08 Sep 3302
Got myself pulled out of Xuesen Orbital without a hitch.
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| 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.
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| 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:
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| 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:
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| 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:
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| 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:
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Yeah. Try and get some shuteye with that thing looking in your window. |
CMDR Aubrey Herreshoff,
Signing off.
== EOT ==
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