20231219 - Run 46

We get back to a landing pad and D.va and Chad start working on solidifying some of the fixes to the in-atmo control systems on the Highwind. I helped D.va out looking at the control systems and then excused myself to go take a bit of a break on the edge of the pad.

We determine that I can also hold the forms needed for proper control of the warp core better than D.va (since it’s basically qi management) and so I switch over to handling the power core and allowing D.va to be Chief Engineer everywhere else. We decide to head back up - Caleb’s on helm, I’m on power ops, D.va is Engineering, Chad is running logistics / loadmaster / Invis Hand, and Nyla is playing Candy Crush on her Karl shrines.

Things progress reasonably. We head up, and the in-atmo controls get less and less use-able… but Life Support kicks in, so that’s working. Caleb decides at this point to try out the exo-atmo controls - a different set of sticks and buttons, to control an entirely different system. 

Nyla gets to watch the first exo-atmospheric sunrise through one of the portholes, the solar light crisp and creeping across the floor. Luckily it’s just light, so the radiation shielding works! I manage to cleanly handle the additional power draw from rad shielding and exo-atmo maneuvering. And nothing breaks! So it’s actually kind of boring, because we manage to test everything we can test without transiting to another planet in about 10 minutes, but we don’t have the ship stocked with gear.

But we _can_ do local observation missions. So we do a few orbits, set the optical sensors to project what we can see of the planet,  and realize that with some sort of recording mechanism we’d be a lot better at mapping things. Then we do go back down to the Hub.

On the way down, the ride starts to get a little bumpier, and then our artificial gravity system cuts out. D.va starts trying to fix the antigrav system,  and manages to get it to start working again with a lot of kicking and percussive maintenance. Caleb continues re-entry and the ship keeps making terrifying stressed-metal noises - I think we may have come in a bit hot.

Chad … starts praying for the Invisible Hand to shelter the Highwind. Caleb then … pilots the ship down. But there may have been a bit of help. The flames of re-entry may have looked from afar like they formed a hand with a thumb and four fingers, if one were inclined to look and be generous with their description. And then we’re back in-atmo and all systems are nominal. But we have no real idea where the Hub is.

So D.va gets us back to the latitude of the Hub and we fly west until we get there. It takes several hours and Caleb toughs it out, stays in the pilot seat the whole time, but we do manage to get there most of a day later.