MissingSea's Deep Space Journal Day 6 (more like 143 but 6'll do)
17 Aug 2016MissingSea
I really should think of a better name for my logs... ah I know.....Anyway today has been a day for exploration and cataloguing. My aim; find planets that can be terraformed or ideally an Earth Like World (ELW for short).
Why you might ask?
Well the answer is simple, with the arrive of Jaques all the way out here away from the Orion Bubble, there has been talk of colonisation efforts. The first indication for this was the call for building materials for a new outpost, but there have also been rumblings from residents of the Orion Bubble that they want to get away from the politics of the old worlds and start anew (though you can bet your bottom credit that those politics will head out here eventually... I must try not to be so cynical). Anyway, if these rumours of a colonisation effort are true, then eventually people are going to want to settle on worlds where they don't have to live in protective domes, hence my search for terraformable planets. Now I don't know if anyone else has found a ELW out here, but so far my searches have yet to recognise one. But I have found Water Worlds and terraformable planets within 100 ly of Jaques.
My first find of the today (after a handful of systems with no candidates, or even planets in some cases) was in orbit of a F-class star about 60ly coreward from Jaques, the second planet out was a heavy metal content world (HMC for short), with conditions ideal for terraforming. It was a bit hot, but from orbit it reminded me a bit of pre-terraformed Mars in the Sol system.
There was also a terraforming candidate water world, that was part of a double planet system with a HMC that was also a terraforming candidate. Both of these planets seemed a little cold for my liking with average temperatures of around 277K, but who knows what those planetary engineers might accomplish!
All in all, I felt that that wasn't bad for a mornings work. Now I could have stayed out looking for more systems, but the influx of pilots to Jaques as also meant that there are some eateries opening up, and quite frankly I preferred a meal that wasn't going to be eaten in zero g, or worse high g. So I made the quick jump back and rested up for a couple of hours and read the local news. One of the articles was related to the call for construction materials, with a commander saying that the rings around the fifth planet had some decent Os rich asteroids, ok it's not next door like the rings I have been mining, in fact it's nearly 3000ls away with the current planetary alignments, but what the hell. I decided that the Dynamite needed a slight change around too, I didn't really need to deploy two prospector limpets at a time, but I really could do with that ability for my collectors, so a quick trip to the outfitters and off I went.
The article was right, I collected more Os in an hour of mining today than I did in three hours yesterday. Unfortunately, due to my limited hold size I ran out of limpets, so I headed back to Jaques. I'd intended to return to the Os rich rings, but it seems some script kiddies back in the bubble managed to ddos the ship update system** in the midst of an update. It's only hit a subsection of Pilots Federation ships, but it meant that the update wasn't complete and caused the ships interface to randomly crash out. This left me stranded in Jaques for a few hours, and then when I thought my systems had finally been restored, I ended up dropping out of supercruise. Luckily the safeties kicked in and it was a controlled drop, but I was left in a dead ship between Jaques and the fifth planet. I've checked my system status and apparently the update has been reapplied and I can now get a move on, but I'm too knackered so I think I'll just bed down for the night in deep space and get back to it tomorrow.
** Xbox Core services went down and connections were spotty