Ship Released – Engines Engaged
08 Feb 2016TheDarkLord
Trevithick Dock, LHS 3447. Sidewinder.September 3301
With a great clank, the landing pad grapples released. My first few interactions with the controls were tentative. I could see I was going to have to run the mail slot on the launch as well as the landing. “I’m sure that used to be automated,” I thought. “Oh well.”
I left the station with all the grace of a newborn foal falling down stairs, as some oligarch barged through in his sleek Orca.
Launching yourself into space with only a passing familiarity of the ship’s controls probably isn’t the best plan, but that was where I found myself. Resolutely straight-lining away from Trevithick with no viable ideas. I headed for the nearest station to buy something that I could hopefully trade for a meagre profit.
I was feeling the smallness of the Sidewinder as I dropped out of Supercruise and headed for Dalton Gateway. Another Coriolis station. The old docking fears from my past life returned. The slow, lazy but inexorable spin of the station. The docking slot rotating in front of me. I approached gingerly, still feeling out my thrusters, and slid right on through. No scrapes, no shunts. No apparent difficulty.
Pads lit up all around me, so I picked one at random. It wasn’t the one I was cleared for. Things got ugly, and I pinballed off the vast interior before finding ‘my’ pad and landing on it. But I was facing the wrong way, and couldn’t shut the ship down. I figured out the yaw thrusters with thirty seconds of my docking window remaining. My first trip through space in the Sidewinder had been twenty minutes of terror, and aside from the docking Orca, I hadn’t even interacted with any other ships.