A Lesson in Humility #2
20 Sep 2017LongDistanceClara
It's currently - I don't know, some ungodly hour - and we're back in dock after a pretty gruelling run. In all fairness, we have covered about 120k light years in a little over four days and that's a pretty conservative estimate since that's based on A-B calculations - and there was nothing A to B about this one!Day three began with planetary scanning. After powering the Clair back up after the night, I scanned out the content of the various planets and moons in the current and neighboring systems. Fortunately we'd hit the jackpot - three moons in an adjacent system with decent content for the FSD boosts we were going to need to push on.
<Interminable time spent rock bashing>
Right, let's crack on. Go-juice duly synthesised and injected into the FSD and off we go. Few hops later and holy cow - an ELW but not the best and I'm not sure I'd like the night sky when it's looking out to the rim!
Fatigue setting in a little and I'm starting to chew through the boosts like nothing else (I get easily sidetracked
). I decide enough's enough - a super distant ELW and a bunch of new systems under the belt and I'm basically in throwing distance of the rim - yep, this'll do. There's the obsessive in me that wants to go farm out some more boosts, just so I can tick Erikson's star ("go on, its just a few more jumps!") - but I'm going to let that one dangle for another day, a reason to come back. Hard over, course 180 - home, Jeeves!Slight moment when retracing my steps I seemingly got dead-ended, but all good in the end - one final boost and I'm back in the more densely populated part of the arm. Nav computer is still struggling to compute above 400ly but at least it's working again and getting stronger every light year. I decide to cut it (and myself!) some slack and head further up the SC arm before turning the corner and heading for home - I'm exhausted and just can't bring myself to face bridge-hunting in the Mare Desperationis right now.
A fairly uneventful - but very, very long - day puts me back onto the inner spiral arms of the galaxy. I barely have it in me to shut everything down before collapsing into bed. Although when I wake up the next day, it turns out I was overnighting in a fairly fun little system:
Five T's around a pretty big B-class with another A-class in system and a whole family of gas giants to boot? Certainly not the weirdest undiscovered system I've seen but something a little out of the ordinary on the way home and a fairly funky barycenter! But I'm still exhausted from the day before and all I can think about is getting home.
The jumps drag on, with the only eyeopener really being a fun little binary that decided to give me a "wash" as I passed within one of their coronas:
On we go. Not long after, the PLIO AIM nebula puts on a beautiful show briefly in the canopy before disappearing behind us as the jumps blur into a stream of "frameshift drive charging"...
It's so late at this point and the last few days are really starting to take their toll. I haven't felt this drained on a short excusion for a long time and I really think it's down to my initial complacency, thinking I could just scoot out with my feet on the dash and do a quick jolly to a new part of the rim and back in a few days - "hell I've explored the rim back in the day in short jump range beasties with far more limited tools, this'll be a breeze!" It's kinda nice to know the galaxy can still kick you in the ass if you don't give it the respect it deserves
Well, thanks for the refresher
I think I need to get back to the bubble, chill out for a bit (maybe stick around long enough to see if Lakon make good on their T10 promise!), then gear up for a proper exploration - not just a high-speed sightseeing loop, an old-school properly planned expedition. It's been a while and I've gotten lazy with the beast that is the Clair. There's a big uncharted patch of the galaxy where I was getting a ton of ELWs not too long ago - think I might head out there and have a serious look for "Clara's Paradise"Barnard's Loop creeps into view - thank God, I'm getting close. That little red bullseye has never seemed so welcoming! I'm so tired at this point that a few plots later, I barely register arriving back in my home system. Thank god it was quiet at station, I somehow manage to fumble the Clair through the mailslot and down without scratching the paint - such of it that's left.
Thanks for looking after my dopey butt out there, old girl - we'll get you squared away tomorrow.
I think I may ask the station to revoke my undock privileges for a week or so - nearly half a million light years in the last few weeks isn't healthy! Clara out for a while...