Sunday, 8 February 2015

Exploration - The first few waypoints

The expedition for the night have been scouted by members of the FGE, and there were a number of waypoints set a different intervals established for their points of interest. These were the following:

Schedar
26 Upsilon-1 Cassiopeiae
32 Cassiopeiae
HIP 4674
HIP 4755
HR 266
27 Gamma Cassiopeiae
LBN 623 Sector PD-S B4-5

Along the way we would encounter black holes, neutron stars, planets with life, metal rich planets, and plenty to just basically stare at in wonder. This was a trip of over 500 light years out of civilized space into the wilds.

A route was plotted to the first waypoint, a large star called Schedar. There will be no stations or platforms on this route, so it was essential that your ship was equipped with a fuel-scoop. These fuel-scoops can scoop fuel from the surface of stars into the fuel tank to allow you to take on such long journeys. Fuel scooping is not without it's dangers as the ship heats up quickly when skimming over a star's surface, so you need to be careful.


Because my ship has a good jump range (28+ light years without cargo), this first leg of the journey was only 3 jumps.


When you arrive in a system, you arrive next to the main star. Here we can see Schedar in all it's glory. It is an Orange Giant sun, a bit larger than the typical suns you come across. It was a fuel-scoopable star, but you didn't need to get too close before you started heating up. The suns in the game look amazing, with solar flare activity on the surface, and bubbling surfaces. Later in this post we will see some other star types.

Because this star had not been surveyed before, my discovery scanners were used to identify it and scan for other bodies in the system. In the game you can collect this exploration information, and return it to a faction and sell the data to them. This, under certain circumstances, may result in that faction exploring the system themselves, and establish their own stations there. This way you can be a factor in how the population of the galaxy evolves over time.

The next waypoint was "26 Upsilon-1 Cassiopeiae"


An interesting system with a number of planets to look at. The one that particularly caught my eye was the metal-rich 3rd planet on the right. I did not spend time here scanning, but I plan to come back here again some time to take a look. Another planet, like the 3rd one here, came to my attention later in the journey, and I got some good pictures then, in a later post.

The next waypoint was a very interesting one for all of us, "32 Cassiopeiae". It has 13 stars, around 80 planetary bodies, and a Black Hole. The next few pictures are exploring this system. I didn't manage to scan everything there.

This is a gas giant in the system


Approaching a cluster of bodies with a large Gas Giant with rings at the centre


Here's the Gas Giant a little closer, you can now see the details of the rings. The rings here were mainly Ice, but there are other planetary rings (of which we will see in a later post) that contain metal and mineral deposits that can be mined.


Here we are approaching a Brown Dwarf star with a large ring system. Ringed stars are not common, and this system had a number of them.

 
Another ringed brown dwarf below.


 Of course what everyone wanted to discover was the Black Hole. Quite often you can't see the actual black hole (not like the movies), because they are sometimes remarkably small. However the power of these objects is immense. They distort space around them, and will cause your ship to heat up very quickly if you get too close, so you need to be careful when flying around them. The next couple of pictures show the back hole in this system, and the space distortion around it.

Here you can see the distortion of the galaxy in the background in the middle, and to the left is another bright white star.


The distortion is much more visible here as I approached the black hole. It was shortly after this that the temperature of the ship started to rise, and rather than risk damage, I moved off.



 
That's all for this post, more to see in the next as the exploration moves closer to the nebula.
 
 
 

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