Role playing out our time in game seems like a lot of fun and I wanted to throw my hat in, so here's my first entry on that front. Added flavor images, let me know if I'm clogging things up by attaching them this way and I'll change to embed links!
Miko Stargazer's Travel Log Entry#1 21st of March 3302
This is so amazing! I’m running a final diagnostic on the FSD firmware and once that’s done my journey is going to start and for the first time in my life I’ll be travelling beyond my local star cluster. I’ve been dreaming about a trip like this for a long time, but now that I’m sitting on the edge of it I’m getting kind of anxious!
I guess I should start a bit more formally if I want to keep a proper travel log. My name is Urasaki Miko, born and raised in the Mingh system. I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of it. Mingh is a triple star system out on the very edge of inhabited space. There’s nothing of note except a mining colony and a terraforming project run by the Furukawa Corporation, the latter is my home.
It isn’t a proper home yet. Masamune is still at least ten years away from being livable without suits. You won’t find any planet named Masamune if you look up the system. The official name in the galactic registry is Mingh A 6, but everyone has decided its colony name will be Masamune. It’s a reference to a famous blacksmith from Earth, inspired by the high metal content of this world. I should avoid getting too deep in the weeds about the planet, at least for this entry. I’m chock full of such info because my father is the head of climatology for the terraforming project. He’s been working on this planet for the past twenty five years and he’s so passionate about terraforming that any topic can be linked to it. Every dinner conversation will start to meander into aerosol based abatement methods or albedo calculations. Thankfully Grandma a will point out when he’s getting carried away. She does the same thing for me, to the point I can imagine her in the back of my head telling me that I’m starting to ramble on this entry!
You can’t blame him for being so enthusiastic. Terraforming has always been his passion and Masamune is not just a job, it’s a homestead. Our family is being compensated by Furukawa in acres of land once the terraforming project is complete so my parents built a family here and in another decade or so we’ll be among the first official colonists.
My siblings are all working on the family business, so to speak, studying geology, hydrology, and the like. I’ve never been interested in terraforming of the planet myself. I’ve always had ‘the wanderlust’ as my grandmother puts it. While my siblings have been off studying the planet, I was studying grandmother’s old Sidewinder.
I first found it when I was six years old. I made a wrong turn in the supply warehouse and there it was, tucked away in a corner
It was the closest I’d ever been to a real spaceship, and I crept closer. With its landing gear extended, I was just tall enough to reach up and touch the bottom of the ship. I moved a few boxes to construct a set of stairs and hopped up onto the top of the ship. That was when I saw the inscription along the edge of the cockpit: “CMDR Urasaki a.” This wasn’t just any ship, it was my grandmother’s, which made it even more tantalizing and taboo. Grandmother never liked talking about her past, and those who asked her about it openly were met with only a grim stare. I had only heard vague references from my parents and half informed details from my older brother. To a six year old, concepts like 'bounty hunter' were overly technical, but I understood clearly it meant grandmother used to fly all over space. The ship represented a piece of my grandmother’s past that seemed otherwise closed to me, and a promise that I could one day fly around space as well.
I started volunteering to grab things from the warehouse so I could go back and look at the ship again and again. Every trip left me captivated. I would run my hands over the hull, memorizing each little scratch in the paint and dent in the canopy. I would become so engrossed with the ship, that on that fateful day I never even noticed that grandmother had followed me.
“So this is why you’ve been so eager to help out your father lately.” I heard her say from behind me. I had been looking inside the cockpit, trying to guess at the purpose of all the buttons and displays and was caught so off guard I lost my balance and tumbled off the ship. Masamune is only 0.6 G, so the fall didn’t hurt at all. What was far more painful was the fear of what grandmother might do now that she knew what I was up to.
Well, not that she would do anything more than scold me, but you have to understand! She has this presence that makes me think she could stare down the president of the Federation and the Emperor at the same time. She’s over a hundred years old with the wrinkles to prove it, but her poise lets you see that she wears her age and her age doesn’t wear her. She has such deep, penetrating, brown eyes that seem to cut right to your core. Picking myself up from the ground, I could tell those eyes had peered into my soul and learned of my every thought and emotion as I studied her ship. Knowing that I had been trying to peek into a past she didn’t like to talk about, I braced myself to be torn apart by her words.
Instead she gave a soft smile. “Like the ship, do you?” I was still too stunned to do more than offer a little nod. She walked closer and ran a hand along the prow. “It’s been a long time since I flew in this..”
