Final Guardian Visits, Camping At Explorer's Anchorage
30 Sep 2021Scubadog
Well, I made it to galaxy center, a bit the worse for wear. So, this leg of my journey has been a might eventful. After I exhausted galavanting around various Guardian ruins sites off to the "west" side of the galaxy I headed more toward the center to visit several there. Things went pretty damned smoothly, only concerning myself with the periodic repairing of the jump drive. Neutron star boosting is a fast way to travel, but exceeding the manufacturer's design parameters that way--and that frequently--gradually degrades the FSD reliability. Once it drops into the 70's you get the growing dropouts when you try to fire the thing up. I've grown use to that.
Then the damnedest thing happened. I located one of the Guardian ruins toward the middle of the galaxy, which was on the night side of this particular planet, and sat my Anaconda down on what I thought was a flat, open spot nearby. As I cut the engines and let the ship touch down I heard a faint rumbling echo across the skin of the ship...and then a horrific crunch. The ship shook something awful. The crunch was insanely loud. Alarms started screaming at me and Eden announced a hull breach attack! What the hell? I killed the alarms and had Eden display a damage report. There was a frelling hole in the bottom of my ship! Just behind the SRV bay. A big ass hole. Thankfully, the SRV bay was undamaged. I suited up and climbed into the SRV. As the scooter lowered to the ground I saw it. Even lit only by the ship's running lights, I saw it and knew what happened. One of those damned Guardian Relic towers had sprung from beneath the ground as it sensed my ship touch down. That son of a bitch shot up right through the bottom of my ship!
It scared the crap out of me. I pulled the SRV back up into the bay and then grabbed my engineering scanner to survey how bad it really was. Turns out, that Guardian tower pierced almost through three decks. Since I have The Ceti Azeria configured pretty bare bones for deep exploration, none of my key modules were damage except the cargo hatch. I was glad to see that the ship's systems had adequately deployed a sealant around the areas that were punctured. I tried every cutting tool I had in an attempt to chop this thing up and get it out of my ship. Nothing worked. I knew the only thing I had powerful enough to do it were the SRV guns, which does me no good on the interior of the ship. At that point, the only thing I could do was make sure I wasn't going to bleed atmosphere and then go about the exploration of the ruins.
I spent about three hours roving all over the Guardian site, gathering copious amounts of obelisk data and looking for any unique features. Once I got the SRV secured again, had to come up with a plan to leave. With something as large as that tower buried into the body of my ship like a harpoon in a whale, I wasn't all that confident I could lift off. The Azeria is running most modules well below optimal size and class, so my thrusters aren't all that impressive. No landing on high-G bodies, that's for sure. I wondered if this relic was going to latch hold of me like a barbed spear. I knew the attempt to pull the Azeria off of being impaled was going to be violent. I strapped in, set pips to full thrusters and began goosing her off the deck. I felt the ship shake all to hell and begin to rise...and then vertical movement stopped. Adding more thrust did nothing. I pulled back the throttles and settled back onto the surface. Time for a different approach. Time to rip the band-aid off. I steeled myself for what I thought would be disaster, and then pushed full throttles and hit the boosters. I shot up violently and heard the ship scream bloody murder as the Guardian tower was ripped out of the gaping hole in my ship. I had already sealed the bulkhead doors on the decks around the wound, so I knew I wouldn't lose atmosphere. Once I broke orbit I dropped the ship into normal space and did a quick scan of the ship. As it turns out, the result actually was damage to a number of modules. I was able to get the AFMU to repair most of the modules. I only had a 4 unit cargo module onboard and, as luck would have it, it was already full with four occupied lifepods I rescued on my way out to these parts. Sure, I could have dumped them so I could synthesize repair limpets and send them out to patch the hole in my hull. Better angels prevailed, though. Plus, the repair limpets wouldn't be able to fix the hole that extended through multiple decks of my ship. So, I'd leave those parts of my ship to the vacuum for now. You're welcome.
I continued on my quest to visit more of the Guardian locations I could find out this way. I came across one location that was on a very tight binary planet.
It made for a pretty spectacular planetfall. As I approached the site I was a lot more picky about where I set the ship down.
I spent a couple of hours gather more obelisk data and eventually hit max capacity for all known types of Guardian data. It was time to move on. I slowly ran the SRV beneath the gaping wound on my ship and looked for any other signs of stress fractures, etc. I secured the SRV and carefully launched. I set course for Explorer's Anchorage. The trip there was about as normal as I expected. Once I hit the pad and entered the hanger I had station crews start work on damage. That isn't going to be cheap. But all the cartographic data I accumulated should be plenty to pay for the repairs. I told them there was no rush on it, I'd be resting at the station for a spell. Once the ship and I are ready to head out, I'll be popping over to Sag-A just to get my butt puckered. That black hole is just frightening as hell. But worth another visit. I'll have to decide where I want to go after that. Still not sure.
Hopefully things won't be nearly as messy the rest of the trip. Wish me luck.