Moonvertising, Antiques and the Ads of Days Gone by.

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Log No: 018

I went for a nice walk around the Starbase today after a friend suggested that I check out the Envirdome, I eventually found the place and wasn’t disappointed! Its a large dome located on the upper regions of the base filled with various flora and fauna, it was a real treat for a homesick spacefarer. Don’t get me wrong I do love the flawless holographic scenery that a quantum processor can provide but there’s something about a real environment dome that feels a lot better. Back to the headline story then! I decided to take a different route back to my quarters and found what can only be described as the stranger part of the Starbase. There was a long narrow passage way which I decided to take a stroll down, this took me to a large and poorly maintained market hall. As I had just come from the Envirodome the smell was almost unbearable but I persevered and was soon haggling for goods. There were traders from all corners of the galaxy carrying some of the strangest stock around, a lot of it I’d never seen or heard of before. I noticed a familiar logo painted onto a glass bottle so I had a butchers at it and noticed the accompanying set, I made the trade and walked away with the 200 year old bottles you see in my picture. I’m not sure what I’ll do with them but I thought they were pretty awesome. The bottles were adorned with simple three colour advertising and I guess that it must have worked otherwise the bottles wouldn’t have existed, it started me thinking about the mass advertising assault that we are subjected to nowadays. As a youngster in London I used to lay in bed at night and look up at the night sky watching the Moonvertisments, I never thought about how much of an effect it had on me but 15 years later I can still recall at least 25 of the products and logos that were projected. I guess laser pointing a Burger chain logo onto the Moon is bad but I think the worst method of advertising is Adverteyz, a small chip is placed in your eyes and It stimulates your retinal tissue into a state of phantom projection. Sure the companies that implant and advertise through them offer discounts on products but 20 minutes of continuous un-turn-offable advertising just after you wake up and just before bed is not my idea of fun!

Thanks for reading, Private Jack Fast.

A Change of Spacefarers’ Insurance and a Big Forzean Hypercarrier.

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Log No: 017

It’s always worth checking out that you have the best deal when it comes to Spacefarers Insurance and as I’m at Starbase for a while I thought I’d get all my banking up to date. A couple of days ago I booked in with the Financial Assistance Droid to see what savings I could make. So yesterday I nipped over to the branch where me and FAD-364V toothcombed through my sorry ass accounts to see where improvements could be made. To be fair my accounts were in a much better state than I’d imagined they would be, mainly because I spent most of my time zooming around space with not a lot to spend my wages on apart from bills. However there were a few bits that were pointed out to me and one was an update to an new Spacefarers insurance, I’d let my old one roll over for five years and it was an old product it had continually increased it’s annual cost. Now I am pleased to say that I have a new cover and its saving me £294 a month! At least that means I can send my old dear a nice gift every month to take her mind off of her little lad working out in space. So onto part two of yesterdays events. I was having late breakfast in the Pop Tarts Bar after the bank and I was watching the local traffic whizzing about the sector when I noticed a slower moving vessel in the distance, now in space you have very little to make comparative distance judgements but for some reason it was obvious that this was big. As the ship came closer the Starbase was switched into a back up power mode, exactly what for I don’t know but it did manage to cause a brief moment of panic when the lighting dropped to 50%. It turns out that this ship was a Forzean Hypercarrier, It was about twice the length of the Starbase and is apparently used to carry up to 15 Mining Tankers and their support craft into uncharted space. Being an engineer of sorts I’m usually pretty clued up when it comes to new ships which makes me think that the construction of this one was kept fairly quiet, I’m guessing that they’ve found an untapped resource somewhere that they don’t want to share. When you think that my ship the Remus an old mining ship is about the size of an up to date mining support craft at around 120 metres long and a modern mining tanker is ten fold that, this Hypercarrier carries tankers in three rows of five with three support craft per tanker. If I was to take an educated guess I would say this carrier was between 7 – 8 kilometres long, so its pretty big. Anyway I’ll keep you all updated when I find out what the back up power was about!

