We departed!
I headed from Flade Enterprise out to the fleet departure point at Pallaeni to await the first mass jump to HR 5413 as the fleet departed
Unfortunately, as I was awaiting the departure, I was brutally murdered by CMDR Rivertide, a Dangerous-ranked commander in a Mamba. Thankfully, I’d docked at Bakewell Point in the Pallaeni system, so I didn’t have far to travel back to the departure point.
Due to issues with server lag, I didn’t continue the journey beyond the initial jump.
Yesterday I thought I had a bad day with white dwarves.
Today, I jumped with my pre-charged FSD to another neutron star, charged and jumped again, and tried to charge a third time on a third neutron star.
I got too close to the neutron star while inside the jet cone, and was kicked out of supercruise while still inside the jet cone.
Because you get buffeted around inside the jet cone, and remaining in the jet cone for too long causes a lot of damage, my ship quickly lost the ability to fly.
I couldn’t jump to supercruise because I couldn’t reorient to the escape vector – assuming my FSD didn’t glitch out before that point. My AFMU couldn’t keep both my thrusters and FSD healthy enough not to glitch out.
Eventually, my canopy shattered, and at that point it was clearly game over. Being 7.7kly away from home, there’s no way I had any hope of getting to a station for repairs in the 25 minutes of life support I had available.
Thankfully, someone has kindly grabbed my escape pod and escorted me back to Flade Enterprise in LHS 28, where I’ve managed to convince the insurance people to give me a new ship.
Whether or not I’m going to actually get to see these bubblegum worlds now before the update is another matter, but alas I shall try again. Probably spending little to no time gathering exploration data while en-route – I can do that on the way back.
As I progress through the galaxy, I’m noticing more and more that stars and systems seem to be grouped into areas. At first I was encountering a lot of single-star systems with many planets, then a lot of systems with no planets but many stars, and now I’m encountering a lot of white dwarves and neutron stars.
I did, however, encounter this pretty thing – a very fast neutron star near a pretty class-L star.
I guess it’s just interesting seeing how different regions of the galaxy have different types of things to see.
However, I finished today with a few incidents with white dwarves – the jet cones are much smaller than that of neutron stars, so I’ve unfortunately tripped the supercruise safety mechanisms when trying to supercharge my FSD, and forcibly dropped out. Of course, white dwarves are also pretty hot, so I’ve had a few overheating issues as well.
With the new E:D lighting system just around the corner, there’s a few worlds which I want to go and visit with the old lighting system.
I’ve heard stories of fluorescent green and pink gas giants in the depths of space, and I simply have to see these for myself before they’re toned down with the next update.
I’m taking my Asp Explorer “Pathfinder” as a prelude to Distant Worlds II which is happening early next year. I’ve got this loadout, which gives me a decent jump range of 43.78ly laden, oh, and did I mention I’ve already left?
With the recent announcement of Distant Worlds II now being open for signup, I’ve quickly jumped on the chance to be involved in the second round of the amazing exploration trip. While I unfortunately missed the last one, I’m not going to make the same mistake again!
I’ll be using this post as an introduction to my intentions, but I expect to have a new post with the final plans on it later. Keep an eye on the tag for this expedition.
The approximate route of the expedition leaves from The Bubble, travels via the Sagittari Conflux, through the galactic core, across the Perseus Stem, Styx and Scutum-Centauris Arm, through The Abyss and up to Beagle Point, then back roughly following the route of the USS Voyager’s voyage home from the Delta Quadrant.
There are a lot of different Commanders taking part – at the time of writing I’m one of 1,728 who have signed up for this.
This expedition is planned to leave after the final chapter of Beyond is released, with the expected enhancements to the exploration functionality of the game. Therefore, the expedition is not expected to depart until Q4 2018 or even Q1 2019.
I’m planning to take Pathfinder, my Asp Explorer. The provisional outfitting that I have puts me at an approximate jump range of 46.02 ly, so this is what I expect to have pending any additional engineering I do. Pathfinder will be switching it’s ship ID from STW-05 to it’s new Distant Worlds 2 designation – 1M2-DW
Looking over signup list, I see both CMDR Obsidian Ant (#108, 18P-DW) of YouTube fame, CMDR Felix Macedonica (#455, 011-DW) of VonRictofen’s Rescue / Macedonica’s Leap fame and also CMDR Harry Potter (#2223, 0A1-DW) from SDC. While I’m excited to see Obsidian Ant and Felix Macedonica on this list, SDC’s presence, while unsurprising, I’m less enthusiastic about.
