Yesterday I crossed into the Plaa Ain sector. The going here is slow but steady with some busts of progress followed by some long pauses to find the route. Worryingly this sometimes happens even when the route has not deviated much. The number of stars in range of any given jump has increased the number of possibilities that need to be checked in the galactic map to find the one true blue route of my original passage. I either seem to locate the next star almost immediately or else there is a frustratingly long search; not much in the middle.

These are dull regions, dense with stars but devoid of interesting features. In the last forty jumps covering a distance of 916 light years, only three systems are known to EDSM to have been visited by anyone other than myself. NGC 6357 is more than a thousand light years behind me and my next waypoint in Clookeou over three thousand ahead of me. I think to make up for the lack of nebulae, the galatic cartographers have placed their bounderies here in the middle of nowhere - arbitrary straight lines dividing zones that are almost identical like the geometric straight lines that once divided the old mid western grain belt states in the United States on Earth.

At least this gives the route a little something to watch for as I also steer close to the boundary between two much vaster regions of the galaxy - the Norma Expanse where I travel now and the Inner Scutum-Centaurus Arm. I do not know if my travels will ever bring me into the Arm region but it is certainly trending that way, if very gradually.

For now I must labour slowly coreward through the thick stars of Plaa Ain and see where it will take me.

NGC 6357 is receeding behind me now as I point my ship over the great galactic plane of Pieluia, heading ever so gently down and to galactic spinward. My next destination, an earth like discovery in the Clookeou sector now about 3800 light years ahead.

Escaping NGC 6357 proved to be every bit as difficult as I had feared. I might have missed Pismis 24-1 on the first occasion but I had taken a dog log to visis CL Pismis 13 and from there it was really difficult to pick up the trail where it dived down into a blizzard of undistinguished nebula stars shrouded in dust and darkness. Each leg was a masssive exercise in patience and speculative analysis, eyeballing scores of stars for their systems data until the mapping light shone out white in a moment of euphoria to indicate the ship had a map and so the next star had been found.

Even breaking free into Pieluia did not immediately make things much easier although as the stellar density dropped a little it gradually became quicker to find the path. But never as quick as it was the other side of NGC 6357 because the stellar density is still rising as the distant core becomes slowly closer. I fear it will only get worse. Still, I now have occasional bursts of finding three of four linked route systems at once, only to be stuck again for ten or fifteen minutes when the next one fails to show up. And this is when the route is relatively straight. When the next dog leg comes up who knows how difficult that will be to find? And whilst I have some key waypoints in Earth like systems, in between there are only hazy memories of the route and it certainly did not follow a straight line always.

I've refined my technique for finding the route. Now I spend no more than 20 or 30 seconds scanning ahead for obvious possibilties along the line of the flight path from the previous stage. If this fails to give me a quick win, I rotate the view and find some star at roughly the jump limit, then systematically search backwards at the level of the previous waypoint and then at lower and higher levels depending on whether I think the journey was rising or falling through the galaxy at this point. Seems to be working a bit better but still far from easy and it hasn't been tested in the really dense regions ahead yet.

Now I am in a lonely part of space. It's been 14 jumps and 285.5 light years since I've visited any system where I'm not tagged as the discoverer and where EDSM doens't record me as the sole visitor. Seems like no one is interested in travelling this close to the galactic plane even though it is quite close to the direct Sol to Sag A line and getting closer as I drift in to spinward and down.

Crossed the border into the Norma expanse today (without breaking out of Pieluia). Interesting to be picking up planetary discoveries in the Codex with no stellar ones (until I came to a double star where the second star was far enough away not to have been picked up on my original scan). I'll probably break the journey soon with some planetary visits the next time I find geological or biological sites of interest since these will be credited to Norma and so will count for something new in my Codex now.

Can't believe my original route passed less than 10 light years from CL Pismis 24 1 and I never noticed it or stopped to take a look. Two massive O type stars blazing at the heart of the nebula. Giant beacons in the dark, like lighthouses marking the route to the galactic core. No planets. No rocks. Just the blue arc light of hydrogen destined for a big explosion...

I'm back on my ongoing quest to log visited blue stars along the path of my original journey to Sag A and back. The first stage from Bodhinga passed relatively uneventfully. Here were systems I have already scanned and I wasted as little time as possible passing through them. My current jump range is higher then on the original journey and occasionally I was able to skip the odd star where there had been small adjustment jumps the first time around.

