Entry #003 - Call me Ishmael
09 Mar 2017Zinnsei
Commander's log, 09 March, 3303Napoleon came back to the Zenith around late morning. Apparently he'd met this friend of his and they'd proceeded to celebrate into the wee hours of the night. I've got to hand it to him. After a few hours of rack time, he was as fit for flight as ever. I guess that goes with being an expert. I, myself, spent about a half hour on the top of the mountain overlooking Hillary Depot, plotting in the route for our next 1000 LY waypoint. My prodding did pay off, as I found myself in a pleasant conversation with a quite lovely, young lady at a local bar. Turns out she too was heading out to the Neutron fields in her DBE. She gave me a few pointers on where to search for the Neutron stars, and as I sat there in the SRV, watching the Belugas take off and land, I found several points of interest, not far from our next port of call, Amundsen Terminal.
We took off around 13:30 UST and made our way deeper into the black. We weren't as thorough in our scans of the systems, we went through, as many of the systems had already been mapped extensively, and the trip to Amundsen Terminal would be around 2000 LY. We did, however, find a few undiscovered water worlds and some truly great photo opportunities. Under way we took our lunch on an impressively smooth Ice World, after which I took out the SRV for a 6 km. drive, before departing again.
At the end of the day, we only managed the first 1000 LY, so we set down on a rocky world and settled in for the night.
This morning Napoleon and I took our breakfast on the viewing deck while discussing the beforementioned new points of interest in the Clookie Sector. Napoleon, always the stout explorer, wants to divert at Amundsen Terminal and fly below the galactic plane to follow a sort of Neutron Highway to the core. I'm inclined to agree with him. The only thing keeping me from jumping at the thought, is the potential of further reducing the Zenith's weight and increasing her jump range at Colonia, before we venture into the core. If anything should happen, we'd be hard pressed with only our current 20 LY ability. I shall have to think about it.
Then, right before we had finished breakfast, the ship's engineer hailed me over the comms and informed me that we would have to take the systems off line for maintenance and asked me if we should do so immediately or if I wanted to press on for a while. Needless to say, we took off immediately and proceeded to cover around 200 LY before setting down on yet another ice world for the duration of the maintenance. The chief engineer assures me it'll only be about 40 min., so we shouldn't lose too much time today, provided he's right.
In the mean time, I'm having tea, alone in my quarters while reading Moby Dick, a stout classic of the 19'th century.
CMDR Zinnsei, out.