Having walked away from a good-but-not-great landing at the Paradise's
new homeport, Procyon, the crew's thoughts naturally turned to repairing
the damage so they could get back to Terra, offload the Smutny survey
boys, and get paid for the out-and-back charter.  The Smutny boys,
strangely enough, also wanted to get back - they didn't want to risk
this trip getting any more Chinese-curse interesting.  ("Why'd they book
passage with a boatload of lunatic PCs, then?" is a separate, and meta,
question).

Game-mechanically, the damage to the M-drive was a critical hit and 10
hull points worth of the regular stuff.  In-game, there was a fair bit
of conduits that needed ripping out and replacing, fire damage to be
made good, and the M-drive had to be torn down and examined before
anyone would trust it.

Nikki also wanted to double-check the contragrav - lack of lift
redundancy worried her on general principles (something about the ship
gliding like a "polished brick" when deadstick).

I ended up redlining/montaging the boat repairs, with the Smutny boys
pitching in as general hands (alongside Superjoat and Lily), Bert
shaking his head at how people managed to get injured while fixing Das
Boot, El Capitane dug himself out of the accumulated paperwork with a
shovel, while Nikki bossed the repairs with Rosa as her off-sider.

Took (I think) three or four days and 1.6 dtons of spares before Nikki
pronounced the Paradise ready to fly.

Lift-off was refreshingly uneventful, as was the boost out to the 100D
limit.

As I come from a GT background, MGT2's jump mechanics don't work for me
for my goals in this game.  One, the pilot roll to ensure successful
J-space entry has been a source of hilarity in games previous. Two, they
only give at most two characters a chance (the astroguesser and the
engineer) to muck things up.

Something something rule zero something something collect underpants
something something.

Thus, the following rolls are required (MGT2 skills):
1 - Astrogate (EDU), difficulty 5, penalised by number of parsecs jumped
(min 1).
2 - Pilot (DEX), difficulty 5, likewise penalised (is easier for me to
remember).
3 - Engineer (J-Drive) (INT), as above, further modified by the
astroguess margin of success, DM -4 for jumping inside 100D, _another_
DM -4 for jumping inside 10D, and a further DM -2 if using unrefined
fuel in J-drives not built for it.

I must ask the Learned & Honourable Members to keep in mind that
deliberate jumps to deep space are impossible according to current
(IW-era) understanding, both Vilani and Terran, of jump maths.

Aboard the Paradise, El Capitane is the default astroguesser (one more
thing to blame him for), Rosa is the default pilot (note, both ex-Scouts
are the ones collectively responsible for pointing ship in desired
direction), and Nikki handles the Jump drive.  This is further
um...facilitated by the ship's quirks - a -1 DM applies to all three
rolls to enter Jump.

The outbound jump to Junction from Procyon was nice, smooth and boring. 
People (but not Henry Freeman...) busied themselves racking up another
week towards whatever they were studying.

Then the elapsed-jump clock ticked past 184 hours.

And kept going, the featureless grey void of jumpspace still enveloping
them.

Approx 32 hours later, Badass-Moustache picked something up on the
sensors, slowly overhauling them from aft.  No, the ship hadn't yet
exited Jump.  Yes, the sensors (per their telltales and diagnostics)
were working properly.

A first cut gave a loose lower bound on displacement of 10 megaton. 
This was a first for El Capitane, Badass-Moustache, Rosa, Nikki and
Lily.  Bert didn't seem too wound up about it, using much the same logic
as Alfred E. Neumann - "What, me worry?"

With the unknown rider closing, El Capitane was getting a little
worried.  What was supposed to be impossible was happening - and worse,
to him.

Eventually the damn thing got close enough to provoke cursing from the
sensor station in Welsh, English, Russian and Afrikaans as
Badass-Moustache double-checked the sensor feeds were definitely being
saved.  The area near the sensor station may need repainting.

"Quit making up new swear words, how bloody big is it?" - Mr Sweep

As the billion-ton unknown rider (which did NOT seem to be derelict)
pulled abeam, El Capitane decided to Do Something and took the helm.
Their jump bubble also decided to Do Something - namely, start collapsing.

Das Boot was violently ejected from jumpspace - everyone's kit absorbed
the resulting person-into-something damage.

As he was still going to Do Something, El Capitane decided to fly the
approach to Junction highport himself.

Herr Sweep's famously manic-depressive dice karma kicked in again, on
the no-goodnik side of things.

The other players pissed themselves laughing at El Capitane's Epic Fail
on approach to the highport.

Due to the sheer lulz (and... well... lulz), I said that Drake had
earned his captain a 15 kilosolar fine for maneuvering without
instruction in a positive control zone, impersonating a competent pilot,
and not indicating when turning right.

"Woot!... wait... I'M the captain... " - Mr Sweep

Everyone else was still laughing.

Possibly due to the sustained lulz, I managed to muck up here. I had the
image of the Paradise on approach to a fly-in-and-land berth, while the
players thought the ship was on approach to an external cradle. 
Especially since it didn't impact the story, I admitted my mistake,
fixed my assumptions, and kept the ball rolling.