I dropped in the odd surface scan here and there just to tag systems where I was otherwise unrecorded as passing through but didn't even do this consistently. The first real change came with a break away diverion to one of the new Colonia way stations which are marked by my Squadron. Opening up the FSD to max base capability (a not especially spectacular 35 light years) still felt like accelerating after the painstaking picking out of predetermined stars and in relatively little time I reached Blu Thuaa AI-A C14-10. Resting, refueling, repairing and selling data brought in a suprisingly good credit haul considering I'd already visited most of the route.

Now I just cut loose completely from the path of blue visited stars I'd already marked to head directly "over the top" towards the trail head of the original inbound journey, tagged in the NGC 6363 region. Here there was a system with an earth like I knew about from the first journey, not discovered by me but soon to be mapped by me, and only a few jumps further my own very first earth like discovery I was keen to map.

Soon came the transition to the Smojai sector and I was resurveying old systems again for the first time and turning them to visted blue - the primary goal of the whole mission. I compare the Codex visited system count on my Elite records with the ESDM count. The latter is oh so slowly catching up as EDSM finds out about systems that the Codex already knows I visited. The gap is 8134 to something just over 6000 and rising now and I wonder how close they will be when I finish. In an ideal world they would be exactly the same. I have tried to revist everything in the Bubble with EDSM posting enabled since I first installed it, unfortunately quite late in my career. No idea how close I've got but I'm pretty confident most of the Bubble systems that should be visted "blue" and should also be in EDSM now are, as well as the relatively minor local exploration missions I've retraced (such as one to Rigel and Betelgeux, one taking me in a big loop above Spica and one to Deneb). The only KNOWN anomoly oustanding now is the big one. This trip to the core.

Ascending the "Smojai Rise", a part of the coreward trail where I'd climbed to a sparser region of stars it didn't take too long to reach the Cat's Paw nebula. Here I struggled with the route for a bit before finding a long jump across and up through the Nebula that took the route even higher and led out to the long relatively boring run through Byeia Euq. Here I started surface scanning a few more worlds and was rewarded with a new biological discovery of some anemonie type creatures basking the glow of a blue star and also the mildly interesting system of Byeia Euq RX-L D7 97-B which almost certainly isn't a record holder but has a LOT of bodies.

Deep in the Lysoorb sector was my next goal. My second earth like discovery. CMDR R.U.A.L had beaten me to it and already mapped it, since I was last here! That's fine. Always nice to see other souls have travelled these parts and I have mapped it as well now.

And now on to NGC 6357 which has been looming ever larger in the sky. Along the way I've been doing full system scans trying to tag systems that I was unable to tag before using a bit of mapping, if possible and if there is no discovery record of my previous travel. Just the one tag to mark the route is all I want. I wonder if other commanders will note the odd discovery patterns which are a strong hint that I paid a second visit to these distant systems, when my name is first discovery for the star, someone else has a world discovery tag and I have the mapping tag over that. Should look a bit weird to a seasoned explorer.

Here I plan to break from the route a little bit to visit Pismis 24 (aka HD 319718) an interesting massive O star binary (at least) viewable and named from Sol even in the ancient days of the first space telescopes. This must be close to the maximum distance of where there are known named stars of that era so worth making the effort to detour before I try to pick up the onwards trail to the core again. From here I recall I cut inwards and there is my next earth like discovery to aim for the CLOOKEOU sector but that's over 4000 light years away and I suspect navigation is going to start getting tricky before then as the density of stars increases and the time to find the route goes up. We'll see...

I'm spending some time in Federation space in my Imperial Clipper the Blue Angel. The task is to renew some old acquantances in the halo of stars around Capella and update my charts to include computer recognition of previously travelled systems on the galatic map. It's all part of a long term goal to reconcile the codex system count with the pilot's federation EDSM records as far as I can. Not that they'll catch up until such time as I venture to the galactic core again, but I'm down to less than three thousand systems worth of difference (just more than 5000 on EDSM to just less than 8000 in central galatic records) and the gap is closing. I feel the time is aproaching when it will only be my galactic core journey which accounts for the entire difference. Then I intend to make that trip again via the same stars as far as I possibly can. This time I want to do it in an Anaconda and first I have to be able to afford that.

I'm not afraid to hide my allegience to Aisling's Angels with the Blue Angel's livery and there's a certain frisson in docking at Nanomam with this ship. I'm not looking for trouble but it needs to be something pretty powerful to intimidate me. And that's what I found, when I was completing a delivery run. Jumped by a Krait and got a bit complacent before I realised I was badly outranked. Escaped in a high wake jump with just 4% hull. Phew!

