The journeys of the GCU Monday Morning Apocalypse

Mephane · Dec 22, 2015

Some may remember me from my first set of expeditions. I have been holding out for Horizons for a new one - so now is the time. I've grabbed the good old Adder, refurbished it, upgraded the thrusters, installed a vehicle bay, and gave it a fresh coat of paint. I originally planned to make it bright red, good for spotting it with the naked eye especially in environments like the surface of ice worlds, but with the arrival of the black paintjobs, I couldn't resist.

I present the GCU Monday Morning Apocalypse:

At this point I want to give out a huge kudos to anyone involved in designing the Adder, from the shape of the hull, all the moving bits like the rotating heat radiators (and how they change their hue at different heat levels!), to the sounds. It is a beautiful little ship with lots of character.

(On a practical note, all the pretty pictures are going to be presented directly, the spoiler tags will hide the "boring" stuff like reference images with landing coordinates and system map descriptions. You can skip them if you are not interested in these details. Also, I am not going to distinguish in my text between planets, dwarf planets (if you buy into that dinstinction in the first place), or moons. Anything that is not a star is going to be called a planet.)

The ultimate goal is indeed Sagittarius A*, but I consider this a soft goal. I am aiming in the general direction, but if I don't make it there for any reason, I won't consider the expedition a failure. After all, the journey is the goal, isn't it?

I am going to make up individual destinations as I go along. As the first target I had originally picked the Coalsack, but I must admit I found it kind of boring there and thus quickly went on without taking the time for interesting pictures. The next goal in the journey was Shapley 1 and the Fine Ring Nebula.

Before heading into the nebula itself, I jumped to the closest system just outside it, for the best view of its exterior. This also was the very first time in this journey where I went down to a planet and landed.

I picked this landing site intentionally, just inside the terminator line between day and night, and on a hill just at the edge of a big crater, for the best view at both the stars and a low-hanging sun.

Naturally, this being my first landing, I had to drive all the way down into the crater, where I even found an almost rectangular rock. Not quite the regularity and proportions for a monolith, but it was a good try. You rock.

Eventually, it was time to launch and jump to my real goal.

And I was not disappointed.

Cmdr Frawd Digger · Dec 22, 2015

Beautiful pics Cmdr...that nebula is just superb!

And yes, while I have never flown an Adder it does look like a beautiful ship.

Good luck with your explorations.

Frawd

Edit...you need to change your sig...the adder is still red

Adept · Dec 22, 2015

Great pictures

Mephane · Dec 23, 2015

The first earth-like world on this journey:

Mephane · Dec 23, 2015

HR 6164 - come for the black holes...

... stay for the scenery!

I just had to touch down on that central peak.

Mephane · Dec 26, 2015

While heading roughly coreward, I followed my usual habit of aiming for bright, blue stars, simply because I like them. Often they are just singular or multiple stars without any planets, sometimes with lots of planets, but I found a particularly interesting triple star system with 2 planets, one of them with a moon (i.e. 3 planets total, going by the convention that they all count as planets). Only one of them landable, so I went in for a closer look

I landed inside a small crater, which seemed to be filled with a very thin layer of dust. This was not visible from above, only when looking out from below.

Curiously, it looked the same after I had driven out of the crater, even across the planet's wide flat plains.

The plains were interrupted by various tiny craters and the occasional field of hilly terrain.

I was not the first one here. I found various crashed probes and SRVs, and even an occupied escape pod. Sadly my Adder does not have any cargo capacity whatsoever, so there was little I could do.

I've been noticing the same cluster of blue stars in the galactic plane for quite some time now, and when leaving this planet, I decided to make it my next big milestone.

Mephane · Dec 27, 2015

I came across this binary planet with several peculiar surface structures which I would like to call "spiderwebs". So I took a closer look.

It turned out the spiderwebs are interconnected shallow canyons revealing some material from below the planet's surface.

So I landed and drove down into one of the canyons. It's floor featured mostly large, flat areas.

I chose this particular piece of the canyon because it cut through a higher area of the surrounding surface, giving me a view downhill from the canyon floor, in both directions.

As I suspected, the ground material of the canyons is native to the planet: all objects I found on the wave scanner were outcrops. And just look what one of them revealed after closer inspection.

Among the yield from these outcrops were not just iron, nickel and chromium, but also such rare materials as vanadium and zirconium.

My curiosity thus awakened, I went to check out the other half of the binary planet pair, and indeed, it also featured the same spiderweb structures.

I noticed an "island" within one of the spiderwebs, and picked that as my landing site.

I touched down and drove to the edge of the island, which was at least 3 kilometers away from the ship. I would have really loved to know the actual size and height of the island, but alas, such tools are not within our grasp (yet?). But the ship self-dismissed before I reached the edge of the island, so assuming I landed smack in the middle (I probably didn't), I might estimate the island to be at least 6km across.

I drove down the edge, or "shore", quite easily. I have found that the best gravity for driving is around 1.5G, where the grip is very strong already but you have not yet any trouble climbing slopes. This canyon was especially wide, and its floor also consisted of mostly large, flat ground.

And then I found my first outcrop.

Jackpot.

Two more outcrops very close to the first one were just as shiny on the inside.

Mephane · Dec 31, 2015

I expected the spiderwebs to be a unique feature shared by the innermost binary planets, but I found a moon somewhere else in the system.

But before I inspected any of the many spiderwebs, I noticed something else. Look again at the above image, and pay close attention to the dark area on the left. Yes, that's right, gigantic ejecta lines spanning halfway across the planet!

Following their trail to the where they converge, I found this massive impact crater.

I landed on the rim...

... where I proceeded to have a fantastic space dinner - space pancakes and space chocolate and this wonderful view outside the window.

Then I went out and bingo!

And off to the spiderwebs.

As expected, they were canyons cutting into the surface and revealing different material from below.

The wall was very steep and the ride down was thus, let's say clumsy, but I made it in one piece.

I found some outcrops, but sadly they yielded only very common materials, iron, nickel, some sulphur. No shiny rocks.