Entry 0007 - What is COL 70?

CMDR's Log
13 Sep 3302

So here I am, enjoying the view, getting ready to blast past Barnard's Loop, and finally set my sights on the outer rim.

I am going to miss views like this.

When my nav computer starts puking on every route I try to plot toward the rim. Every plot, "Plot failed." After some poking around, slowly backing my route length up by hundreds of light years at a time, I found out that the sector directly between Nehet and the outer rim, by way of the far side of Barnard's Loop is called COL 70. Every system I checked in COL 70 is restricted. You need a permit. A permit that's not recorded in my nav computer. The nav won't even think about setting a route to or through anything in that sector.

Usually, you'll see a message saying "Sol permit required" or "Acheron permit required". Those, I get. This is "Unknown permit required." That is some shady, hinky stuff right there.

Conspiracy theories aside, it looks like I'm going to have to backtrack a bit. I've made that turn to starboard a little earlier than I expected, along with a pull up toward what we usually call the North of the disc, to try and miss COL 70 by way of COL 69.

The shape of frustration.

On the upside, COL 69 showed me my first white star in a while. Yellow was getting pretty boring.

It's the little things.

Anyway, I've set down on a little rock to stretch out, get some shuteye, and try and sleep off the frustration of this minor setback. Hopefully, the next transmission will be from a good chunk more rimward than I am now.

Nighty night.

CMDR Aubrey Herreshoff,
Signing off.

== EOT ==

Entry 0006 - Can't see the nebula for the trees

CMDR's Log
12 Sep 3302

Waving goodbye to the Witch Head, I plotted the next leg of my journey. 20 hops and about 460 lightyears V417 Orionis, deep in the guts of the Orion Nebula.

Busy Neighborhood

The flight out there was fairly monotonous. Yellow star after Yellow star, but the view kept getting better.

Yes.

And better.

Oh yes.

But then, I got to my next destination, and it was...underwhelming.

Wait, what?

It turns out that the insides of nebulae tend to be full of very (relatively) thick, opaque dust, and it tends to obscure pretty much everything further away than your windscreen. Lesson learned. Nebulae are prettiest at about 100 lightyears.

Or a few hundreds

CMDR Aubrey Herreshoff,

Signing off.

== EOT ==

Entry 0005a - Supplemental

CMDR's Log - Supplemental
11 Sep 3302

In reviewing my notes and camera footage from the day, I remembered a sobering discovery from the Asterope system. My navigation computer pinged to notify me of the presence of a degraded signal source, deep in the system.

What's this?

 I went to investigate. The computer calculated a low chance of threat (don't ask me how it does that. Probably some kind of algorithm or methodology or something), so I decided to drop out of supercruise. What I found was not especially fun.

Wreckage

What you're seeing there is most likely the wreckage of a deep-space explorer. They might have been on their way out, but considering they had a big stack of survey data, ready for delivery, they were probably on their way back in. This just makes my stupid oversight in Stuve's Lost Sector hit even harder. 

If I want to make it back to Nehet, I'd better stay frosty.

CMDR Aubrey Herreshoff,

Signing off.

== EOT ==

Entry 0005 - Witch Head Nebula

CMDR's Log
11 Sep 3302

It's been a relatively exciting few hours. I bounced briefly through the Taurus Dark Sector, a many-lightyears-wide region of thick, opaque dust. From Kamadhenu or Achenar, it just looks like a starless blotch, but from inside, well, it looks like a blotch with no stars outside.

Not the greatest postcard

Even the brilliant Pleiades nebula, with all its blue stars and gold and green gases looks muted from only a couple dozen lightyears away. I don't know what I was expecting when I went somewhere called a "Dark Region", but now I know. 

From the Taurus Dark Region, I plotted the next stop in my sightseeing adventure, I mean contracted surveying mission.

Headed for the Witch Head

The Witch Head Nebula is the first stop in a very gassy, star-rich neighborhood, sharing space with the Orion Nebula, Barnard's Loop, and the horsehead nebula. About 20 hops and 520 lightyears should find me some lovely views.

