Flieger, grüß' mir die Sonne, grüß' mir die Sterne und grüß' mir den Mond. Dein Leben, das ist ein Schweben, durch die Ferne, die keiner bewohnt! - Hans Albers, F.P.1 antwortet nicht (Adaptation in the 80s: Extrabreit)

Thursday 5 March 2015

Having climbed the stair of stars

This thread has another report of a longer exploration and some hints where valuable systems are.

From another thread I take it that HIP 63835 is a black hole, so I can finally look up one and see how it is supposed to look in the galaxy map. Ok, an appearance of a kind of blueish giant star, good to know.

This game session goes slow and serene, while I spend my time also chatting, reading, watching some videos. I do some long jumps through a bundle of red stars with only ice planets around (I can tell from the way they look in the system map), until I find a cluster of stars with some more interesting planets about. No earth likes, though, but I scan everything down anyways, since they are still undiscovered. Now and then, I spot another water world, sometimes also a metal rich world with an atmosphere which can be terraformed.

At one point, I enter a system which has a brown dwarf as the last "planet" of the system; it has a ring which does not identify by a surface scan, so I get close to see whether it is ephemeral.
 

It is not, and my ship computer initiates an emergency drop, which costs me 1% of my hull structure. However, the scenery my ship falls into is simply gorgeous. The twilight purple shine intermingles with that immense a vast dusty asteroid belt, which probably should be more kind of a protoplanetary disk, and the light of the milky way permeates this gloom with a golden shine. It sure looks like something proto...

I now really regret that the external camera is not ready before next week. Of course I could fly in the separate beta 1.2 client, but then my exploration would not count on my character name, which is part of "the game" for me. Nono, I am now "at home" in this game, no more beta for me! But this scenery, this was really worth coming here, best moment for this game session!



There are other sights which capture me, and so it goes on and on. This session will consist more of pictures than text, I suspect.

All the while, I was headed again upwards, but now I have landed in another dead end; the next star up there is 40 ly out. There might be other routes, though. I am 1,114 ly away from Yakabugai, the system I had spent most of my time in civilised space, and I have climbed my own stair of stars up to this point. I think I am content about this spontaneous venture. Now, what to do next?

I understand now that travelling to the farthest outer shores require the longest range jump drive I can get. I should rather use my Cobra for a shorter range trip and do some sightseeing. For example, the Horse Head Nebula (about 1400 ly from my current position). A bit farther away still is the Soul Nebula and right next to it the Heart Nebula; about 8,000 ly from here. Whew... I still do not get how big all of this here is.

I spend a very long time just floating through the galaxy map, trying to get a better read on its data and a sence of location. At some point, zooming backwards from Barnard´s Loop, I spot a system with two black holes in it; HIP 11792. A system on the path over there, HD 16440, has a strange denomination called "AEBE5 VI". I think it is a worthy venture to travel the 1,775 ly over there. I probably arrive in time for the new patch next week, to have an external camera for some awesome screenshots.



I get a bit despaired for a moment when I cannot find again my target system; the galaxy map shows different stars, even though I type the same name each time. So I better note down also a neighbouring system, just in case; Wredguia AE-T C3-2. Now the difficult taks is to plot a good course, since the pathfinder resets everytime when I start a surface scan. Very, very annoying. I choose Wredguia KG-O D6-17 as a 978 ly away half-way nav point and start ploughing my way through the stars. This might take a while.

As I plot the course and follow it back to my current location, another star system with a black hole comes into view, HIP 46659! How convenient, so I do not need to travel that far, after all! The first jumps I have to backtrack through my already explored systems, how annoying. Climbing down the stairs of stars. Time for a new soundtrack, Divine Divinity, very well suited for exploring. It was a fantastically moody game in that regards.



So time passes again, I have my course and heading, and if all goes well, those systems on my way are going to be bearing my name as the first discoverer. Logging out.

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