Anyway, for now, this is mostly just to say “I’ll be there!”, and as more details are released by the DW2 staff team, I’ll start planning a more detailed mission.
The DW2 logo and the DW2 route plan above are sourced from the DW2 signup thread – more information about the DW2 expedition (and if you want to sign up yourself) can be found at the relevant forum thread.
About a week or two ago, I discovered that one of the five 2TB hard disks in my home network server had… vanished. The system was recognising it as an approximately 3G disk, with no health status, and generally no idea what it was doing.
Needless to say, the storage pool wasn’t the happiest of things, and generally the entire system was almost unresponsive.
When I finally got into the OS, I discovered that one disk (disk 5; the failed one) was in a state of ¯\_(ツ)_/¯, one disk was failing, and another disk was showing warnings
Naturally, the first disk I replaced was disk 5, as I couldn’t get anything out of that at all – connecting it to my PC to try and figure out what was going on caused sufficient disruption to my SATA controller that all other disks vanished from the UEFI configuration tool, but would still start a boot into Windows, which just hung completely. Removal of this disk put the system back to how it was immediately.
This led me to think it was a controller failure – and as my last disk to fail was also a Seagate disk of the same model, I considered doing a quick controller-swap to see if it was indeed a controller failure, but alas no. The “new” controller from the other disk exhibited the exact same symptoms.
Time to open it up!
Dark marks within the seal on the top cover
On first opening the drive, I noticed some dark marks on the lid of the drive, indicating that the internals of the drive were not the clean environment I would expect from a drive.
I also noticed some larger debris on the top platter of the disk – not as visible in the photo due to the presence of dust too – it took me a minute to realise I wanted photos of this and to find my camera. Notably, in contrast to everything else, the debris here is actually the larger bits.
Debris on the platter
One of the first things I noticed was that the little filter pad to the side of the disk was filthy with the same black marks as the lid of the drive, quickly followed by me noticing a read head was missing from the arm – more noticeable if the arm is swung onto the platters
More debris towards the back of the platter – note the missing read head
Obvious missing read head is obvious
It was also at this point that I noticed the surfaces inside the disk were horribly filthy as well, and I realised that this is a fine likely metallic powder.
Detail of obviously missing read head
Head parking – also covered in the powder
I began to disassemble the stack of platters, in the hope of finding this missing read head, and possibly more insight into what actually happened.
Removal of the retaining bracket at the top of the platter showed how filthy even the surface of the platter is
It didn’t take long to find out what happened – the underside of the top platter revealed this pretty patterns of dust, visible on the outer half of the platter still in the case, along with a very obvious wide scratch mark across the surface around the middle.
The next platter down revealed even more dust, along with a massive gouge near the centre of the disk – some serious force must have been involved in this. The entire surface of these platters is also covered in concentric rings of dust which just wipe clean
Needless to say, I think I have a fairly good idea why the drive failed, but there is still one mystery I’ve not solved – where did that read head go to?
For comparison, here’s a photo of another Seagate drive of the same model that also failed (nowhere near as spectacularly) about six months prior – the top read head is clearly visible
Another curious point is that upon replacement of this disk, the other disk that was reported as bad is suddenly only showing caution signs:
It’s possible that the disruption to the SATA bus was causing this to completely go haywire I suppose, that and the three disks with problems were all in the same cage – so it’s possible that one failing disk has caused issues with the others.
The cage to the rear, behind the memory modules, is the one which caused issues. The disk in question was at the bottom of this cage.
tl;dr: Cool stuff happened, I’m going to see it for myself.
What can only be described as a seriously concerning chain of events has unfolded before me today, not only due to my somewhat-late discovery of the Dynasty Expeditions, which appear to have been leaving beacons on routes across the galaxy, and now we’ve found one of the mega-ships from that expedition based on some decoding work done by The Children of Raxxla, with some troubling log entries as first discovered by CMDR Jackie Silver. CMDR Shabooka has summarised it all here:
Needless to say, I’m wanting to see this for myself, so I’ve plotted a rough route across to Syreadiae JX-F c0 to find it for myself. As this involves crossing the infamous Formidine Rift, I’ll be using another CMDR’s route across the rift until I’ve actually got some idea of what it’s like. This will be the first outing for my Anaconda, which has this load-out.
I need to be acutely aware that this is not like my last exploration trip where as I got further and further away from home, the star density increased massively – I’m heading out to the galactic rim, where a serious shortage of scoopable stars is a distinct possibility.
