The most uncanny rescue occurred today in the Andromeda galaxy. Nearly impossible.
Operating under the assumed avatar name of “Andromeda,� I ran out of fuel while babysitting the artifact on Andromeda's cloaked planet. Sending out a distress call, it was answered by fellow IM pilot Starbuck and an old buddy by the name of Gorf.
Starbuck arrived on the scene first, having pinpointed my position via a deployed sensor array. Upon close approach, we realized the difficulty of the situation: electronic interference hampered any direct link between our two ships. In other words, Starbuck was unable to transfer fuel from his ship to mine.
With standard rescue procedures no longer an option, Starbuck attempted to deploy a refueling station such that, as the planet rotated, I'd drift into the station and refuel on my own. No luck. Due to the orientation of the refueling station relative to my ship, aligning the two turned out to be a hit-and-miss effort where only the “miss� part came into play.
Nonetheless, we were not beaten. Due to the mechanics of the SAVE option when planetside, we realized that it might be possible to escape from the conundrum of the planet's electrical interference by using either the ESC-and-exit option or the self-destruct button … thereby forcing a re-spawn above the planet. Hopefully outside the effects of atmospheric distortion.
The re-spawn worked as expected … putting me into low free-fall above the planet. But, unfortunately, not above the electrical interference. I still couldn't make a direct connection with Starbuck.
As my ship drifted slowly back to the planet, Starbuck tried another alternative: he deployed a refueling station directly underneath, in the path of my free-fall. This time, it worked. Not for long … gravity eventually tugged hard enough at the ship to pull it out of reach of the station. But, by then, enough fuel had been transferred to make a jump into space.
And that would've been really cool had I, first, remembered to use the SAVE option.
Well, after burning up in the atmosphere, the second try turned out to be a charm. Starbuck repeated his technique of deploying a refueling station below my ship, whereby the ship drifted into the station and sucked up about sixteen units of fuel. At that point, no amount of maneuvering would keep me inside the station.
So I saved, jumped, blew up, re-spawned in a slightly higher orbit … and then headed out into space using the sixteen units of fuel. Making it with almost eight units to spare … enough to deploy another refueling station and dock with it under my own power.
