(#meanwhileincolonia Part 2)

(ye I still have a cough. Not streaming again, making a habit of it now..)

.. The story in deep space so far, in the course of going deeper and deeper into deep space in the search for a virgin undiscovered system, I find 7 escape pods in the middle of nowhere which did not help my hunt for FSD injection materials - the extra weight has reduced my jump range.

I had moved to the second barren planet in this system. The first landing site there was a bust, not a single thing showed up on the SRV scanner (odd..), so I pitched camp for the night.. and ended my first log here.

Back to our story - After some much needed rest, I took off again and moved to the next crater over, now this was a much more productive site. Ended up totally filling my supplies of some more common materials like Iron etc, still have 45 Vanadium from the first planet, and now I have 16 Polonium. Sorted for escaping this orphan system cluster at HD 110346 - but this crater also contains two downed intelligence (ha!) drones.. owned by opposing factions.

Probably been here for a century so not sure how useful it is, but I grabbed a copy of its data anyway.

Perhaps a clue why they are here, I find a destroyed SRV surrounded by obscenely valuable ore canisters, (not entirely sure how this many canisters fit an SRV, maybe its some limited edition military or early retro model or something) and some mining equipment between the two drone sites. . Ended up tossing the mining equipment because.. of course nearby there is another 4 life pods and it was either leave one here or dump the machinery.. sigh the miners over at my home system Arverda would sell their left testicle for this equipment, but I cant leave them out here. At this point my jump range would be further if i got out and pushed.

For a remote system nobody could even be bothered surveying the planets on, it seems awfully crowded out here.

Anyway, now that I can injection jump up to 60+ LY these orphan systems and cul-de-sacs are less an issue, but the navigation system still refuses to plot jumps based on injection, and will barely plot jumps more than 78LY on connected systems. What is up with that?

So I jump deeper into the void, with one brown pants moment near a wierd red giant star where i come out of jump too close and immediately take 12% hull damage and drop out of Super Luminal (That's a fancy way of saying Low wake Frame Shift). I find some systems with a few planets people missed.. plus a few interesting hotspots on some rings which I tag to return to later with a mining ship. With people being this sloppy, chances are good I should find an entire system someone missed..

..But disaster strikes - while attempting to land and investigate some wierd geological features, (the hell is a compressed water lava vent?) something goes horribly wrong and the ship crashes into the ground. Must be the extra weight of all those pods and ore canisters. Hull is down to 45%.. lucky I opted to keep even a smaller shield for this mission, Or there would be 12 escape pods here!

At this point I decide to try to make a run back to the nearest station for repairs.. following the systems as I find them, I end up roughly 1300 LY above the bubble on the Galactic south west end.. and find a bunch more system density - now I am finding orphan system chains 20-30 LY apart of 8 or more, seperated by 50 or or 60LY voids, and I start finding more and more systems where the discovery scanner reports more hits than the system map shows - so a detailed scan finds quite a few undiscovered planetoids and the occaisional gas giant someone missed. I might come out a head in credits on this after all.

In the middle of one of these system chains, I find it. A totally Virgin system of about 40ish points of interest that nobody has visited before. Ironic I found my mission objective on the return trip. Well that pays for the entire trip.

I scan the system in detail and begin surveying each planet - I find some more interesting geological sites, and attempt to land, in my "excitement" my night vison goes out.. (dang it!) and I missjudge the ground, (why is the geological site marker 80 metres underground... on the dark side of the planet) and end up bouncing off the very features I planned to investigate, taking my hull down to 2%! argh! (and not the fun sort of pirate argh either!)

Having nearly left my mark in the form of 12 escape pods here too.. one with a nasty brown stain in it.. I climb for the sky and boost like crazy to get clear. I check my modules, but thanks to the module hardening upgrade I left installed, they are all in the high 90%'s condition wise. I tag the system with a bookmark and write the name down on a note, and start plotting manual jumps down towards what I hope is the nearest station. Jacking up my shield system power a little out of paranoia.. since thats pretty all I have between me, space, and that 2% hull.

I also note the 3 or so orphan systems I had to jump between to get my isolated chain of systems where my virgin system is so I can get back again.

I half heartedly honk the systems as I go past, and find maybe 1 or 2 planets someone missed which i quickly scan and move on. I get stuck at one point and jettison one of the less valuable ore canisters just to squeeze in a fraction more FSD range which gets me within 600 light years of the most remote station I can find nearby on the galcon. The milestone commemorated by a random space pirate trying to interdict me. Hell no.. power to engines and escape and an injection jump to lose the guy.

