The Best Is Yet To Come - 3: Remote Workshop
12 May 2023CrazyGolm
Remote Workshop - April 3309After a brief period in which its owner was absent and in Colonia, Golm’s Kitchen was back in use once again.
CMDR CrazyGolm was in a hangar aboard his fleet carrier, tinkering with a Viper.
The [IDA] Synergy Trolley had been something of an experimental patrol vessel, armed with shock cannons. Golm was now converting it into an anti-xeno vessel.
This involved reinforcing the armour, swapping its weapon complement with gauss cannons and a flak launcher, and completely removing all shielding.
Golm was following a blueprint for modifying hull reinforcements to be heavy duty. An assortment of tools, parts and materials were scattered next to the ship. To the uneducated onlooker, it was a disorganized mess, but Golm knew where to reach for what he needed. That said, he needed to be a bit careful in case the components floated annoyingly away in the zero-G hangar bay. Duct tape did the trick.
There were some who would say that tuning ships is too much work, but Golm enjoyed it. A lot of the work could be done with robotic arms, but Golm found tinkering with ships to be a good hobby. It was not easy work, but it was satisfying labour.
Golm had a liking for small, agile spacecraft, particularly Vipers and the Cobra.
He had a number of performance Vipers for races and combat events, and he had configured the [IDA] Synergy Trolley as an experimental combat craft with a very silly name.
Then there was the Validius. The original. His first Viper, and his first ship after the loaned Sidewinder he had received from the Pilots’ Federation. The Validius had been with him for the vast majority of his piloting career. He had been through thick and thin, and it had been with him throughout, even if it had been consigned to a warehouse all too often. It had initially been outfitted as a bounty hunting vessel, then a fast patrol vessel armed with pack-hounds, and finally it was overhauled as a heavily engineered bounty hunter. It had come full circle. Its battered paint job was a deliberate nod to its experience and its defiance.
The Crux was the next ship that he had bought, not long after the Validius. He was glad that both were still useful vessels after all this time. It had been his go-to multipurpose craft, but recently Golm had replaced the Cobra’s large cargo bay and twin SRV hangars for one large SRV bay and two hull reinforcements, removing its cargo storage but making it a more formidable combat vessel than before.
The Paper Plane was Golm’s Alliance Chieftain, and the first medium ship he had owned. It had long been a capable combat vessel, however lately Golm had refit it for the Thargoid War, where it had seen substantial success, and even defeated a Basilisk (with the help of local AX forces, and after a long time and many repair stops).
Golm decided to give the [IDA] Synergy Trolley a spin.
The test flight did not go as planned. The [IDA] Synergy Trolley jumped into a Thargoid Alert system, but it encountered no Thargoids. Golm ended up using his AX weaponry to fight a pirate by the name of James Alexander Curry. Amusingly, because it was an alert system, search-and-rescue craft came to the aid of both vessels during their duel. Unfortunately, without a shield, the [IDA] Synergy Trolley fell victim to the downsides of a particularly momentous ramming manoeuvre, and promptly exploded.
Thankfully, Golm exercised his knack of getting out of shipwrecks fairly well. With a little help from his Remlok™ Emergency Occupiable Escape Pod and the Rescue Rangers, he was back on board his carrier soon enough.
Perhaps, he mused, that had been a bad idea.