Perfil de Halpy > Diario

Perfil
Nombre de Comandante:
Nave actual:
HEART OF GOLD [MGE-07]
(Dolphin)
 
Miembro desde:
15/4/2019
 
Distancias subidas:
21
 
Sistemas visitados:
13.459
Descubrimiento(s) de sistemas:
4.757
 
Saldo:
1.000.013.353 Cr
Void Troubles

Having flown out to support part of the initiative with the Independent Explorers Association as a member of the organizing staff of the At the Eldritch Gate expedition, I found myself well out of range to send in logbook updates. After the successful rediscovery of the missing glowing green gas giant, and the subsequent celebration in Galnet wherein one of our staff was mentioned having reported the story of Cmdr Oranges discovery to Galnet News, I found myself at a crossroads.

I could either take Puzzles Bar & Grill down into The Bubble or up to Colonia. Colonia was actually quite a bit closer so the crew of the carrier and I opted for that route. We plotted into the main thoroughfare of the new Colonia Bridge, stopping to get some fuel, and arrived in Colonia proper a few days later. From there I went out on various missions for the locals before getting a hail from one of our IEA scouts that we should catch a ride into The Void and check out all the lifeforms out that way.

Never one to back down from adventure I got back to Puzzles and sorted out the Anaconda for long range exploration. A few days later Sense Amid Madness pulled into port in Magellan and we were able to hop aboard during their bunkering operations. I did get to see some interesting sights along the way and found some new plant life I hadn't yet seen in this galaxy, however disaster struck yet again, as it always seems to do.

My wingman, Cmdr Fluffy, had a few too many in the bar one night and fell into one of the escape pods in the main hallway. This left him with a severe hangover when he arrived back in Colonia and a hilarious argument with Jaques Station's Inter Astra staff. They refused to sell him a new ship so he could continue flying because the Anaconda he had left here on Sense Amid Madness still had cargo in the racks, two whole unprogrammed limpets. They also refused to let him have access to one of his own ships they had stored so he could have the limpets shipped to him for destruction and we were unable to contact the crew aboard the SAM in the cargo depot to simply remove the cargo from the ship itself.

This of course made me laugh a little bit because of how insane the bureaucracy of the whole situation was. Like all commanders I've always found it strange how we can't just leave cargo in our ships when they are stored and command another ship, but the dock masters are always perfectly fine with me leaving nearly 800 tonnes of highly radioactive tritium in my ship in their docks for months on end while I'm off exploring aboard another commanders ship as a member of the crew.

We're currently working on finding a way to bypass this ridiculous customs issue so we can get Fluffy back into a ship and get him back on track. Life sure is funny sometimes with how policy and procedure can overrule logic and reason.

The Bar Shall Open

The interior decorations of The Limpet are finally complete. Took us a while to get it all sorted out, but the crew worked on it. We still have some minor issues we need sorting out, like whoever bolted these chairs to the floor just below the command deck needs to have their head checked because some of them got melted into the wall thanks to the heat from that last star we were around during the install. That said, we're excited to see that we have three new bulkheads we can occupy with some services.

We're in negotiations with Pioneer Supplies to reduce their requested operating cost though. They are wanting five million credits per week to be allowed to operate a store on our carrier and that is a bit steep compared to all the other services. We have secured a contract with Vista Genomics and with several liquor distributors so we will be hiring crew to man both a bar and the Vista Genomics counters once we return to civilization. Looking forward to it as we've been wandering into the bar area during construction for several weeks now and it looks promising as a great place for the crew to blow off some steam.

Our expected arrival to an administration system to hire crew is sometime around the 21st of March 3308. We're currently slowly rolling our way towards WP21 of our Magellan Experience route, but the last three waypoints are all quite close to one another and are more for folks who have never experienced the area to get a look at some of the older views of the route to Colonia and Sagittarius A* that we had to fly before we had all these connection highways, megaships, and stations along the way making the trek what it is today.

Looking forward to having the new crew members onboard this weekend! See you in the bar of The Limpet on or after the 21st of March 3308!

Magellan's Return

It's been a little while since our last log. I believe our last notation was during our hunt for a refueling operation location before we made it to Magellan's Star. That is long in the rear view now. We made it up to Magellan's and we're well on our way home. We've made a galactic arm void crossing as well as met up with another refueling point. It's been an eventful few weeks.