Systems density here is crazy and all of a sudden my navicon can plot jumps up to 700 LY's chains again. Thank feck for that. I lock onto Arverda and start doing fast jumps. About 3/4 of the way there, I get the hostile power warning light come up, and poke about the system map, and find some obscure remote mining outpost in a system with literally 1 planet 430,000 light seconds in. It is also the power that owned one of those downed probes to boot. I thank whatever wealthy idiot thought that was a good idea, although since when does the power bubble go this far up? Who cares, I put all power to engines and jam my way over there and land.

I immediately repair my hull, and dump the probe data. Checking the market I also offload a couple of the ore canisters, saving the other 2 for a nearby system where its worth 2000 more (which pays for the hull repair) apparently this outposts faction like me now.. pfft. Was hundred year old probe data that important?

While I think of it I release all my system data taking claim to the system I found, and the few dozen other things I found.. ok thats like 50 million credits worth, I just doubled my money.

This stations faction REALLY likes me now.

I tag the station (its the closest to my shiny new system) and jump a few more over to sell the last 2 cannisters.

I finish my trip to Arverda, and convert my Diamondback explorer back to a combat ship, then swap out with my ASP explorer mining ship. With all the mining fittings its jump range is junk but I am curious what I will find in those ring hotspots.

I slowly make my way back to my system, stopping at a few rings which are meant to contain low temperature diamonds. All i find is some crappy water and oxygen crystals with my abrasion blaster. I did get some wierd crystal with the mining laser, but not enough to sell. Also apparently the salesman saw me coming when I installed the mining bomber, none of the bombs explode when I shoot them into the hot asteroids - or even seem capable of exploding. Well my dreams of void opals and diamonds are dashed then. I throw all the junk ore out an airlock, and good riddance.

I return to plotting course to my cherry system. Man the fuel scooper on this ASP is over powered, I should downgrade something and put in more cargo.

Oddly my nav computer manages to plot me to within 300LY of my system.. wonder why the Diamondback struggled so much. Things get complicated however, all my marker systems are 60 to 100 LY away from this direction. The ASP maxes at about 50LY on lvl 3 if I dump all my cargo. Using injection, getting me at best 35LY on lvl 2 - I manage eventually to reach some of the approach systems I used before, but that puts me 138 light years in the wrong direction, so I have to burn some of my precious level 3 injections to make 3 hops over.

Finally I arrive at my system. I do a quick surface survey and land near my first geological POI.. silica lava vents, Pretty, but apparently I already discovered one like this, so my bonus is only a few thousand. I hit some mats Vanadium. Nice. So I settle back into my ASP as the sun sets, leaving me a view of lava vents like the camp fires of an army laying siege to a castle in the night, and bed down for the night. It has been a long day.

What will the future bring I wonder. At the very least hunting for more polonium, or I might be stuck here forever. Not that it would be a bad thing. Us spacers always say.. we want to die in space one day.. just not on impact, and preferaably of old age..

Meanwhile in deep space.... ( #meanwhileincolonia Part 1)

(So for once I didn't stream, got a cold, nobody wants to hear me coughing in their ear, so I am writing of my adventures now.)

I set a goal, keep flying into deep space until i find myself a shiny undiscovered system to call my own. So I poked about my dust covered hanger to see what has the most range, and I break my diamondback explorer out of the mothballs, my old low level bounty/boom ship, and strip that girl down until she has a jump range in the 30's. Not engineered so about as good as I can get a stocker without losing all the modern amenities.

Off I fly.. after one false start after a misshap with a neutron star.. i go roughly Galactic south west, and up in a spiral path, figuring non cardinal directions are more likely to fluke a new system, unfortunately, it appears everything in that direction leads to rather annoying cul-de-sac systems where the next system is 50 or more away, anyway, after numerous dead ends, I scroll out the map and manually tag a remote system as a vague goal to get near.

I find a few systems where surface scans have not happened.. seems promising, looks like I am in pre-DSS era systems. I am roughly 900 - 1300ly outside the remotest bubble systems, and I stop at an asteroid area. Much to my surprise, there is a (NPC) ship there mining. At least he moved like a miner, but wasn't actually shooting any mining beams. Weird. He is flagged as dodgy, but has no bounties and we scan each other, then promptly ignore one another. Tho I do a quick scan of the galaxy map for the hip faction he proudly transmits the name of, and discover this bad boy is 1200ly from home.. someone took a wrong turn.