“It must have taken you to a lot of amazing places.” I managed to say.
She looked back at me with a strange smile, like I had reminded her of some old loss. “Yes, it took me to...and from many things. Are you interested in far away places?” We sat on the edge of the ship and I gave her an avalanche of questions about the places she’d been and the people she’d met. She offered a few tidbits here and there, but chose her words very carefully and didn’t go into much detail. I suspect she was not entirely proud of being a bounty hunter, but exactly what her feelings on that were is still a mystery. After a little while she declared questioning was done for today, but offered to tell me more later on. “It seems you have a bit of the wanderlust in you, Miko. I suppose that’s normal for the young.”
“Did you have wanderlust when you were young, grandma?”
“No, never.” She replied flatly. “I’ve always wanted a place to call my own. The things I did when I was younger...well you do what you must to survive. Space isn’t a place for innocent.”
And the next ten years worked that way. I would ask questions about everything from her past to details on how the ship operated and she would carefully ration out answers. But over time that changed. When I was sixteen, in between my questions, I asked if could have a chance to fly.
There was always a stream of freighters flying into the Furukawa Enterprise station up in orbit. Terraforming requires a lot of imported material. Grandmother’s sidewinder had space to carry 4 tonnes of cargo and while it wasn’t much, I could contribute to the terraforming project that way, and perhaps make some money in the process. Grandmother forbade it. “I won’t see you blown up by pirates for the sake of four tons of cargo.”
And she had a point. Mingh didn’t have infamous pirates looking for spoils, but also didn’t have much in the way of security. Masamune was technically Federation affiliated but didn't have all that much in the way of security. There were several independent organizations that tended to raid incoming shipments.
I pleaded and argued for a while, and perhaps because she could see how dedicated I was, grandmother made me a deal. The sidewinder needed a lot of restoration work so we would fix it up together and she would let me fly only when I was ready. And that meant grandmother was going to teach me how to fight.
We started working on the ship every morning and every night we would plug into a virtual simulator and grandmother would train me. This involved me exploding, a lot. It didn’t matter what ship or loadout I tried to use, grandmother could mop the floor with me when she wanted to. Slowly she taught me some of the essential principles of combat, especially when it came to her sidewinder. She had me slowly memorize the ways to counter any kind of ship I might come across. After about two and a half years of her tutelage she decided that while I was not a gifted combat pilot, I sufficient enough to survive in our local space. Or as she put it, “You’re good enough to kill most of the backwater trash that flies through these areas, but you’ll be in a lot of trouble if you face a real pilot.” I was happy though because it meant I could fly.
And fly I did, and my second home became Furukawa Enterprise Station. Even with my comparatively low cargo space, there was supply and demand to be had. I happily spent the next two years flying back and forth to supply our station with metals, terraforming equipment, or just a few packs of liquor on the down low. And just as grandmother had predicted, there were plenty of pirates happy to blow you up over 100 credits. If not for grandmother’s training I’d have been floating around in escape pods on a dozen separate occasions. Instead I found myself working through five thousand rounds of ammunition over the course of the year. In the second year, I started making more money from the bounties than I was making on the trade routes. It was good steady work and I was able to visit a dozen nearby systems, but I was starting to get a bit restless. I started to jump out a little bit further, seeing if I could get a better deal on cargo, or just flying around some of the brown dwarf systems nearby Mingh.
Grandmother started noticing the diversions in my flight log. “I think our little corner of the universe has become too small for you. You know, you’ve been scanning those pirates all this time and a lot of them had bounties in the Alliance and Empire. I’ve noticed you’ve built up quite a claim.” It was true, it turned out a lot of these low level pirates travelled around and built up bounties in places all over inhabited space. I was entitled to over a hundred thousand credits from the Alliance alone. “I suppose I can give you your birthday present a few days early.”
Grandmother gave me a suggested flight plan, and a copy of two ancient earth books on real paper, entitled Waldon and Leaves of Grass. “I used to read these on long flights, they might be good reading for you as well.” But she gave me an even bigger present a week later. She walked me out to the sidewinder to show me. She had fitted a new kind of scanner on board to help with my sightseeing and had changed the inscription. I hugged her tight and cried seeing the new inscription on the ship: CMDR Miko Stargazer. “A lot of pilots go by callsigns, and Urasaki turns out to be hard for some people to pronounce. I thought Stargazer suited you.”
So that’s the story. I guess it did run pretty long. But it’ll be more exciting going forward. Everything is green and I’m all set to go. The Friendship Drive is charging and I’m about to fly out into the unknown. I can’t wait!
