Finally A Day Without Incident
09 Oct 2016IsraelZulu
After the rough ride I've had to this point, yesterday was quite refreshing. I made nearly two kylies' progress with zero incidents. Not even so much as a close call.That's why last night's status update didn't include a Ship Health Assessment - there's no change to report.
I finally realized why the neutron fields were thinning, when my ship's computer absolutely refused to plot a course to a star that was only 200 Ly away. Apparently, a gap between the spiral arms of the galaxy had snuck up on me sooner than I was expecting.
The good news is, that means I'm getting close. And a little ahead of schedule. The bad news is, no more neutron farming on this trip. Time to just pull "up", towards the central galactic plane, and head straight for the finish line.
That's not to say I'm skipping scans entirely just yet. There's still a lot of great stuff out here to be captured. For that matter, neutron systems are usually the least interesting things - visually speaking - that I come across. So, letting the computer plot me through whatever types of systems it might should yield more entertaining waypoints.
And I've got to enjoy myself as much as I can on this trip. Because my plans for the return trip leave no room for smelling the roses, so to speak.
Yesterday, the ship's computer did indeed turn up some eye candy. A gaseous planet with some rings and an abnormally high degree of axial tilt, not even 20 Ls from its star.
I'm not even sure what's in this thing - I'll have to check scan data later - but it was dark. Even up close, I almost couldn't tell there was anything inside those rings unless there was something in the background for it to block. Or, if I found just the right angle to reflect the star's light.
Finally leaving the small gas world behind (I hesitate to call it a "gas giant" - despite its technical classification - since it was so relatively small), I managed to line it up for an eclipse. There's just something spectacular about the way a star's light will scatter around the edge of such planets. Add in the rings, tilted at such an extreme angle, and you get a really amazing view.
I didn't get to set down anywhere particularly special last night. The long trip was starting to wear on me, so landing criteria got a bit more lax. I even thought of just shutting down and spending the night in orbit somewhere.
Eventually though, I did find a rock that had a nice, up-close-and-personal view of its star.
As the ship's various modules turned off, and the cockpit started to frost over, I began to realize something.
The ice does a pretty decent job of hiding the cracks in my cockpit.