In reply to Kaya Wilden (msg # 83):
The cruise to Little Giant will take about two days standard time. The trip is uneventful. Boring. Aarav sends you lots of reports. He seems to like generating reports. Anyway, he gives you an inventory for the drones.
There are subspecialized drones but broadly speaking, they fall in three catagories:
>Defensive Drones. These are designed to pop out the back of the ship and draw fire their way. Mostly designed for torpedo attacks. There are 12 of those.
There are a handful which will project a false image. They're designed to foul up autolock firing systems by sending out code that make them appear to be duplicates of the
Gryffin. Aarav has programmed 3 of them to mimic your ship. There are 2 more unprogrammed. Aarav notes he thought it best to leave some blanks in case you wanted to imprint those decoys onto another ship.
>Offensive. There are 20 drones which will function more or less like smart torpedoes. They don't have the speed of a torpedo, but they can be set ahead of time like snares. Pirates love these kind of drones as they will set them up in asteroid fields as mines to hijack cargo ships.
>Mining. The bulk are mining drones. Roughly 50 of them. Most ships carry a few mining drones as they are handy for doing some Extra Vehicular repair work. But 50 is excessive. None of them are powerful enough to open a crater in a moon. But they can drill tunnels fairly effectively, though the tunnels won't run too deep.
Peri runs her sims. She glowers a bit, but she does seem to understand what she did wrong. She's a capable enough pilot. But she does seem to have a bit of temper.
Rei gives you the medical. It's nothing fancy, but she seems interested in drawing blood.
"One things we want to monitor is your hormone output. Fluctuations in certain hormones can be an indicator of some of the symptoms from Ace syndrome cropping up."
She provides you a log showing her insulin shots.
Rokzi spends his time cleaning and maintaining his equipment.
You hop out into the Little Giant system.
Crappy Map time!
X indicates an asteroid field.
Nouns are for a planet
M is for a moon.
ST is the star
M
Cerebus
ST
Calliope M
M
M1 M2
M3
M4
Little Giant
M5
M6 M7
M8
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There's a small system control base on Cerebus. They buzz you as you get within range.
Gryffin. This is Little Giant System Control. Please state your purpose in visiting.
It is standard to log incoming and outgoing traffic. Most systems ask a new arrivals purpose as part of standard protocol