Stepping out of Character: Jaques Station.
31 Jul 2016NickTheGrey
A lot has happened since my last log entry. Jaques Station has pretty much never been on my radar as a potential destination, simply because it moves around. I was interested to read about its planned - and eventually failed - trip to Beagle Point. When it was reportedly found and confirmed to be staying where it had ended up for the foreseeable future I decided this was my opportunity to add him to my list.First question to answer, however, was whether or not I took part in the Community Goal to deliver parts to repair the station. The station is located in a system some 22KLY from Okinura (where I am based) and I was exploring nebulae 2KLY from there. It seemed daft to head out all the way to Jaques and not take part in the goal so I high-tailed it back to Okinura to sell the exploration data that I had, earning promotion to Ranger. I grabbed 8T of Tantalum figuring some was better than none and began the long trip out.
Last night I finally made it to Jaques.
I had heard that the station was in dire need of repair so I'm not sure why the state of the Services there was so surprising. No refuel, no repair, no outfitting - just a Mission Board and Commodities Market. Luckily I have the fuel to make it to a star and fill the tanks that way.
Surprise number two is that 8T of Tantalum was enough to get me into the top 10% of contributors. I've no idea what other ships have made the trip successfully but I guess that cargo space was at a premium on them! It also means that the payout at the moment is 2MCr.
There is also a Community Goal being run here to deliver osmium which I'm assuming has to be mined. The problem with this is that as I've said, there's no facility to outfit ships at Jaques so if you don't come here pre-kitted out for mining you can't take part. If anybody is reading this and knows better, please feel free to drop me a PM. I don't see how this Goal is going to progress if no mining ships are making the trip.
I'm planning a two-week layover here at Jaques while I wait for the Goal to reach its conclusion. The Great Annihilator and Sagittarius A* are 10KLY or so away and I will definitely be headed out to both before I head back to the Bubble. Luckily(?), Real Life Land is going to offer plenty of things to be doing for these two weeks so it should pass relatively quickly.