Our current status is managing the lead carrier. We've increased the time available to our expedition, however The Limpet, which has been renamed about halfway through the journey because we got bored with the old name and the registration authority is way too easy to convince to let us change names without a new inspection, pulled in alongside a couple of other carriers at our 18th waypoint at the Three Worlds Nebula. This is one that I visited during the Apollo 15 anniversary expedition, but I thought it was cool enough that it needed to be featured to more commanders. Despite not actually needing it for the official capacity of the trip, we took on another 4,000 tonnes of tritium to increase our buffer storage bringing us to around 2.7 times the total needed fuel to finish the trip.

Currently we're about halfway between Waypoint 19 and Waypoint 20. We're headed for the Jewel Box Sector, specifically the Cluster, and we'll be stopping around one of the largest known stars in the Galaxy at HIP 62918. I do believe there is at least one other star that is larger, but I'm reasonably certain this one is still top 5. What I found interesting about it last time I was out this way and was unable to actually swing over and visit were the reports of commanders saying it was so large you could fuel scoop it from insane distances. Looking forward to scouting ahead of the carrier to get there first and finding us a parking spot near to the first planet rather than the star itself. Should arrive in approximately two hours. We'll be getting the final safety checks done and then plotting the course here momentarily.

The Hunt for Fuel

It's been a well known fact that we'll need to refuel all of these fleet carriers along The Magellan Experience at some point along the route. Some of the folks have been feeding the carriers a bit as they go along which is nice. Of course, per my last log, we're already stocked up with about a 900 tonne buffer to finish our route, but we'll likely need to take on some fuel for a larger buffer to allow for safe completion of the route. Worst case, we can always carry some fuel to bail out the other carriers since at least one of them is carrying unnecessary gear limiting their fuel capacity.

That's where today's mission comes along. We've arrived alongside The Extended Warranty at waypoint 10 of the mission and we've begun searching for Tritium hotspots. Along the way we bounced around to a bunch of different nearby systems within approximately 200 LY. We've picked up a little over ten hotspots in that range which should work out well for us. The nearest few are within 31 LY of our current position, but one of the nicest spots is a little over 100 LY away. Either one would be ideal given we can pop the carrier over to them easily without much cost for fuel and it will allow our routing to be within tolerance on our way outbound to WP11.

The bonus being that along the search I also picked up a lot of new undiscovered systems with a myriad of interesting terraformable worlds, water worlds, ammonia worlds, and interesting gas giants. There was a decent commision payout from Universal Cartographics even with the 12.5% cut they take for the data transmission for being the carrier owner. Now we're down in the engineering bay getting the Python prepped for mining and making sure everything is ready to go. We might do some speculative mining tomorrow before our big event this weekend with the rest of the expedition crew. The Lockheart should arrive here sometime in the next few days as well so it might be useful to be able to direct them to the most effective hotspot rather than having them need to jump into WP10 then away only a few LY.

Christmas in the Black: A Magellan Experience Story

It has been an interesting couple of weeks. I have mostly been hanging out with the crew of my fleet carrier, The Revenge, and getting this interior sorted out so we can start letting other commanders in out of their docking bays. We made it to Way Point 8 of our expedition on The Magellan Experience.

We pulled alongside the DSSA Nereus' Deep a few hours ago and discovered they had a small stockpile of tritium for sale. I went ahead and took Snoopy over and bought out the market to top off the storage locker for our continued journey. Between that, and what is in the fuel tank currently, we have enough fuel onboard to continue our designated route and make it the rest of the way around the loop now. That is crazy!

We still have a mining adventure planned further ahead down the road, but it is looking like anything the commanders bring onboard for us will be nothing more than a buffer. That will be nice. I do believe one of our storage T9s still has around 756 tonnes of Tritium onboard as well. I will have to confer with the commander when I see him again. Last I saw he was back in the bar getting the refrigeration working and making sure the ice would not melt. The irony is not lost on me that in the cold vacuum of space we must worry about our ice melting, but that is just one of those oddities. I suppose it is a good thing we have life support and HVAC though, otherwise the fish tank would freeze over, and our stores of fresh fish would go to waste.

We will be having a small personal celebration for Christmas this year onboard The Revenge and then heading onwards to our next way point. I think if time allows, I may jump into one of the ships and do a bit of manual exploring out ahead of the route for a few days and catch the carrier up when it comes up behind me again like I did when we first set off. Though for now, we will remain here on station alongside Nereus' Deep and enjoy the holiday. We may have folks swinging back up this way from the Christmas event that was held a few hundred light years to our Southeast with some of the commanders from the expedition.

