JAQUES OR BUST!

Again. Thankfully, the local interface to my seemingly remotely piloted ship has been a lot more stable today, so I wasn’t needing to reconnect every second jump like I was at points yesterday.

On the way I passed a beautiful L-class brown dwarf

This was followed by one of the first peeks at the Colonia Nebula:

Space is confusing though, as the stars just suddenly… stop.

As I slowly continued, I could see the Colonia Nebula getting bigger in my field of vision as I drew closer and closer to it.

Alas, I finally made it to one jump to go, and decided to call it a night.

Wait, who am I kidding, it’s ONE JUMP TO GO!

So I arrived in the system, found Jaques, and proceeded to approach the station, I managed to get docking permission, and just about set down on the pad.

And then….

At least I’ve arrived.

After reconnecting back up to my ship, I repaired my ship, restocked it, sold my cargo and exploration data.

Eleven tons of Hutton Mugs have travelled over twenty-two thousand light years to be here, and all they get is 16,759/ton? That’s still over 180k credits profit though, given they’re cheap as chips at Hutton Orbital.

I sold 1,596 bits of exploration data, worth a total of 12,337,830 credits, split over 33 pages, averaging to around 7,730 credits per bit of data.

And so, an update on my financials:

In addition, I ranked up to Pathfinder!

There’s a large part of me that doesn’t want to do any more exploration now, as I have Curiosity and Opportunity as my ships, and Pathfinder as my exploration rank…

That’s all for now, I’ll probably summarize everything tomorrow in a new post, but I FINALLY MADE IT!

JAQUES OR BUST!

Bust it is then.

While fighting through the constant disconnections, I’ve finally made it to the final waypoint – Waypoint 22 – Dryooe Flyou OC-L d8-2066. This means I’m now less than a thousand light years from Jaques!

A quiet session tonight – mostly dominated by two CFIS and the discovery of an earth-like world!

I see CMDR Braxton Doyle has actually now beaten me to Jaques, and if the rumor has it, I need to get to Jaques before Thursday – so JAQUES OR BUST!

I started off by meeting up with CMDR Braxton Doyle at Waypoint 17, which means he’s caught up to me again. We were both glad to see another ship, so stopped for a photo opportunity.

Anyway, it was suggested that I backtrack two jumps to a high metal content planet, Blua Eaec IY-H d10-140 1, on which CMDR Braxton Doyle told me there was Vanadium to find. After spending a lot of time roaming around in a crater full of green/grey fog, doing quite a lot of damage to my SRV to the point I had to repair it 4-5 times thanks to either the high gravity or the really bumpy surface, or both, I decided it was time to get out of the crater and try the surface of the planet proper. Having not much better luck on the surface, I cut my losses after quite a while and continued onwards, not before crashing into the planetary ring system on my way out though.

An interesting discovery was that of a brown dwarf with some very impressive rings – it’s definitely trying to be a planet!

I moved onwards to another high-metal content planet, and did find two new elements (zirconium and ruthenium) here, as well as getting enough resources to fill my materials storage. Some iron and some sulfur had to be discarded unfortunately. It’s worth noting that CMDR Braxton Doyle mentioned specifically materials being grouped together – is this not normal?

There’s been a few crazy systems too with huge numbers of planets and subsystems – here’s a few choice ones:

Other assorted pretties:

So I got lazy and tried to combine watching something and playing E:D at the same time. Now, you’d have thought I’d have learnt this by now, but never combine flying a spaceship near stars while distracted.

Distraction this time came at a cost of first flying far too close to a star while fly-by scooping – I must have just grazed the edge of the emergency stop zone.

The second cost of distraction was emergency stopping straight into a brown dwarf.

._.

Anyway, Waypoint 17 reached, Waypoint 18 plotted, mostly because CMDR Braxton Doyle has nearly caught me up…

Today, I started off by going for a wonder in my SRV around a high metal content planet in the system I left off in – Clooku YS-D b43-3. After finding some materials – including the Vanadium I needed for my AFMU – I went back to my ship to continue onwards. This was the highest-gravity world I’ve been on so far, at ~1.3G. Apparently, this makes it easier to flip my SRV onto it’s roof… although I’m fairly sure the really rough terrain does not help.

When I launched my ship, I decided I’d see what materials I now had, and discovered (to my dismay) that I’ve lost five of my sixteen mugs, so I’m down to 11 remaining. Having said this, I noticed yesterday that the jump range on the galaxy map was mysteriously set to 11/16, so this is probably why. One of the components that did malfunction during that 200% overheat incident was the cargo hatch, so I strongly suspect that this is what has caused me to lose some of those mugs.

En-route to Waypoint 15, I discovered a very pretty B-class star, with a really intense blue glow that was just stunning. Even the glow on the console in front of me was impressive as I was passing it.

Look at that glow…

Anyway, I’ve reached Waypoint 15, which (I believe) puts me ahead of CMDR Braxton Doyle, whose waypoints I was following. Thus, this session has mostly been taken up by me trying to figure out how to plot the next waypoint. The rough process I’ve taken is this: Continue reading →

On leaving the planet on which I parked myself, there was a great high-res photo op, of the dark side of a planet against the galactic background. It’s really pretty out here…

There are a lot of really pretty systems out here at the moment, and I’m getting quite distracted by the thoughts of how pretty they are… leading to the inevitable controlled flight into brown dwarf I managed to do. Accidents never seem to end…

I reached Waypoint 13 14 today, didn’t get much past it though, so onwards to Waypoint 15 it is!

Departing from Skaude SA-A b32-5, I set off towards Waypoint 12, Prua Phoe SM-R c6-8.

I noticed pretty quickly that the Skaude sector appears to have a lot of very close binary pairs, quite often M/L class, or M/M class. There was one system I found which turned out to be a M/L/L/L quad-star system, reasonably close together.

After a quick stop admiring a pretty B-class star, I rapidly remembered what an abundance of close binary pairs could mean… as my frame shift drive dropped me out nicely between two stars. It didn’t take me long to realise something was seriously wrong, as my heat gauge rapidly rose over 200%.

That ended up being a pretty major overheating incident, as almost every module (the only exceptions being my PVH and canopy) taking 10% damage (± 2%). As such, my AFMU was left to run for a considerable time before I dared move off from this system, afeard as to what lay in store further on.

As it turns out, I managed to make it to Waypoint 12 successfully and safely from that point, with not too much further damage done.

EDIT: Incremented incident counter due to later-discovered mug loss.

I started off from the mountainous area I left my ship in to discover that another planet in this system was causing a partial eclipse with the nearby star.

Beyond that, and a sudden urge – thankfully suppressed – to go fly around in the arches of stellar matter of a pretty B-class star, not a huge amount happened. This means, once again, I’ve had ZERO incidents. I might go as far as suggesting I’m getting better at flying now :P

I landed on a rather boring ice planet at Waypoint 11.