Off we go again! Working on plugging away at the Apollo XV Anniversary expedition route. So far we've seen some interesting places. The starting system was T Tauri which was a great sight to see again. As I was flying past the bubble on my way out to the next waypoint I picked up some radio chatter about the Marlinists up to some shenanigans again.

I'll be surprised if those guys don't put out an initiative for the pilots of the galaxy to support one or the other of their candidates. Sounds like they are pushing for a seat at the Galactic Superpower table and have two candidates in contention. I'm sure later today when I get the latest Galnet News sent to my COVAS I'll hear that we need to "support some guy" because "reason" and he'll give us "random reward" and it'll be a head to head race to see who can convince us to support them. I always find it weird how the independent pilots get so much sway in those matters but none of us ever actually live within the areas that we are impacting. If we don't like the leadership in one star system or station we can all literally just leave and go anywhere else we want. Why are we given such power to choose?

Seems like the independent pilots should be polling the citizens to decide which side of random faction conflicts to support. Though I suppose at the end of the day we really just have to research and judge based off what we know and hear about to decide what we want to do. Just some random musings while I explore the black on my way outbound. I've been finding a lot of new life on planets to keep me busy, but I'm sure the news cycle will be interesting when I get back to the flight deck later today. I believe I heard a rumor that the bugs or perhaps some terrorists attacked a station as well. I'll have to have Leo flag that story to alert me when a follow up comes along. May turn out that I'll be flying back in later this week to grab the Wakeful and help evacuate again.

There is something amusing about defending the right of a colony to declare independence from their previous overlords while using the weapons of war provided by that overlord. I guess it never really changes though, does it? You oppress a people for long enough and they will take their tools and push back.

The most recent news article regarding multiple factions and systems declaring that they are seceding from the Federation comes at an interesting point in time. As the Federation is born from the remnants of what was once the United States it is oddly fitting that they are now celebrating their independence from an oppressive overlord while also trying to oppress another colony in far flung system.

As a believer in the rights of the people I have taken my federal corvette to the system to blockade the illegal actions of the Federation and defend the recently separated systems. I have flown alongside some interesting folks and even had to shoot down fellow corvette commanders who are attempting to steamroll the rights of what were so recently their fellow citizens. I suppose history really does continue to repeat itself over and over. Here we are over a thousand years past when the origin of the Federation was fighting this same fight for themselves and yet they have not learned. They are making the same mistake that they complained about back then.

All the same, shoot for the FSD and disable the power plant. If they refuse to surrender at that point leave them on the float. If they continue to act aggressively, overload their powerplant. Hopefully, those who survive by running away tell their friends that perhaps fighting for the Federation during this illegal war effort is the wrong thing to do. King George should have learned that lesson over a thousand years ago and he did not. Perhaps Zachary Hudson will figure it out before it is too late now that we can communicate across interstellar distances in an instant.

Shortly after getting off a shift at the loading docks, hey a guy needs some extra credits sometimes, I got word from some AX pilots that a Sanchez class mega ship was under attack in Maia from some Thargoids. There were already quite the number of AX pilots amassed to assist in the defense, but I loaded up the Rocinante - though we call her Cupid now since she's mostly been used for shooting Thargoid Hearts - and ran out to meet the crew. There were a total of 8 or 9 of us at peak working to defend the ship from several waves of Thargoids ranging from scouts through to Medusa class interceptors, often more than one interceptor at a time.

It was an interesting thing to take part in. While normally there is a lot to deal with while taking down one of the more challenging interceptors, having the absolute sheer volume of firepower available to use was really doing the trick. We even found out that you can in fact do enough damage to a Cyclops to cause it to reveal one of its four hearts simply by circling it while targeting it with multiple beam lasers. At one point we had three of us with a combination of six total beam lasers of varying size on target simply doing our best to hold it in place while maintaining our ships heat below a 20% margin to prevent it seeing us while the other group worked on the other interceptor when we noticed it accidently revealed its heart. What a wild surprise! We've always thought human weapons were too weak, but it turns out that while they are really weak compared to AX or Guardian tier weapons they can technically work.

