Sacaquwea - Nearly Halfway There
25 Feb 2018Scubadog
Shortly after setting down at Sacaquwea Space Port and getting The Ceti Azeria secured I popped over to stellar cartography to see what my scans would fetch from this leg of my trip. It was a nice surprise to find my account padded with almost 40 mil this time. I have to admit, I wasn't really expecting much since I focused more on moving through the jump points than I did on scans. But I did hit a few more water planets and a couple of earthies, so I'm sure that helped. I should be so lucky with whatever route my nav computer gens up on the next leg to Eagle's Landing. If I can cross 200 mil when I jump into the Core Systems, that will go a long way to setting up the Azeria for an optimal trip home to Colonia Dream.
I did a walk-around of my ship last night--mostly 'cause I couldn't seem to spin myself down for some sleep, but also driven by the fact that not long after leaving Gagarin I kept noticing a strange noise, an off vibration that grew to annoy me over time, then outright worry me. Okay, I get that a new ship is literally going to go through a shakedown initially. And since I never really took the Azeria on proper cruise before striking out to the Core, I anticipated some settling. But as much as I'd put her through before Gagarin, she still had a predictable, even comforting sound too her. Nothing had changed about that after getting patched up at Polo. But I truly did get an odd feeling about those techs at Gagarin. Anyway, about two thirds of the way to Sacaquwea, I finally gave in and set down on planet with about 1G. I wanted to check out what might be wrong with my ship in gravity I was comfortable with. I had the ship run internal scans for any anomalies and manually scanned from the outside. What I found was the cargo hatch, which had been replaced by the Gagarin techs, had a set of under-spec hinge pins stuck in them. Although the caps on both ends of the pins were large enough--and seemed secure enough--to prevent them from working their way out of the hinges, there was plenty of slop around the pins that allowed the hatch to shift and vibrate. A LOT. If I hadn't discovered this, I've no doubt that at some point, that loose vibration coupled with me actually using the hatch a few times would have left me with a decoupled hatch, catastrophic decompression of the cargo bay and who knows what else. Obviously, I knew I was not going to get to scoop anything up from this point until I reached Sacaquwea. I took a patch gun and filled in the hinge pin gaps as best I could, did a little sight seeing on the planet and then continued on the journey. Needless to say, I had the techs here at Sacaquwea yank that cargo hatch completely, check my hull and mounting area for tolerances and then install a new hatch---with the right pins. Everything else looks right.
I have a lot less paint on the ship, I noticed. Running so long without the shields powered up really scuffs up your finish. But, as I look at it in the weird lighting of this hangar, it looks like home. I don't know if I'll ever polish it back up. Oh, I'll keep up on the ship name and ID, but the rest of her? Maybe not. We'll see. I'm not entering her in no contests.
I caught the latest waves on what the Thargoids seem to be up to. Looks like they figured out who's turning out the new weapon tech to combat them, and the Thargoids are going after them. Aegis folks have got to be pissing themselves trying to guess which of their sites is next. If they've got more labs strung into the Core Systems, things may get really messy quick. If they're smart, they'll shut those places down and move them out away from the core. The Thargoids clearly don't respect the idea of non-combatants.
Well, leave it to reading or writing in a log to make you sleepy. I'm going to knock off and get some sleep before heading out on the next leg. Eagle's Landing, here I come...this is going to be a long stretch.