under control, we were ready to jump again.
"We're heading for Al Mina. It's my home. You can find your way from there. Al Mina has it's problems, but at least we'll have civilization."
"As long as it has running water..." I said back.
Each jump from here would take some cool down time, with us having to manually dump our heat and wait for the FSD drive to cool down before jumping again. What should have been a three hour journey, took us a full week to accomplish. But before long, we found ourselves limping in to a port called Gillekens Terminal. A place I would call home for the foreseeable future.