Vacation fun, we hope...
29 Jul 2020Don Samen
After very much back on forward I could give the order to my captain, Rose Farmer to set course for distant uncharted systems. She tried the regular "Yes Sir, right away, Sir!", but I stopped her half way through that sentence. I will not the crew to see me as "Sir". I'm their boss, but I prefer that they title me and all on board by first name, or whatever they respond to when I shout their name. It that should be "Cheesecake", fine by me. But there is no rule without exceptions, and in this case it is John, the Jar-head. He is soldier to the bone, and he will never stop yelling "Permission to speak free, Sir!". So I considered letting all communication with him go by Marie, but then the very scary image hit me. What if they suddenly should fall for each other... That jar-head as my son-in-law? So better safe then sorry, so I will have to continue listen to that "Sir..."-whatever-crap. But that part is basically going fine, the crew has found their position and hopefully see this carrier as more then just a job. I want them to see this as their home too. I pay them to do their job, but I have seen them do the little extra to make this place more pleasant. That is what I like, then they will take more responsibility to insure that this is a great and safe place to be. So when I put the ship to outfitting or repair I appreciate that they do the little extra, test the ship and configuration, basically put a little extra pride into the job.
Anyways, Rose set course and we jumped out. We had to do several jumps to find systems never visited by others. So it was basically a rally to run to "Kon Tiki", the newly engineered DBX to explore the system. I won the race by offering desert after dinner, just when we entered the system. So by the time they new what was happening I was already in the seat doing the pre-flight checklist. Thank you rose for that heads-up, she just got an extra ration of desert the next week.
The first system was pretty fast to scan, only planets with no rings. So I jumped to the next system, and set course for the sun to fill up the tank again. That was the exciting moment, when the fuel scope did its job. I increased speed and flew closer to the sun to let the scope run at full capacity. What can I say, the setup with clean drive thrusters works like a charm. No overheating at all. I just love when things goes as planned. And I mapped two more systems with only suns and some planets. It was on the thirt system I found a planet with icy rings. And it had both LTD and VO-hotspots. So I called up Rose, gave the coordinates and she initiated the jump while I finished scanning and mapping the rest of the planets.
I had just finished mapping the last planet when I got message from Rose that they had arrived at destination. So I hurried back to switch to "Drilling Boomer". I sat course for the VO-hotspot since "Drilling Boomer" is the ship to use when you want to blow up asteroids. The side thrusters on that ship is so much powerful then on the Cutter "Drilling Miner", so it is much easier to place the detonations with that ship. And I had a pretty good day out there with the Corvette. I found and blew up 7-8 asteroids and ended up with something like 100 T of Void-Opals. Not bad for just an hours work. But the LTD-hotspot proved to be a challenge. The outcome was not what I expected, and after 2 hour of hunting and shooting out prospector limpets I headed back to Valhall with only 60-70 T of LTDs. I had a short talk with my brother, Jack. He has mined most of his life, so he offered to take "Drilling Boomer" out to the LTD-hotspot.
Jack headed for the hotspot starting the drilling. He was back two hours later with 78 T of LTD and 25 T of Grandidierite. He emptied the ship and walked right by me heading for the bridge with a very determent mine on his face. I had to more run then walk to keep up with him when he entered the comms area. I tried to ask what's going on, did something happen in the rings? He called up someone called jake, not sure where he works. I tried to follow the dialog, but that was some highly technical stuff in that conversation. I heard something about deep scan frequency, wrong calibration of wave-something. Then Rose headed over, she had just gotten a message from the DBX, 42 Ly away. I must have seen pretty confused out there. "Kon Tiki" 42 Ly out? Where? What? Why?
Maria had decided to take a trip on her own. She actually managed to map two systems while Jack was mining. And she had found another system with ice rings. And this one had several VO and LTD hotspots. So the big question was, should we jump after. I stood there thinking and then just raised my shoulders, why not? Good, she said. The jump was already initiated. What can I say, I love it when the crew can think on their own.
By then Jack had finished the conversation and came over to me. It turns out that he had discovered that "Drilling Boomer" and probably "Drilling Miner" both has a critical fault in the prospector limpet controller. The limpets will not read the asteroids properly. That's why the outcome was so low. I probably have missed a lot of valuable asteroids that was not properly scanned. But Jack had raised his voice, it is not that often he do that. And that bloke on the other end on the line probably knows that, because he has promised to investigate this and send us a software patch that will fix the problem with the prospecting limpets. The problem is that it was due today, but he discovered some other potential problems, so he had to postpone the release until monday. That is close to a week with faulty mining equipment.
But Marie had an interesting idea. Let's use the days until monday to explore as many systems as possible. If we are lucky we will find another potential glory-spot. So now both miners are parked, but at least the heating problem is gone on "Drilling Boomer". "Drilling Miner" on the other hand will still overheat when I use all 4 class 2 mining lasers. But that is a problem for another day, now it is exploration on the plan for the next days.