This is the debriefing report about my fourth exploration journey, which (as usual) took a little longer than anticipated 
.
The journey can be divided into five distinctive parts:
Up front the statistics:
Some links:
Personal achievements:
And here's the wordy part.
Next things to do: Get that engineered FSD with a mega jump range. And maybe earn enough Imperial rank for a Clipper.
.The journey can be divided into five distinctive parts:
| 14 January - 27 February 3302 | Distant Worlds expedition part A | From Pallaeni system to Eok Gree CN-M C23-3274 (near DWE waypoint 16), where my ship was destroyed in a careless moment while landing on planet A 5 for prospecting with the Rock Rats |
| 28 February - 7 March 3302 | Distant Worlds expedition part B | Retracing my steps to Eok Gree CN-M C23-3274 for morbid sightseeing |
| 7 March - 30 March 3302 | Distant Worlds expedition part C | Continue journey to Beagle Point |
| 8 October 3302 - 12 February 3303 | Sagittarius-Carina mission | From Beagle Point (mission camp 19) to Gooroa GY-F D12-7 (mission camp 12) |
| 12 February - 6 April 3303 | Direct route back to the bubble | From Gooroa GY-F D12-7 to Ngulungbara |
Up front the statistics:
- Exploration credits for this trip: 143'330'168 (includes first discovery bonus)
- Rank before this trip: Pioneer
- Rank after this trip: Elite
- Systems visited: 5'018 (includes an unknown number of systems that I visited before the crash, but didn't visit a second time when I retraced my steps)
- Distance travelled: 156'486 ly (includes 49'003 ly travelled before the crash)
- Hyperspace jumps: 5'111 (includes 1'612 jumps made before the crash)
- Number of days: 258 (includes 10 days to retrace my steps after the crash, but excludes the time when I took a break [191 days])
- Earth-like world: 50 (37 first discoveries, 42 submitted to the List of Earth-like worlds, v2 forum thread)
- Water world: 237 (127 terraformable, 110 non-terraformable). This number is so low because I stopped scanning water worlds at some point to save on time - I'm no longer exploring for the money.
- Ammonia world: 47
- Terraformable high metal content planet: 196 (probably more, but this is the number I have recorded in my spreadsheet)
- Terraformable rocky planet: 5
- Water giant: 6
- Helium-rich gas giant: - (I didn't look)
- Black Hole: 61
- Neutron Star: 153
- White Dwarf star: 17
- Carbon star: 13
- Wolf-Rayet star: 15
- Red giant: 40
- Orange giant: 47
- Blue-white supergiant: 29
- Yellow-white supergiant: 5
- Red supergiant: 1
- Herbig AE/BE star: 84
- Class O star: 91 (all added to CMDR Andrew Gaspurr's list of class O stars)
Some links:
- Imgur album with images and travelogue comments for the Distant Worlds expedition part of the journey
- Imgur album with images and travelogue comments for the "Return via Carinii" part of the journey. The name comes from this forum thread by CMDR Whiterose.
- This page on my personal wiki has the current state of my project to create a survey of every possible star type in the game. There is still much to do .
Personal achievements:
- Promotion to Elite
- Eeshorks TO-R D4-531: First binary carbon star system.
- Dryio Flyue ND-S E4-151: First red supergiant star
- Nuekea AA-A H36: First binary supergiant system. First discovered by CMDR Rinzler 070707.
- Speamoea YT-Y D1-838: System with both a carbon star and a red giant star. Unfortunately I was unable to revisit the system after my crash, so it remains untagged. Feel free to get it.
- Chraichoi ZF-L D9-58: System that contains a terraformable water world that is orbiting a gas giant. The water world itself also has a moon, and the moon is landable! The orbital period of both the water world and its moon are fairly low (2.3 and 0.2 days, respectively), so the moon landscapes are subject to frequent day/night cycles, and you will almost always find a spot on the moon where you can admire both the parent water world and gas giant peeking over the horizon. Submitted this as POI to the S-C mission and the GMP.
- Flimbuae BA-A G5: System with 8 primary stars
- Cyaumie OZ-G D10-1: First CN6 IIIB type carbon star that I found. I have seen quite a few CN type carbon stars during my travels, so I like to think that this type may be somewhat rarer than the CN4 and CN5 types.
- Schreang MM-M D7-16: Carbon star system that contains an earth-like world
- Floawns YE-R D4-127 and Floawns XE-R D4-59: A red giant and an orange giant star system, respectively, that both contain an earth-like world. Not sure if this is really rare, but for me at least it's a nice find.
