Planet Bubblegum & Colonial Cruising :)
13 Aug 2018LongDistanceClara
I was going to go into detail about the engineering upgrade part of the log but figured since I was so late to the party, it'd be tremendously boring old hat to everyone! So that got heavily abbreviated 
The "pink pics" are literal screenies - no post processing (apart from the framing), and no graphics injectors aka no EDFX/ReShade, it's absolutely just a screengrab. V weird! I also mindlessly natter on a bit about Sol, which is a salute to the Parker Solar Probe that launched from Canaveral yesterday; fingers crossed for a successful mission! Anyway - back to virtual reality
I could get used to this
I'm just quickly recording this log before collapsing into a sleep-coma in the most luxurious bed I think I've ever slept in outside the bubble! We're currently dropped out of supercruise and drifting gently around a big old K-class somewhere midway between Colonia and the bubble in a ship that's basically a floating pleasure boat
One of the best things about being a freelance pilot, never know what'll pop up next!Last log, we were just starting back from Beagle in the trusty Krait. There really wasn't much of note for the majority of the Coreward stretch, aside from it going much more smoothly than I thought. Usually, that particular leg is the one that really drags for me - the hopping back over the inter-arm gaps before hitting the neutron fields aways seems to take so long. This time round, however, boop - and we're back in the core! I wasn't complaining, although aside from the odd glowing blue gem of a B class, there wasn't a whole bunch of interesting going on.
Although we'd planned to take it easy on the way home and stretch the return trip over three days, we were making great time and ended the day just north of the core. Next morning, it seemed fairly inevitable that we'd be back in town by "nightfall", so we set off bright and early. The pickup in speed around the core was eye-opening as always, rattling down the neutrons, stopping only periodically to patch up the poor old FSD. It was around mid-morning when Coral observed that although the run was going smoothly, there wasn't much in the way of shinies to catch the eye.
I don't know how she does it. Some kind of psychic comedic antennae but literally the next system we drop into, there's a neutron and something bizarre lurking very close by. Odd, I thought, don't often see stuff in such close orbit...wait, what the hell is that?
Yep.
It's Planet Bubblegum.
I've seen some fairly lurid gas giants before; even super-luminous dwarfs, Y's and the like; but this was just bizarre! We went in for a closer look and I've never seen so much pink. After just a few minutes cruising around it, my eyes were starting to nervously ask my brain if we could go now, please. When I looked away into the cockpit, I'd get weird after-images and wondered if my retinas were getting irreversibly pinkified. Coral, who usually likes the truly bizarre and wonderful, felt slightly weirded out by this huge blob of candy, glowing away in the light of the neutron. Even the usually clean and (sorry Krait!) slightly bland cockpit was looking a little too disco for my liking!
After cataloging the find, we'd had enough fabulous for one day; I swung the nose bubblewards and jumped, leaving Planet Bubblegum behind to weird out the next poor unsuspecting voyager. God forbid you run into that thing when the space-crazy is lurking in the shadows! After that, it was the usual home stretch; 400...300...200...100....50, hey Barnard's....
As the Krait gently settled onto the pad at Schwann Port, I felt almost guilty. She'd performed like a champ, taking us safely 140k and change in just five days, through neutrons, sleeping pilots and next-level-pinkness - but I just didn't gel with her. I'd recommend the ship to any explorer in a heartbeat, but I think this was where we'd part ways, for now at least.
I signed her back in to the lease company and that was that! Usual priorities followed - find a room on station, bath, sleep, impossibly large breakfast, fight the crowds to hop a shuttle and back to Jameson. Coral wanted to catch up with some folks from the old days, so with nothing else to do, I wandered down to the promenade and ended up in one of the better known hangouts for pilots.
It's funny - it doesn't matter where in the galaxy you are, you see this in almost every bar that pilots frequent; there's a very distinct group of "types"
You have the Yahoos - they've been further, seen everything, killed more baddies than the rest of the galaxy combined and are clearly God's gift to humanity; and while they're busy noisily broadcasting their obvious perfection to anyone unfortunate enough to be in earshot, at the other end of the bar are the real McCoys They're usually just sat there enjoying a quiet drink or a conversation, utterly non-descript in appearance, and you can more or less guarantee they've really done it all. These are the guys you don't want to get on the wrong side of in a firefight, or try and lecture about "going out there"; I like to think I've covered a light year or two but these folks are the ones who were well into seven figures long before you left flight school - the genuine article And on this occasion, I ended up having a really nice chat with one of them; apparently since I'd been away on my little tropical hiatus, there'd been great strides in jump tech; drives could now be pushed further than ever before with relatively little tinkering needed; and a cheeky new module that could give any ship a kick in the pants and bump its' range another ten or so light years. Sounded interesting! I took some notes from Mr Genuine Article and thanked him before scooting down to pick up the Kara from the shipyard and start poking around for these upgrades!
