A successful week of prospecting
04 Oct 2019Rex-Cramer
It's been a long week in here in Colonia. Each evening this week I've been taking Firefly out to about 500LY away from Colonia to survey star systems in the hunt for metallic rings for mining that are beyond the reach of most pirate operations. It's been a long week of charging that FSD and hopping stars. In the process though I have been making good progress on refilling my raw materials reserves so important to engineering and synthesis. In order to make a through search of an area I like to find a local feature to anchor the search and in this case a black hole system at ~470LY made a good anchor point. From here I filter to a single class of star and I begin to work from there. Most of the other metallic rings I have found have been in systems with higher mass stars so I have focused mainly on those. The star density in Colonia means that you can spend a great deal of time on just one class within two jumps of the anchor. This is why Firefly is good for this work. With >50LY per jump I can work a 200LY diameter without the need for any other class of star as a way-point.
Each night I've headed down to my anchor and worked more of the B class stars abundant there. Lots of rings, a number of earth like worlds and water worlds but only a handful of metallic rings. Most were thin and quite wispy but with no lucrative hotspots. One promising ring that was enormous centered around a brown dwarf raised my hopes but almost unbelievably, this huge ring contained no hotspots at all. On it went through the next few days. Then finally a system with 7 promising gas giants was discovered. I began to sort through the data. Rocky, rocky, icey, rocky, METALLIC! "Alright don't get your hopes up", but I set off to map the ring. It's a good sized ring finally. Deep and very bright in the reflection of the star. I launch my probe and wait. "Holy crap"! The ring lights up like a Christmas tree. Five painite hotspots and some monozite and other high-value minerals as well. No holy-grail of overlapping hotspots where yields spike so heavily but certainly a ring worth looking into.
The ring itself is beautiful. The intense, 4 solar mass, blue-white, monster of a star shines at an oblique angle on the ring that casts shadows through the dust in a spectacular way. It does complicate the search for cores but makes for a wonderful setting. The class 4 giant cuts an imposing figure at a staggering 3,400 earth masses. Not the biggest out there but certainly very large sitting near some other brown dwarfs I've seen. It's faint burgundy color is also reminiscent of a failed star.
I head home with a smile on my face and the knowledge that for once I will be able to mine without the pirate gnats circling my face hoping to snatch a ton or two of cargo. It will be nice not to worry about maximum yield per minute and instead make a run that might span two days, shut down to sleep, and not worry you will awake to a vulture or three scanning your hold. I'll take Narada out there soon and make a go at it. Sampling the ring suggests platinum, gold, silver, osmium, and samarium are all present in reasonable quantity so we can supply a number of mission-related contracts in addition to high-value minerals like monozite and painite.
CMDR R. Cramer