A New Plan for HIP 22460
13 Aug 2022Ember Lacson
I don't often get other CMDRs stopping aboard, but I ran into somebody yesterday who had just come from HIP 22460 in a Diamondback Scout of all things. He didn't seem fazed at all, and when I asked if things had cooled down, he said, "Hell no. They're bad as ever." When I asked him why the hell he was flying a DBS, he said, "It's the best stealth ship you can buy. Fast-ish, cheap, and it runs cooler than the A/C on this ship. Seriously, how can anybody walk around without long sleeves?""I own this carrier," I said. "But I'll let it slide." Then I asked him if he could give me pointers, because I wanted to head in at some point to get the ley of the land and collect some logs. He said surviving was pretty easy. All you have to do is stay under 20% heat and keep a half a klick between yourself and any Thargoid. His build was more of a general build with clean drives and a low emissions power plant. But I think I can run shieldless to take advantage of silent running when necessary, while packing a bunch of heatsinks and a shutdown field neutralizer.
I put one together that should be at 18% heat at max thrust, even using dirty/drags instead of clean drives with thermal spread. I decided to go with a DBX instead of a DBS because it allegedly has a marginally higher heat capacity and has two size 4 optional internals, which I plan on fitting corrosion resistant cargo racks into. Problem is, I have to do a dance for a tech broker to get them, so that's probably next on my list to do. I don't imagine HIP 22460 will be cooling down anytime soon, so I think I have a few weeks to go in, get photos, get logs, and so on.
Nicole is doing pretty well. She's still in bed, but her headaches are better, and she's awake most of the time. They said it should be safe for us to jump in the next 36 hours, so I think we'll head out to GR1 first and dig up some relics, then to Maia for some meta-alloys, then back to the Bubble. I know some of the Thargoid bio-devices can be found in Sosong, so when I head there I'll probably ship everything I have stored at Jameson Memorial over to the Morningstar. Then once I get some grelics I'll work on engineering a new DBX. Maybe I'll try getting meta-alloys from whatever Thargoid structure I visit, too.