Hopefully not of fiery doom

But not before a fuel scooping run goes wrong. This is what happens when you have a lapse in concentration and your Frame Shift Drive thinks maybe you shouldn't be going close to light speed near a star. It smashes the brakes and you go from a fraction of C to a couple hundred meters a second in the blink of an eye. Beside the gut-wrenching deceleration (thank goodness for inertial dampers), you often end up in a hell of a spin, which takes a few long seconds for your thrusters to overcome. It's jarring for the pilot, and what's worse, for the ship. The computer tells me I took a hit to my hull integrity. I do some more of these, and my trip is cut short, possibly very, explodingly short.

Anyway, the trip to the Witch Head has been pretty beautiful. Some good scans, some beautiful white stars, and some motivation to give the camera drones a whirl. Check out this view:

Oh, that's lovely, that is.

Watching that gorgeous stack of nebulae getting closer with every hop was a very nice diversion from a long string of yellow stars in my face. Every time I wrapped a fuel run, I'd point the nose into the black, and, once my solar filters cleared up, I'd have a view like this waiting for me. Fantastic.

Finally, I found myself in the Witch Head Nebula proper, and decided to give the landing gear a stretch. I set down on a little moon, close to its arctic daylight terminator. You really can't ask for a better bedroom wall than this:

Nighty night

Next stop: Orion, Barnard, and Horsehead.

Entry 0004 - Goodbye Pleiades

CMDR's Log
09 Sep 3302

I wrapped up my little pilgrimage to the Pleaides. Saw six of the seven sisters, and even visited Titan and Pleione. Merope was interesting. Partly for the star, and her several concurrent flares:

Good show

But mostly for who was in the neighborhood. While scanning Merope 1B for useful minerals, I found something interesting in my nav computer:

Hello, who's this?

I decided, probably foolishly, to take a closer look. I dropped out of supercruise to find this:

Pictured: One nope.

That is a Farragut-Class capital ship. One of the Federation's finest. I, being an Imperial-registered CMDR and sworn to the service to the Empress, Arissa Levigny Duval, long may she reign, I pulled the hardest 180 my little DBX could manage, and got right out of town. I relayed the ship's position to all the proper channels, and beat a quick FSD hop to Titan, hoping to put enough lightyears between me and the cruiser's support ships to be worth a chase.

I'm plotting a course for a quick bounce off the Taurus Dark Region before my next real stop: The Witch Head Nebula. Another Entry when I get there.

CMDR Aubrey Herreshoff,

Signing off.

== EOT ==

Entry 0003 - Goodbye Civilization...Maybe

CMDR's Log
08 Sep 3302

Got myself pulled out of Xuesen Orbital without a hitch.

Next stop: A bunch of nothing

Got through the mailslot, and took one last look at civilization in a flight-assist-off tailslide away from the station.

Maybe not the safest way to start a months-long surveying mission

So after that little indiscretion, I got out of departure control's space, cycled the guns once to make sure power management won't shut down my air to feed the lasers, and asked Hazel to spin up the FSD for the first jump.

And I was greeted with this view:

Solar Flare

My very first stop, HIP 17049 gave me a nice little wave with a horrifyingly large solar flare as I skimmed her corona for a fuel bump. Now, I know those things take days to leap off the surface and grow to that size, but wow, I can't help but remember just what's going on a couple light seconds below my butt as I do a scoop run. Fusion reactions are NO JOKE. I was planning on playing it really safe, and grabbing fuel at every scoopable star class (KGB FOAM!), but the thought of dipping too close to a ribbon of superheated, magnetically charged plasma has me thinking twice about that decision. Either way, I'm glad I sprung for the top-end heat dissipation gear.

As I grew closer to the Pleiades, jump by jump, the nebula grew ever larger and brighter, and the light I was seeing got thirty years younger with every hop. Here's the nebula from about the halfway point:

Pleiades Nebula at 158 LY

I busied myself over the first short leg of the journey by warming up my discovery scanner, and dropping bookmarks in my galaxy map all the way. I dropped the bookmarks partly to have a keepsake of my long haul, but also, it's contractually obligated. Apparently,  my log has some kind of metadata somewhere that can tell my client whether or not I was actually AT the spot I bookmarked at the time.

Anyway, corporate oversight aside, I pulled into Maia, already a bit bored. Then BAM. Big blue star. Here's Maia A from pretty far away:

Maia A

What a jewel. I just love blue stars. Maybe this trip won't be so bad.

