Space is big. They tell you that in flight school. In fact, it is the first thing they tell you in flight school. What they don't tell you is what that means.

It is big, but on a scale that is almost impossible to comprehend in any meaningful way. We have ships that can cross a solar system in minutes, Interstellar distances in the blink of an eye. And there are a lots of them out there.

But in an infinite volume of space the finite amounts of life are statistically insignificant. The chances of bumping into someone out here by accident, without prearranging a meeting is so infinitesimally small that there if you want company you had better stay at home.

This is what I learned just tooling around in the bubble. Hoping from one station to the next and slapping myself on the back, congratulating myself on how lucky I am to have crossed 10 light years of witch space and a couple of hundred light seconds of interplanetary travel without scratching my paint. Hell, I even let the ship fly itself into port.

Now though I realise how naive I have been. 6000ly out from the bubble and there is nothing. Sure there are astronomical bodies, and I am sure that when I find civilisation again they will end up being lucrative. But beyond that you are alone. If something goes wrong there is no help coming. If you are lucky you might hit a planet and leave a marker for some future explorer to find. If you are unlucky you are just a cloud of atoms dissipating on the solar wind.

I learnt this the hard way, after 70 uneventful jumps I got complacent, I came out of witchspace aiming to refuel on the star and jump 71. Instead a two second lapse of concentration saw me skim too close to the sun and drop out of frame shift.

"Taking heat damage" was my almost instant reward as I quickly turned and throttled up, watching the FSD cool down timer inch it's way down so I could get the hell out of dodge. Temperature climbing, hull strength decreasing and my own panic rising.

I got away. I got away lightly, only 5% damage overall. And in another 30 jumps was a station which I made it to without any further mishap.

But I learnt a lesson. Space is big, and even in the bubble you are on your own. Space will kill you. It only has to get lucky once.

You have to be lucky every time.

Fly safe o7