- Pyria Eurl GL-P D5-0 and Cho Eur GZ-O C19-3: Systems with two earth-like worlds in binary orbit
- Pyria Eurl GZ-H B23-0: System with an earth-like world that is orbiting a class L dwarf star (type L1 V)
- HD 140360, HD 138081 and HD 140507: I almost couldn't believe my eyes, but these system were not yet discovered. So I bagged them . Astonishing that it's still possible to put your tag on stars from one of the real-world catalogues so late in the game. And the closest of the three is merely 1874.50 ly from Sol, so no real distance for someone who is used to exploring. What have you been doing, guys?
- Last but not least, I found many new star types that I have never encountered before, which considerably helps my project to make a survey of every possible star type in the game. While in the more barren regions of the Sagittarius-Carina arm I even began surveying T Tauri stars . This page on my personal wiki has the current state of the project. Note: If you follow the link you either have to make a security exception in your browser, or install the class 1 and 3 root certs from the CAcert site.
And here's the wordy part.
Thanks to the Robigo Cartel, which now owns my soul, I was able to set out on the Distant Worlds expedition with an Anaconda, the Gaean Reach (later recommissioned as the Gaean Reach II). After much and heated deliberation in the DWE forum thread about possible/ideal/etc. loadouts, I had decided on something that was based on CMDR newman1702's ideas (coriolis.io link) and which gave me an unladen jump range of 36.16 ly. Since I took some cargo with me, the actual jump range was somewhat lower, but I don't recall the actual figure. Open the spoiler tag in the unlikely case that you're interested in the cargo details.
The cargo I carried for the other CMDRs I had picked up only after my involuntary return to the bubble. Alas, I was never able to deliver the cargo to its recipients, so on the return trip I jettisoned everything with a solitary salute, because I had need of the additional jump range.
Some moody notes from the DWE parts of the trip.
After the Distant Worlds expedition I wanted to travel back to the bubble along the Sagittarius-Carina arm, visiting the camps of the Sagittarius-Carina mission on the way. The idea originally came from CMDR Whiterose, and I dubbed this part of my trip the "Return via Carinii" after the title of his forum post. But before I could go on, I first had to take a break from the game - DWE had left me quite exhausted. Six months later I began playing again, refreshed and with the intent to keep a much slower and more leisurely pace than during the expedition. Travel along the Sagittarius-Carina arm was indeed slow and seldom interrupted by anything out-of-the-ordinary - as I soon realized the S-C arm is not terribly spectacular, which sometimes bore on my patience, but sometimes also triggered a burst of exploration activity when I did find something unusual. Despite these successes, the longer I travelled the more I realized that it would take me a year or more to complete the entire return trip if I were to continue on the S-C mission route. Impatience took hold of me when I reached mission camp 12 (Gooroa GY-F D12-7), and I decided to break off the mission and travel home on a direct route. I didn't like the decision because I usually go through with whatever things I have planned, but the thought of accumulating even more exploration data than I had until now, and of the unimaginable risk of losing it all in a careless moment was too much for me. Another thing that influenced the decision was that so far I had completely missed out on the 2.1 and 2.2 updates of the game, and I was becoming more and more impatient to finally lay my hands on an engineered FSD with a great jump range. Anyway, after I had made my decision, I managed to mostly rein in my "oh shiny" impulses and got home within another 2 months time. The direct route would have been 47642.77 ly, but according to my spreadsheet I made detours of roughly 15 kly. On 6 April 3303 I finally docked at the peaceful starport Flippenko Dock in the Ngulungbara system.
After the disaster in the middle of DWE, I had remained mostly careful and so returned with the three critical modules (hull, power plant and life support) having their health still well over 90%, and most of the other modules still in the 80% range. I never had to use an AFMU (I took two of them with me), so on future trips I will consider leaving them out should I run out of module slots. The damage I had taken accumulated over many small incidents of overheating during scooping, or accidentally hitting a Black Hole's body exclusion zone. Luckily I became aware of the Neutron Star scare early enough so that I was able to evade them until Frontier had fixed the problem - many thanks to all those who reported their findings on the exploration forum (which is the only forum that I read). During the entire journey, the only really scary moment was the one where my ship jumped right into a star and I couldn't be sure whether I would manage to break free before I was fried, but as you now know the episode turned out alright. Open the spoiler tag if you want to know the details about the incident.