Thanks for reading, Private Jack Fast

Hooked Up to Starbase Heck of a Month, Pop Tarts and Ice Hockey.

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Log No: 016

Wow has it really been over a month? Sorry about that, it seems more like a week or so at most. Well since I’ve last blogged we have docked at Starbase and the ship is undergoing It’s last leg of repairs, unofficially we have two more missions left and it’ll be decommission time after that. So anyway let me tell you about the Starbase, it’s huge! The first thing you notice is air quality, you spend a week in an almost euphoric state because the oxygen is so abundant. Once you have become accustomed to the rich atmosphere you start to explore what is essentially a floating mega city and there are some serious perks. Every day I start by heading to the Pop Tarts and Lavazza Coffee bar and it is the real deal they do some amazing things with Pop Tarts I had no idea about how versatile this awesome food is! Then I go to the antique arcades for a bit of Call of Duty 4D followed by a nice Italian restaurant lunch, then cinema / sports / workshops etc whatever takes my fancy, they’ve even got a traditional chip shop on board so I can eat cheesy chips and curry sauce. There’s no half arsed carbonised food on board the Starbase it’s all made in traditional methods and warped over via huge cargo ships, it is quite frankly a taste of home! The facilities here are pretty insane too and being from London I was keen to check out the Ice Arena. I should inform you about the connection between London and Ice Arenas, it’s quite the tale and if you’re from Canada this may be of interest! around 140 years ago, the gulf stream that flows along the west coast of the United Kingdom drastically altered direction causing the Isles to experience rapid cooling, this had some very random effects one of which caused the collapse of the Football Premier League. The game of ‘soccer’ as a few know it had been suffering financially anyway as wages had peaked to ridiculous levels, and then to add insult to ‘injury time’ the cooling prompted 90% of the foreign talent in the leagues to leave for warmer climates. This created a vacuum which allowed more home grown players to fill the void demanding almost the same wages as their foreign counterparts. The problem was that there was not enough quality to completely fill the void and almost all of the sponsors pulled the plug. In the mad rush to purchase all of the available players 70% of European teams also bankrupted themselves thus causing the collapse of football. In response to this the people of the UK looked to winter sports for recreation and became heavily hooked on Ice Hockey. I myself played Ice Hockey for a while with the Heathrow Highwaymen, we were based at the 20,000 seat Jack Knight stadium which is the best in the land! So as a result Canada, England and Scotland are currently the best teams in the world by far. About a week ago the local Starbase Floaters invited me to take part in a Floaters ‘vs’ Spacefarers game, I knew it’d be rough as there is no love lost between the two groups. Along with the humans we had two Crevelians on our team and the Floaters had a Shubian and a Droid which made us pretty evenly matched, the game kicked of to a bit of an excitable start but then settled. In the third period we were 3-2 and things began to get a bit lively again when the Shubian dropped his gloves and squared up to Voortius, the Crevelian on our team. We could see the refs were struggling a bit and so we headed over to seperate them, It was at this point that Voortius took an almighty swing and took the head clean off of the Floaters’ Droid. I have to say it was the first time I’d seen an actual ‘face off’ in a game of hockey. It ended up getting our team disqualified, even though the Droid was eventually repaired, phew! There were a few red faces but at least we were 1 up when the game was pulled. I still think it was a fix though!

Thanks for reading Private Jack Fast

Starship Remus is Being Decommissioned? Plus I Got My Hovercycle Back!

