If you wanna wait that the whole story is finished before reading it, i'll be sure to link the story in PDF (Formatted with LaTeX) and in EPUB for those who want to wait and/or read it again!
Prologue
written in Union Standard
…..Neuronal Connection Established
…..Identity checked
…..Name: Ariana Luivon
…..Informations: Human, female, ambassador of the Union to Earth
…..Language: Earth Standard
…..Translation: OK
written in Earth Standard
Extracts of the captain logs of the Union Science Spaceship AEXIII-1,
Date: 12th of December, 1902, 1002h Human Standard Time (HST)
Our spaceship just dropped out of FTL in the outer fairing of a stellar system, the star is a class G yellow star, with a mass of approximately 0.8 Union Standard Stellar Mass (USSM), radioactivity is normal and particle emition seems to indicate that the star is approximately mid life.
We are currently in orbit of the 8th planet, a beautiful but useless blue gas giant, our engineer is looking the drive to see when we can resume our mission, we are more than 80 light years away from home and we still have a few anomalies to investigate. While we’re blocked into this stellar system the sensors are at full power to see if any biological activity is present.
Date: 12th of December, 1902, 1130h HST
An alarm just went off, the sensors picked up life signal, and weak electromagnetic activity on the third planet of this system. The system have 4 inner planets before what seems a belt of asteroid and the outer planets, only the 3rd have biological signals.
A prob has been launched and put into orbit safely in the second Lagrange point of the planet-star system, it has a faster-than-light communication arrays and is far enough to be non-detectable from the surface of the planet.
It is designed to pick up information (and any EM signals they might send) gather data, and send it right back into the main world to be processed and analyzed, this planet and specie may be interesting to study.
Date: 14th of December, 1902, 0103h HST
The engineer just called my station, they is positive the vessel is capable to safely perform an FTL jump right back to mainworld, we have to inform the chain of command of our discovery, and we have to setup the legal shenanigans to study the society of the 3rd planet, the coordinates of this system were safely put into the Union Shared Spacemap and we installed an FTL jump-point approximately 0.7 light years away from the star, in a circular orbit.
The central computer just approved the jump and I instantly felt the mechanical switch from our sublight fusion drive to the powerful space-bending FTL drive, after the final checklist was checked, the countdown was called, at T0 I feel the intense acceleration of the drive, a few broken glass later we finally were at our FTL1 speed to join mainworld in a bit over 3 months.
written in Union Standard
...
…..Language: Earth Standard
…..Translation: OK
written in Earth Standard
First, if the first bit is UI that Ariana is experiencing, the "written in Union Standard" bit doesn't really fit, especially with it then implementing a translation for the log. If Ariana doesn't know Union Standard, would make more sense to just cut that first line and start the prologue with the interface loading bits.
I can think of more than a few who would object to English, or any other human language getting designated "Earth standard". I'd highly recommend calling it something like "Earth International English", maybe even with a set dialect preference to show her preference there without bogging it down too much when mentioned again.
With the alien logs taking place in 1902, "written in Earth Standard" is quite confusing. Presumably the logs were written in Union Standard. I would suggest going with "Translation: Complete. Machine translated from Union Standard to Earth International English"
Given the age of the logs, a presumably a completely different calandar system, and the headache that is relativity, I would avoid such precision in the timestamps. "translating" the timestamp to an approximate Earth calandar date should be plenty.
the 8th planet, a beautiful but useless blue gas giant
It's a gas giant, what would a useful gas giant look like? Heh, it's also full of yummy hydrogen, helium, methane, ammonia, and even silicates if you can handle the gravity, and that's before you consider all the lovely moons and ring debris free for the taking. With it's incredibly low density compared to most gas giants we know of, it's also perfect stop to refuel your reactors, even if it's out of the way for a real mining operation
A prob has been launched
Probe.
The last paragraph slips into present tense a bit (I feel) and looks a lot more like narration than a written log. Logs are dry and written after the fact. Plus, as a space ship I gotta say it's awfully irresponsible to be using primitive glass. I think reporting an unsecured beverage making a mess would capture the humor in a dry way much more effectively.
Overall, a solid, short and sweet introduction for what it aims for, but unfortunately, it does feel lacking in anything special to really hook the reader. It feels like this log should be more focused on the decision to switch from passive observation to first contact, rather than humanity being discovered by random ship that doesn't affect the plot at all.
Thanks for this chapter ( and the one on the first chapter too ) I'll take all of this into account :)
Right now i'm a bit busy with the concours ( a bizarre french thing ) and it's the first ever piece of long fiction i wrote so I'm thankful for your comments and your ideas for improvement.
I think the next chapters become a bit more readable I did not rewrote the first one on purpose.
A prob has been launched and put into orbit safely in the second Lagrange point of the planet-star system, it has a faster-than-light communication arrays and is far enough to be non-detectable from the surface of the planet.
It's supposed to be spelt probe