#4
03 Mar 2021MoonSeeker2020
I'd wanted to try my hand at mining for some time, so yesterday I refitted my old trusty Blackadder with a medium Mining Laser, a first class refinery and a controller for Collector drones and set out to mine the first metal rich planet ring I found. On my next run I thought of packing some collector drones, too - just the controller does not help much, and learned how to use them. I mined some gold and silver, but that line of work proved a slow way to get rich ...But today I was able to check out a pristine metallic resource I heard of through the grapevine - and, wow! Quite a difference to the trials and tribulations of my first mining experiences: gold and silver in abundance, platinum and palladium here and there, even some small lumps of painite! Quite a different beast that was. However, my trusty Adder was still a bit small. I didn't want to relinquish my shield, so I had to do with just 12 cargo slots, some of them filled with limpets. Those slots filled up alarmingly fast each time, and as tried to I skimp on drones, I run out of them just after I found and already mined a rich ressource of painite, losing the last fragments as I could not scoop them fast enough by hand.
So I sold my Adder and bought Khazad Dûm, another Cobra Mk. III, instead. What a difference! Thrice the space in the hold, a whopping 36 tons, a bit more speed and a decent jump drive - now I could mine to my heart's content, and I did. Mining in my pristine metallic belt, jumping to the next hightech world and selling what I found, and back again. Not a bad way of life, and - all things considered - a welcome change from shipping rares 'round the galaxy all day or bounty hunting, as I was spending the last days with Gwaihir.
Oh, and another first today: on my maiden flight with Khazad Dûm, I got interdicted after returning to Shinrarta Dezhra on the way to Jameson Memorial. I submitted to the interdiction, confident it would be a nosy System Authority ship, but no! It was a wanted pirate - in the middle of Shinrarta Dezhra just some Ls from the Founder's World, carrying just some fruits and vegetables of all things! Where has the galaxy come to? So it appearingly was a good idea to add some small beam lasers to the mining ones ... That way I got some thousand credits for my troubles at least.
And with my first mining runs, I paid for an upgrade to medium beam lasers. Better safe than sorry! (And now I'll have to upgrade the power plant some day ...)