As it turns out, it was a fairly painless experience! I popped over to dear old Elvira, who banged some spanners and whoomph - one ridiculously supercharged friendship drive! Wonderful - now a bit of casual grave robbing from a Guardian site, that would have been fine were it not for my personal brand of weirdness. This is something I've had since childhood - zero g flight? No problem! Driving on uneven ground? Huaaaarrrghhhh! Seriously, NOT pretty and the less said about it the better - suffice to say I think the sentinels at the guardian site almost took pity on me, seeing the shade of green my face went! It's a shame I wasn't really in the right frame of mind to admire the beauty of the structure when I finally managed to crack the scan, but god, I just wanted to get the hell out of there and give my inner ear a damn good kicking...
So - back to Jameson, berthed the Kara, staggered back to my quarters and lay in bed quietly begging for the world to stop spinning. I guess at some point I must've fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, I'm being shaken awake and Coral's trying to say words at me. You'd think she'd know by now that I don't English until coffee has happened...
ANYWAY - turns out, one of her friends had snagged a nice little job; a playboy-type out in Colonia had commissioned Coral's buddy to fly his personal "toy" out to Jacques, for a ridiculous pile of credits. The poor fool had prematurely celebrated getting this shiny little shindig by going on a night out on the town - and ending up with two broken legs after a failed drunken stunt (I'd heckle at this point but I swear this sounds familiar...). Coral had oh-so-generously offered our services to fulfil the contract, which I was pretty indignant about. I was indignant as she bullied me into getting dressed, I was annoyed as she pushed me down to the shipyard - and then they rolled the ship out onto the pad and I started doing cartwheels.
This thing is ridiculous. So at first, I'm thinking "Coral, you're going to laugh when you hear this, but I almost thought they'd wheeled a goddamn FDL out on the pad!" - and then we went onboard and mwaah. This thing is more or less what it'd look like if hedonism and opulence had a baby - it's dripping with luxury! Hot tub - check; ridiculously expensive and exotic bar - check; stateroom that looks like it's had more credits spent on it than the entire ship is worth with a bed that could render you unconscious just by looking at it - double check.
"Yeah go on then, I guess we can help your friend out"
The thing was already stocked to the gills with provisions and was ready to go, so a quick once-over and thirty minutes after my Coral-alarm clock, we were skids up and heading out of the dock!
It's pretty hard not to trot out every cliché in the book at this point, but this "thing" didn't roar or rattle as we left - it purred its way out of Jameson
I really have to look into getting a slice of luxury installed on one of my old barges, I could get used to this! It was almost time to get on our way to Colonia, but there was one thing I wanted to quickly do first in the Sol system.I'm a bit of a history geek, and about a thousand years ago, give or take, the inhabitants of Earth launched a probe specifically targetted at the beating heart of the solar system - to investigate the sun, to dive through the coronasphere and discover more about the nature of that amazing nucleus that was responsible for the genesis of humankind. As we dropped into Sol, I took us down and dipped a silly little salute through some of the towering prominences arcing up along the flux lines shooting out of the photosphere; however far we come, I always think it's good to be humbled now and then and remember just how utterly insignificant we are in the face of such incredible power
I have nothing but respect and admiration for those whose motivation is not of personal gain, acclaim or reward, but rather simply a greater understanding of the amazing universe we live in!
I think Coral's looking at me like I've lost the plot
RIGHT - homage paid, plot to Colonia laid in, and off we go! We managed a good solid 10k before deciding to call it a night and as we lie here, drifting gently along in blissful pampered luxury, a thought occurs; we're not expected in Colonia for another two days - maybe we should ease up a bit? I mean, we wouldn't want to damage the drive at all...
Sleep-coma imminent. One very comfy Clara, signing off