Another much more dangerous event was when I almost ran out of fuel due to two crashes of the game client. The spoiler tag hides the event log, which I was able to reconstruct thanks to the ED Discovery journal. It is my opinion that the current behaviour of the game is a bug: Fuel should not be deducted at the moment when you jump, but at the moment when you arrive. Or in other words: If the jump was initiated and fuel was deducted, and the game client subsequently crashes, the ship should be placed in the target system on the next login. The current game behaviour makes it extremely dangerous to travel with only a very small fuel tank - I would never leave on a trip without a tank that can carry fuel for at least two maximum-range jumps.
- 16t of Fuel Limpets, for the Fuel Rat support role with which I had registered to the expedition
- 10t Void Extract Coffe, for personal drinking pleasure
- 1t Liquor, 1t Beer and 1t Wine, for guests who don't like coffee
- 1t Onion Head, for CMDR Kronek (he didn't have any cargo space, so I promised to carry it for him)
- 3t Onion Head, in case CMDR Kronek asks for more
- 1t of Imperial Slaves, ordered by CMDR Nightstrider with the goal to free them at Beagle Point to found a colony
The cargo I carried for the other CMDRs I had picked up only after my involuntary return to the bubble. Alas, I was never able to deliver the cargo to its recipients, so on the return trip I jettisoned everything with a solitary salute, because I had need of the additional jump range.
Some moody notes from the DWE parts of the trip.
- Expedition launch: Damaged my ship on Pallaeni due to having set thrusters to reverse during takeoff. Repeated the same mistake at waypoint 1. Returned to the bubble for repairs both times. Good start.
- Between waypoint 1 and 2: Spent more time exploring type G systems than admiring the waypoint systems suggested by the FGE, because I wanted to submit an entry to the ELW competition of the Pioneer's Cooperative (forum post). Actually found a candidate, Bleia Dryiae HW-C D17, which was accepted as submission 13 (out of 35) and did fairly well in the first round of voting (it barely missed getting into the second round). Proud.
- Between waypoint 4 and 5: Attempt to rescue CMDR Olivia Vespera during the Waspiracy event. Great fun.
- Between waypoint 6 and 7: Found a cluster of giant star systems which I still need to submit as a POI to the Galactic Mapping Project. Floawns XE-R D4-45 is at the center of the cluster. Excited, but lost much time.
- On arrival at waypoint 7: Have fallen behind the main fleet. Waypoint 8 has already been announced. Was dead tired at 3am and had to stop for the night despite the urge to press on. When I finally got around to play again 2 days later, I realized that waypoint 9 had already been announced. Disheartened.
- Between waypoint 8 and 9: Very nice blue-white supergiant system (Schienaei FB-X E1-32) with interesting system layout. 3 class V gas giants. All moons of the AB planets are tiny metal-rich landable planets. The distant CDE planets are class IV gas giants. All large bodies in the system (gas giants and dwarf suns) have rings. CDE 4 D is a landable rocky planet with an excentric orbit around its parent (a ringed star), so from its surface it should be possible to see the rings of its parent, including all the stars in the system. Spent ages in the system, thoroughly enjoying myself.
- Between waypoint 11 and 12: Participated in the ad-hoc formation of a star made out of spaceships at Sagittarius A* (forum post). DWE is great!
- Between waypoint 15 and 16: Disaster strikes! Ship destroyed at Eok Gree CN-M C23-3274, entirely due to my own fault. Impact right next to CMDR Olfart's SRV, glad I didn't hurt him.
- Back in the bubble: Recommission the Gaean Reach II, taking advantage of the newly introduced white paint-job for Anacondas. So glad I destroyed my ship.
- Bubble to waypoint 16: Re-trace my steps and re-visit important systems that I want to have my "first discovered" tag. Otherwise jump, jump, jump.
- Waypoint 16 to 22: Catching up with main fleet. Suppressing urge to stray off the expedition route. More jump, jump, jump.
- Waypoint 23: Beagle Point, at last. Exhausted.
