Got rid of those pesky Gold Faction pirates
10 Jul 2019Purrfect
In a drunken haze at dive bar in Patterson in Uszaa about a week ago, I accidentally accepted a sizeable wing bounty mission. I failed to check the number of pirates to send to the bottom of the nearest hazres. 40!After sobering up, I realized the extent of the fail I had committed, as being a Novitiate in the dark combat arts, I really couldn't see myself taking out all of them. I scraped together the change at the back of my Anaconda, bought a Chieftain and engineered it to take out 40 bad guys after nearly losing a combat rated Krait Phantom to the Threat 4 mission target. They weren't mucking around. They even used chaff and fought together!
Luckily, whilst engineering my Chieftain wondering how I would get through the next 20+ pirates, I met Commander Lupinemaxx in Wolf 357. He is a lot more experienced in the methods of disposing of nefarious types, readily agreed to take on my wing mission. He needed to pick up his combat ship, and I needed to engineer my first set of rails and plasma accelerators. We agreed to meet back at Baijungu in 20 minutes.
After entering the Threat 4 with Cmdr Lupinemaxx, he cleaned up all my mistakes, the first of which is my lack of experience with fixed weapons. He took me from 13 dead pirates to 27 dead pirates over the next few hours. If packing up my quarters in Sol hadn't intervened, I bet we (well, Lupinemaxx) would have retired the last 13 pirates in no time.
However, I couldn't find Cmdr Lupinemaxx for a few days in a row. Every time I stepped outside the station, suicidal pirates came at me. I got up to 37 pirates. I was sweating plasma because I would fail the mission today if I didn't get the last three. Unfortunately, events in Sol got my attention and I had to leave with just a basic controller instead of my normal setup. I couldn't pull anyone out of hyperspace to save me with this setup. It wasn't helped that the controls weren't in places I expected them. I was getting desperate for Commander Lupinemaxx's confident ability to terminate pirates.
I decided to visit the nav beacon in open mode and see if there were any other Commanders in the area. Big fat nope.
What was in the area was a slow succession of Deadly and Competent pirates who needed to go away. So in the space of an hour, I managed to find three mission targets and retire them. I made the mission with 30 minutes to spare before I had to head back to Sol for my normal life. So happy.
Thank you to Commander Lupinemaxx for introducing me to the delights of wing missions with actual wing mates, and I hope to see you again soon for many more missions. Hopefully, with less side trips to Sol and with my normal set up.