EZ Orionis
23 Feb 2016Thelan
Have you ever wondered, what happens when you slam face first into a landable planet full speed in supercruise? Well, I just unintentionally did it. The planet just sort of pounced on me from nowhere, like a bad-mannered cat. I expected to just instantly vaporize with the ship, but instead, the flight computer said "Too fast for orbital cruise" and threw me into physical space wildly tumbling at insane speed a few kilometers above the planet's surface. Then, I crashed into it, still at 100 meters per second or so. Class 7 shield saved the ship from instant destuction, but never the less this unfortunate "landing" left me with 43% hull and a lot of damaged modules which took some time to repair. No such luck with the hull and powerplant, though.
HD 36560 6, I officially hate you. Bad planet.
Never the less, as soon as repairs were finished, I moved on along the dense bar of red and orange low-mass stars that stretches for a couple hundred light years towards the Running Man and Orion Nebula.
The Orion Nebula takes up the entire front view now. It looks like a dark, bleeding heart.
Perhaps, the brightest star in the area is EZ Orionis. It's a truly immense supergiant that rivals Betelgeuse in size; the jump puts you at 900 LS from the star, and you can scoop fuel from its corona at 700 LS. It has no planets.
There are also some interesting water and ammonia worlds and a couple neutron stars and black holes within the bar that I'll look at tomorrow.
Barnard's Loop region is like a small galaxy within itself. One can spend months surveying all the countless densely packed systems here.