MY SHIP REBOOTED TODAY!!!
10 Oct 2015Latium Greenvine
So, my ship, an adder named the Serenity Now! just rebooted. I don’t mean that some of my modules rebooted. I MEAN THE WHOLE FLIPPING SHIP JUST WENT DARK! ...and then did that annoying BING BONG BING startup tone that all of the Zorgon Peterson ships do when they first start up after the powerplant is first turned on. If you think that’s crazy, once all of the modules came back online, one by one (a good 3 min wait for it all to boot up properly) a message popped up on my HUD that said “DEMO MODE”.DEMO MODE??? What the actual fluffernutters is DEMO MODE? Oh, you don’t know? Well let me fill you in on what demo mode is because I’m a flipping demo mode flipping expert now.
So, demo mode is what new Zorgon Peterson ships use in the showroom so customers can play with the ship’s controls. You know, without burning down the station while throttling up the engines, or by not blasting holes in the General Manager’s office testing the weapon systems.
I had never heard of this, so I was like, “demo mode?”... “umm, okay”. So, there I am floating near Trevithick Dock in the LHS 3447 system. I had been sitting still, looking at my Galaxy Map screen when the reboot happened and everything shut off. So, I go push up the throttle to jump in to supercruise, and what do you think happened??? My cockpit speakers generated a fake engine sound but I went NOWHERE! I then tried my lateral thrusters, but instead of the Serenity Now! thrusting side to side, I only heard my speakers playing a gentle “hiss” sound. It was a flipping RECORDING of thrusters!!! AARRRHHHGGG!!!
Just for the heck of it I deployed my hard points, thankfully they deployed as normal. I was still in the no fire zone for Trevithick but my curiosity got the best of me. I squeezed the trigger and… “pew pew pew”. Really Zorgon Peterson? Really? That’s they best sound you could record to simulate weapons fire?
Anyways, I was close enough to Trevithick to still access their network. I called Zorgon Peterson tech support and, of course, got patched through to a technician way out in the flipping Sothis system. Geez, I can never understand their Sothis accents!!!
After a long (much longer than it should have been, I just couldn’t understand the guy, plus he was reading from a script) time I finally had the dash taken completely apart. Screws, and wires, and loose console panels floated freely in my cockpit (working on a ship in zero g is hard!). I mean, there was parts floating everywhere, it’s like I had my own asteroid field of cockpit bits floating around inside my canopy. I finally get down to this red button. I have to power down EVERYTHING in the ship and hold this button for 30 seconds. I lose contact with tech support at this time because nothing has power now. It’s just me and my ships guts hanging in space. I turn everything back on and BINGO! I’m out of demo mode! YAY!!!
I’m pretty sure I got everything put back together mostly right. My dash rattles pretty bad now when I boost though. Also, I get pelted by random screws floating silently in my cockpit. It seems like every time I make a hard turn or reverse thrust one hits me in the head.
Oh well. At least I’m out of demo mode!
Whisper979 signing off