Intergalactic Milestones :)
17 Aug 2018LongDistanceClara
Almost a year since I came back to E:D (aside from various rl interventions this year!) - and it's been great fun, not least thanks to Inara making it all the more immersive! This last week or so has just been a bunch of jumping however, so I'm hoping to get back to something a bit more immersive soon; that Gnosis jump coming up in September seems like the perfect thing! In the meantime, I had great fun in this one meeting up with some folks from a wing I'm friends with; the first meeting was a little tricky as it was cross platform, and we had to take photos at the exact same coordinates and paste them together! But it was a bit of a giggle and turned out ok in the end. I also had some lovely pm's after the last logs and just wanted to say thank you very much indeed - I'd write my dopey logs anyway as they're just a bit of fun for me, but it's very nice indeed having support from others in the community, so thank you again!
More goofiness!
I'm so fickle >.<
As I write this, I'm sat in my bunk on board my dear old Clair de Lune, my trusty & creaky anaconda. It's been almost a year since I dug out my old Remlok and poked my nose back into the stars; and since I began the year in the Clair, it felt fitting that I should bring it to a close in her.
She always was a great ship, reaching out further than pretty much anything else, even going back to the bad old days before those technical wizards had arrived on the scene with their spanners-of-amazing!
I've hauled everything from black marke- wholly legitimate goods, to explorers, all around the galaxy; she's carried me to the cardinal points of our little disc more than once. With the new upgrades, Clair 2.0 can jump further and faster than anything I'd have believed possible all those years ago.And yet she still doesn't have a hot tub/spa/some-form-of-facility-dedicated-to-unspeakable-decadence-and-gratuitous-pampering!
It's not her fault - that luxury FdL spoiled us rotten! Last log, we'd just left the bubble shortly after midday monday, heading to Colonia to deliver this fancy shmancy boat. Ferdie's aren't exactly known for their jump range, but the new bells and whistles that had been fitted to this thing meant she actually had a pretty decent range. The only real issue was an overly-polite approach to fuel scooping, taking little sips through the size four scoop; that, coupled with a fairly dinky tank that could only hold at best eight tons of fuel, meant that for the first time in a long time, I actually had to pay attention when scooping! Each jump swallowed the better part of half the tank's capacity and if I'd just been blasé about buckyballing, there was a pretty good chance we'd end up with a dry tank and an angry Coral (she does the whole folded-arms-tapping-foot thing far too well...).
So it wasn't completely a disengage-brain pleasure cruise. However when we did "pull over" and take a rest, it meant we could go poke around her and good grief - I didn't know who the guy was we were delivering this FdL to in Colonia, but he'd clearly got more money than sense >.< The interior is completely bespoke, all the tech is cutting-edge swanky stuff, the bedrooms make the classiest Beluga look like a shanty town and if I'd stayed in the gargantuan tub in the master suite any longer, it's quite possible I'd have dissolved.
There's a breed of explorer that think things should be tough and gnarly out here in space, roughing it, like a rite of passage out in the boonies or something; and I might agree but it's hard to hear them talk with the hot-tub running, bubbles in my earballs and the pleasure-coma I'm rapidly falling into
So, rather unsurprisingly, we were slightly late starting tuesday morning
But good god I've never felt so relaxed when climbing into the pilot's chair first thing! A quick look at the map showed we were way ahead of schedule - if we carried on down the highway, we'd be in town by lunch. Since we weren't expected for another two days, it seemed crazy to just sit around the starport when we had this "barge'o'luxury" at our disposal, so we swung her slightly north, passing between Colonia and the Core to nip up to the Orio-Perseans and extend the vacation As we started getting into the region, a thought occurred - I vaguely remembered an explorer I'd recently met was trekking up from Colonia to Beagle Point and was kind of in the area, albeit several k further out. I'm always a sucker for meeting people out here in the wilds, so a few exchanged messages, a jump or two and pretty soon we were landed on a pleasant little dustball on the outer edge of the core. Thanks for the rendezvous, Cmdr Soantii, and safe travels on your onwards pilgrimmage to the Great Doggie in the Sky!
Breaking the cross-platform barrier! PS meets PC
We spent another spa-sized night of luxury before firing up the drive the next morning and turning due Colonia-wards. Just before arriving, we did a quick once over of the ship to make sure it was presentable - we may have gotten a little carried away monday night and tuesday morning required a bit of a cleanup operation after the impromptu party; it's amazing how much mess two idiots can make in the space of a few hours when appropriately fuelled
Jacques' mailslot was the usual Kruger-fest and after successfully negotiating our way past pilots apparently navigating by braille rather than eyeballs, we set the ship down, disembarked and went off through the dockyards to notify the factor for delivery of the ship. Which is when things got interesting. As it turns out, the ship belonged to some trust-fund-baby, playboy son of some magnate or other high up in Rockforth Corp. Apparently he'd been 'misbehaving' out here in Colonia and daddy dearest had demanded his return to the bubble, sans toys, lines-of-credit etc. - such a cliché! So at first, I'm thinking "ok - well worst case, we don't get paid", which was ok - it had been worth it for the vacation, we'd had fun and maybe they'd at least spring for fare to get us back to the bubble.
Next minute the factor is apologizing profusely, telling us that since we cannot be paid and that there is no credit in place to return the vehicle to its point of origin or store it, the hull was forfeit and WE were now its lawful owners...
Say what now?
