New Acquisitions...And The Trip Home Begins
18 Dec 2020Scubadog
The sheer stupidity of some of these factions in Colonia angers me. I was out in the black for a while, and when I came back I'd found that the Carcosa system--which formerly was the one location you could find Federal ships and the latest Alliance ships--had been taken over by a moronic faction that was more concerned over power than allowing freedom in the one system that offered these ships. It's people like that who prove why cousins should never marry...their family trees have zero branches. Idiots inbreds.So, when I decided I needed to try using a Challenger instead of my Gunship for some Compromised Nav Beacon work, I had no choice but to get transportation back to the bubble and pick one up. And, because I could afford it and because I didn't want to have to make this trip again, I also picked up a used Crusader. I'm not really a big fan of the corners that had to be cut on that design just to shoehorn a fighter bay in it, but I'd rather have it and not need it than...well, you know the saying.
Once I got them, I outfitted both with armour and modules that could only be bought in the bubble (at least now because of the retards that ruined Carcosa for Colonia citizens). On the Challenger, I went ahead and optimized it for an exploration trip back to Colonia--reducing mass as much as I could on everything while installing survival essentials I always take with me when traveling halfway across the galaxy--maintenance unit, repair limpet controller, engineered scanner and SRV for gathering any materials I might need along the way. Heaven knows I learned the value of keeping plenty of synthesis materials on board for the life support system. My 18k lightyear trip home from Beagle Point without a canopy left me completely exhausted, but alive, as I pulled into my home station. Anyway, my new-but-as-yet-unnamed Challenger was quickly made ready for the journey back to Colonia.
Meanwhile, the also-nameless Crusader was otherwise kept stock, since that will reduce the cost of having the thing shipped to Colonia. After I parked it in The Silverbacks' home in Arexe, I ran final checks on my new ship and launched from Janes Horizons. For my first day I made fair distance. I say "fair" because the best I could coax out of the Challenger was 40ly (laden). Damn, that reactive armour drags down the jump range. Same with the prismatic shields. But in the afternoon of the first day I did manage to run across an earth-like world that had what looked to be a fantastic beach for me to get some diving in:
I ran some scans from low orbit it was pretty much perfect. Air temps were pretty warm, since the spot I chose was fairly close to the planet's equator, and the water temps were as well. As I got close to the surface on the beach area--it had a beautiful pool that apparently was created every high tide, and then was exposed once the tide dropped. This planet's moon was quite a bit larger and closer than Earth's, so I could see the tidal effect was more dramatic. Bottom line is that I couldn't leave the ship on the beach for more than 12 hours. A day on this planet was about 28 hours, but the tidal shift was about every 12. Anyway, the dive did not disappoint. I didn't run across anything that appeared predatory--at least to humans--and plenty of what passes for fish on the planet.
The rest of day one went pretty routinely. Boring, in fact. After the excitement of the earth-like world, all the rest of the systems I jumped to were decidedly bland. Just as I was about to think there weren't even any geologically active planets on this trip so far I finally hit a system with a single planet with geologic sites on it. I did my normal scans and set down by a geo site and hopped into my SRV to extract some materials for my trip. The geo site I picked was not nearly as bountiful as I'd hoped, so after I finished in the SRV, I stowed it, and now I'm prepping to get some sleep. I've got cockpit system mostly shut down, and the shields on low power, so I'm ready to sign off for now and head back to the captain's stateroom. No personalization in there for this trip. I threw a couple of changes of clothes, my toiletries, and not much else into the stateroom.
I'm not even going to set an alarm, I think. I'll wake up when I wake up, grab some breakfast, then dust off for day two.
Nighty-night.