The Discord group that Easy Frag is in - Keep Calm and Get Dangerous -
strangely applied here.

https://ih1.redbubble.net/image.831343648.3293/flat,750x,075,f-pad,750x1000,f8f8f8.u8.jpg
for a visual.

And, thanks to Jeff Zeitlin, Darkwing Duck IS IMTU!  MTU diverged from
OTL on 27/12/91.  (And boy didn't it _diverge_ - even if I have to wave
my hands madly).

When we left our Boatload O' Lunatics, they had put down on Solomani Rim
3035 to refuel.

Said refuelling and orbit regaining was routine, as the Objective
Interim Moustache Support System got to casing future joints.

In a week from a standing start two parsecs away, he pulls off a full
system map of Solomani Rim 2835 + rogue objects.

Badass-Moustache then spent the next eight days casing SR 2834 - ends up
identifying the "mainworld" and producing a reasonably accurate estimate
of its physicals.  While all that survey data strained through The
Badass Moustache Itself, Nikki knocked off Science (mathematics) 1 and
El Capitane _flubbed_ his study-period roll, to general lulz, pissing 8
weeks of study effort up the wall.

El Capitane chooses to jump out to 2835, and off they shoot.  In jump,
Badass-Moustache knocks off Electronics (sensors) 2.

10 days' remote sensing of SR 2734, starting upon emergence, manages to
detect the red dwarf system primary, and not much else. Another 12 days'
work comes off much better - a full system map.  (In the MGT2
exploration rules, only the best remote-sensing roll applies towards the
survey level).

Onward to SR 2734, putting the Paradise and crew a mere 6 parsecs away
from the trailing ass-end of UN space.  Bummer about that 3 parsec gap,
innit?

The jump was routine.  The refuelling... not so much.

Rosa almost succeeded on putting the ship down onto that soggy stuff
without incident.  Das Boot managed to spring a leak - Nikki found out
about it by promptly getting soaked.

"Who broke the bloody ship?" - Nikki

"Who do _you_ think?" - El Capitane

The Old Farts (PCs this time - Milford and Stone.  Is just coincidence
that one old-fart PC is played by one of the resident old farts) head
down to engineering to help Nikki fix problem, and promptly bugger
things up.  (Both failed in their rolls to help, granting Nikki a total
-2 DM).

Despite their efforts, Nikki still almost succeeds - the old farts blame
each other.

"You want more help from the old farts, Nikki?" - Me
"Hell no!" - Nikki

Rather brassed off, Nikki sends the Modern Major-General to go find one
of the high-throughput pumps they have, while leaving El Capitane
unsupervised within cooee of a welder as she argues with the main
reactor.  (To my surprise, he managed to find + patch the leak).

Stone returns with aforementioned pump, while El Capitane's innocent
look fooled the distracted Nikki but not the suspicious Badass-Moustache.

Rosa manages to cock up lifting the ship out of the water.  Stone
manages to botch (snake eyes, confirmed by snake eyes) the pump hookup. 
A loud ZAP ensued, slagging the pump and discharging a lot of electrons
into the water still in the reactor room.

All three of them cop 11 points of electrical damage.  Badass-Moustache
stays up despite being at Ground Zero (END 1 after the fact) - El
Capitane and Nikki are up, but not particularly happy (END 0).

After the shenanigans, the actual refuelling and
dewatering-of-reactor-room was quite straightforward.  Badass-Moustache
chose to prop up an airlock bulkhead as he passed out.

With the ship back in a stable orbit with the refiners chundering away,
Rosa revealed her hitherto-ignored MBBS.  (Yes, Bert has Medic 6 vs
Rosa's Medic 2, but I prefer to give players who are present the spotlight).

Following El Capitane's direction (and despite having the capability to
treat both of them, listening to said direction), Rosa concentrated on
long-term medical care for Nikki, starting with the Severe Injury (1-2x
END) which would lay her up for 5 days (per MGT2 rules). 
Badass-Moustache fired up the ol' Awareness discipline and started
self-healing, while El Capitane took his chances.

Taking two damage that day from "natural healing" quickly changed his
mind, as he lobbed in sickbay the next day.

The first day worth of stupidity made Rosa's medical care more
difficult, and she gave Drake a well-earned serve.  On top of losing the
first day, he would be laid up for another 6 days.

The Modern Major-General comes good in three days despite being at
ground zero of the ZAP and not seeking _any_ medical attention.  The
distracted Rosa wrote it off as luck.

