Star Light, Star Bright :)
17 Nov 2017LongDistanceClara
I'd forgotten what this was like 
For a couple of months now, I'd been getting "Clara's Core Cruises" established and despite the odd foray, the majority of my time had been spent trucking back and forth to the core. Don't get me wrong, it was a blast and I still had plenty of time on the way to be nosy and poke around the systems on the route, but there was still a clear 'start-middle-end' to each trip.
I'd forgotten what it was like to just - drift
After leaving Traikkoa, we continued steadily moseying up the Orion-Cygnus arm. Some fun stuff here and there, with an obligatory lunch break and photo op in front of this big blue light-bulb - a chunky O-class that provided a beautiful backdrop whilst simultaneously melting our corneas >.<
Throughout the next couple of days, we pinballed around the arm bouncing off an ELW here, a gas giant there, as we looped up around the backside of the Bubble mk 2. Even at a few k range, the Colonia expansion was putting its stamp on the galaxy, as more and more often UniCart would show that someone had surveyed the systems we were dropping into.
It's funny to think how tetchy we get about the Thargoids invading our back yard; I'm obviously not drawing a direct comparison but to an outside observer, I just wondered how humans would look as we wander around setting up shop here there and everywhere in the galaxy
It seems like our attitude hasn't changed much from "the good old days" - to quote the 'philosophy' of a 20th century comedian, we still seem to look at territorial expansion as:"I claim this land!"
Indigenous population walks up
"But - we live here?"
"Do you have a flag?"
"What? No we don't have a bloody flag, so what?!"
"No flag, no country!"
We seem to be fine when we do it, but god forbid anyone doing it to us! Anyway - just a random, unhinged thought
We had a really nice campsite one night on a planet in fairly close orbit of a fun trinary which we christened "The Three Sisters" but should maybe have been named "Turn the bloody lights out, I'm trying to sleep >.<".
A little more travel and we were up in the Orio-Persean Conflux - basically where you'd get if you headed out of the bubble going west, followed the arm up round the back of Colonia and followed it as it swung in towards the galactic core.
This area is pretty. There's no other word for it, there's just so much stuff to see! Literally every third or fourth system was a bit of an eye opener - supernovae remnants, black holes, honking great O and B classes with long strings of cooler stars and gas giants dangling off them. I tend to anthropomorphize stuff very easily and get a bit caught up in things, but this whole region - it kinda felt like being a kid and walking into a huge, cavernous workshop where massive wondrous toys were being made.
That or I'm getting a mental jump-start on Christmas
Hal had a special request - he wanted to "tag" a black hole; he'd obviously already seen the big dog (Sag A*) previously but wanted to get one under his belt as a discovery for UniCart. One of the good things about this region of space is you can practically throw a stick and it'll get sucked into a singularity, there are so many around here! We headed over to the nearest one and as luck would have it, it hadn't been "tagged" yet. So Hal got his first black hole and our SLFs got stretched a bit
Now we were up here, the "work" began in earnest - filtering out for the more favorable goldilocks systems and just pinballing around. We decided to split up to cover more ground and for the first time in a long time, I felt pretty lonely out here as I watched his 'conda spool up and boop - gone. It's funny, having pottered around the galaxy for so long on my lonesome, it felt really quite spooky being out here on my own after just a couple of weeks with someone riding "on my wing"!. Still - there was work to be done!
Fair few *almost* candidates but nothing really setting my hair on fire - there was one earthlike that almost had me, everything was perfect but the surface temperature was too low. I had hoped that I could find an equatorial sweet spot that would compensate, but the axial tilt among other things kinda put the dampener on that. I was heading to another candidate system a few hops away when I dropped into something pretty beautiful!
The system was a whole mess of 'undiscovereds' but what really caught my eye was the stunning trinary at its heart; an incredibly bright O-class with two equally sparky B's, all in a tight little dance. I pinged Hal who was only a handful of jumps to my 'west' and he dropped in to check it out. My hasty snapshots really don't do it justice, but it was just breathtaking - we must have spent the better part of an hour, just drifting slowly towards them out of supercruise, like bugs drawn to a lantern
I really hope we find my paradise out here; the neighborhood is just too beautiful for words! The search will continue tomorrow though; for now I'm going to drift off to sleep with one of the most glorious backdrops I've seen in a while