After the Distant Worlds expedition I wanted to travel back to the bubble along the Sagittarius-Carina arm, visiting the camps of the Sagittarius-Carina mission on the way. The idea originally came from CMDR Whiterose, and I dubbed this part of my trip the "Return via Carinii" after the title of his forum post. But before I could go on, I first had to take a break from the game - DWE had left me quite exhausted. Six months later I began playing again, refreshed and with the intent to keep a much slower and more leisurely pace than during the expedition. Travel along the Sagittarius-Carina arm was indeed slow and seldom interrupted by anything out-of-the-ordinary - as I soon realized the S-C arm is not terribly spectacular, which sometimes bore on my patience, but sometimes also triggered a burst of exploration activity when I did find something unusual. Despite these successes, the longer I travelled the more I realized that it would take me a year or more to complete the entire return trip if I were to continue on the S-C mission route. Impatience took hold of me when I reached mission camp 12 (Gooroa GY-F D12-7), and I decided to break off the mission and travel home on a direct route. I didn't like the decision because I usually go through with whatever things I have planned, but the thought of accumulating even more exploration data than I had until now, and of the unimaginable risk of losing it all in a careless moment was too much for me. Another thing that influenced the decision was that so far I had completely missed out on the 2.1 and 2.2 updates of the game, and I was becoming more and more impatient to finally lay my hands on an engineered FSD with a great jump range. Anyway, after I had made my decision, I managed to mostly rein in my "oh shiny" impulses and got home within another 2 months time. The direct route would have been 47642.77 ly, but according to my spreadsheet I made detours of roughly 15 kly. On 6 April 3303 I finally docked at the peaceful starport Flippenko Dock in the Ngulungbara system.
After the disaster in the middle of DWE, I had remained mostly careful and so returned with the three critical modules (hull, power plant and life support) having their health still well over 90%, and most of the other modules still in the 80% range. I never had to use an AFMU (I took two of them with me), so on future trips I will consider leaving them out should I run out of module slots. The damage I had taken accumulated over many small incidents of overheating during scooping, or accidentally hitting a Black Hole's body exclusion zone. Luckily I became aware of the Neutron Star scare early enough so that I was able to evade them until Frontier had fixed the problem - many thanks to all those who reported their findings on the exploration forum (which is the only forum that I read). During the entire journey, the only really scary moment was the one where my ship jumped right into a star and I couldn't be sure whether I would manage to break free before I was fried, but as you now know the episode turned out alright. Open the spoiler tag if you want to know the details about the incident.
Damage incident at Chraichoi CR-K D9-21: My ship was literally *slammed* through the companion star. Upon system entry there was a horrible loud noise, and my ship braked right *inside* the star. Instinctively I gave full throttle, and while the ship struggled to free itself from the star's gravitational pull for painful seconds, I was able to watch the graphical glitches as the ship exited through the star's surface. After maybe 20-30 seconds of heat above 100% (the maximum was maybe 140%) temperatures slowly dropped, along with my heart rate. In the upper-right corner I saw a message flow by that said something about "internal damage", but otherwise the actual impact on the hull and module health was minor. Some modules fell below 90%, but otherwise nothing critical seems to have happened. I don't know whether this is repeatable, but I'm not going to try. For anyone who is interested: I arrived from Chraichoi OI-S E4-3, the route planner's next destination was Chraichoi BR-K D9-17. The route was calculated in the galaxy map while in map mode, with the filter set to O and F class stars, White Dwarfs, Proto, Carbon, Wolf-Rayet and non sequence stars. The ship's tank was pretty full at the time, and the jump range was 36.16 ly.
Another much more dangerous event was when I almost ran out of fuel due to two crashes of the game client. The spoiler tag hides the event log, which I was able to reconstruct thanks to the ED Discovery journal. It is my opinion that the current behaviour of the game is a bug: Fuel should not be deducted at the moment when you jump, but at the moment when you arrive. Or in other words: If the jump was initiated and fuel was deducted, and the game client subsequently crashes, the ship should be placed in the target system on the next login. The current game behaviour makes it extremely dangerous to travel with only a very small fuel tank - I would never leave on a trip without a tank that can carry fuel for at least two maximum-range jumps.
- I have a full tank of 32t after fuel scooping in Ploxuia DN-Q d6-7.
- Jump to Ploxuia AB-W e2-2. The jump requires 5.5t and leaves me with fuel level 26.510925.
- Attempt 1 to jump to Ploxuia IX-X -0. This jump is not registered in ED Discovery.
- The game client crashes.
- Logging in again. I am still at Ploxuia AB-W e2-2.
- Attempt 2 to jump to Ploxuia IX-X -0. The jump requires 7.2t and leaves me with fuel level 11.783796. Calculating backwards, I must have lost approximately 7.5t of fuel in the first failed jump attempt.
- The game client crashes - again.
- Logging in again. I am still at Ploxuia AB-W e2-2.
- Attempt 3 to jump to Ploxuia IX-X -0. This time the jump requires 7.0t (because I carry less fuel than in attempt 2) and leaves me with fuel level 4.750721.
- The jump succeeds. By accident I now notice the critically low fuel level and eco-jump to safety to a nearby scoopable star.
Next things to do: Get that engineered FSD with a mega jump range. And maybe earn enough Imperial rank for a Clipper
.