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Log No: 015

Obviously being stuck on a rotting old starship is a little bit drab sometimes, so it’s inevitable that at some point the fuel of boredom pours onto the rumour mill and things can occasionally get out of hand! No one really knows where these rumours are emanating from and some of them can be a little far fetched to say the least. For instance around 2 years ago we were transporting a diplomat to the newly found planet of Eriuvalous, what started out as a little bit of careless chin wagging nearly caused a mutiny on board the Remus. We had entered the orbit of Eriuvalous’ star and were awaiting P.O.C (Planetary Orbit Clearance) when a rumour spread around that the Diplomat was a wanted criminal and the Eriuvalites were planning to ambush our ship to detain him. Now anyone with an ounce of common sense would have realised that a species that takes 29 hours to respond to a P.O.C is probably not going to be very proactive when it comes to full on orbital assaults, still a lot of the crew were panicked and it took an encyclopedia of dialogue from the High Command to calm them. I guess you’re thinking what the latest rumour is, well there were a lot of upset faces on deck 7 earlier so I made a few enquiries. It seems that there has been word from high command that the Remus is due to be decommissioned after it’s next 2 missions. If you ask me it’s not a bad thing as the starship is nearly old enough (and organic enough) to be a feature in the Natural History Museum! At a guess I’d say most of the top deck would be happy if this turned out to be true, I’m not sure what problems they know about up there but from a warp drive engineers perspective the old GL warp systems this ship is running are in constant need of negative charging and like to randomly spew ammonia from the coolant chambers. All this got me thinking about the next ship I might be stationed on as the current builds list is pretty impressive. Right now though I’ll save my sentiment and keep it for the next time I’m on Earth as today I received a pretty cool message from the local law enforcement agency. I was on board the Remus about 14 months ago and I received an alert from Earth that I’d had my I had my Musk 3000 Hovercycle stolen. I was gutted, mainly because it was a present and the person that gave it to me was upset as well as they had spent a year tracking such an old rare bike in the even rarer pearlescent orange trim! Any way the fuzz have got it back for me and it’s being stored at the station so I’ll put the boys in blue on my Christmas card recipients this year! By the way I know some of you might ask: (Picture Lucy on a Hoverbike by Artist Jake Parker) Yeah his work is awesome, check him out!
Thanks for reading, Private Jack Fast.

Holy Food Hybrids I’ve Created the Banarshmallow

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Log No: 014

OK, don’t mind the state of my carboniser I’m aware it needs a good clean! I’m in space and it’s a fairly boring place for a Warp Drive Engineer who’s Warp systems have to remain offline until we get the ship repaired, so as a result I’ve been tinkering lots. The carboniser is our main source of food on board and a few weeks back I went against High Command rules and optimised it to create a wider menu as the stuff we’ve all been eating is just a bit bland. I could have stopped there but I found an old teleporter processor in the stores next door. To cut a long story short I’ve hooked up the processor to the carboniser and I’m using it to simultaneously create the signature of a secondary product within the production sequence of the main processor, essentially I’m tricking it into creating new cross-bred foods. The Banarshmallow is my favourite so far. 

Pirates, Hulks and Christmas Shopping in Space

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Log No: 012B

Me and the crew had an unexpected surprise today, the deep space comms system came into live range of Starbase RS-251A. As a result we’ve got real time Intergalactic Web Transfer (igw.) so most of us have managed to get all of our Christmas shopping done and dispatched to our home planets and colonies. Super result, although when you’re sending presents from light years away there’s a stupidly high expectation so it’s high pressure and my wallet looks a bit like a limp dick now but hey sod it man, It’s Christmas! Second on todays menu is the arrival of 5 heavily fortified Hulk class ships which are escorting us back to Starbase, No one pre warned us they were turning up and the sight of 5 weapon loaded ships suddenly surrounding us resulted in Capt Thompson spending most of the afternoon on the toilet ‘expelling last nights dinner’. Due to our current positioning and relativley slow speed we are apparently a prime target for pirates, although I’m not sure whether a ship like the Remus is carrying much that would be of value to them. Any way the word is that a ship called the Hurvageon has been sighted in the area and this has made the commands buttholes pucker in fright. The Hurvageon (Her-Vague-Eon) not (Her-Vaj-Eon) is a ridiculously formidable pirate ship crewed by an interplanetary crew and captained by a highly trained and unpredictable mad man called Xykron. Xykron is the currently the most wanted being in 3 Galaxies and will attack any ship with a flag on it, usually resulting in the destruction or at least a complete ransacking of the vessel. Although they’re severley inferior 5 Hulk classes should be enough to discourage an attack, Xykron won’t want to run the risk of taking a lot of damage to his own ship in such a pirate rich area of space. It’s a bit of a sad story but Xykron is 1/2 Crevelian 1/4 Human and 1/4 Eriuvalite, his anger manifested from a young age after his parents sold him to a trader fearing their people would never accept him. He was purchased by an ex Draagxun commando and was fully trained in advanced combat by the age of 10. A sad story but also a very good reason to stay the frak out of his way!

