My new home... For now

I did it. I made it to Colonia. My first long distance trip and I'm in one piece. And so is the ship!

It's taken a week of travel time, and I've seen some wonders along the way. I've been the first to discover entire systems. One of them even contained an Earth-Like planet. A potential world for people to inhabit, and I was there first.

I don't know if it's customary to name these when you discover them. "Elpis" seems a fitting name

I've seen things I never even imagined I'd encounter, like the Earth-like orbiting a neutron star at EORD FLYUAE BN-1 D10-4705. But the strangest thing I encountered was out in a previously undiscovered system, BOEWNST FY-F B44-72. There's not much there; scoopable star, and a braown dwarf and mostly balls of rock. But on the moon of the 5th planet, my SRV's wave analyser started picking up a strange signal. At first I thought it was on the blink. I mean I'm really only just getting the hang of reading these things. But nevertheless, I followed it to the source, where I discovered this:

It was emitting a constant audio signal

What the hell is this thing? It's too big to be an escape pod, it looks too smooth and sleek to be a ship, and besides a ship that small couldn't have gotten this far into space on its own. Even if it had gotten lost in part of a convoy or something, it's standard practice to scan systems as you travel and this one was undiscovered. It was definitely man-made, judging from the lettering on the side. I took a scan of the mysterious object and headed off into the black.

If I'd had my wits about me I would have recorded the signal

Later on I found myself in another neutron star systema nd flew into the jet streams for a boost. As I tried to jump out to DRYIO FLYUAE FN-J D9-561 my blood turned to ice. "FSD Malfunction", my ship computer calmly said. No, no, no, without a FSD this far out I was dead. Those old Bowmen back in the bubble had warned me of the dangers of neutron jumping, but everythiong had been fine up to now. I tried again and hit witchspace.

When I arrived at my destination I checked the diagnostics on my FSD. 77%. Not great. Thanksfully I had seen fit to equip two autorepair modules, so I had the drive (and my other systems) fixed up in no time. The rest of the trip was nice and smooth, but to be honest I was mostly just jumping and honking and jumping and honking. I wanted to get back to civilisation as fast as I could in order to get the Heidegger checked out.

As deadly as it is beautiful

When I finally reached Colonia, I felt a huge rush of satisfaction. I headed for the nav bouy, and a thought popped into my head. Buoys are bigger than escape pods, but smaller than most ships, right? I got as close as I could, and that solved the mystery of BOEWNST FY-F B44-72 A 5 A - It was a crashed nav buoy!

But wait... What the HELL was a nav buoy doing crashed on the moon of the fifth planet of an uninhabited, undiscovered system a thousand light years from civilization? I'm going to have to look into this weirdness in more depth when I have time. Right now though, here I am, in Colonia, twenty-two thousand light years from where I started. It'll do as home for now.

 The problem now is that I'm in danger of succumbing to the "Bowman's Blues" - that feeling of depression that explorers get after returning home from a long trip. It makes sense; You've put all your energy into a goal, you've worked and worked towards that goal, sometimes running on empty, but the desire to reach your goal is what keeps you going. And once you achieve it... there's nowhere for that energy to go, not even a need to generate it. So you sink. You don't have the will to start a new expedition, and going back to a "normal" life seems impossible.

While browsing the Galnet feeds I found one way to combat this. With all the talk of Thargoids down in the Pleiades, many people from the bubble have been fleeing to Colonia. The systems are currently unable to cope with this many people coming in and are desperately trying to set up refugee shelters, but they need all of the equipment to be centralised in one place. They're apparently desperate for evac shelters, auto-fabs and power generators. When I saw this I knew I could help out. I put the Heidegger into storage and bought a Lakon Type-6 Transporter. Christened the Northamptonshire, she can carry one hundred tons of cargo and has a respectable jump range of 20 light years unladen.

I did my last mission for me. My next mission is for the people.