Miko Stargazer's Travel Log Entry#1 21st of March 3302
This is so amazing! I’m running a final diagnostic on the FSD firmware and once that’s done my journey is going to start and for the first time in my life I’ll be travelling beyond my local star cluster. I’ve been dreaming about a trip like this for a long time, but now that I’m sitting on the edge of it I’m getting kind of anxious!
I guess I should start a bit more formally if I want to keep a proper travel log. My name is Urasaki Miko, born and raised in the Mingh system. I’m not surprised you’ve never heard of it. Mingh is a triple star system out on the very edge of inhabited space. There’s nothing of note except a mining colony and a terraforming project run by the Furukawa Corporation, the latter is my home.
It isn’t a proper home yet. Masamune is still at least ten years away from being livable without suits. You won’t find any planet named Masamune if you look up the system. The official name in the galactic registry is Mingh A 6, but everyone has decided its colony name will be Masamune. It’s a reference to a famous blacksmith from Earth, inspired by the high metal content of this world. I should avoid getting too deep in the weeds about the planet, at least for this entry. I’m chock full of such info because my father is the head of climatology for the terraforming project. He’s been working on this planet for the past twenty five years and he’s so passionate about terraforming that any topic can be linked to it. Every dinner conversation will start to meander into aerosol based abatement methods or albedo calculations. Thankfully Grandma a will point out when he’s getting carried away. She does the same thing for me, to the point I can imagine her in the back of my head telling me that I’m starting to ramble on this entry!
You can’t blame him for being so enthusiastic. Terraforming has always been his passion and Masamune is not just a job, it’s a homestead. Our family is being compensated by Furukawa in acres of land once the terraforming project is complete so my parents built a family here and in another decade or so we’ll be among the first official colonists.
My siblings are all working on the family business, so to speak, studying geology, hydrology, and the like. I’ve never been interested in terraforming of the planet myself. I’ve always had ‘the wanderlust’ as my grandmother puts it. While my siblings have been off studying the planet, I was studying grandmother’s old Sidewinder.
I first found it when I was six years old. I made a wrong turn in the supply warehouse and there it was, tucked away in a corner
It was the closest I’d ever been to a real spaceship, and I crept closer. With its landing gear extended, I was just tall enough to reach up and touch the bottom of the ship. I moved a few boxes to construct a set of stairs and hopped up onto the top of the ship. That was when I saw the inscription along the edge of the cockpit: “CMDR Urasaki a.” This wasn’t just any ship, it was my grandmother’s, which made it even more tantalizing and taboo. Grandmother never liked talking about her past, and those who asked her about it openly were met with only a grim stare. I had only heard vague references from my parents and half informed details from my older brother. To a six year old, concepts like 'bounty hunter' were overly technical, but I understood clearly it meant grandmother used to fly all over space. The ship represented a piece of my grandmother’s past that seemed otherwise closed to me, and a promise that I could one day fly around space as well.
I started volunteering to grab things from the warehouse so I could go back and look at the ship again and again. Every trip left me captivated. I would run my hands over the hull, memorizing each little scratch in the paint and dent in the canopy. I would become so engrossed with the ship, that on that fateful day I never even noticed that grandmother had followed me.
“So this is why you’ve been so eager to help out your father lately.” I heard her say from behind me. I had been looking inside the cockpit, trying to guess at the purpose of all the buttons and displays and was caught so off guard I lost my balance and tumbled off the ship. Masamune is only 0.6 G, so the fall didn’t hurt at all. What was far more painful was the fear of what grandmother might do now that she knew what I was up to.
Well, not that she would do anything more than scold me, but you have to understand! She has this presence that makes me think she could stare down the president of the Federation and the Emperor at the same time. She’s over a hundred years old with the wrinkles to prove it, but her poise lets you see that she wears her age and her age doesn’t wear her. She has such deep, penetrating, brown eyes that seem to cut right to your core. Picking myself up from the ground, I could tell those eyes had peered into my soul and learned of my every thought and emotion as I studied her ship. Knowing that I had been trying to peek into a past she didn’t like to talk about, I braced myself to be torn apart by her words.
Instead she gave a soft smile. “Like the ship, do you?” I was still too stunned to do more than offer a little nod. She walked closer and ran a hand along the prow. “It’s been a long time since I flew in this..”
“It must have taken you to a lot of amazing places.” I managed to say.