Thanks for reading, Private Jack Fast.

First Officer Evans and the Chronic Misquotes

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Log No: 012

On the 21st of July 1969 at 0256 GMT the legendary Neil Armstrong became the first man to step foot on the moon. As he placed his foot on the lunar surface he declared: “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Famously he missed out the ‘a’ between ‘for’ and ‘man’ which given the humongous amount of pressure he was under is totally understandable, I mean the dude had just flown to the moon in a rocket powered bacofoil tent so fair play! Now I’m not saying that everything I do and say is absolutely perfect but what I don’t understand is First Officer Evans and his daily ability to misquote everything! FO Evans claims to be a fan of classic Film and literature and tries to overcompensate with quotes and impressions at every opportunity, unfortunately they are usually wrong and often make zero sense although some are quite funny! Here is a list of some of his worst offences:

1) To a rogue Iqualforian Captain about to fire on us – Go ahead, make my week.

2) To the Captain – Always forgive your enemies, no one enjoys them so much.

3) To a Greejuin trader last year – I’m gonna make him a bid he can’t refuse.

4) When asked to identify himself on Greejuis – I’m a King of the World!

5) To Harry the ships old plumber who fixed his toilet – You’re a wizard mate.

6) When talking about the Starship Remus and its reverse set warp layout – Aerodynamically, the bumble bee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumble bee doesn’t know it so it must be good at physics or something. 

7) When falsely arrested for smuggling – I am no bird, and no net ensnares me. I am a free human being with a dependency.

8) Talking about the time he slapped a Draagxun Guard in a bar brawl – When you’re brave but you still do it anyway, that’s scared.

9) When we were asked to leave Forzean space the first time – You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin’ to? (The Forzean reply was “We’re talking to Captain Thompson actually”)

10) When confronted with a strange hag type woman on Greejuis – Boyo, I don’t reckon we’re in Kansas any more!

Thanks for reading, Private Jack Fast.

Greejuin Trader Frenzy, Kelloggs Fruit Loops and a Bad Back!

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Log No: 011

I have had a bad back for a few days now and because medical bay has been full of people suffering from The Folds I have had to remain bed ridden for the duration. However as a result of being off work I have managed to catch up on some retro gaming on my Playstation X, So the time off has been fun although I’ve had a posture strap rammed up my ass crack since last Thursday so it’s been far from comfortable! After 6 days of solid gaming I was getting a bit bored and then yesterday we received a hail from a Greejuin Trade Vessel offering goods. The industry stance on letting traders onto a vessel is a pretty strict no however the Captain decided to raise the crews spirits and let him on board. After 3 hours or so of some of the best quinslak bartering I have ever heard from a trader I managed to grab a moment with him. There were plenty of interesting things to buy from him but it was the contraband boxes of breakfast cereal that caught my eye. In true quinslak fashion I asked him how much for his poor quality knock off products, he responded with an insult about my cash only being useful to wipe his ass with. After a few more insults I finalised with ‘A blind old goat wouldn’t pay for his product with it’s own shit that was mainly composed of another shit it had eaten 2 days ago.’ He seemed to like this insult and offered me the cereal stock for £800. When I get to Starbase I’ll trade it myself and make around £6000 on it, however I might have to chomp a few bowls full first! Thanks for reading Private Jack Fast.