Jacques Recon and Resupply - Day 3
06 Jul 2016James Hussar
Downtime. I'm dictating this message from the ship mess, which I've converted into a rec room for this journey, and I can't be bothered to look up the name of the system in which I have been parked for a little over a day. The 16LY jumps are wearing on me. Given it's taking 60+ jumps to cover 1kly, this trip is going to take much longer than I imagined it would. Tedium is setting in, at least for the moment, and I'm wishing I had brought one of my AspX's instead of the Anaconda. I'm as prepared for anything as I possibly can be, but at the cost of forward progress. Either of the Asps could be moving me ahead at twice the rate of the Conda, but then I suspect I would be running into deep-space pirates or dangerous systems instead. I suspect that by the time I reach Jacques others will have delivered a sufficient quantity of meta-alloys to get the station back into a more nominal mode of operation - but hey, I'm sure mine won't go to waste even in those circumstances.
I've only got a few days before I will need to stop for a full week to do some deep maintenance on a couple of essential systems, but hardware and software, that are unavoidable. I didn't want to put off the trip to see to these before setting out, but I had hoped to make better progress and at least reach Jacques before taking things offline for so long - I hate doing this so far away from civilization and technology, and something to do while the maintenance runs its course. I should be able to push on for a few more kaylies, maybe even to the mid-point between home and Jacques, before shutting things down for a bit, but it's less than ideal.
Frankly, I think the thing is that I did not expect to find as many systems worth at least a partial scan because it is this that is slowing me down. I've gotten into a fairly consistent routine - jump, honk, if little turns up check if it's close enough to scan without diverting for long and if it is, take the few minutes to scan, otherwise, swoop, scoop and jump again. If there IS a lot on the scanner, I pull up the system map (which always takes a disappointingly long time) and look at the identified bodies in a bit more detail. If there appear to be earth-like, water or ammonia worlds I make a point to scan them and anything that appears to be metal-rich. If there are nearby metal-rich worlds, I divert to scan them if I need a change of scenery only - because jump after jump does tend to numb the brain a bit. And if there is nothing, or anything but earths, water or ammonia is far away, I just pass it up and jump again.
It would be very handy if I could enter the criteria worth stopping for into the nav and have the ship just tell me if there is anything worth investigating in a given system. I think I could make better time. This is just one of the technological deficiencies in present-day spacecraft. For all the technology needed to frame-shift and keep from flying into stars and planets, I'm amazed at some of the trivially simple things that just are not automated. I understand that AI has gone rogue before and we intentionally isolate functionality of disparate systems from each other, but what I'm talking about here isn't even close to AI - it's simple convenience.