This did bring up the question of how those super powerful lasers on stations seem to fail to stop the interceptors attack runs when they are being hit. Perhaps they just get overwhelmed with too many interceptors at a time. Scouts don't stand a chance against a station unless of course they overwhelm the auto targeting and make the lasers switch targets too fast and use a regenerator to help them stay alive. I'd wager one or two good direct hits from one of those though and a scout is popped.

Either way, it was an eventful day and we were able to successfully keep the goids at bay once again. I'm sure they'll be back, but I'm sure there will also be constant wings of AX pilots flying around there keeping it relatively safe. It didn't hurt that the pilots federation paid us very well for our efforts despite it being done in a massive collection of two wings of commanders. We each made off with at least 100 million credits depending on when we began the engagement and which targets we participated in. I believe I made around 120 million personally as I was late to the fight. On top of that we learned some interesting new science about how to fight Thargoids. I doubt it will be useful outside of wing fights, and it likely won't scale up to match the Basilisk, Medusa, or Hydra variants, but it is something to keep in mind if you are in a wing of combat vessels and you find yourself caught by a Cyclops. You do have a chance to actually take it out if you can't escape it.

Back to the Waffle Bar and onward to Sol though. I hear we got some terrorists using Thargoid based weapons on stations out there and there are people to be rescued. Never ending work in the bubble it seems. I might need to take a vacation out to a distant world soon and relax in the peacefulness of the Deep Black. Soon.

So, these big wigs in the governments around the galaxy underfunded Aegis and then got upset when they couldn't be mobilized for a Thargoid attack? I mean that must have been a shocker for such genius folks at the top of the food chain. Not like Aegis ever did much other than take the credit from independent pilots pushing the 'goids back to where they came from and rescuing the people left abandoned by their local factions.

Well they are of course upset with the "high quality" foods we dropped off before their summit and now begging for more food to be brought in and of course there are pirates trying to pirate the system. All the news is about how the heads of state are just bickering and not accomplishing anything about how to deal with the Thargoid threat. So, I and a few likeminded independent pilots thought we might do the sensible thing, and go be proactive about it. We fitted up some ships with guardian tech broker equipment and went out to the front lines of the Thargoid v Human war and went bug squishing.

We flew out to the Pleiades sector and stopped off at the Operation Ida Waffle Bar for a bit to get everyone grouped up, fueled up on waffles, and ready to go and then we launched out of the mail slot and got to work. At first, we were split into two groups of two commanders and my wing took on a Cyclops variant and managed to bring it down with relative ease. There were some kinks to work out in our tactics, but we did well. From there the other wing contacted us and said they had cornered a Medusa and wanted to know if we wanted to come help out.

While myself and my wing mate were less experienced, we jumped at the opportunity and we joined up in a wing of four and managed to bring the beast down. After that we were feeling pretty good about our success as a group and were going to head in when someone spotted it. A threat level 9 was coming into the system. Well we can't have that, now can we? We repaired and rearmed our vessels and tracked the signal source down and found a wing of scouts which we engaged. We took down two of them and as we were working the other two a Hydra warped in near us.

One of the veterans took over managing the Hydra while the rest of us mopped up the scouts and dealt with the massive swarm of Thargons it had launched. Once we had that down we all converged and let loose with a massive volley of gauss cannon fire. As we worked through the hearts the combat was taking its toll on myself and my wing mate as we were less experienced so we were popping out and back in to get our ships patched up, but luckily we managed to always have three of us on the Thargoid at any given time and slowly worked through all of the hearts.

It was a triumphant moment when I saw that last bit of health drain off the 'goid on my ships scanners and the subsequent cry and burst of caustic gases from the beast was let loose. I always feel a bit bad about them crying when they die, but they do attack our people. It's entirely plausible that we are the "bad guys" here, but for now, given what we know, we have to defend our claims in the galaxy and if the elected and appointed officials are just going to bicker at each other rather than do something about it, then we will be here to do the work that needs doing.

