The second leg of the Great Colonia Expedition was from Amundsen Terminal in the Lagoon Nebula to Eagle’s Landing in the Eagle Nebula, spanning from the 9th Feb to 13th Feb 3303! On the way I stopped off at the Omega Nebula and the Traikaae AA-A nebula high above the Galactic Plane, and gradually realised that I was in this for the long haul!
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I found an insane system on my travels!! It contains a Class V gas giant that orbits its white dwarf primary in only 15 minutes, and passes through the jet of the WD! Its orbital distance from the WD is 0.4 ls, so close that it cannot actually be reached using supercruise (the WD drops the ship out of SC about 2 ls out). There is also a nearby M V companion star a few ls away. As an aside, there is an unusually high number of Carbon Star systems around this location too.
The planet is so close to the WD that (a) it is within the WD’s Roche Limit and should have been torn apart to form a ring system and (b) orbits faster than the WD’s rotation period (which itself is only 16 minutes) and therefore is spiralling in to the WD anyway due to tidal forces. The system is also 7.8 billion years old – how the gas giant continues to survive, how it got into its current orbit around the WD, and how the WD and its planet both got so close to the M V star after the end of the WD’s former red giant phase are all deep mysteries!
The System Name is BLAA PHOE NC-D D12-230, and it should already be in the 3D map of the latest version of EDDiscovery (under the name “Death Spiral”). Check it out, CMDRs! 🙂
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20 second timelapse video: |
15 minute full video (with music in the first half): |
Here is the Exploration Log (i.e. screenshot gallery) of the first leg of my Great Colonia Expedition, which I’m currently working on in my Elite Dangerous Exploration streams! This covers the somewhat roundabout journey the Bubble to the Orion Molecular Complex (yes, that’s in the other direction from Colonia – I took the scenic route!) and then turning around and eventually arriving at Amundsen Terminal at the Lagoon Nebula for some much-needed rest and repairs!
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Before I headed out on my Great Expedition to Colonia and beyond (I’ll be uploading the logs later on), I bought myself a Python and did a bit of mining. Here are some of the highlight from that escapade – it was actually kinda fun, though not exactly a huge money-maker for me.
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Here’s Part 2 of my expedition to NGC 7822 – continuing on to the Pleiades and to take a look at the Guardian ruins!
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My third expedition was a rather roundabout trip that started off as an investigation of the NGC 7822 nebula (an interesting line of stars that are visible from the vicinity of the North American Nebula). I ended up seeing a little more than that though…! (January 3303)
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My second expedition was to the supergiant star Antares. I’d been there before in my Cobra Mk III when ED was first released, but I didn’t have an Advanced Discovery Scanner then and it was harder to plot a route to because the plotting distance limit was about 100 ly. This time around I was better prepared, heading out in a new Keelback with an ADS and fighter bay!
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I’ll be posting my Elite Dangerous Exploration Galleries here so I can have them somewhere safely archived (and more accessible than Facebook or G+). So here’s my first proper exploration trip to Deneb and the Sadr Nebula in my Asp Explorer! (December 3302).
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And now for something completely different – I have started streaming! I now have my very own Twitch page at https://www.twitch.tv/evildrganymede and I’ll be streaming Elite Dangerous there on a semi-regular basis (check the twitch page or my twitter for updates)!
I’ve already finished my first stream this evening, and you can now see the whole thing on youtube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i94h6R1x8wk . Highlights include a few neutron star boosts, finding a moon that orbited very close to the edge of its gas giant primary’s ring system, and a big landable icy planet. Plus an explanation about how planetary rings work, and a few rants about the inaccuracies of Elite Dangerous :).
So if you’d like to join me as I explore the galaxy in Elite Dangerous, please check out the twitch page and videos and Follow me there to be notified about when I’ll be streaming again!
While I was looking at the side branches of the French Arm (I’m still working on it!), I found a group of systems that were 7.769ly from the nearest star on one of the side branches. Which got me to wonder – what happens if a system in the 2300AD setting is slightly over 7.7 ly away – between 7.7 to 7.8ly? Can people still reach it without tugs or multiple drives/tuning? Do they have to “push the drive” even for such a small increment?
Let’s have a look at how “pushing the drive” really works (using the MGT rules). The rules say: “Pushing a stutterwarp drive past its discharge limit: 1–6 hours, Very Difficult, range increased by Effect x10%.” So when do you start “pushing the drive”? I’d guess no later than 6 hours before it gets to 7.7 ly (otherwise you wouldn’t be able to finish before hitting the limit).
Getting into the nitty-gritty of the game engine, I guess theoretically an engineer could spend a lot of time on it (reduce by two timesteps to 10-60 hours – so break out the coffee and stims!) to knock the DM penalty from DM-4 to DM-2. I’d imagine most engineers would have skill level 2-3 (DM +2 or +3), and Int or Edu of at least 9-11 (DM+1) – let’s just say that a competent engineer should be able to get a DM+4 between their skill and characteristic. So if they spend 10-60 hrs on it they’d be rolling 2d6 against difficulty 8 with a net DM of +2, which would give them a 72% chance of success. Though granted, it’s unlikely they’d be able to do the task for 10-60 hours (on their own at least) – at worst I think they’d just do it at Very Difficult with 1-6 hours and have all the DMs cancel out for a 42% chance of success. It seems to me that a competent engineer could reasonably be willing to spend at least 6-24 hours to push the drive to get a 58% chance of success with no possibility of destroying the ship (though there’s still a 42% chance that he’ll destroy the drive, so it’s probably not something that would be tried regularly).
Exceptional Failure only occurs if the Effect is -6 or less (I think that’s what the rules mean – not less than -6, since -6 isn’t on the table otherwise), so they’d only have a 2.8% chance of exploding the ship if they didn’t take more time to do it (Very difficult, no DMs, 8+ required) – otherwise Exceptional Failures can’t happen if there are net positive DMs. Though Average or Marginal Failures still at least disable the drive (I’d imagine the drive would just explode but not necessarily destroy the ship with it, and the the ship would suddenly drop out of stutterwarp).
If the roll succeeds, then there’s a decent chance that the range is increased by 10-30% (the chance is lower for the 40-60% increase, since that would require bigger effect – though spending longer on the roll would make those more likely) – so theoretically a drive has a reasonable chance of being pushed to 10.01 lightyears (maybe up to 12.32 ly if the engineer is very good and very lucky)!
So the question really is whether all this is even necessary to go slightly over 7.700 ly. If it is, then I guess it’s not going to be very likely that anyone would want to be regularly heading out to systems that are even 7.71 – 7.80 lightyears away since there’s a significant chance the drive would be destroyed/rendered inoperative (even though it’s at most about 1-2% further in range). Maybe risk-taking explorers would do it, but it wouldn’t be a regular route. Or maybe a 1-2% range increase is OK, but the drive MUST be checked over/recalibrated/retuned at the destination (after discharging) before it can be reused? I’d be more inclined to go with the latter option – it adds possibilities and doesn’t seem unreasonable.
Extending the drive range
There are at least three options (possibly more) to increase the range of the drive:
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