Needle in a Haystack

So that was it. Two months minimum to wait for assistance from the DSA. The only other choice they had was the tiny light duty dingy. This ship was kept at remote stations like this one in order to ferry passengers and equipment and to handle emergencies that were close by. It was not designed for long distance runs, certainly not anything like the run back to close space which they would have to make if they were to survive. "What about the Armstrong Heshy?", Jim broke the silence. "Forget it, with all the luck in this part of the galaxy and twice the supplies we'd be able to stuff in, I'd give it half a chance to ever show up on the radar. That's how close we'd get. No Jim, I don't want to freeze to death out there and that's what would happen." Heshy sounded really hopeless. "We could rendezvous with the cutter that's much more realistic. I've been going over the figures for the last hour. It would take the best math we had to get a line good enough to make it on the available fuel. We'd have to make little tiny corrections as we went." "Doesn't the computer do that automatically?", Jim asked. "Only if it has reliable position data. Here one thousandth of a percent would translate to hundreds of miles. You can't rendezvous like that. We have to monitor our position more frequently and more accurately than is normally done." Jim was well aware of the importance of relative velocity in docking maneuvers. It took huge amounts of energy to make even relatively small course changes at the extremely high velocities that they would be travelling. This far out, rendezvous were very expensive. "I think it's worth a try Heshy!"