Trials of a Starship Captain / Galactic Emperor / Colony Commander

Or a humble civil servant engineer if you will.

This weekend had to be a quiet one ... Turns out my body was damaged more than I thought on all that walking around on Wednesday. Or was it my efforts to clean up the damage that caused more ...

It's a funny one this condition. The torn up bits need care and cleaning to keep them ok but ... the cleaning will also disrupt the injury to the point where the healing gets set back. Especially when I end up being overzealous with the cleaning.

So the weekend was spent chilling out keeping the shredded ankles bare to allow them to heal. I had a hankering for pizza :

(Actually wearing that top this evening !)

But the ankles wouldn't have supported the walk to the pizza shop. That's ok. I had pizza tonight, the ankles were already complaining from walking at work most of the day.

It was pizza and a movie, watching Jurassic World again this time. A decent movie but somewhat held back by the blockbuster tendency to dumb down movies or put explosions and fire in for the sake of it. You know, putting daft plot elements in to create drama to give an excuse for more, yet more special effects.

Perhaps I think of it as a good movie due to having great company the first time around ? Maybe.

Oh and another tribulation of me is that it looks like I need new sets of trousers ... Yep ! Getting smaller. Not bigger. The weight is going the right way - downwards.

But it is meaning that my trousers are having a tendency to fall off. Let's just say I will not step outside the house in my comfy running around in trousers any more. I would be arrested. That said, my old cricket whites are fine, although I just use those to sleep in now. Turns out they're really good for allowing my legs to heal up while I'm sleeping. Not using them means the leaky bits get aggravated.

I'll fix. Slowly ... but I'll fix. But I do have to leave the wounds alone long enough to let that fixing happen, which is still the challenge.

Right ... about that title ...

I went back into the Elite Spaceship cockpit this weekend ! Instead of flying the Cookie Cutter around doing trading, I parked it up and bought an explorer ship, the Asp you see in the picture above. The plan is to :

Start at the X in the bottom, go Galactic South until I get to the next galactic arm and then follow that arm into the core as far as Jaques Station. I think from there, it will be a trip to Beagle Point on the far side of the galaxy to our own planet. It's the furthest point we can get to. I'll then follow one of the Eastern arms back around until it becomes a short trip home. It's best to travel down the arms, as the gaps between them can be a bit too sparsely populated for the hyperdrives to jump between the stars.

You can see the start there with the green line. I only had a short session after setting off, two series of jumps to see me 1,700 light years away from Earth. The X in the middle is the centre of the galaxy, the super massive black hole Sagittarius A*. Been there already :

It's more impressive in game. Kinda. Yeah, that trip around the galaxy will take a while, especially as it'll happen in short doses. The trip to Sagi A* took a fortnight of more intensive doses.

Galactic Emperor ? I been playing the Stellaris again.

After being addicted to Master Of Orion 2 (Moo2), Stellaris is my current space emperor strategy game. It ticks many boxes and improves on Moo2 in pretty much every way. The new Master of Orion just out is a pale imitation of the original two games (Moo3 didn't happen).

The problem this time around was rushing into a war that my people weren't ready for, losing my fleet in one battle and rushing piecemeal fleets around doing harassment work until I had enough ships together again to challenge the enemy. We won the war in the end :-) albeit with help from a neighbour.

Colony Commander - this is the Planetbases ...

Apparently I didn't take a screenie of the current challenge ... That one is from the crash landing where your people have to survive in a base for 20 days before building enough radio telescopes to call in an evacuation. They managed it ... but it took more like 36 days due to me speed bumping in the middle for some reason.

The challenge I'm on now is a Dark Moon colony, where :
The only power available is solar;
The days are something like half the length of the night;
You start with minimal people;
The target is to grow the colony to 300;
And the stretch is to do it in 70 days.

Not sure if I'll do it this time after a series of disasters :
Growing the colony to 49 out of a capacity of 50 in the oxygen generation at the time ...
Then spotting that the food supply had run out ...
Literally ripping up the beds to turn the bioplast into food plants ...
Having meteors hit the batteries at really bad times ...
And then having the oxygen nearly run out due to not enough power.

It's a tough game but I enjoy it. But not tonight. Tonight is chill time with videos.

And seeing sobering stories come up on the news like what's happened to Michael Schumacher.  Both his case and the Paralympics show that however bad my luck has been with getting damaged, I'm still in a privileged place with all limbs and head intact. I'll write something about Schumacher and the Paralympics at some point but ...

I'm lucky that my head injuries, while they've had consequences, they're nowhere near as bad as they could have been.
And those Paralympians are an inspiration aren't they ?

Look for that inspiration, may it help you tackle your problems.

Cya !

PS That Asp needs a name ! First thought - IEV Scott (Imperial Exploration Vessel) after "I'm just going out for a while, I may be some time" but perhaps IEV I'm going to find the cookies is more like it.