I have luxury passanger cabins in the Blue Angel and I took on a mission for a criminal tourist who wanted to see some ice geysers. Then the scum refused to acknowledge I'd taken him where he wanted and wouldn't pay me. Should have spaced him! It's making me think twice about taking on a longer mission of this kind. Who wants to go 20,000 light years not to get paid!

Oh, that's right. Me when I'm revisting my old route. Hmmmm.... :-)

Back in "Silk and Steel" my sleek little Cobra, which I picked up from Capella after "Let's Sort This Out", my much more expensive and harder skinned Krait had brought me safely there through the backwoods of some ancient routes to spinwards of LHS 3447. My new fortunes have allowed to me to afford a repaint and some internal refitting to bolster the defences of the "Silk and Steel", although she was already reasonably armed with cannon fire and pulse lasers. Flying the cobra after the krait feels like shedding some thick swamp rhino skin and slipping into snake skin. Been surveying in the wastelands trailing and down from Gurabru and corewards of Jotun where the writ of the Dukes doesn't run. It's a sparsely populated region, notionally Federal and where it owes any allegiance to galactic powers it nods to the Sirius corporation but in reality there are few important systems here and most are dubious little independent outfits one step away from pirate hideaways even if they aren't openly signaling the red skulls of defiance which many of them do. There are forests of tiny brown and T Tauri stars here, with a sprinkling of red dwalfs and not much else. It pays to keep an eye on the fuel guage as scooping isn't guaranteed at every jump. I've had to keep my weapons ready but to be honest there wasn't much to scare the Silk and Steel as I zig zagged through the region filling in some forgotten maps and difting slowly down. The few pitiful pirate rats that tried it soon turned tail and fled when they saw what they were facing.

Now I've picked up an old trail leading across the ragedy borderlands into Empire territory where civilization picks up and government gets gradually more civilized, although it's distressing to see recent Thargoid attacks in more than one system. I've reached Wangal, a control system for Denton Patreus with a plethora of stations where I've traded before, what seems like a life time ago before I signed up with Aisling. I expect now to head for Achenar in due course before taking a slow route home towards Cubeo, but I'll take my time to fully explore and trade amongst the stars round here first where I have a friendly reputation from my last visit.

Before reaching Rigel I hit a problem. Turns out the route I'm following dipped into Col 70 space. Since the shroud descended over that region, it's impossible to jump into the sector and I could no longer follow the pathway I'm contracted to map. Did the best I could and sutchered in a little bypass, which only skipped three systems. To make up for this loss, I added some more waypoints in the Witch Head Nebula. I'd been told this was optional but figured I'd better include it to try and keep my patron happy. Not sure how he's going to react to the next leg. As I travelled up from Rigel towards Betelgeuse we hit a more extensive block of Col 70 systems. At least they were contiguous but I had to make a much bigger detour around them, tracing the border of the forbidden zones in Synuefe space. When I rejoined the route it wasn't far from the Orion belt stars and these had been visited so a winding journey from Alnitak to Mintaka followed. Then onwards and upwards to Betelgeuse where I have just arrived. Without the new FSS scanner it would have been a much longer task but that has helped so much since I managed to get it working when I got to the bottom of the Synuefe stairs.

Now I'll do some trilateration then it's time to turn for home on the last stage of the route.

I've been engaged by an obsessive old map maker to complete a comprehensive survey of a historic charted journey that loops out from the edge of Federation space to Betelgeuse then drops through Orion belt stars to Rigel before rising back to enter Empire space via the Hyades region. He calls this the Blue Loop. There is no time scale but the orders are specific and require following the predetermined route for every star along the way. It must have been travelled originally in a ship with a tiny jump range. The Vingliote could complete the circuit, visiting the points of interest in a fraction of the time the survey will need. Instead we must tiptoe through the stars, making progress by slow degrees. And every system must be scanned in its entirety, although at least I am not required to explore them all as well.

Am I looking for anything specific?

"Just complete the route", he tells me. "The money is good is it not? And you can sell the data afterwards. I don't care."

I'm running the Blue Loop in reverse and in stages. I'm working for Aisling Duval these days. Just doing my bit to fight slavery and keep the Empire clean so I can't afford to spend too much consecutive exploration time which would interfere with my other duties. My patron doesn't mind, so long as the job gets done in the end. Fortunately because the Blue Loop is relatively local to the bubble I can travel out and back between stages of surveying.

Now I'm on a part of the Blue Loop his maps call the Synuefe Staircase. In my direction it descends down through Synuefe from populated space in the direction of Rigel. Tagged on the map it does look like a staircase. One with a lot of steps before it peters out into a final meander to Rigel. Much scanning done but much more to do. I will have had my fill of exploration before I'm through...