She looked back at me with a strange smile, like I had reminded her of some old loss. “Yes, it took me to...and from many things. Are you interested in far away places?” We sat on the edge of the ship and I gave her an avalanche of questions about the places she’d been and the people she’d met. She offered a few tidbits here and there, but chose her words very carefully and didn’t go into much detail. I suspect she was not entirely proud of being a bounty hunter, but exactly what her feelings on that were is still a mystery. After a little while she declared questioning was done for today, but offered to tell me more later on. “It seems you have a bit of the wanderlust in you, Miko. I suppose that’s normal for the young.”
“Did you have wanderlust when you were young, grandma?”
“No, never.” She replied flatly. “I’ve always wanted a place to call my own. The things I did when I was younger...well you do what you must to survive. Space isn’t a place for innocent.”
And the next ten years worked that way. I would ask questions about everything from her past to details on how the ship operated and she would carefully ration out answers. But over time that changed. When I was sixteen, in between my questions, I asked if could have a chance to fly.
There was always a stream of freighters flying into the Furukawa Enterprise station up in orbit. Terraforming requires a lot of imported material. Grandmother’s sidewinder had space to carry 4 tonnes of cargo and while it wasn’t much, I could contribute to the terraforming project that way, and perhaps make some money in the process. Grandmother forbade it. “I won’t see you blown up by pirates for the sake of four tons of cargo.”
And she had a point. Mingh didn’t have infamous pirates looking for spoils, but also didn’t have much in the way of security. Masamune was technically Federation affiliated but didn't have all that much in the way of security. There were several independent organizations that tended to raid incoming shipments.
I pleaded and argued for a while, and perhaps because she could see how dedicated I was, grandmother made me a deal. The sidewinder needed a lot of restoration work so we would fix it up together and she would let me fly only when I was ready. And that meant grandmother was going to teach me how to fight.
We started working on the ship every morning and every night we would plug into a virtual simulator and grandmother would train me. This involved me exploding, a lot. It didn’t matter what ship or loadout I tried to use, grandmother could mop the floor with me when she wanted to. Slowly she taught me some of the essential principles of combat, especially when it came to her sidewinder. She had me slowly memorize the ways to counter any kind of ship I might come across. After about two and a half years of her tutelage she decided that while I was not a gifted combat pilot, I sufficient enough to survive in our local space. Or as she put it, “You’re good enough to kill most of the backwater trash that flies through these areas, but you’ll be in a lot of trouble if you face a real pilot.” I was happy though because it meant I could fly.
And fly I did, and my second home became Furukawa Enterprise Station. Even with my comparatively low cargo space, there was supply and demand to be had. I happily spent the next two years flying back and forth to supply our station with metals, terraforming equipment, or just a few packs of liquor on the down low. And just as grandmother had predicted, there were plenty of pirates happy to blow you up over 100 credits. If not for grandmother’s training I’d have been floating around in escape pods on a dozen separate occasions. Instead I found myself working through five thousand rounds of ammunition over the course of the year. In the second year, I started making more money from the bounties than I was making on the trade routes. It was good steady work and I was able to visit a dozen nearby systems, but I was starting to get a bit restless. I started to jump out a little bit further, seeing if I could get a better deal on cargo, or just flying around some of the brown dwarf systems nearby Mingh.
Grandmother started noticing the diversions in my flight log. “I think our little corner of the universe has become too small for you. You know, you’ve been scanning those pirates all this time and a lot of them had bounties in the Alliance and Empire. I’ve noticed you’ve built up quite a claim.” It was true, it turned out a lot of these low level pirates travelled around and built up bounties in places all over inhabited space. I was entitled to over a hundred thousand credits from the Alliance alone. “I suppose I can give you your birthday present a few days early.”
Grandmother gave me a suggested flight plan, and a copy of two ancient earth books on real paper, entitled Waldon and Leaves of Grass. “I used to read these on long flights, they might be good reading for you as well.” But she gave me an even bigger present a week later. She walked me out to the sidewinder to show me. She had fitted a new kind of scanner on board to help with my sightseeing and had changed the inscription. I hugged her tight and cried seeing the new inscription on the ship: CMDR Miko Stargazer. “A lot of pilots go by callsigns, and Urasaki turns out to be hard for some people to pronounce. I thought Stargazer suited you.”
So that’s the story. I guess it did run pretty long. But it’ll be more exciting going forward. Everything is green and I’m all set to go. The Friendship Drive is charging and I’m about to fly out into the unknown. I can’t wait!
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