Piece of Cake; With Tea?
24 Aug 2020Challenge
I stopped in Pausch City in EME carrying a much needed cargo of Resonating Separators at a sizable profit. I decided to take some time for a look around and pick up some rocks to add to the mats collection, which, of course, meant I needed to map some orbiting rock piles so I had some chance of finding some pickable deposits. I was just finishing up a sweep of five Gas Giant moons when I got a message from a Shawn Burt, the Envoy of the EME For Equality Faction on the Lazutkin Settlement outpost orbiting EME A 3.Since I brought in needed hardware I guess he thought I'd like some more work. Since the Equality Faction runs the system, I didn't think upping my Reputation would be a bad thing, so I agreed to do the mission -- of course the 1 million + CR mission pay probably had something to do with the speed I used sending the acceptance message. All I had to do was run over to LP 672-42, pick up a couple of back boxes and bring them to the outpost.
Piece of cake.
It really was.
I dropped into LP 672-42, scanned for the boxes, flew over and scooped them up. I got a message saying the opposition was on its way, but the scanner was clean so I fire-walled the throttle and hit the FSD switch. I Dropped into EME and clear space so I scooped up some fuel while I figured out where everything in the system was and pointed at my destination.
There was a second Mission indicator; it was a signal source out away from the orbital track and, being not of sound mind, I went to take a look. It was a beacon asking for a delivery of tea for a few hundred thousand CR; being occupied I didn't respond, I turned back to my primary mission target -- and noticed a couple of ships headed my way. As they blew past me I was scanned by each of them, then they fell in behind me.
At full throttle one slowly faded out of my sensor range, but the other one seemed to be slowly closing. Once again I pushed the FSD switch and watched the charge meter as it very slowly started moving up. It felt like I was trying to fill a 20 liter bottle with an eyedropper. I boosted but the added speed did nothing to shake my tail. He was high behind me, so I fired the upper thrusters to start drifting down and finally the FSD charge started working the way it should and off I went.
There was an attempt to interdict me as I got close to the outpost, but that was really trivial. I dropped out of FSD well inside the No Fire Zone and followed landing procedure and got my million-plus without even getting my paint job scratched. Which is a good thing since this ship was a replacement for the Cobra III lost trying to be a hero rescuing a ship under pirate attack.
Someday I'll figure out why the FSD had such a painfully slow charging rate.