The Magellan Experience

We at The Independent Explorers Association have been working for several months now on getting this trip up and running. We're actually finally underway and have a group of around 180 pilots flying with us and that's pretty exciting. I did final preparations on Halpy's Revenge on the 28th of November and set off a couple days later out of Beta Sculptoris heading for Hell Port. I've had a few of our commanders who are out exploring stop by and say hi as well which was nice.

Once I reached Hell Port I topped off the fuel tanks and boarded my own Mamba explorer that I talked about a few logbook entries ago. I initially set out to just go check out the station at Thor's Helmet Sector to see if our work out there was still in place, which it was, but then I decided to simply take that ship with me on my journey instead of swapping to something with more range. It really is a nice smooth cruising ship even if it wasn't meant to be out here doing this.

I remotely operated the carrier as I flew along to Faust 1521 and had it leave Hell Port and make its way to our third waypoint, flying by me in the night as it went, and came to stop around the A Star of Gludgoo XU-G d10-14. I then made my way to it after visiting the historic nebula found by Mr. Herschell and sold off around 26 million credits worth of exploration data. I know I took a hit selling it remotely via the carrier, but money isn't that important these days. It also appeared that some intrepid miner fulfilled my request to top off the fuel storage as well as I wound up with a couple hundred more tonnes in the storage tank and a few million credits were dispersed by the market team.

I stayed the night with the carrier and did some maintenance and engineering on some of my fleet while I was in the docking hangars. I think for this next leg I'm going to take the Dolphin out for a spin. It has all the toys I could really want on it and can repair itself as it goes along so I think that will be a nice boat to work with for the next ~10,000 LY or so. I'll dispatch the carrier behind me remotely and have it fly up to the Skull and Crossbones Nebula to meet me when I get there.

It is pretty awesome flying along and seeing all these commanders names on the stars as I fly through and knowing that our mission to map this relatively unmapped region of space is going well. By the time we reach the tip of the Perseus Arm at Magellan's Star and The Brink I think we'll have made a pretty sizeable dent in the known POIs, routes, and Tritium Hot Spots out this way and that's what it's all about. Doing our part to help future explorers while also getting to see the beauty of the galaxy.

If you are reading this and want to come along, it's not too late, we only departed November 28th 3307 and we plan to be out and about until March 7th of 3308. Catch some neutrons and catch us up sometime. If you feel like taking a break Halpy's Revenge, The Extended Warranty, and the SWS//Lockheart are out here floating around the fleet as mobile stations and they will be relatively nearby if you want to stop and take a break for a bit to ride with us. Feel free to patch into our comms channels as well at: https://discord.gg/vmKJ73M7Qj

Fresh Bread

After a relatively uneventful week moving cargo from my fleet carrier to a nearby space station I've managed to make quite a bit of cash to use to pay to refuel the carrier. It was quite an interesting experience getting to move so much cargo that myself and three other friends could easily cash in on a gross income of 1.3 billion credits. It wasn't overly complicated really, most of the work was relatively relaxing and involved passively checking in the with the dock master from time to time to see if they needed more of our goods. After 2.5 days of doing this I managed to amass twenty high paying contracts and then we simply filled them all and walked away a lot richer.

I suppose it makes sense though. These folks needed these commodities so we brought them in, but now I need Tritium and I'm going to do the same thing by parking near Johnson Orbital and simply buying the fuel at a rate higher than the station is selling it for.

As it is now, I've got the carrier parked about 14 megameters outside of Johnson Orbital paying around 65,000 cr/tonne for the fuel. I may haul some of it over myself to alleviate some of the costs, but hopefully some enterprising commander comes along and makes a small profit off it while I am napping.

Fleet Movement

After a long time of waiting and not moving on the purchase of a fleet carrier I finally got pressured into it. Brewer Corporation dropped the price by 30% which was a deal I couldn't pass up. Fully custom outfitted I was able to get everything for under the original asking price of 5 billion so I had to take it.

After picking it up I've been working on filling it with fuel. I've had all of my ships brought over, but I still need to move over all of my stored modules and that can wait for now. I would prefer to move the carrier closer to our old home before moving all of those objects to save some cash on the journey.

For now, despite having nearly 8 billion left over between my pockets and the carrier, I have been baking bread to get a bit more money. We'll be heading out on an expedition soon so it'll be useful to have to buy extra fuel once we get underway as this journey is going to require a mid flight refuel.