"Band-aids, whiskey, mustache..yep, Colonel's got everything he need to
heal" - Herr Sweep.

While waiting for the others to recuperate (was another 2 days to
recuperate under medical care from the residual Major Wound), Captain
Badass-Moustache starts work on casing SR 2732.  He manages to rumble
the giant and red dwarf stars, the two planetoid belts, and all the
planets in sufficient detail to figure out whether they were gas giant
or rocky.

Although he _could_ have jumped the ship single-handedly (since the 3
wot normally did it were busy in sickbay and ain't JOAT 3 grand?),
Captain Badass-Moustache chose to wait for the proven experts to lob
back (on grounds that three specialists familiar with the ship's
respective quirks were less likely to stuff up their areas of specialty
than one sort-of-trained generalist who wasn't).

The next day, Das Boot got underway to SR 2732.  Approach, skim and
departure were routine, as Badass-Moustache started casing 2631.  Yet
again he rumbled star(s), brown dwarfs, and positions of planets and
planetoid belts, including a hot Jupiter.

The jump out to the outermost gas giant in SR 2631 (3 parsecs away from
the trailing ass-end of UN space) was routine.

The skim... was anything but.

Rosa managed to fail the cloudtops entry, and snake-eye the
avoid-buffeting bit (and some frames buckled slightly).  As Das Boot was
initially built _before_ Starleaper One buggered off in 2097 AD, the
main reactor started arcing up.  Nikki valiantly wrestled with the
recalcitrant kit, but to no avail.  The reactor kicked offline, the main
engines died, the main power alarm sounded, and red blinkenlights kicked
on EVERYWHERE.  According to Rosa's board, they had 20 hours before they
dropped out of the cloudtops.

"If we're gonna die, I'm staying in my command throne.  If I'm going
down, I'm going down in _my chair_" - El Capitane

Due mainly to the non-Vilani-derived nature of the main reactor (came
with Das Boot initially), it took Nikki and Jim 10 hours to trace the
root causes of the failure.  The primary one was the D-D fusion igniters
(the spark plugs, if you will) had crapped out.

It took a further four hours for the intrepid duo to dismount said ignitors.

"Is this remotely in the manual?" - Badass-Moustache

"Left that behind when I figured out the igniters were buggered." - Nikki

"Buggered" turned out to be a slight understatement.  They looked to be
original kit with accumulated wear and tear.

"Doesn't your guy have something built-in that can help here?" - Easy Frag

"Brain in neutral...." - Eddles

_pissing themselves laughing_ - Herr Sweep, Wombat, me

In a desperate attempt to avoid imminent Moustache-geddon, the Modern
Major-General got weaving on microkinetically reconditioning the
badly-damaged igniters (14 MeV fusion neutrons are _nasty_) with help
(mainly in what it needed to do) from Nikki.

Sweat drops marched, lemming-like, off the ends of The Moustache (and
the adjacent hooter).  Despite rolling with disadvantage, Eddles rocked
out boxcars - 7 hours of (literal) skull-sweat later, the igniters had
been reconditioned more-than-well-enough - the powerless Das Boot having
fallen into the shallows in the meantime.

Jim and Nikki kept going despite having put in 21 straight hours of
effort - the looming death sentence concentrated their minds
wonderfully.  (ie, they made their END rolls to keep going).  Nikki's
consistent answer to El Capitane's enquiries of "Can I help?" was "Yes. 
Bugger off."  Das Boot needed someone on the bridge to take immediate
advantage of M-drive availability, so Rosa got comfy.

Now they had to reassemble things, run the main reactor through an
accelerated restart, and get the M-drive working, all in the next 7
hours or so (until they dropped out of the deeps).

Over the next six hours hours, the pair reassemble the main reactor with
the reconditioned igniters.  They manage (both making a difficulty 11
engineer (powerplant) roll) to drastically shortcut the reactor startup,
and Jim collapsed from exhaustion just afterwards.  Nikki, however, kept
on trucking.

Rosa sounded more than a little concerned as the powerless Paradise
dropped into the deeps.  There started to be a rather distressing
boat-like crunching sound, as the hull damage accumulated, and they were
minutes away from death + funeral in one convenient package.  (You bet I
was milking it for all it was worth).

"Bloody ironic, isn't it?  We get three parsecs away from home, and a
gas giant eats us for a snack." - Eddles

Hanging onto the frayed edge of consciousness for grim death (and they
were just about AT the bitter end), Nikki made her first attempt to
restore main engines - and flubbed it.

