January 20, 3305

Incalculable Progress - 72U-DW

Omega Mining Operation

Omega Sector VE-Q b5-15

Well that's Week 1 over and done with, started out strong with a total, utter and complete system failure during the Jump from Pallaeni to HR 5413 that left CMDR Sadness and I stuck in HR 5413 for 2 Days while we made the necessary repairs.

We made Shapely 1 by 10PM ship time on the 15th, but by then both Sadness and I were exhausted from 2 days straight of repairs and several hours of frameshift jumps and mind-numbing scanner log sifting. We spent an extra day at the Shapely 1 landing site testing out our SRV's and ironing out any bugs in our ship control systems. CMDR Sadness departed Shapely 1 several hours before me to do some further exploration of the local star systems.

I made excellent time to the next POI at HR 6164 (The View) but after listening to the traffic reports from the expedition controllers decided not to attempt a landing at the designated layover point as there had already been over 30 accidents due to the High-G nature of the planet. I pushed on to the next leg to Cycladia but after around 14 jumps I called it a night and waited for Sadness to catch me up, not wanting to risk such a long leg without the extra fuel that Sadness was carrying aboard Zulu Foxtrot.

The next day Sadness again set out several hours before me to do further survey work in the local area. Once I was awake and ready to leave, we made rendezvous and continued on the long haul to Cycladia. For once we had a mostly uneventful leg and made good time, though we did experience some unusual comm outages and delays far beyond those normally found when exploring the vast trackless wastes beyond the bubble.

After spending the night in the ring system above Cycladia, I for once awoke early and set out before Sadness on the long haul to the Omega Sector. After several gruelling hours of constant Hyperjumps and scanning stops I took a break in Thor's Eye to eat dinner and wait for Sadness to catch me up. When Sadness arrived we again encountered the strange comm issues we had first experienced the previous day. Not wanting to waste time trying to troubleshoot the defective systems we instead switched to our backup comm system, which operated perfectly. After a brief discussion in Thor's Eye, Sadness and I decided that with the imminent launch of the next leg of the expedition the following day we would skip the rest of the POI waypoints and instead make straight for Omega Mining.

About an hour into this final push, and only about a 3rd of the way to Omega, Sadness began to experience severe control problems and about 2 jumps later had total failure of most of Zulu Foxtrot's cockpit systems, at first we believed this was a simple system error and Sadness quickly began the process of restoring the latest backup of the cockpit control software. However once this was complete the control systems still did not come back online, suspecting that the issue lay in the hardware, Sadness began the laborious task of disassembling the cockpit control systems insitu. With no space in the cockpit of Sadness' Asp Explorer for 2 of us to try and fix the problem, he convinced me to carry on to Omega and await his arrival there. From there the rest of the leg passed uneventfully apart from an encounter with a pirate fighter on arrival in Omega Sector VE-Q B5-15.

After I landed at the Omega Mining Operation, I learned the final piece of bad news for the week. I had misread the date for departure from WP2 and as a result Sadness and I had run ourselves ragged, and skipped several points of interest, trying to get to to WP2 in a week, when in fact we had 2 weeks to make the journey. To top it off it has now been almost 12 hours since I left Sadness alone in the black trying to fix his flight systems with only on-board equipment , and I have not heard anything from him.

And to think we still have 17 more weeks of this before the halfway point.

On that Bombshell

o7 Commanders

See you in the Black