I was talking with some buddies of mine in the racing leagues about what it was like to go exploring out into the deep black and they thought the idea was a bit crazy. They said they could never imagine seeing themselves out that far into space with no one around to save them if something went wrong. They kept going on and on about how their Mamba would never really be a viable exploration vessel anyway so I challenged them that I could make a viable exploration build out of one and if I could, that they would owe me 1,000,000 credits.

Obviously to us that is money you wouldn't even bother stopping to pick up if you dropped it so they agreed. I procured a fresh Mamba and after going over it with a few engineering buddies of mine we managed to crank it out to being able to push over 42 LY per jump with a maximum range of around 117 LY before needing to fill up. Well simply building the ship wasn't really proof of concept enough though was it? So I set off for HR 6164, the time tested exploration target for anyone who wants to do a shake down run of a new vessel. It's staged close enough to Hillary Depot that it's not that big of a deal if you wind up having issues and it even has a neutron star in the system to use for tests as well as a pair of black holes to test the heat capabilities of the vessel. Well after sending the photo of the ship proudly sitting on the surface at The View to my racing league buddy and stopping off at the Tourist Destination near the black hole and neutrons I got an idea.

I had heard of a tale, however unlikely that a commander had been hyperdicted in a nearby region of space, but it wasn't by Thargoids. I did some digging into the old commander forums and found several variations on the story which meant it likely wasn't true, but in my navigational computer I had apparently marked a specific star system in the past where this supposedly happened. As the story goes, the commander was hyperdicted, though they had never been pulled out by a Thargoid before so I'm not sure how they were aware of the similarity other than from stories, and when they fell out of space and their ship was shut down they didn't see or hear a Thargoid. They were instead met by a group of white orbs and then suddenly they could fly again.

That seemed rather farfetched to be sure, but I set off for that system anyway as it was nearby and it would allow me to mark it off my navigational bookmarks if there was nothing to it. As I got into the system there wasn't anything of note to really care about. I thought that perhaps I should plot away from the system and see if there was something to the story as you jumped away and that's when I saw it. White orbs.

I don't think the commander who told the original story truly understood what he was looking at though. What I believe I'm seeing isn't alien in nature at all, but rather a nearby supercluster of very bright stars. They appear to be within 20 LY by normal star standards, but to be fair, they are absurdly bright so they very well could be hundreds of lightyears away. I've begun plotting around and flying towards them. So far I'm a little over 150 LY closer to The Bubble and I can still see the distinct pattern of what I suspect now to be a tight cluster of class O or B stars.

I'm not sure what to think of the original commanders story, but I haven't yet removed the marker from my navigational logs. What's curious is there is no nebulae anywhere between me and where the stars appear to be. After manually plotting around until the marker on my HUD seemed to align with what I was seeing out of the flight deck windows I suspect I'm on track. I may have even managed to plot one of the stars specifically, but I'm continuing towards them as long as I can. They are getting brighter as I go and I'm genuinely curious as to why so many bright stars clustered together in this region with no nearby major sources of gas or matter. Most other stars in the area are average luminosity, but these seem to be the type you'd expect to see around PW 2010 or out near the Orion Nebula.

Of course, if there is anything noteworthy to log I'll keep you updated. I've got the telemetry data records running and I've got a camera mounted on my suits helmet to assist with documentation in case something of interest does happen. It's probably nothing more than a non-documented cluster of stars that are so bright the commander in the original story simply was confused by the circumstances of his FSD failure coupled with the unusually bright stars in the sky.

It's been a while since I've dictated to the ships log. Last I wrote in here I was on my way out past The Core with passengers in what I believe would equate to September. Well I made it back from that, actually barely snuck in on the time table for that one actually. I made a tidy profit from it though, around half a billion credits overall give or take fifty million or so. I got back into the bubble and there were a few different community efforts ongoing. I can't recall them all, but it all revolved around something called Marlinsim and supporting one side against the other.

