Commanders,

In the last report from my travels, I had presented you with an impossible star - a cool, red Wolf-Rayet. But there aren't just stars, but also planets that we seemingly cannot understand yet, worlds that couldn't and shouldn't exist as they are.

One such thing that you may come across out there - although they're quite rare - are water worlds with no atmosphere whatsoever.

Just take a look at this eerie world:

Imagine naked water directly meeting the vacuum of space! It shouldn't be, because at zero pressure, the boiling point of water drops so hard that it would start to do just that - boil. And that would happen until the resulting gas would envelop the surface to enact pressure on it, thus raising its boiling point until the liquid would become stable.

It could also happen that the steam would immediately freeze up, and start to cover the ocean below with solid ice, turning that water world into one with a massive subterranean ocean, like with Saturn's moon Enceladus.

So it is still unclear how this can be. Something mixed into the water that affects the evaporation point? I do not know.

Here, have another photograph instead of an explanation, this one comes with rings:

One could also assume that the steam would be blown away by the solar wind and thus won't form an atmosphere, but I don't think that that works here.

Those worlds all seem to follow a similar pattern; They're large, relatively high g, and they're cool on average. Below the typical freezing temperature of water at 1g pressure. The zero pressure could explain why they're all liquid (even at the polar regions and on the dark side), but it cannot explain the absence of a gas layer.

Them being so cool and so high g means, that the solar wind probably won't be powerful enough to blow the water steam away from the world after evaporation. At least that's what I'm guessing.

An absolute mystery indeed!

Commanders,

There have been many discoveries on my first trip that are noteworthy, but the one that moved me the most for a long while, you know, emotionally, and that I still have fond memories of was my discovery of a somewhat hard-to-reach Wolf-Rayet star. Class WC, to be precise. Expect to need FSD injections even if your ship has 50+Ly of jump range...

It's just that the Wolf-Rayet somehow didn't even end up to be the most spectacular thing in that system though.. but you'll see that in a moment.

I exited close to a hot class O star, so far so good. Then I looked to my starboard side to see that there was another class B star pretty close. The Wolf-Rayet I was after was nowhere to be seen, and I couldn't spot it on my scanner, meaning that it might not be around the central class O. So maybe behind the class B?

Alright, so I thought, I'd just hop over to that class B very quickly to check it out.... which is when I noticed that the star seemingly didn't move relatively to my position.. 10c, 20c, 30c, 40c of speed, and finally I could see some motion. "Holy crap, that star is huge!", I thought.

The Wolf-Rayet was indeed revolving around a common barycenter with the class B star. When looking at the photograph below, please keep in mind that that purple Wolf-Rayet star is already 10 times the size of our sun, diameter-wise!

Just imagine how huge that sub-giant star is! And that's at over 4000 lightseconds of distance. More than a billion kiometres away! Wow.

Let's have a look at the purple ball of fire that is the class WC Wolf-Rayet star:

While it is not perfectly clear whether it's true in case of this star, given the presence of such a huge class B right next door could mean, that this Wolf-Rayet has indeed been entirely stripped of its outer layers, feeding the larger sub-giant with its stellar material. In that case, what we're looking at right there is the stellar core. So here we can probably look directly at pure Hydrogen fusion happening right before our eyes! Awesome.

But still, the thing that excited me the most was that huge class B star...

Here are the size/mass specs of the three (The class O wasn't included in the photos):

Class O5 IVa sub-giant: M☉: ≈102.5, R☉: ≈46.6

Class B7 IVa sub-giant: M☉: ≈61.5, R☉: ≈436.5 (huge!)

Class WC0 I Wolf-Rayet: M☉: ≈53.2, R☉: ≈9.4

Almost got a few galactic records here, close misses. ;)

That was one exciting discovery I tell you!

And here's a bonus feature, an anomaly you could say. An impossibly cool, deep purple-red Wolf-Rayet:

This should be an impossible star.. it is still unclear how such a thing could even exist!

Well then, so much for the Wolf-Rayet stars!

Commanders,

There was a time when I was in the galactic centre and thought I just had to see the view from high up, or deep down. Just to see what the galactic disk would look like from there.

In the end I ended up going both places. Turns out hell isn't all too different from heaven after all. ;)

First, I went up!

