Er'tsuda Expedition: Day 3

A bit of an early update today...

I've found a way out onto the canyon floor from the factory. There is a small service passage at the outermost end of the harvester receiving area. This leads to a narrow flight of stairs, some ladders, and a claustrophobically thin hallway before finally ending in a door. The door took me outside, where I followed a very weather-worn path down to ground level. The enormous arc of the pellet factory swept up and away from me across the breadth of the canyon, backlit by the light of the morning sun; a sight so incredible I nearly fell over trying to take it all in.

I planted a stick in the ground, marked the position of its shadow, and set up some equipment to record the passage of time here. I have a time-lapse camera and a stopwatch attached to a tripod and trained on the stick. Some time tomorrow, I'll come back and check on the stick to see how long it took the planet to make a full revolution. The science of exploring these worlds is arguably my favorite part... I could take or leave the heavy manual labor of fixing everything, I just want to look at stuff and see how it works.

I also set up a more permanent camp down here near the bottom of the canyon. Like Er'cana, it's a wide basin rather than a more precipitous chasm like most of the Grand Canyon, so my concerns about a storm potentially flooding my base of operations require less drastic precautions... it takes a lot more water to fill up a broad, flat canyon than it does to fill up a narrow one. I'm set up about 15 feet from the bottom right now, on one of the widest parts of the access path.

Cursory efforts to get the docked harvester up and running have proven unsuccessful. I'm not exactly surprised, though. As I said yesterday, the thing's been sitting for at least 200 years now. Any lubricant and fuel that could possibly have been in the thing is gone now. I'm going to do some more searching around the crawl spaces in the factory this evening and see if I can find any useful replacement materials that might have survived (I doubt it... might need to make an excursion to the Surface again for some engine repair stuff).