I flew several combat sorties, rescued people from burning stations that were attacked by terrorists, and participated in delivery and protection routes for food stuffs and materials to build new stations. From there I took that T10 out on the planned holiday trip to Colonia of course. That was an adventure and a half trying to help organize so many people who were brand new to exploring. Thankfully I had a good group of folks also on the team who did the bulk of the facetime and I was able to simply manage the backend. I did have to organize and participate in a rescue of a stranded fleet carrier at one point. He found himself stuck in a system with no fuel for getting to Colonia, but luckily he was right next to a hotspot for Tritium. The expedition group rallied together and helped blast enough gas that should be scoopable from the corona of stars to get him topped off with handwavium. Would have made way more sense to need to mine lithium and refine it to capture the ejected tritium than it does to find it naturally occuring in icy rings, but hey what do I know? I'm just a space pilot with multiple degrees in physics and engineering. The Pilots Federation knows better than me of course.

From there it's been a relatively slow process. I caught a ride home onboard a fleet carrier from Colonia only to have a request for biological samples come out of Colonia. Some of our fleet returned to take care of that request, but I remained at home after a long trip for a break. I did pop off to assist The Dark wheel in their expansion efforts and those Marlinist folks from before needed more food again for some reason so I popped by to bring in another couple tens of thousands of tons of fruits and vegetables from my fathers agricultural claim in a nearby star system. You'd think they would still have food from the millions of tons they got just a few short months ago, but I guess they ran out.

There has been a lot of talk about politics in the galaxy lately. Core Dynamics is apparently up for sale. I've thought about putting in a bid myself, but I don't know if I want to own a company and inherit their warranty claims. Nothing terribly exciting has gone on that really warrants a single specific log, but for now we'll just sit here and poke about the bubble from time to time. I hear there is some big Odyssey coming up soon that I'm looking into. It sounds like it's going to be a big wash though and just disappoint everyone. That would be a shame, but I hope all the people saying it will fail are wrong.

With not much going on in the Bubble and the T10 set to run to Colonia for Christmas already I didn't have much to work for now and I wasn't sure what to do. I was hanging around one of the local pubs on Jameson Memorial when someone gave me an idea. They told me I should take that T10 I set up to run to Colonia on a shakedown run, but rather than hauling cargo, I should go down to the passenger lounge and find me one of those crazy explorers who likes to sit inside their cabin all day just to look at a single star or tourist beacon and miss all the fun in the middle. It'd be a great shakedown to make sure everything was in place and worked as intended for Colonia. Sounded like a good enough idea to me so I finished my drink and walked down to the passenger depot.

Found myself a pair of "explorers" who insisted I fit with a First-Class cabin for their comfort and to take them out to the Holy Twins. Simple enough right? Along the way after countless amazing views and new discoveries with the famous folks in the back with no view I got a comms ping from Helios Maximus. Turns out he was off in the Trifid Nebula doing some mapping of his own. He plotted an intercept for us, and I set course for the Omega Nebula to have a rendezvous point. He caught us up about 40 jumps out from Omega Mining Operation and we continued together for a while before having to land for standardized maintenance for our COVAS.

After the update was complete, I went ahead and finished the run to Omega Mining where Helios met up with us and we had a chat about what was going on in the galaxy these days. A bit of chaos kicked off right after the last COVAS reset which gave the station some good gossip to chatter about. Best keep our lips sealed on this one though lest anyone know more than they should. From there we set our sights on the Eagle Nebula as a good waypoint for a short hop. I made a miss click in the nav computer and accidently plotted a course for the penal colony rather than the planetary base. Once I arrived in system, I realized the mistake but decided to take a stop off anyway and check if we had any good local bounties to pick up that I could set our SLF crew on. I alerted our passengers that we would be making a docking and they told us they were harboring secret intel and they could not be found on the manifest. That seemed a bit odd to me, but I was prepared to run silent as we docked to be on the safe side.