Here, the first system I had thought to be the highest I could reach had a hot and young class O star at its centre:

Decided to land on a planet in that system to enjoy the view:

Pretty nice indeed! But then I thought I'd push it a little further using a Neutron star to just boost all the way into absolute blackness - literally as you'll see in a moment:

"Literally", because the central "star" of that system was a black hole, at exactly 3001Ly of height from the galactic disk. This would've been suicidal, if the black hole didn't have yet another Neutron star next to it. So it was possible to Neutron-boost back out of this place:

And this was the highest place I managed to reach, what a vieeew! An entire galaxy to your feet!

with that done, I just had to do the same thing on the other side of the galactic core. From top to bottom!

Where I had managed to reach +3001Ly upwards, I fell slightly short at -2938Ly downwards. A star system with one O0 and two B0 stars makes for a lot of light.

Here it is, the bottom of the world, feels as if the sky could fall on your head any time ;)

(Note: This screenshot has been edited in an attempt to mitigate blocky artifacts - it looks kinda borked still, but I wanted to show you nonetheless...)

Roof and bottom, heaven & hell. You could say I've been to both and am still living to tell the tale of it.

But then again, heaven and hell probably take somewhat different forms in this galaxy, so mere distance from the galactic plane probably doesn't qualify, heh? ;)

Commanders,

This was probably the first photograph I took on my exploration trip #1. Still pretty even now, so please lay your maybe-stressed eyes on this sunset for some relaxation:

I just like worlds orbiting their host stars closely, you know, for the views. And this one made for a reasonable high-g training ground along the way at 1.38g.

One has to stay sharp after all, so yep. Landing on higher g worlds every now and then definitely does that for me. And I won't complain if I get a nice vista along with it!

Commanders,

Rings again! I love rings. But let's uplift the topic a little bit by presenting you with yet another slightly more special discovery from my first exploration trip. This should've been roughly 3 months ago I think.. and at the time, it had my jaw drop!

Can you guess what this could be?

Well, it'd probably still let my jaw drop even today, just have a look at how gorgeous this is:

That's a class M red dwarf star right there, and stars most definitely look much better with rings! Well, any stellar or planetary object does, so yeah. ;)

Let's get closer:

Just wonderful, I tell you! Unfortunately, like the ringed Earth-like world I had mentioned earlier, this was the only one I've found so far. I hope I can see more beauties like this one in the future!

Edit: Right, I forgot to tell you the system name! It's [Greae Flyi AA-A h31].

Commanders,

This one will be short; A very recent discovery from the later part of my 1st trip; A named Neutron star that had not been discovered before my visit. That's a detail I found to be somewhat noteworthy. Well, at least for me.

Here you can see it to my port:

Other than HIP 25704 itself, there wasn't much to be seen there, so I hope you like that photograph of the star!

It was a pretty sight!

Commanders,

This is a story that began before my first (and just wrapped up) exploration trip. Or maybe I should say it is the story of my first attempt to explore?

One night, I was travelling in my shield-less and back then entirely un-engineered Diamondback Explorer (I love that ship to no end), just about 20.000Ly away from Sol, travelling through the Sagittarius Carina arm. And then I found a planet of which I thought it was pretty and colorful, so I wanted to land on it.

Well, let me cut this story short... At the helm of my unshielded vessel I was drinking beer, boosting downwards to the surface in a pretty laissez faire fashion... It was only after the second-to-last boost that I noticed it. The fact that I was dropping like a stone! I had made a stupid mistake out of pure ignorance, having had zero experience with higher g worlds...

Despite my level of intoxication I was still able to make the right choice; Nose up and boost! And as I heard that reassuring roar of my booster rockets coming to life... it was over, in that very same second. I had been to late.

Reawaking in my escape pod had me in a daze of shock and disbelief. My entire body would just go numb.

After seconds, maybe even minutes of just sitting there in disbelief, I simple had to accept in inevitable.

After I got back to the bubble, I would just wander the stations and streets for a few days, as my motivation simply didn't rise much at all. I felt wrong here. I always had that strange feeling when sitting in the midst of civilization.

I didn't belong here.

And that's when it hit me. I had to go back! I had to go to that very planet again, and conquer it properly by landing on it.

But before, I simply needed something even more significant to overcome all of this... A baptism of fire!

I looked at the stellar catalogues of Universal Cartographics, and there it was. My choice. At 98M⊕ and 9.77g on the surface this was one of the most challenging worlds to land on, and reasonably close to the civilized bubble, just 1400Ly away. This is where I would start! HD148937 3!

Of course, a Commander I know would jokingly say to me that I would've learned to equip shields on my ship after all of this. Right?

Heh...

Hell'd rather freeze over!

All I did upgrade was my frameshift drive, so I could get there faster, already feeling the hunger for the g's!

