While it turned out my first selection of a class B supergiant had already been claimed, my second one Eol Prou ZE-A f7 had not. It was only about 9 jumps from Colonia, too.

The view is from the rim of a large impact crater looking back towards the supergiant from a bit over 2000Ls. The Colonia nebula is to the bottom right of the image. The nebula between the star and galaxy is Dryooe Prou AA-A h55. The one just peeking out from behind my Krait Phantom is Dryooe Prou AA-A h131.

The surface of the crater wall was extremely lumpy and formed some nice canyons to fly down. Poor flying and 1.37G resulted in loss of shields and 5% off the hull. I could have repaired that, but decided not to bother since I was returning to Colonia anyway.

I must have searched tens of thousands of systems in the galmap, searching for a Class-G Supergiant. I'd noticed on EDSM that the systems were almost always "e" numbers, so I limited my searches to those. Even so, I ended up downloading a mouse macro utility (Mini Mouse Macro - it's standalone and doesn't even need installing) to speed up the galmap searching.

After many play sessions I eventually found Dumboea YZ-Y e2287. This is the view of the star from about 2800Ls.

After scanning the system I decided to visit another system I found while searching - Dumboea UY-S e3-3733. I had noticed that this system had one of each type of main sequence star, except for an O-class. I was worried that I might run into one of the other stars on entry to the system, but the nearest stars to the entry star are 230Ls away.

While checking my list of first-discovered star classes, I discovered a new type had been added! Now I need to find a Class-B Supergiant!

Luckily, they are much easier to find. Search for the "AA-A h" pattern until a blue super giant turns up. I just need to find one nobody else has.

Made it! A successful landing on Kyloall CL-Y g1518 D 1.

The gravity was already above 5.3G when I got close enough for the gravity reading to appear and rose rapidly after that. Unlike the last high-gravity world I landed on, I was able to stay in orbital cruise right down to the drop altitude, then glide down to about 3km altitude. On landing, the gravity reading was 0.01G short: 11.00G:

I didn't even ding the shields - they read 100% when I checked immediately after landing. Next challenge is taking off...

I'm going to scout around this area to see if I can find an undiscovered class-G super giant.

After a month of slowly collecting and trading materials, I've fully engineered a Krait Mk2 as an armed trader for "general missions", and a Krait Phantom for exploration.

I've never really liked the Kraits - I've preferred the Python for a long time, but the Krait Mk2 was fine for doing surface scans, prospecting, and hauling cargo from A to B.

As a "shakedown cruise" for the Krait Phantom, I'm going to Kyloall CL-Y g1518 D 1 - an 11.01G planet!

I'm starting my expedition at Tolagarf's Junkyard. The Krait Phantom has a respectable 63.44Ly jump range and I've been pleasantly surprised that it's only 38 jumps to get there.

It's been seven months since I paused this main account and switched to my alt account for a while.

For that time I've been selling 400 Arx worth of exploration data each week. This week, I finally brought my account balance up to 4,000,000,000Cr!

I know it's not much in these days of LTD cheesing, but I feel like I earned this properly.

I had estimated that I would end up with a balance of about 4.1 BCr by the time I sold all my data, and it's looking to be about 4.18 BCr. I estimate I have one more week of exploration data to sell.

Now that I have the badge - it's time to start spending. There's going to be a new Krait Mk2 for Colonia mission running while I unlock the engineers here. Then there's going to be a Krait Phantom fitted for exploration. Finally, I'll probably buy a Mamba. All these are going to engineered as best they can in Colonia, then left here as my 'Colonia' ships.

Today would have been Day 255 of Distant Worlds 2. I finally made it to Colonia.

I first landed at Colonia Hub, primarily because I really don't like docking the Beluga at space stations, but also because it is controlled by the Colonia Council and I wanted to sell my exploration data there.

First thing I did was repair my ship, including the paint. I'm not one of those commanders who thinks a tatty ship looks good. I like to see my decals!

As it turned out, Colonia Hub doesn't have a Universal Cartographics, so I flew to Prisma Renata which does.

After selling two pages (about 100MCr) worth of exploration data, I exited to the main menu to see how my Arx was going - 400 already!

According to EDSM, I should have a little over 2.8BCr of exploration data to sell. If I don't want to waste Arx, it's going to take a while to sell!

I'll take the opportunity to work on my alt account after neglecting it for many months.

A mere eight jumps from Colonia, I discovered another Earth-Like World - Eol Prou MT-G c11-175 CDE 2.

I should probably stop these close-up photos - it's just a big tease reminding me that we can't land on these worlds.

Still slowly making my way towards Colonia. Still got about 7,000Ly to go.

Today I found an Earth-like world, Agnaimt YP-N d7-26 3, the first for some time. Got some nice screenshots from it, too.

I'm now about 400 jumps from Colonia. I decided it was time for a break from travelling to get some screenshots and found a rocky moon with some volcanism orbiting a gas giant.

Dryua Ble UZ-W d2-5 6 a had a couple of volcanic spots down some canyons located with nice views of the gas giant on the horizon.

The second area had a very deep canyon.

I was able to park the Esra Taf at the top of the canyon and still able to drive to the end of the canyon with her taking off. I got to 1.7km away at most and was able to drive down the bottom of the canyon and examine the volcanic vents there.

One of the more obscure "to-do" things while on the Distant Worlds 2 trip was to find at least one Helium-Rich Gas Giant. It was the only planetary body type on my EDSM Exploration dashboard that was "first discovery: 0".

I searched EDSM for helium-rich gas giants and located Eok Greau HS-R d5-64 a little over 1,000Ly from me that had nine, so I headed there on the reasonable assumption that other helium-rich gas giants might be in nearby systems.

As it turned out, the second system I visited had 2. The first one had a rocky moon orbiting quite close to the rings. What a nice view of my first EDSM discovered helium-rich gas giant:

When I then checked my exploration dashboard to confirm, I found out that G-class super-giants have been added to the list of stellar bodies - and I haven't been first to discover any of those!

Sigh, one step forward, one step back.