We’re now starting to get the early details about the touchdown itself – (touchdown, of course, being used in the loosest possible sense)Only about an hour late Dilwyn and Meg pushed all the furniture to the front of the ship to tip the craft towards the surface to start the descent as planned.
From there things all happened a bit quicker than we expected. Cymru III then accelerated to about 800mph in a perpendicular descent to smash into the surface ice some 1,100 miles from the proposed landing site – which is pretty close for us though.
The insurance company did start to quote all legalese stuff at us when we first rang them to claim for a new spaceship.
“The definition of accidental damage is that which occurs suddenly as a result of an unexpected and non-deliberate external action. blah blah blah”
Yes, we know smashing into an unknown planet’s surface in a glorified grain silo might not be describable as a non-deliberate act. But it wasn’t our fault nobody had told us about re-entry friction, and ballistics and all that stuff. And we certainly didn’t intend it to catch fire and start to burn up on re-entry.
Anyway, they were very good about it and have decided that from an insurance point of view, Cymru III is a write off and they will pay the £325 (less £250 excess). Lucky we bought fully-comp.
