Commanders,

This is a story that began before my first (and just wrapped up) exploration trip. Or maybe I should say it is the story of my first attempt to explore?

One night, I was travelling in my shield-less and back then entirely un-engineered Diamondback Explorer (I love that ship to no end), just about 20.000Ly away from Sol, travelling through the Sagittarius Carina arm. And then I found a planet of which I thought it was pretty and colorful, so I wanted to land on it.

Well, let me cut this story short... At the helm of my unshielded vessel I was drinking beer, boosting downwards to the surface in a pretty laissez faire fashion... It was only after the second-to-last boost that I noticed it. The fact that I was dropping like a stone! I had made a stupid mistake out of pure ignorance, having had zero experience with higher g worlds...

Despite my level of intoxication I was still able to make the right choice; Nose up and boost! And as I heard that reassuring roar of my booster rockets coming to life... it was over, in that very same second. I had been to late.

Reawaking in my escape pod had me in a daze of shock and disbelief. My entire body would just go numb.

After seconds, maybe even minutes of just sitting there in disbelief, I simple had to accept in inevitable.

After I got back to the bubble, I would just wander the stations and streets for a few days, as my motivation simply didn't rise much at all. I felt wrong here. I always had that strange feeling when sitting in the midst of civilization.

I didn't belong here.

And that's when it hit me. I had to go back! I had to go to that very planet again, and conquer it properly by landing on it.

But before, I simply needed something even more significant to overcome all of this... A baptism of fire!

I looked at the stellar catalogues of Universal Cartographics, and there it was. My choice. At 98M⊕ and 9.77g on the surface this was one of the most challenging worlds to land on, and reasonably close to the civilized bubble, just 1400Ly away. This is where I would start! HD148937 3!

Of course, a Commander I know would jokingly say to me that I would've learned to equip shields on my ship after all of this. Right?

Heh...

Hell'd rather freeze over!

All I did upgrade was my frameshift drive, so I could get there faster, already feeling the hunger for the g's!

"And there it was, in all its glory" is what I should be saying now, but... While I'd love to show you how I landed on a certain 9.77g world, I didn't take any photos of it. Idiotic. :( Instead, as a replacement, let me show you a much farther-away 10.66g one instead, which I had conquered later in the game:

Let's get closer!

And real close!

Well, there is at least one funny anecdote about that 10.66g world that truly sets it apart from the other high-g planets I've visited so far. When just 200 or 300 metres over its surface, I noticed that my lateral thrusters had suffered from some drift. The control ministick was seemingly not perfectly centered, so my ship didn't hold still.

Now I had to make a decision... blast off again, fix it, and then re-attempt landing? After all, accidentally igniting my downwards vertical thrusters (on the same ministick!) would mean certain death, as my vessel would drop for more than a kilometre, should that happen.

Ultimately, I decided to do it on the spot (with over a billion worth of exploration data on board at that time).

I don't think I've ever touched anything (or anyone) as softly and with as much care as I did that ministick... ;) And it worked. No vertical thruster ignition, and the lateral ones would just hold still...

That resulted in an awesome feeling after finally having put my heavy arse to the floor:

"Shieldless and flawless" should become my planetary landing motto after this!

Needless to say, I had my meeting with a certain 1.53g (heh.. how unintimidating it now seemed) world that I had dubbed "Azar's Ender" as well. With success this time around:

This time everything went smooth, almost boringly so:

And that, Commanders, is how I came to be enamoured with high g worlds.

Ah, that reminds me, recently a Commander going by the name "HassleTheHoff" (heh ;)) landed on a new record holder with 11.01g, [Kyloall CL-Y g1518 d 1].

Guess I won't be running out of challenges too soon! :)

Edit: Aaaah! I found a photo of that 9.77g world in my archives after all...

Oh well, here it is:

Commanders,

Here is another much-belated report from my first exploration trip. The topic: Black holes - Sinister beauties! Most parts shown here are from my early travels up to the end of the first third, I believe.

Of course there will be a time in any explorer's travels where ones becomes fascinated with them, as happened to me as well.

Here would be one with clearly defined gravitational lensing, a smaller one with just 2-3 M☉ if I remember correctly:

I remember it quite clearly, that feeling of fear when coming close. As if some primordial sense or instinct in the back of my head had started screaming something along the lines of "This isn't natural! Don't get closer! Run!!" or something.

The closer I got to any of them, the more my hair would start to stand up with that eerie feeling and sense of danger all over me.

Here, have another one, sitting inside of a supernova remnant nebula, of which I also made a photograph:

This time I got cocky... I don't know what it was that got into me, but I carefully entered the black hole's exclusion zone, dropping out of frameshift space just outside of it, using thrusters for the rest of the way. Despite the mass of the anomaly at I think it was around 4M☉, the zone was really small and easily traversable. By using conventional thrusters I got as close as just over 40km from it:

Let me just say... that didn't feel very safe. At 40km I simply had to stop as the heat from the gas around the object had become too high for my ship to handle. Just imagine the closeness - and that one had over 4M☉ of mass!

And to round this up, here comes our supermassive one, Sagittarius A*:

Where I could get as close as 40km to a regular black hole, the closest I managed to get to SagA* was 40Ls - about 12 million kilometres! Here, heat's keeping you at bay just as much as with the smaller one before.

Another shot:

And yes, it's warping space pretty badly, you'll even get double-vision:

Commanders,

This first log entry of mine comes belated by several months, as most will as I describe the happenings on my first exloration trip, which ended up being a galactic circumnavigation. Well, almost, I kinda skipped a quarter of the galaxy in favor of visiting Sagittarius A* and Colonia.

Mind you, my reports will not come in any chronological order until I've caught up with what I'm currently doing.

But now, about that Earth-like world with rings... let me just say, it came as a complete surprise as I had entered the system [Hypoae Scrua EH-M d7-2661], having started to cautiously use Neutron boosts here and there, just briefly before finding that system. It was in the galactic centre, so about at 40% of my exploration trip.

Seeing that the system had only one world, I thought "let's just wrap this up real quick" when activating the full spectrum system scanner. Moments after that I started to become really nervous though, as the single spectral line looked really conspicuous in all the wrong part of the spectrum for a neutron star system.

And there it still was... a sole Earth-like world, all alone in its system!

And it was ringed!!

Of course I had to get closer:

And two divings into the rings, because I couldn't just not do that:

And even today, many months and many discovered Earth-likes later, this is the only ringed Earth-like I ever managed to find. And what a coincidence for it to be in a Neutron star system as its only satellite.

Most certainly one to remember!