"And there it was, in all its glory" is what I should be saying now, but... While I'd love to show you how I landed on a certain 9.77g world, I didn't take any photos of it. Idiotic. :( Instead, as a replacement, let me show you a much farther-away 10.66g one instead, which I had conquered later in the game:

Let's get closer!

And real close!

Well, there is at least one funny anecdote about that 10.66g world that truly sets it apart from the other high-g planets I've visited so far. When just 200 or 300 metres over its surface, I noticed that my lateral thrusters had suffered from some drift. The control ministick was seemingly not perfectly centered, so my ship didn't hold still.

Now I had to make a decision... blast off again, fix it, and then re-attempt landing? After all, accidentally igniting my downwards vertical thrusters (on the same ministick!) would mean certain death, as my vessel would drop for more than a kilometre, should that happen.

Ultimately, I decided to do it on the spot (with over a billion worth of exploration data on board at that time).

I don't think I've ever touched anything (or anyone) as softly and with as much care as I did that ministick... ;) And it worked. No vertical thruster ignition, and the lateral ones would just hold still...

That resulted in an awesome feeling after finally having put my heavy arse to the floor:

"Shieldless and flawless" should become my planetary landing motto after this!

Needless to say, I had my meeting with a certain 1.53g (heh.. how unintimidating it now seemed) world that I had dubbed "Azar's Ender" as well. With success this time around:

This time everything went smooth, almost boringly so:

And that, Commanders, is how I came to be enamoured with high g worlds.

Ah, that reminds me, recently a Commander going by the name "HassleTheHoff" (heh ;)) landed on a new record holder with 11.01g, [Kyloall CL-Y g1518 d 1].

Guess I won't be running out of challenges too soon! :)

Edit: Aaaah! I found a photo of that 9.77g world in my archives after all...

Oh well, here it is:

Commanders,

Here is another much-belated report from my first exploration trip. The topic: Black holes - Sinister beauties! Most parts shown here are from my early travels up to the end of the first third, I believe.

Of course there will be a time in any explorer's travels where ones becomes fascinated with them, as happened to me as well.

Here would be one with clearly defined gravitational lensing, a smaller one with just 2-3 M☉ if I remember correctly:

I remember it quite clearly, that feeling of fear when coming close. As if some primordial sense or instinct in the back of my head had started screaming something along the lines of "This isn't natural! Don't get closer! Run!!" or something.

The closer I got to any of them, the more my hair would start to stand up with that eerie feeling and sense of danger all over me.

Here, have another one, sitting inside of a supernova remnant nebula, of which I also made a photograph:

This time I got cocky... I don't know what it was that got into me, but I carefully entered the black hole's exclusion zone, dropping out of frameshift space just outside of it, using thrusters for the rest of the way. Despite the mass of the anomaly at I think it was around 4M☉, the zone was really small and easily traversable. By using conventional thrusters I got as close as just over 40km from it:

Let me just say... that didn't feel very safe. At 40km I simply had to stop as the heat from the gas around the object had become too high for my ship to handle. Just imagine the closeness - and that one had over 4M☉ of mass!

And to round this up, here comes our supermassive one, Sagittarius A*:

Where I could get as close as 40km to a regular black hole, the closest I managed to get to SagA* was 40Ls - about 12 million kilometres! Here, heat's keeping you at bay just as much as with the smaller one before.

Another shot:

And yes, it's warping space pretty badly, you'll even get double-vision:

Commanders,

This first log entry of mine comes belated by several months, as most will as I describe the happenings on my first exloration trip, which ended up being a galactic circumnavigation. Well, almost, I kinda skipped a quarter of the galaxy in favor of visiting Sagittarius A* and Colonia.

Mind you, my reports will not come in any chronological order until I've caught up with what I'm currently doing.

But now, about that Earth-like world with rings... let me just say, it came as a complete surprise as I had entered the system [Hypoae Scrua EH-M d7-2661], having started to cautiously use Neutron boosts here and there, just briefly before finding that system. It was in the galactic centre, so about at 40% of my exploration trip.

Seeing that the system had only one world, I thought "let's just wrap this up real quick" when activating the full spectrum system scanner. Moments after that I started to become really nervous though, as the single spectral line looked really conspicuous in all the wrong part of the spectrum for a neutron star system.

And there it still was... a sole Earth-like world, all alone in its system!

And it was ringed!!

Of course I had to get closer:

And two divings into the rings, because I couldn't just not do that:

And even today, many months and many discovered Earth-likes later, this is the only ringed Earth-like I ever managed to find. And what a coincidence for it to be in a Neutron star system as its only satellite.

Most certainly one to remember!