On the Dig I
24 Jan 2019Nisme Dalheidis
Personal Log, Shalatula LabSince the shakedown, the Cuvera seems keen to pluck bounties out of the aether, so I thought it might be time to follow up with McQuinn on those suggested mods. After a little digging on the Alliance nets, it seemed I'd have to do a different sort of digging, this time in an SRV. I have no shortage of salvage stowed here and about, but geological materials... this was be something new. Phosphorus, Manganese, Sulphur, and Nickel. At least my shopping list was small... for the moment.
I hop over to HIP 54614 since there are so many rocky and metal-rich bodies within a couple-thousand Ls of each other, most of them are listed on the nets as being perfect targets. Pop into this new scanner firmware, probe the most likely source... nothing. No signatures, geological activity, you name it. Next one on the list, same story. I'm confused. I must be doing something wrong, so I review the changes to the scanner tool and look for the missing link. Near as I can tell, it ain't PIBCAK. I go all down the list, seven planets, seven scans. All called out by prospectors for mineral haul, all complete blanks. So I found the nearest pad that wasn't a damn trespass zone and set down, tuck tail belowdecks, shutdown the CPU, and reinitialize. Cold boot the DBX in the hope that either the firmware was on the fritz or the Nomadata's having some kind of underrun error.
No joy. Every result, still null. I can't be certain it wasn't bad data returned seven times over, odds just seem... unlikely. Especially for real-time search queries. Disinformation, s'pose that's possible. These minerals aren't even rare commodities, so this shouldn't be competitive to the point of tampering with public records. I don't much like it. Guess that's it for me and the SRV, til this is sorted.
I think I'll skip the commissary tonight. The techs down here are pretty good with matsyeom instant noodles by the smell of it. Maybe I can grab a bite from them, see if they don't have a notion of where the problem is. Bum a cheroot if I'm lucky.