After trying (and failing) to play it cool and sign the various documents without my head falling off from the ear-splitting grin, we left the office, ran screaming through the shipyards and straight across the dock (with deckhands shouting at us all the way for being idiots and running over active pads), and bundled back into the 'lance.
Unbegoddamnlievable! About two days ago I was being bullied by Coral to haul a poxy FdL to Colonia and now we were the proud owners of what I can only imagine is one of the most ridiculous floating pleasure cruisers in the galaxy! That in a nutshell is what I love about this "life" - there's bumps and the bad stuff, it's pretty unpredictable what you'll be doing tomorrow, let alone next week; but now and then, something equally ridiculously awesome pops up and makes it all worthwhile
We restocked her and with nothing else keeping us here, fired up our new ship and set off back to the bubble. We'd need a name for our new toy and after all the hype had subsided and we'd calmed down a bit, Coral pointed out something I hadn't even noticed on this trip. She'd been back over my logs over the past year since I'd jumped back into space, and it turns out that if we made the trip back to the bubble, my personal annual odometer would tick over to two and a half million light years - more or less the distance from here to our nearest (big) galactic neighbour, Andromeda.
So that's that settled! Our new vacation boat and home-away-from-home - "Rommie"
I think we were buzzing so much we didn't really notice the light years fly by; and later that evening (albeit very tired!) we drifted back into Shinrarta, two-and-a-half days and one beautiful little ship better off
A very good night's sleep; and as Coral and I were having breakfast in one of the noisy cantinas that line the docks in Jameson starport, we chatted about what to do next. The last week or so had been a fairly heavy slog, what with taking the Krait to BP and the there-and-back run we'd just finished in the FdL. It'd be nice to just get back "on the drift" and float around aimlessly from one shiny to the next, no particular destination in mind. Although I was itching to get back in the Kara, my thoughts strayed to my old workhorse the Clair de Lune, an anaconda that had been sat in mothballs for a long time.
We headed down to check her out and it had indeed been a while - the poor old thing was definitely looking rather dated and could use some TLC! A quick refit and another pop over to Elvira (seriously, we should be getting a loyalty card from her at this rate!) and the Clair was looking a bit more up-to-date. The rest of her engineering was all legacy stuff, but really good quality and ticking along just fine. With that in mind, a brief stop back at port to load up on essentials (coffee, more coffee, snacks, and coffee) and we set off for nowhere-in-particular.
About mid-morning, we found ourselves drawn to an old favourite up the spur, the Eta Carina nebula; and as we went poking around one of the unremarkable dustballs in a system, the local star was obliging enough to line up and put on a bit of a light show, illuminating the nebula in all its glory, reminding me of nothing so much as some kind of monstrous volcanic eruption
Coral took the fighter out for a spin and we took some quick piccies before buckling up and heading back on our way.
We drifted on, pinballing back and forth across the Shallows and passing Hawking's way to the north. I glanced at the map and was amazed that with the very relaxed travelling we'd been doing, sniffing at the odd gas giant here and Earth-like there, we were almost out to the rim by mid-afternoon! The Clair was absolutely stocked to the gills with all the mod cons - the usual explorey paraphenalia plus fighters and a repper - and yet with an hour's tinkering back home, she was now quite comfortable jumping ridiculous distances! I guess it's been the same throughout history, that progress has pushed us to bigger and better things, but I'm always a little wistful for the days of the scary pioneering around in a dangerously rickety barge and a map with "here be dragons" marked over the vast majority
Still, change is good right? At least it enabled us to skew straight up out of the plane without engaging brain at any point and just leaping from star to distant star to get way up there above the disc. We found ourselves in the strangest little "layer" of white dwaves - literally nothing else around for light years, just dwarf after dwarf. It was absolutely beautiful, if a little surreal! At one point later that afternoon, we bumped into this little guy:
I'd been to visit the "planet from hell", that wonderful little landable that had been found near Colonia passing through the ejection cone of its parent star; this was no landable, however, and looked extremely unwelcoming anyway! We nipped in for a closer look, but with a fair bit of care - it was very clear that if we grazed the planet's exclusion zone (or that of the dwarf, come to that), we'd land squarely in the ejection cone and be in real trouble! After taking our snaps, we gingerly backtracked, happy to get out intact - so beautiful but very eerie!
Dropping back down to the plane, we picked up another ship in the neighbourhood; this was getting to be a habit! A bit more nattering over comms and soon we were enjoying some company, scuttering over the surface of a class 2's adjacent moon with another deep spacer out exploring the south-eastern quadrant in his rather snazzy Krait
All the best with your onward travels, Cmdr Randalph!
It seemed to be as good a time as any to call it a day. I must admit, it was wonderful to be back drifting, just aimlessly bumbling around and enjoying the pretty all around. I hear the Kara calling us back to Jameson, like a pet dog scratching at the door, but I think we'll take the long way round and come back via the Perseus arm; my memory is a bit iffy but I remember visiting a whole bunch of nebulae in that area all the way from the Loop round to the Rift, and I'm sure Kara won't begrudge us a little sightseeing delay before we come home
We've just dropped in on a big bright B-class, so I'll put us in orbit a few diameters out just so we can feel the deck beneath our feet - in all these years I've never gotten used to sleeping in zero-g! And my bunk may not be the indulgent satin-bedecked stateroom of the Rommie, but it's good enough for a weary traveller
Sleep well, wherever you are!
