20231205 - Run 45

We start planning a shakedown cruise.

Jammer systems:

• Life Support
• Radiation Shielding
• Power Source
• Propulsion
• Gravity
• Fire Suppression
• Landing Gear & Hovering
• In-Atmosphere Handling
• Exo-Atmosphere Handling
• Helm
• High Quality Optics
• Invisible Hand Protection
• Karl Protection

Caleb and I make plans to trade off helm duty. D.va is going to be bouncing all around the jammer to handle engineering duties, and Nyla is going to be attempting to commune with Karl to obtain a bit of eldritch and/or arcane protection for this endeavor.  Chad is explicitly monitoring life support, hydroponics, and the shrine to the Invisible Hand.

The life support system is made of plants. Of course, D.va wants some medicinal plants. So then so does Caleb. And me. Given the psychedelic contents of the life support system, we dub this jammer the Highwind. 

We take off for orbit. Caleb’s on the helm and helm response is nominal; D.va has a bunch of stuff to monitor and is pinging around the ship going from system to system. We take off, and we cruise out. The ship performs well for several minutes. But then Caleb starts getting some feedback in one of the controls. The gravity starts … undulating. Chad heads off to the gravity system to try to stabilize it. Caleb tries to pilot through the gravity distortion and breaks one of the controls. A loud twang reverberates through the hull and then the ship pitches down and starts to corkscrew towards the ground.

The main control linkage between the helm and the wings seems to have snapped, or broken, or something.  I tag Caleb out, because he’s stronger than me and if we find whatever broke he’s going to be in a better place to fix it, and I try to recover control with what control surfaces remain. Chad has made his way to the hover controls, and turns the hover system on to try to regain some control. The Highwind also bounces off of … some tentacles. But not attached to anything. They just sort of show up. Nyla has been running between shrines to Karl doing something, so it seems she got some divine protection to keep us from slamming into … rocky ground. Cliffs, apparently.

Meanwhile D.va and Caleb are trying to figure out how to repair the ship.As  D.va is crawling out on the wing and Caleb is supporting her, I end up yawing the ship in a flat spin to get the nose of the ship back in-line with our direction of travel, entirely coincidentally barely missing losing parts of the ship against the side of a fucking skyscraper that has appeared out of the fog on the surface of the planet underneath The Hub. (D.va and Caleb manage not to puke _or_ lose their grip when I do this.)

Somehow Caleb wrestles the linkage back into place and D.va manages to repair it, and I feel the broken control start to have responsiveness again! As soon as I get enough control to do so, I pull the fuck up, so as to reduce somewhat our chances of impacting the planet. Meanwhile, Chad has discovered that something is wrong with the main power generation orb. He tries to get D.va to the generator, as everything seems to have needles in the red part of the gauges, but by the time D.va gets there, I’d levelled off a bit and I guess the power orb wasn’t “beating” quite as hard anymore.

After this, we head back to the Hub, to land. We panic a bit about ‘what if the landing gear fails’, but… it works fine! the hover system and the landing gear work together just fine. Everything’s fine. And that’s the first flight of the Highwind.