After getting increasingly frustrated by the galcons inability to chart a course.. anywhere anymore - and discovering using the option to chart based on using additives doesnt work out here either, I start manually locking systems, injecting and overclock jumping across a few 38 to 40 light year voids from the dead ends. After ending up in an annoying orphans system cluster of 4 systems, in the middle of nowhere 50 LY from anywhere else and running low on additives to jump any deeper, i scan all systems and surfaces in detail, plently of rare additives in these systems, also someone else was here before me and honked it seems 🙁 but only about 5 of them have atmospheres light enough (or non existant enough) I can actually land on and explore with the SRV.

So an hour into jamming around in my SRV in a particularly promising crater and getting loads of jump additivies, I pick up a perculiar railroad shaped contact on the spectrograph, thinking I might have found something rare I head over that way. What do I find? 1500 lightyears in the middle of nowhere, in an isolated desolate planetoid in a remote cut off system, that has barely even been honked and never explored in detail, I find 7 life pods.

How the hell did they get here? Sighing as i realise these things are going to hurt my jump range, I call up my ship and load them on. Who knows how long these people have been on ice. Well they can stay on ice a bit longer, I am a long way from home too.

It is probably a random find, tho what are the odds anyone would land on that planet, in that crater, and drive to that exact spot to find them. I should buy a lotto ticket. 7 seems an odd number, and their transponder beeping loudly and showing on my spectrograph is all the more strange since I cannot lock on find or even scan it.

Having stowed them away, I fly to the next rock and land, the scans say I should find materials for a lvl 3 injection.. but 40 minutes later not even one rock shows on the scanners. This is going to be a long trip I think, as I drop the ship into low power mode and settle in for a sleep..

So at great cost I might add, I have sat and passed my pilots federation License.

It was not easy. Compared to the Flight systems of my KeenSWH Pirate Corsair, Built by Space Engineers it was a nightmare of undocumented buttons and switches.

But if I ever wanted to leave my home system, it had to be done. There is an entire universe out there to explore. Far larger than rock hopping asteroids.

It took time to reconcile the controls I was fluent with on my rock hopper to the frankly absurd complexity of controls in a small frame shift capable ship.. but I get there eventually.

About the only advantage is being considered "harmless" after about 2500 undocumented hours of pirating in my corsair rock hopper in the non-aligned asteroids of Ramblers Frontier out From Jupiter... "encounters" will never know what hit them... "harmless" heh heh heh (muahahhaha)

Downside of course is with my Pilots Federation Registration comes a debt of many thousands for my first frame shift capable ship. This is no dinky little Rock Hopper out in the belt - this thing is fast and long range. I have to keep on the right side of the law until it is paid off.

The station where they delivered my sidewinder was of course a rotating station. This "rental" had a defective flight stick which failed the initial pre-flight check.. and it didn't improve from there.

Alone with my "new" (reconditioned?) ship, dumped in a system in the ass end of nowhere - it is still no walk in the park. My flight training and certification was at a remote Outpost past the Oort cloud, only covering basic flight and combat. Nobody explained these rotating stations, or taking off from them!

Hundreds of buttons on the control panel.. yet you to use the hat controls on the flight stick to queue up navigation and coms? What fool thought that was a good idea? Millions of commanders out there using the same controls? Lunacy!

I select coms and request permission to take off. Released from the landing pad I raise the landing gear and pull up navigation, picking a location at random - I locks it in but it causes the guns to suddenly deploy.. why? I've not even left the station and I have a 100 credit fine now? I attempt to stow the guns and a fault in the system panel miss fires my after burner. I watch in horror as I scrape the side of my ship along the inside of the station... bleurgh! Now someone is yelling at me on coms about the speed limit.

Things get worse.. I kick the reluctant system panel several times to get it to stow the guns - live firing a freakin missile in the process before it finally responds. With only half the flight controls responding... I somehow manage to avoid fire from the local system Authorities who are now shooting at me.. where was that afterburner again... some luck - they activate! Quickly I turn on the one axis that actually still works and perform a 3 point turn then boost again to escape the station and hostile gunfire. Well the ship isn't useless in a straight line at least, I outrun the the authority ships and keep running until the radar is clear. Well I don't care for all the red flashing lights and alarms.. I think I took damage.