My planned route is roughly-speaking to make a quick tourist stop in Tionisla, and then take a bee-line to the travel to a couple of remote outposts towards the Formadine Rift, then onwards to visit the Dynasty Expedition rally points, and finally to the Heisenberg Bridge starting in Myoideau RF-N c20-1 of the Perseus Arm, which provides a guided set of waypoints to Hyopae Aescs YE-R d4-2, from where I will cut up the Cygnus Arm to Syreadiae JX-F c0. What I’ll do after that, I have no idea. While I’m coming this way, I may try and find some of the Dynasty beacons too (yes, they’re plotted), and I’ll be on the lookout for some tourist stops along the way too.
I’ll need to keep in mind CMDR Heisenberg6626’s warnings – a jump range of 32.7ly is more-or-less needed unless I use jumponium, and of course, with lessons learnt from my last exploration trips, I’ll be kitting out heat sinks and multiple AFMUs.
This is going to be a long, dangerous journey, another trip away from the Bubble of civilisation. Multi-crew is now possible thanks to this shiny new Holo-Me technology I’ve had fitted, so CMDR Braxton Doyle and I can still go bounty hunting in the asteroid fields around Aequeelg, and he can come and see the sights for himself if he chooses.
I’ll keep this post updated with my overall plans via the dynamically-generated information at the bottom, but for now, this is still definitely in the planning stages. Given the event that’s supposedly happening a couple of weeks from now, on the 29th April with CMDR Salomé, I might stick around the bubble just long enough to see that. Now that Salomé is dead, I want to go and see the evidence for myself. I’ve already been to check out the logs from “R” in the Teorge system, and this has my curiosity piqued.
Update 2017-05-01: Salomé dead, Teorge listening posts, not going to Tionisla (already been when in Teorge; anticlimactic), plus remote outposts
Update 2017-06-07: I’ve set off, but chickened out with my 32T fuel tank that let me do only three jumps without refuelling. I’ve added an additional 64T fuel tank and a fighter bay to just play with. This has unfortunately knocked 5ly off my jump range, but hey.
Update 2017-08-17: Turns out I got involved in attempting to rewrite my ships’ operating system (or something like that, I don’t know where the project eventually got) in deep space – rather than fly out. Turns out there’s a new version of the OS on the horizon anyway, so before that hits general availability I want to complete my mission! I won’t be turning this into a deep-space exploration trip like I’d possibly hoped, instead I will take Red Dragon back across the Heisenberg Bridge, and back to Flade Enterprise to await the new update.
Update 2017-09-25: I’m home, finally. 2.4 arrives tomorrow, with the Thargoids. I hope I’ve got the kit I need here at Flade Enterprise… not sure I want to do a cross-bubble shopping trip. Looks like I’ve managed to net myself another 18,102,623 credits in exploration data, with a further 51,524 in first-discovery bonuses. Not as big a haul as I’d hoped, but I was racing back to the bubble without doing much in the way of exploring.
THARGOIDS!
There have been real confirmed reports of first contact with an unknown ship. As such, I’m skipping some of the sightseeing on my return to the bubble, and planning to make a beeline back as fast as possible. This will probably mean only scanning the primary star of a system at most, no more planetary scans, and also possibly attempting to use neutron stars to boost my journey back.
Anyway, other than that, waypoint 15 reached, waypoint 16 plotted towards Eyes of Riker still.
Nothing particularly interesting on the journey front, other than that I made a rather annoying mistake on the plotting of the last waypoint, which I have reached.
As can be seen from the above, I took one coordinate in the wrong direction, as such Waypoint 14 is going in the wrong direction to Eyes of Riker. Fortunately, I realised this mistake early before another waypoint was plotted, and no further waypoints are needed to make up for this mistake. The upper green line is the route I should have followed, and now a new waypoint has been plotted to account for this mistake, which is the new Waypoint 15.
Today I decided to pay attention to the minerals on planets, and decided I would try and find some polonium, so I decided to try my luck inside a crater.
However, space madness got the better of me, and I noticed that there were signals on my wave scanner coming from the large, steep mound in the middle of the complex crater. So I decided to see how far my SRV could get up the side.
Turns out the SRV is pretty good on this planet, and it made it up rather far up some very steep slopes.
.. and so I made it right to the top.
At this point, I realised that being so high, I was at serious risk of tumbling down the side leading to almost certain death. Attempts to recall my ship lead to the autopilot picking the most sensible place for it to land in the vicinity – at the bottom of the hill.
With only one thing for it, I began the terrifying decent – with what looked like a solid wall in front of me, the tyre tracks made it obvious that I was staring down at the crater floor.
Rather shockingly, I actually made it down to the bottom in one piece, though it took me quite a while to make the decent.
… and after all that, I actually found some Polonium too!
