20240220 - Run 48

(Run 47 was an undocumented exoatmospheric test which determined that the gravity system was temperamental, and the fire suppression system was tested after landing, nearly killing Chad, but the party did survive. The party was bad at orbital mechanic and had a hard landing on the Moon.)

We have a settlement which has fallen out of alignment with the Hub’s teleportation network and which is also near enough for us to get to, and for whom we have planetary coordinates.

We also have a chain-bound book which we have been requested to deliver to a target without using the teleportation network; the last time it went through the teleportation network, it caused a teleportation outage.

At some point we want to see the station above the glass planet, which used to be a pleasure world. There’s also a time refinery in that system, orbiting a Jovian there.

We think about going to the system with the former pleasure planet and the time refinery, but decide to check in on the outpost that has fallen out of contact first. It’s a 2 month trip there, so we load up on rations and replacement/repair parts.

D.va plots us a course that slingshots us around the sun (or “the system primary” as we are apparently supposed to call it now) to get a little extra speed for entering hyperspace. And then we go shopping for supplies. Chad’s connections come in handy here, to try to find generalized tooling and supplies to keep a Hub-modern society from slipping back to subsistence level if we can’t fix the gate immediately. We try to get Felginor to give us some tips on how to fix gates, if we have to do that, but there’s not all that much available as it turns out. 

Felginor runs out to our ship to give us - not present, that would imply dignity, it was more like frantically shoving into D.va’s possession - a tome. (It’s too big to be a book.) I’m pretty sure he tried to bind this himself with questionable glue. He’s extremely excited, but for some reason he doesn’t want to come along. 

We get supplies and go. I get to pilot again, which is cool, and I slingshot around the sun, and the ship responds cleanly to my controls. It’s a good thing the ship’s radiation shielding is as good as it is, or we’d all be walking tumors at this point. We engage the hyperdrive, and there’s an instant where nothing happens, and I have just long enough to panic…. and then all of space is gone and I have this sense of bieng held. There’s a tiny bubble around our ship, and on the other side of the Gellar field, there is a vast, viscerally unsettling, abyssal darkness with occasional spots of light.

We think about jury-rigging some kind of autopilot, but no, Caleb and I have to constantly staff the helm, 24 hours a day, for 2 months.  Everyone else is generally maintaining the ship… cleaning… making sure things don’t break… praying to Karl and the Invisible Hand that the Gellar field doesn’t rupture… and so on.

After two months we prepare for emergence. I get on Engine Stabilization duty and Caleb takes the helm. I get ready for go time, and then there is a sudden corkscrewing motion as we presumably emerge. I start to fight it, but then realize I can flow with the corkscrew effect and am able to increase engine power to try to counteract whatever is happening. At the same time up on the bridge, Caleb jerks the stick straight - heh - and we stop corkscrewing by force of bicep. Most of us end up fine, but Nyla ends up vomiting all over her Candy Crush shrine from the emergence  corkscrew maneuver. 

D.va starts to survey the system. She points out what she thinks are definitely planets 3 and 4 in this system, has a tentative ID on a few more, and is able to give Caleb a course towards what she thinks is the colony planet, planet 2. We make an approach and after about 5 days of travel, we settle into orbit around what appears to be the second planet. 

We’d thought that this was just a 5 planet system; it turns out that there are _more_ than 5 planets in this system, but the planets we’ve been able to ID are consistent with the previous astrological data about this system, so we’re guessing that the planetary survey was simply shitty. We can see that there are several old satellites in orbit of planet 2 - pitted from micrometeorite collisions. Some are relatively small, but there are two derelict space stations. However, they look like ghost ships - systems functioning to keep them in orbit, but probably nobody alive and unlikely to have any atmosphere with all the holes in the hull.

On the planet, it takes a while to see anything, but we do think we can see remnants of civilization, sprawling megastructures. We can’t see villages, though; the tech level is not high enough to be seen from orbit down there.

Caleb takes us down - it’s not the most graceful, but it’s extremely stable. The atmosphere of this planet is slightly more dense than that of the Hub, which may make this descent a bit more “impactful”. The artificial gravity stutters again but this time does not fail, and we are able to enter the lower atmosphere reasonably cleanly. The atmosphere is thick and turbulent, and the descent is loud and there’s quite a bit of heat being shed, but the ‘jammer cuts into the troposphere like a flaming shooting star.