Unfortunately, someone decided we looked like an easy target as we were coming into the rings for the asteroid station. They pulled us out and before I could get the engines running fast enough to avoid the lock, they had run a manifest scan on us. This upset our passengers to such an intense degree they demanded they be allowed to disembark on the next station. I tried to remind them that the next station was a penal colony and there would be no ships departing from there, but they insisted. So we made for our landing pad and the passengers stormed off, one forgot their wallet and an extra sheet of landmarks they were interested in but I didn't think they'd have lasted long on their person on the colony anyway so I just logged them into the nav computer and counted the credits towards our fuel and maintenance costs to get them there. We turned in our nav data from that point of the trip, about 6,500 LY from our start, got around 50,000,000 cr worth, which is a far sight more than those "explorers" were paying. I really wish them the best of luck to be honest. I didn't wait to see if they were going to realize their mistake and went to dock at the civilized colony nearby.

Funny enough, I found another set of explorers there who were a bit more reasonable. They want to go out past Sag A* to check out something called "Neon Lights". I made a deal with them that we could go so long as we also stopped by "Holy Twins" since I was intrigued about what was so important out that way that the last passengers refused to even talk to me after they had been scanned. We set out and we are currently on our way. We have around 65 more jumps to go in the old T10 to get to "Holy Twins" and boy have we found a lot of interesting data along the way. Multiple NSPs and a whole slew of brand-new star systems, water worlds, ELWs, and so on all just right outside the bridge and flight deck windows. I invite the passengers up from time to time to look at the view. This group is far more agreeable and less secretive. They still don't want to be scanned, but at least they are willing to have a friendly chat from time to time.

We should be making a stop at "Holy Twins" sometime roughly tomorrow evening Galactic Mean Time and we plan to head onward toward the core. I have a plot from one of those charts that I got off the last crew I want to check out before we cross the core and Sag A* for "Neon Lights" but our guests have no real timetable. They've given me 4 weeks Galactic Time to get them back to Eagle. Should be interesting indeed.

After a mining run lead me out to the Pleiades Sector to drop off some cargo I thought it might be worth checking around the area again. It had been a while since I flew combat sorties over here last. Last time I was here Palin's Research base had been attacked by Thargoids and an unknown new type of ship was found that has yet to be acknowledged by The Pilot's Federation. Before heading to my cabin to sleep for the night I stopped by the local port authority stall and put in a request to have two of my combat vessels, a corvette and a crusader, brought out from the bubble.

After my breakfast the next day, spent down at the Operation Ida Waffle Bar which is a fantastic little place if you ever are in the Celaeno area, I hopped in the crusader Scooty Puff Jr and headed over to Maia. I'll never get used to the stunning beauty of this nebula or the space stations in the area. I swung by planet A3A to see what the situation was around the now abandoned Palin Research Centre and found that there was still an evacuation beacon transmitting that the base was overrun by Thargoid vessels. Out of curiosity I dropped down into the crater that the base was formerly located within and was able to quickly locate the base from orbit thanks to the bright local star.

Coming into range of the base automated flight control came online and offered me a spot to land so I figured I may as well take a look. Local traffic was still coming in as well, but luckily no Thargoid vessels could be seen anywhere nearby or on the scanners. After realizing that the automated flight control had simply never been shut off and that no one was actually home in the research base, which is odd given how pirates love to take over abandoned locations, I took back to the skies. After flying along for a while I came across some Non-Human Signal Sources.

Dropping into a few of them I discovered that there were cargo haulers attempting to move cargo and pick up wreckage from vessels that appeared to have been hit by the Thargoids in the area. I joined the flight and flew cover for them as they began to jump to hyperspace to deliver their cargo, but was quickly overrun by a massive swarm of Thargoid Scouts, far more than the usual flight of four. Once I dealt with them as best I could myself and my crew mate took back off towards Celaeno to get onboard our Corvette and really bring the fight to the Thargoids.

