Distant Warzone
08 Mar 2019Switch Killington
My smuggling run took days to complete, by the time I got back with my 300 some-odd tons of weapons the situation at Anchorage had deteriorated. As soon as I jumped into the system (yesterday) I was greeted with a few wideband broadcasts of propaganda and protest. Fleetcom chatter was mostly about mobilizing ships for patrols.... in not so many words. "Go kill pirates!" is pretty more accurate to what everyone was saying.This time yesterday the civil unrest in the system was threatening lockdown. That would be bad, because the massive community contract was looming and if the system goes into lockdown that pretty much fires the retros on our little distant worlds party-ship. Pilots wouldn't be able to access mission services, which means nobody gets credit and nobody gets paid. So, there was a mad rush against the pirates and the thrill-killers, and the Lockdown was averted for now.
Today the resource site beacons were lit and the contract came online. I've watched situations like these, these mining contracts always have a security contract to go with it, and often times that security contract is enough to keep the security of a system afloat. But this time, the mission server is busted. Don't know what or how it happened, but now these pilots out here can't log on, so that's going to have a chilling effect on the anti-pirate side of things. You got to pay these pilots, and now we are going to hold onto our bounty vouchers to get that fat bonus credits. And those bounty vouchers are one of the main ways a faction convinces its population they have security under control. The pirates and thrill-killers have no such hang ups, our grief is all they want.
Adding the the absurdity is our actual fleet. Iridium Wing, I assume, is fine, this is their job. But the rest of the fleet are trying to figure out how to even participate. There isn't much overlap between Exploration and combat vessels, and there is no shipyard here, so we are stuck with outfitting our ship with whatever is on the rack out here, or shipping weapons (but not ships) from the bubble over the course of three days give or take. My main exploration vessel is in Colonia right now, and I'm flying around here with an Annie stripped down, no armor, rocking a class 3 shield and an array of beam lasers. I've picked off a few fleas, but I also got shredded by an Asp Ex, almost bit the dust. If you told me two months ago I'd be running combat patrols in an Exploraconda in the middle of the galaxy I would have told you to lay off the onionhead.
The system is a hotbed of activity, hundreds of ships flying through, sensors detecting weapons fire and pirate activity constantly, resource sites buzzing, and the servers are down. I'm thinking lockdown will be in effect either tomorrow or in a few days once the weekend is over and the community goal slows down. That will defiantly slow the flow those much needed metals for the megaship.
Weird, I just checked the contract and it's actually for oxygen and water. To build a megaship? Is it going to me out of ice? They gonna call it the Elsa? That's got to be a typo, right?