After more troubles with the navigation systems, where exactly is super cruise.. its a sub menu off navigation? Errr.. how do I stop it again.. there is no visual queue.. why is my throttle disabled? Only the throttle overrides on the console work in super cruise? Eh? I eventually manage to target the system I actually wanted to travel to - somehow activate the jump - arrive and nearly crash into the star. Each jump drops you on a collision course with a star... what the actual F...

Now my frame shift controls are bugging out, how the hell do I drop to normal space now? frantic random pressing of keys I manage eventually to drop out near a station. I manage to request docking without deploying the guns this time.. and head for the slot.

Oh right the station is spinning. I am expected to manually match rotation..? lucky that axis actually works on this factory second of a ship.. those thousands of hours in a rock hopper dodging spinning rocks and wreckage finally pay off. They have the audacity to give me a mortgage to pay off this ship? I've salvaged better wrecks in the belt than this junk heap. The ship in front of me is rapidly approaching.. I go to hit the match speed control... and then discover there isn't one.. in all the hundreds of controls.. nobody thought to add that one? Sigh. Emergency reverse thrust.. phew close. I make out some freaked out passenger peering at me through a porthole in the ship in front. I just shrug at them. They frown and shake a fist at me.

This cut price ship is also too old to have a docking autopilot. Apparently all the newer models have one now. Lucky me.. I get a bona fide vintage collectors edition without one. Well I managed to get in the slot.. but where is my assigned landing pad.. er.. uuhm? Oh there it is - only had to spend 2 minutes blundering around like a drunken sailor in the dark to spot that faint blue smudge in a remote corner of the station. What do you mean 100 credit fine for loitering.. oh for the love of.. they didn't think indicating your assigned landing pad on the radar was a good idea? Ugh...

Right - to land I need to coast in, lower landing gear, cancel out my forward momentum and... oh crap I hit flight control/assistance instead of zero my thrust.. why are both buttons next to each other.. and unlabeled? What a stupid design.! ....aaaaaand now my throttle has been disabled and jammed at 30..

I curse as my ship randomly drifts into the nearest space station wall.. again. So much for my paint job.

Ok flight controls are online again... there is my pad but speed wont go below 1? Is it stuck? I line up the horizon.. slowly approaching my pad. Er.. how do I descend.. Franticly I page through a stained and faded sidewinder flight manual I find under the seat. aha... the key marked F (f? huh?) Oh crap another button next to flight control assist.. I curse as I hit the wrong key again... overshoot the pad to crash into a wall for a third time. I slam the throttle into full reverse... until I line up with the pad finally. Landing gear down, descent thrust... Oh damnit now I am taxing instead of hovering.. I abort and retry.. my coms panel starts scrolling like a stockmarket readout as one after the other I get another series of fines... another loitering fine, 100 credit blocking fine, 600 credit trespass fine, someone is yelling at me on the radio for entering the station without landing approval.. ARGHHJHHHH!!! for the love of...

much cursing and thumping flight controls with a spanner later

Ok I am back at my assigned pad. According to this flight manual I need to use the mini squiggly ship icon on the radar to align to land.. that wasn't covered in orientation videos either. Achh.. it doesn't tell me which way the pad wants me facing. much frantic reading of manuals and watching of videos later ugh the videos only cover combat? Ok.. right only one direction works.. Nearly out of time I finally line up correctly and hit the tarmac. With a thump and grinding of docking clamps I have landed. Somehow I have managed to pay off my fines without incurring a violent brutal flaming death. This time at least.

Right I need to trade or something to make money.. er.. ok nothing covers the trade process.. I cant even SEE a market anywhere on this station? sigh

many many hours of adventures and swearing at the ship later

Right so I've done some bounty hunting, data deliveries, system defense and a bit of trading. I can't even remember what system I started in at this point. Lets try some passenger tourist missions they sound relaxing... who doesn't enjoy a vacation?

WHATS THIS.. ILLEGAL PASSENGER! This was supposed to be your honeymoon? What the hell did you have in your luggage? Get the hell off my ship.. What! I cant eject these passengers..? Darnit.. now I am wanted? I will never pay off the damn ship at this rate....

Wait.. what.. I need to pay extra for the ability to land on a planet now... some module called "horizons" and a landing suite? Oh for the love of.... sound of static