That said, having a carrier should be useful for the future. Having all of the ships in one place will be useful for longer term exploration journeys. It is a shame they take a 12.5% cut out of my personal discoveries for the long range communication antenna use, but it is nice that we can sell data out in the black now. Hopefully we don't run into banking errors again like we've seen in the past. There have been known concerns in the past with Universal Cartographics forgetting to give half of the 25% fee for the long range antenna to the carrier owner.

Hopefully by the next time I have time to sit down and log some information I'll be underway on the expedition. At the very least, I should be staged for the flight by the end of November.

The Land Down Under

It was a mad dash to be honest. Getting home from Apollo only to turn around and rush out to meet up with Rook Platoon. It was an interesting journey though. Going out that far south and seeing some of the strange things that are in space that no one else really ever sees. Getting to set foot on a planet so far below the galactic plane that nebula appear to be floating free from the light of the arms and the backdrop is just pure black. You can't really beat the view.

I did take a journey out to visit The Zurara while I was out that way as well. It was something I know a lot of other folks have visited. I've been to several other Project Dynasty sites, but hearing those logs first hand while seeing the ship itself was something else. I know that folks have likely uncovered all we ever will about those places, but they still make you think. It's certainly something.

I road back into The Bubble aboard The Extended Warranty and got over to Jameson to get some food and get the ships refit off that carrier. From there I decided to fly out to visit the Marlinists who are having issues with the NMLA still. Seems not many people are coming to their aid in their civil war. I enlisted for a bit and flew down to the surface with the troops to take control of a few different installations during a few skirmishes.

I didn't see too many independent pilots fighting in the skies above us working to stop the NMLA. Of those that are participating, we are seeing a vast majority fighting against the NMLA which is at least a good start. It's a pretty typical amount of people to assist in a non-fed/imp war though. These don't tend to attract too many people. I know some other independent pilots who are newer to the galaxy seem to have opinions that they state as fact that it's "so few relative to goals of the past" but in reality this is par for the course. It also doesn't help that independent galactic news reporters are claiming that this war is going to draw to a stalemate when the NMLA are so far behind. We'll likely easily break past the victory point within the next 24 hours. If the push really needs to be made for the final effort I may get up in the air and start assisting the folks in the orbital skirmishes. They tend to need far more help than the the foot soldiers. I suppose it is a lot easier to kill a man on the ground than it is to destroy his vessel in the sky. Ships do tend to have a lot more armor.

Apollo Complete

Well I made it back to the bubble the other day. I flew out ahead of the anniversary fleet for the Apollo 15 mission since I had to get some ship maintenance done that was going to take a week and I didn't want to get left behind out in the black.

All along the route for the second week onward of Apollo I was also working to coordinate another trip that left to go south to the ferris wheel. I'll be headed out that way once my maintenance period is over. I got one of my Anacondas being stripped down as far as I can get it without it stranding me in the deep black. It is just shy of 80 LYs per jump in its current configuration. That should do the trick to get me out to the fleet carrier in the lead so I can get Apex to bring me a few other ships that are more reasonable for that sort of survey. I would take the Phantom, but after such a long trip out in the black running up and down on atmospheric worlds it needs a few technicians to look it over. The COVAS was having some issues on glide in on planets being unable to arrest the speed once it returned control of the thruster to me that I need to have looked at. I think there might have been a bug in the software for the advanced planetary landing suite. I'm sure it'll get worked out in the time I'm away.

While I was down in the bar I heard that some folks were getting news of some new data that there were new planet surfaces to find. That should be an interesting thing to look into when I get back out there. Apparently no one else has found that Scriveners dredger either. I wonder how long I can keep that one a secret before someone else locates it. Though I think most people are distracted by the Alexandria and Salvation at the moment. Sounds like all the super powers are grinding their three brain cells together to get a report on what finally happened to that megaship and suspect it was this Salvation fella. I won't believe them, but it will make them feel special to say it was him so they don't have to do any hard work. Maybe they should focus on finding Theta Seven or something else that's actually important. The Federation is bleeding systems like crazy to all these people leaving them as well thanks to their mismanagement of... well everything.

It seems every time I come back into the bubble it seems to be on fire and burning it self to the ground. Oh well. That's why the independent pilots don't have to listen to the laws or the rulings of any of the super powers. All of that stuff is beneath us and they are definitely far less wealthy than the vast majority of the independent pilots. It must suck to live down a gravity well.