The highport did let the ship dock, but extracted the fine payment
before letting anyone leave the ship, arrange fuelling, etc.

The boost out and subsequent jump to Terra was far less eventful - Herr
Sweep's dice karma swung around with a vengeance, rolling boxcars to
astroguess and succeeding by (iirc) 6 or 7.

After an enlightening argument with Jeff Zeitlin a few weeks ago, I had
ended up punting on jump masking - the Terra-Sol dynamics would have the
rock masked by Sol's 100D during its austral summer and not-quite-free
during its boreal summer.

Das Boot emerged from Jump bang-on expected time and position (to
justified smugging from Herr Sweep), and gave me a chance to outline
Terran orbital space, a full century after the rock was last known as
Earth.  The big, silent satellite hadn't gone anywhere, most of the
small, noisy satellites had been cleaned up, there was a lot more
supersynchronous stuff, traffic levels were the highest in the UN, and
all three of Terra's highports were a) visible and b) busy.

Phoenix Orbital handled a slim majority of the commercial traffic, Cairo
Orbital tended to handle more governmental traffic, and Alice Springs
Orbital handled all the naval and naval-related traffic. Waay out at L5
were the massive Kaufmann Raumschiffbau starshipyards, who had been
going full-banger since peace broke out in 2121.

The players quickly got the impression that you only impinge on Alice
Springs' traffic pattern if either invitation or duty draws you there.

As their charter required them to offload their passengers and cargo at
Phoenix Orbital, that's where they went, landing in a pressurised berth
and duly offloading same. A couple of the Smutny boys were very glad to
be home, for some reason.

El Capitane gave everyone a week of leave.  Rosa immediately boarded a
shuttle and headed back to Catalonia to get some solid dirt under her
feet.  Bert sodded off to the downport to amuse himself.  Lily floated
around the highport, while Nikki headed back to Germany to catch up with
her family.  Badass-Moustache disappeared into the Free Traders'
Association Club (what I'm using as the TAS equivalent).  Can't remember
what El Capitane did or where he went, except worry about poverty.

Towards the end of the week, Badass-Moustache got a call from an old
friend/partner-in-crime from his Royal Naval Service days.  Captain
Derryn Dodgie, RN, MT and double bar - like El Capitane, an Australian
who departed the continent and tried very hard to avoid looking back.

Easy Frag got the joke almost immediately, judging by his groan.

Everyone else fell apart laughing as my Discord client chose this exact
moment to jump into east hyperspace.

After catching up (and Captain Dodgie expressing the appropriate amount
of awe about the Procyon good-but-not-great landing), the conversation
got around to business, wherein Derryn invited Badass-Moustache "and
that boatload of lunatics you knock around with" to a rather upscale
restaurant (his shout) just off the Champs-Élysées to talk further, face
to face, night after tomorrow.
Badass-Moustache wryly commented that, if Dodgie was paying for the food
and booze, convincing El Capitane to lob wouldn't be a problem.

"Just leave the bloody place standing and me /persona grata/ when yer
done." - Derryn Dodgie

The prediction came true - not only did El Capitane not mind a fairly
posh feed, he was open to more paying work and pulled everyone back
together.  Rosa and Nikki went low-tech with ground transport, while
everyone else piled into grav vehicles of some sort.

I wanted to throw the PCs a bit of a curveball, so to fit in and not
cause too much ruckus, they'd need a SOC-based Diplomat or Carouse roll
(depending on the general approach they were taking).  The results were
... a little mixed.

The Modern Major-General leaned on his SOC E and JOAT 3 to scrub up and
otherwise fit right in, to the other PCs' general surprise. Drake barely
squeezed past on the dice.  Bert somehow made his everyday clobber work
unmodified, loafers and all.  Lily was apparently spooked by being too
close to the East End of FLIPPIN' LONDON.  Nikki got turned away twice,
and Rosa managed to uncanny-valley it (somehow).

After finally getting aforementioned boatload of lunatics in the ruddy
door (which may not ultimately redound well upon Captain Dodgie), fed
and watered, they got down to business.

The really-disreputable part of the UNNF, namely, the Scouts, had been
experimenting with collapsible tankage, to apparently-good results.  In
addition to field-testing collapsible tankage independently, Derryn
wanted this mob to cut across the border and wander around the nearer
kimashargur-dominated worlds, making their way to Gashidda before
returning and reporting on their observations and activities.  To help
with their cover, three as-yet-unrolled lots of spec cargo would meet
them at the berth.

Yes, this was introducing the players to another step of the
proceedings, namely speculative trade.  After Tim Collinson's warnings
about the dodginess of the MGT2 system, I heaved that one out the
upstairs window and ended up adapting GT:IW's system almost holus-bolus.

As it WAS the aforementioned "boatload of lunatics", I was
expecting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hcounting on shenanigans as well.

After some dickering, I think the overall direct payment came out to 800
kilosolars (half paid directly onto the mortgage), 3 loads of fuel via a
UNNF fuel chit, and the spec cargo I mentioned above.

Most of us had trouble staying focused by now (after a good 5 hours or
so - is quite exhausting with this bunch), so we all booked off for the
night.

--