Codename: RT-Columbus
Registered on: Tajima Rosenkov; Rosenkov Technology, Inc.
Class: DL-Hai "Grizzly" Liberty Shuttle - Refit
Role: Deep Space Exploration & Survey Vessel
Crew: 3; a pilot, a scientist, an engineer
Weaponry: <CLASSIFIED>
Equipment: <CLASSIFIED>
Engine: Rosenkov Prototype Engine
The new Rostech vessel went through final tests, then moored away from Furyoku Station. No one asked any question why such vessel, labeled as DL-Hai "Grizzly", had such heavy modifications on board. Or why such expensive - VIP after all - vessel was brought here from the heart of the Sirius.
Columbus.
Adequate name for the ship that had yet to explore the unexplored, unveil the veiled and to light a light in darkness. It took many weeks to refit this vessel with technology deemed too ancient to even try mounting it... However, as every Rostech's technical masterminds, the technology was never obsolete - it just required upgrade.
The final nails had been put and mainframes were placed inside the ship just before the launch, refitted with alternative steel known only to Gallia, instead of ship panels purely made in Sirius. It return, the altered hull gave way more room to move freely inside the ship with all the equipment and way more space taken by enlarged engine and thruster from small capital ship. Not to mention unusually strong set of scanners, allowing to track multiple clouds of informations from all around the new space.
The engine... something that even Junker could create - with some definite changes that only few people knew about. And only few would really want to know about its origin or technology used in it. As a result however, due to the hunger of this very unusual drive, the powercore was enlarged as well to prevent any power shortage.
Two months of exploration, away from the House space...
...that is why ship was also armed as well in remodified Junker-provided particle blaster cannons.
Yet, two months away, reporting about advancement on the most secure channels that even Interspace barely used. Far away from House Space. Alone, just three crewmen.
And their ship.
In the void.
The course has been set. The first phase of the mission was easy, to deliver ship into Sigma-19 System. And then... for Omicron Beta Hole. We didn't know what we could find behind it...
As soon as Columbus arrived to the very strange cloud in the Sigma-19, the vessel started behaving very strangely. The jumphole, labeled as Jumphole to Omicron Beta, was suprisingly emitting a very strange energy patterns that exceeded all around the cloud. After the initial tests, the jumphole was claimed to be rather stable, we started preparations to jump.
Our remodified Grizzly was more than prepared for this kind of radiation, heavy plating from that Gallic steel were proved to resist heavy radiation damage - however, it would be nice if we were not directly inside the radiant cloud... After the fast preparations, we jumped through the jumphole into the unknown for us Omicron Beta.
And then, strage things started happening...
Red alert, all electronics started to fail one after another, flooding our scanners with very riduculous data, far more exceeding the scales at least several times. The turbulence, despite having heavy anti-shock resistant support, was something that almost made our engineer puke all around the ship - what, at last, did not happen.
And then, silence. The energy levels have dropped. It took few minutes after the main computer would do a hard reset (that turned off all the systems, save for life support and O2 filters). Right after everything seemed to be okay, we noticed something was really out of the place.
The tracking and mapping system finally turned on.
Our star chart, instead showing position over the Sigmas, it have shown the position way over up Kusari Coreworlds, what surprised us a bit. The words that both pilot and engineer used are not to be included here, due to high vulgarity and least politically-correct nature towads the whole electronics.
After few checks, it became clear that systems are not wrong and we really ended up on the "top-left" of the Kusari, somehow. Despite the flawled goal of our mission, we ended up mapping entire system, which was already being colonized by Samura Heavy Industries. Our engineer was very disappointed, but at least we made more accurate data regarding whole system, known as Nagano.
That's right. We ended up on the opposite side of the Crow Nebula, instead of being already in the Omicron Beta.
The previous open and available data had nothing regarding all the planets or stars in the system - perhaps due to the Samura disinterest into exploring far-side system stars.
We will surely update the data regarding this system right after we come back from our mission.