DISTANT WORLDS 2 - DAY 14 - HOLEY SPACE BALLS!
26 Jan 2019Zak Starfall
Galactic stardate 26JAN3305After our disappointing day yesterday with few discoveries, I was all ready to head back to Omega Mining Base asap and kill time in the bar before fleet launch tomorrow, but Cathy wasn't ready to give up quite as easily as me.
Overnight she'd been poring over the Codex, and had found several systems within 500lys which had been reported as having signs of life.
As usual, her powers of persuasion got the better of my argument for large quantities of alcohol (to be honest, my argument was somewhat lacking in scientific reasoning and hard logic!), so we fired up the FrameShift, turned Star Reaper's nose away from the Omega Nebula and headed off to see what we could find.
Our first port of call, yielded a couple of Lagrange clouds - viride and roseum, , containing crystal structures of several varieties - flavum, purpuream and rubeum. It's fascinating how the human mind works, a week ago, these were amazing discoveries, but now, having seen several of these crystal structures in our wanderings, we're almost disappointed when we encounter them!
Plotted a route to the next system on the list of targets, and Frameshift engaged.
This system had three stellar phenomena signal sources, a rubicundum Lagrange cloud and a Proto-Lagrange cloud containing more crystal structures, and a viride cloud harbouring prasinum crystals and mineral spheres
This last cloud was beautifully lit by the system's star.
Interestingly, in these clouds, the different types (species?) of crystal were very close to each other, with quite a few almost touching. Whether they drifted together over the millenia, or grew together, it's impossible to say.
What triggers the start of a crystal structure to grow and determines where they grow?
Our final stop on today's excursion, revealed two more Lagrange clouds - roseum and rubicundum, but the second cloud also presented us with a new discovery - a variation on the mineral sphere structures that had been built/grown in a 5-sided lattice format.
A scan showed these to be of the exact same compositional make-up as the solid sphere structures, and they were hanging in a similar cloud of dust/material. But why the difference? Did it serve some as yet unknown purpose, or was it just a random variation? And how many more variations were there out there?
These discoveries are raising more questions than they provide answers. Maybe as we delve deeper into the black during DW2 some of these answers will be unearthed.
We're now back at Omega Mining. I've returned the leased mining ship and negotiated the return of most of my deposit. There were a few extra scrapes and scratches that I had to convince them were there before I leased it - you know how hire companies are! But it turns I got paid 15 million credits for my little contribution of 97 tons of materials to the starport initiative! Sometimes I think some of these galactic corporations have more money than sense. Not that I'm complaining, mind you!
I'm now sampling the wares of the last bar we'll see for quite some time, while Cathy sorts out ship supplies for the journey ahead. I did offer to help, but she insisted she would get on better without my assistance, so who am I to argue? Seems like an awful lot of the DW2 fleet crews are doing the same as me. Could be a lively night tonight in this li'l ol' asteroid base!
Fleet departure tomorrow, so I hope everyone can fly straight with a hangover, otherwise it's gonna get messy!
o7