With a barrage of cursing that would probably be subtitled as *[POMMY]*,
Nikki belted the M-drive controls and was about to try again.

Cries of "you rat _bastard_" echoed from my headphones after I informed
everyone I needed to answer a call of nature.

Upon my return, just before the boat-like crunching sounds got _really_
distressing, Nikki's second attempt succeeded - by skin of teeth.

Rosa's board lit up green, as she stood the Paradise on its ass and
booted it.  Unmodified boxcars meant a clean recovery to a stable orbit,
with some slight structural repairs needed.  By the time the Paradise
had exited the deeps, Nikki had collapsed from exhaustion.

El Capitane lobbed in engineering, chucking fire blankets over the two
unconscious denizens therein, adding this bon mot:

"Dammit, Nikki's been fixing things again."

Badass-Moustache was a mite surprised to wake up at all, let alone after
9 hours of kip.  He relocated the unconscious Nikki to her cabin,
wherein she kipped another day.  Eddles gave me another hook as the
Objective Interim Moustache Support System resolved to look up his old
sergeant, Forsythe-Smith, and apologise for the level of rupert
management he needed back in the day.

The rest of Nikki's switchoff was spent carefully turning things back
on, checking they were OK, etc - starting with the coffee machine in the
captain's office.  18 days' of in-system scanning delivered a full-up
system map of SR 2732, including _another_ garden world.

For some weird reason, El Capitane took very little convincing to put
down on said world so the crew could do annual maintenance. 
Remote-scanning SR 2531 en route turned up three fifths of one half.

Rosa nailed the landing, and, under Nikki's direction (and crit success
on masterminding the job), the entire crew turned to with a _vengeance_
- 8 weeks' work got telescoped into 4.  Carried spares were exhausted,
and about half of the accumulated hull damage was fixed.

After a rest day and refuelling, then regaining orbit, Jim made with the
remote scanning again, starting with SR 2430.  A critical success on 4
days' work rules out anything big enough to generate a 100D limit being
in that hex.  Badass-Moustache got even luckier on the next timing roll,
taking 2 days to scan SR 2530, and coming up with some potentials - 8
sensor blips that are maddeningly imprecise.  (Survey Index 8 on an
empty hex isn't much cop).

As Rosa topped off Pilot (spacecraft) 3, the Modern Major-General spent
a week digging through the sheer volume of data he had accumulated over
the past few months on rogue bodies in an effort to dig up _something_
he can use to refine those 8 damned blips.

On the 7th day, he didn't rest.  It all came together in a great ringing
crash - 1 of those sensor blips was just that.  5 seemed to be tiny
iceballs, not big enough to generate a 100D limit and thus not usable. 
1 turned out to be a significantly bigger comet that could be jumped to
and refuelled from.

Blip 8 was, according to Badass-Moustache's best estimate (JOAT 3
covering a multitude of sins in science (cosmology) ), a rogue gas
_dwarf_.  After double-checking his figures, Jim announced as such to El
Capitane.

After almost (personally) dying twice within 6 parsecs of "safety", El
Capitane gave the order to bugger off into not-quite-deep space.

"We're underway!" - Nikki

"Don't worry, we'll probably crash into Terra" - El Capitane

Nikki spends jump building a nav beacon with IFF capabilities.

Rosa put them into a standard prograde equatorial orbit - everyone held
their breath as Nikki carefully deployed the nav beacon.

El Capitane asked Rosa if it was worth trying to refuel here - possibly
having his eyes on the dollar signs of setting up a refuelling station here.

Rosa asked Jim if he could get a better handle on how turbulent the gas
dwarf's atmo was - a top-of-Moustache estimate came back that he would
be surprised if it _wasn't_ less turbulent than a full-scale gas giant.

Two full orbits with sensors running full-banger confirmed Jim's initial
estimate.

Things were calm enough that Rosa skipped her usual practice of
inserting into the cloudtops - she went right into the shallows, where
the tanks filled in a mere 5 hours.

During this, El Capitane officially named the wanderer "Teapot".

With tanks full, they jumped out to Dismal (SR 2330).

The jump out to Dismal was routine, as was the ocean refuelling stop.

The jump out to Loki was routine, as was the near-immediate jump out to
Prometheus.

Many months ago, the Butcher's Paradise, her captain and her crew had
departed the United Nations.  They were now in a major industrial system
(thanks to all the belt mining) of the Terran Confederation.

--