Tea, Medals and Thrawn

Hello everyone,

I am currently between book ... I know. The horror ! I think it's going to be another one I haven't read yet, Fleet of Knives by Gareth L. Powell. It's the sequel to Embers of War which I felt took time to get going ... but was a worthy read.

I mentioned A Big Ship At The End Of The Universe in one of the discords the other day too, that one had a great combination of spaceships and magic within. I'll be reading the next in line of that after it goes on sale again. (If you're not in a rush to buy stuff, wait 'til it gets cheap ... and then you can buy more for less !)

Oh ! Good news.

Bookbarn is opening up again in a few weeks. Hopefully that's good news and not something happening too early, considering virus ! Their cafe won't be opening up again just yet though.

(I should note at this point that I just spent a minute or two asking Google for "cute dragon reading a book" for the thumbnail before realising that I'd drawn a dwagon reading a book)

Book !

I finished reading Thrawn by Timothy Zahn last night. This is a prequel book, set in the Star Wars universe again. The timeline probably stretches around 20 years, between the Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope and it follows two Imperials Thrawn and Eli Vanto. A third recurring character pops up later.

An interesting book, especially in these times where racism and prejudice has become so visible again. Thrawn is an alien, of the blue skinned, red eyed Chiss race. He was first seen in Star Wars books for the 3x Heir To The Empire books, where Grand Admiral Thrawn is the main enemy protagonist. He's a master tactician and strategic genius and this book sees him rise through several scenarios which steadily bring out that genius ... and how the Empire around him reacts to it.

The Empire is not quite as bad with the racism as our world currently is but the prejudices shown by the human Core World citizens are a recurring theme through the book. It does this extremely well. You have Thrawn as the alien being subjected to the treatment, not totally understanding it at first ... and you have Eli Vanto who knows exactly what's going on, being an educator to both the reader and to Thrawn.

Oh and there are shenanigans going on throughout and because it's Timothy Zahn, who has a fantastic grasp of what you can get away with in Star Wars, the situations are totally believable. (Unlike certain recent movies !)

If you're interested in the expanded Star Wars universe books, I'd totally recommend this one. The Heir to the Empire trilogy (and later Spectre / Vision books) have been wiped away from Star Wars canon but this one remains, courtesy of Thrawn appearing in Star Wars Rebels. I'll read the Heir to the Empire books again at some point, they are far superior to the new movies in terms of story.

Tea and Medals ?

After markedly increasing the credit balance with the internet spaceship known as Grabnarr, I was looking for something a little different again. The above ship is the Tea and Medals, a Dolphin class passenger carrier exploration ship. That picture was as she was being fitted out ...

Before travelling over to Galileo Station in orbit of the Moon ...

Poised and ready for another speed run to the galactic core. I'm hoping for a 4 hour time for this run and that'll be aided by a 20% higher jump range and I'll be using a different way of plotting the route. I.e. I'll be making much more extensive use of the Spansh neutron star jump plotter (link). For the Cobra Mk3 run, I only made about 5 course updates, trusting to the in game jump plotter much more. This trip should be more like 180 jumps.

Spansh says 167 jumps with a bit of wiggliness (efficiency to 80%, 60.7ly jump range), that would be 476 with the direct route ... Neutron star boosting helps a lot. I'll be targeting 180 jumps for the trip, although it'll be more than that. The neutron stars allow you to jump 4x the distance ... but you need fuel which gets scooped from main sequence stars (like our Sun).

Tea-89 took 413 jumps with a decent amount of neutron boosting along the way. I did like Tea-89.

That might happen at the weekend. The speed run has to be done in one shot, so I really don't want to attempt it after shutting the work laptop down for the evening. It also depends on how my hands and neck are doing too ... they're not really happy with me at the moment.

But I'll survive there. Just means more excuses to read books instead of playing games !

Stay safe, be well.