Over the course of the work shift the crew and I managed to drop around 70 Thargoid Scouts and escort several cargo vessels out of the area. Towards the end of our shift the oncoming shift decided to hop into a wing with us and help out with a bit of overlap which was nice. Having a wingman did make the work a lot easier to deal with! Overall, I'm not sure how many scouts we collectively brought down, but my crew and I have combat bonds for 70 confirmed kills and managed to not take much in the way of damage costs. Mostly all we needed was the cost of ammunition. We've talked it over and decided that we will donate the vast majority of these bonds to Colonel Bris Dekker so we can get that annoying message off the engineering panel saying we've only donated 360,000 credits worth of bonds to her so far. We have no intention of needing her services given she has nothing to rate to maximum that we can't cover elsewhere, but the Federation won't stop reminding us that she has invited us to visit her every time we walk past the engineering board in the flight deck.

Overall, not a bad day's work really. There is no solid plan as to what we plan to do from here. Clearly the nebula is still in a constant threat from the Thargoids, but there seem to be plenty of pilots signing up to come out from the AXI. Perhaps we will head back into the bubble and grab our guardian weapons and bring them back out to take down more of the larger Thargoids. Perhaps we'll go out and see what or sister ship is up to out near the Formadine Rift, or maybe we'll return to LFT 926 and continue working to Turn the Wheel for our home faction to see if we can expand outwards further. Plenty to do out here in the galaxy if you know where to look. Finding the time to do it all is the hard part.

The same old grind. Everyone needs money right? Back to mining, but it turns out that we've drilled out all of Borran apparently. That put a rush on the IMU and other mining wings to go out and find new hotspots for all these diamonds people are wanting. I have no idea what it even is they do with the things. I guess there are industrial applications, but then why do they sell for the most money in systems in holiday where people have money to throw around? I suppose if I could buy a ton of diamond for only 1.7 million credits I'd think that was a cool idea. For the cost though you could almost afford to rent a Sidewinder and go mine a few tons yourself and you'd be up from the rental costs!

All the same though, it's good that we have new places to go pop rocks. It gets a bit boring looking at the same sky the whole time and once we start turning rocks to dust the rings get really foggy and hard to navigate. My brother is still out near the Rift looking for Raxxla. That silly dude is gonna wind up getting himself killed by Black Flight or The Club if he keeps at it though. He may have less money than me, though arguably more than your average planet dweller will ever see, but he sure has seen a lot more than I have. Maybe once I'm done with this run I'll take a break and drive out that way to see him and see what he's up to. Maybe bring him some fresh food since I'm sure he's tired of those rations he's been on given how long he's been out that way.

With my wing mates out working as test pilots for the new fleet carriers in hopes to get them past safety inspections and regulatory boards in time for their public launch later this year I've been taking some time off to enjoy being on a planet again. I left my ship docked and took a Mars Taxi over to visit the planets in Sol. Earth is awesome, but the real story is over on Mars. I can't believe that the first person to land on Mars wasn't that X Æ A-12 guy's dad like he always planned! Apparently, some guy named Philip J. Fry landed there first and stole his thunder. Luckily though after years of being only colonized by a select few it is now 100% terraformed and an awesome place to visit. I do need to get back out there though. Gravity feels nice to be pulling me down instead of back into my seat for once, but I've heard there are new horizons out there to be seen. Fleet carriers will be out to the public soon and my wing mates are back from their test pilot days so we'll likely be launching out soon to gear up and prepare for out next big adventure. Rumor has it that the Pilot's Federation is also looking to support some new forms of deep space exploration beyond just carriers as well. We recently heard rumors of a new "Odyssey" initiative that they are planning. I'm sure that will be all the discussion on the comms networks will be about for weeks to come now. Exciting information to look forward to though.