As I scrolled through my nav list, I saw...a station? I had no idea anyone had bothered to build anything this far out. There were a few CMDRs loitering Obsidian Station, which made me nervous, considering this was reading as an anarchy system. I'd hate to get jacked for nothing and have to start over before I even really got started. Radio chatter was weird. Some folks were going on about artifacts, but I'm not an archaeologist, so I grabbed fuel, hightailed away from Obsidian, and did some looking about. And look what I found:

Okay, it's not much to look at.

I admit, it's not very dramatic, but notice how some of the stars are doubled, and there's a bit of a, well, a roundness in the center of the windshield? Those are the telltale visual signs of a black hole. I got closer.

A Lot closer.

So close, in fact, my FSD thought maybe supercruising at an appreciable fraction of C was not the best speed to be going, so it did an emergency dump into real space. Luckily, Maia B is not an especially big or mean black hole, so I didn't immediately overheat and explode, but it was a wake up call to treat these big bastards with a bit more respect, and to give them a very wide berth.

I'm holding station now at Electra, another big, beautiful sapphire of a star, just long enough to write this log entry. The next entry will likely be from a fair bit further from the core, and well on the way to the rim.

Yeah. Try and get some shuteye with that thing looking in your window.

CMDR Aubrey Herreshoff,

Signing off.

== EOT ==

Entry 0002 - The Route

CMDR's Log
08 Sep 3302

My home base is Nehet. Nice, well-populated system with a high tech economy. You can fit out pretty much anything there, from a free Sidey to an A-Class Clipper. Not too close to the Capital to be loaded with traffic, but well inside the safe confines of the Empress Duvall's sphere of influence. There's also some fair spots for bounty hunting, if you know where to look.

The starting point: Nehet

Here's where we're headed first. Maia, in the Pleiades. Seeing as I'm shooting for the quickest route out to the outer rim, and it's in the right direction, and I hear the Seven Sisters are some big, gorgeous, blues, I figure it'll be a nice first stop. Buying and fitting the ship actually took less time than I planned for, so I've got a bit of time to burn. Why not?

First stop: Maia 

Maia is about 415 light years aaaand...

There it is

15 jumps away.

Everything is squared away. The tanks are topped up, the (disgusting) long-haul, high-calorie provisions are packed, and I've got enough scrubbers to last me four lifetimes. Station control is chattering in my ear as I type, "LAKON Alpha Uniform Bravo, you blah blah blah". I guess I'll be lifting off shortly. Here's hoping the GalNet connection stays solid out in the rim. I'd hate to lose contact.

Next you hear from me, I'll be out in the black.

CMDR Aubrey Herreshoff,

Signing off.

== EOT ==

Entry 0001 - Craft Acquired

CMDR's Log
08 Sep 3302

Like plenty of other skippers out there, I've racked up a bit of a debt. Rebuys, refits, air filters, all that stuff. I've agreed to pay down some of that debt by performing a long-haul survey in the outer rim of the galaxy. The plan is to strike out in a straight line from my home base in Nehet for the near edge of the disc, and, when the stars run out, hang a turn to starboard and survey until the contract runs out.

So, goodbye clipper and FDL. I need a cheap, competent, deep-space runner. I fitted a Diamondback Explorer for the trip. The DBX isn't Lakon's sexiest ship, and I'd rather be in an ASP, but budget is budget. Still, with her (now) oversized power core, and its corresponding heat management, I should be able to go nose to nose with pretty much any star without having to worry about overheating.

Lakon is not known for their sexy ships.

The kit is pretty standard explorer fare. Discovery scanner and surface scanner, of course. I chose the stripped down ship-to-ship sensors and thrusters. This bird will never be a fighter. Regardless, I did grab a couple pulse lasers. I feel a bit naked without them. I also opted for the most lightweight emergency life support system I could put in. An extra 7 minutes of air isn't going to do me a lick of good when I'm 3000 lightyears from a starbase. Round out the deep-space kit with the biggest fuel scoop I could manage, an extra 8T fuel tank for those long stretches, and some shields.

Yes, I fitted some class 3D shields. After some months in the black, with nothing around for a hundred light seconds, threading even a Diamondback through a stardock mailslot is a crazy precise maneuver. I'd hate to reset the balance on my contract because I bounced my poor ship off the toast rack on the way back in.

In the next entry, I'll lay out the first bits of the plan.

CMDR Aubrey Herreshoff,

Signing off.

== EOT ==