- 1 - 'Formal records, eh?' - a Tale of Two Khrunovs
03 Sep 2019Grimscrub
So after dragging myself around Eagle Eye, through some AXI work, and into one of the target systems, with some repair work in-between for good measure, I've been told there's something in my Pilot's License requiring an actual "Record of Activities undertaken in your piloting career". They only tell me this after I tacked the third 'Elite' onto my ship. Well I suppose it has been a busy enough month regardless - luckily they didn't say how Regular that had to be.Then I suppose this would be Commander's log - might as well be 1, aboard the Khrunov, an endurance hauling/mining vessel, with some stripped-out Corvette shielding to keep the cargo in and the railguns out. Technically its journey started earlier and mine a few years before, but I didn't have a logbook, so you can't prove anything and noone needs to worry about Shadow President Winters' grudges, savvy? Moving on.
Even from the start, August was pretty intensive - With the fighting over (a few hundred scouts falling to the vulture, and some dented... Cyclopii? Cyclopses? meeting a hastily cobbled together Chieftain, earning a little art from our brave pioneers even as their stations burned), the first week saw repairs start out in the Witch-Head enclave, and a sudden retro-fit to get this thing out there.
With an undersized FSD as I'd left it in-bubble, and a fuel scoop about half the size I'd prefer in the name of cargo-per-trip, it was grueling work. But I was able to throw my lot into it for a while, and from what I last heard at least five of the stations are up and running now.
After arriving with my last cargo load, having cut down my credits, fuel, hull, and had one too many close encounters with a star, I received a tip-off about other hauling efforts, an Operation Ida putting the Humpty Dumpty stations stations back home together again... With a much shorter commute. At the time their focus was on the lastest wave in the Pleiades, to make sure logistics were OK out there in event of any major conflicts following, which doubled as the nearest lifeline for Witch-Head.
And so, following one mis-trip (Arriving too late with some convenient Polymers, legitimately 5 minutes after the first station was fixed up), a few days of aggressive Beryllium hauling, plus some CMM Composites ensued.
Along the way I had more than my fair share of 'Encounters', sometimes both coming and going, but they seemed to just want to spot check ships for their own resources, and on realizing i was 'heart'-less and had no guardian tech, they let me be - much as they made any efforts near the Pleiades twice as long, and forced one or two redirects due to fuel. Regardless, good work was done, and i even earned a little note for that week. When I'd earned enough to feel I'd done something (and after getting through Cavalieri and Titan's Daughter, plus one closer to bubble for good measure) my hauling itch finally felt scratched.But while I may have tired of the repairs, there was more work to be done - near a hundred stations were still wrecked, and they'd been piling up every week for many months until now, so long as people weren't fighting back the interceptors. After some work for my handler
[Conflict specifics classified] and bearing in mind what'd happened in Atlas, Electra, and to Palin in Maia - let alone previously in a system right by home - taking a stand against these giant flowers seemed necessary. So, after some negotiation with the tech broker I'd bought my Gauss from (and sharing some data from the Hydra sample taken back during the Cone incident), I ended up with a second chance (and possibly a 'GET ON WITH IT' stapled to the ship blueprint) for AX work - scouts, while helpful, not exactly being considered worthy of note.So, a newly christened 'Khrunov' Chieftain (As there were two Cosmonauts - father and son, why not have two Lakon ships, peace and war?) was shipped out to Celaeno, and we set to work.
I fear there are far, far more qualified commanders out there to teach the proper strategy for these Interceptors. My previous efforts had been in a Crusader - not the worst ship, but sadly given they had wised up to the ship-launched fighters, the speed loss compared to a Chieftain proved too much for my limited experience.
Having made the switch however, my first Interceptor since Patreus was handing out bounties in 17692 was defeated.
Sadly in combat my camera/drone-work was rather lacking, but the deed was achieved... It'd probably been my hardest fight since the old days, before Ram Tah dug up these weapons when you needed a full formation, scanners, and field neutralizers to stand a chance. My efforts to record the first failed entirely, so I went for repairs, handed in that bond, then worked on a second... and a third, then a fourth. In the end nearly a dozen were taken out during patrols over three or four days, even making some abortive attempts against the 'Basilisk' class. I was even able to join ranks for an effort by the Anti Xeno Initiative, with forces strong enough to form a firing line and shoot down an interceptor in Seconds flat.
But then I noted for all the credits, the pilots federation wasn't rating them as 'Challenging'. Or rather, they rated as equal to a human elite - the same as all the scouts, for their formal ranking system. I'd set myself two major tasks before I returned to desk duty (which is when I was handed this logbook) - To finally achieve Triple Elite, and to make very best efforts to defeat a Basilisk. Sadly they ended up coming in that order, with the latter still not quite achieved. But with quantity, not quality being the target of the Pilot's Fed, I was able to pull my old Vulture together, load the multicannons, and set to work- which there was a lot of ahead... sadly it largely blended together to the point of little record. They were an intense few days, refining my anti-scout techniques, learning my limits both for ammo and hull, and reaching over 7 million in combat bonds from the total scouts destroyed across Asterope, Celaeno, and in the skies over Palin's old base... But it was successful.
The numbers working out perfectly, leaving me able to end on a job well done was a nice touch. Though admittedly the bounty did not balance as neatly - 9,310,000, though 2m of that was from a final interceptor. With that title and badge of honour in hand at least half of my task was complete. As I prepared to refit for Basilisks once more though, intriguing news came out of Maia, a ship that noone had seen before... I ended up rushing back to the bubble to get the Adder I'd left all my scanners in, and rushing back out to meet a whole other fleet of xeno initiative folk... only for a misunderstanding to prove that an Orca is more deadly than 731 thargoid scouts, if it knows what its doing. Fortunately it was a light-hearded accident, and they were kind enough to scoop up the escape pod. Bounties were lost of course, but they had served their purpose, and the peculiarity of 'Orthrus' took most of our focus.
Hard evidence is sadly absent from my own records - I fear someone might have tampered with my ships data to classify that one - but if that's a portent of things to come, we've hardly seen anything yet.
When that excitement had passed, I withdrew to some hobbyist mining, and examining the 'Eagle Eye' installation transmitters each week. Sadly I picked a poor month to take greater interest from an AX standpoint - having stopped by since the first of the month, from 'No Activity Detected' to 6 sites on repeat for 4 consecutive weeks, my intel has gotten staler than that bottle of mega-gin stored under the co-pilots seat for celebrations. Regardless... In the end, AX work was challenging but rewarding, though the death scream... haunts you, in an odd way. Some might argue hauling is easy, bar the pirates. But in the quantities and sometimes distances required, you have to respect those dedicated enough to make the journeys again, and again, and again.
For the moment I think that wraps up this entry - Depending how busy things are, I might try to keep these monthly. Enough happens to be worth writing down that way.