So close, yet...
26 Nov 2020Valanga
Honestly, it's about time.We have been conducting mining operations in a star system I'd dubbed "The Motherlode" due to the staggering concentration of pristine - and seemingly untouched - painite crystals we found in the rings of one of the larger water worlds there. This was our effort to finance a megaship to use as a mobile base of operations for expeditions and research.
The Infinitas.
Well, someone else finally found the system. And unlike us, they told their friends. And those friends told their friends... or something, because yesterday the place was swarming with CMDR signatures. From the looks of things, equal parts miners and desperate pirates. And today, they were almost all gone. I sent in a survey team to investigate the area, and it turns out that our precious painite reserves had been all but mined out.
What's worse, the market price for painite has mysteriously tanked all of a sudden. What a coincidence, huh?
The good news is that we brought in a LOT of money from our ventures into The Motherlode. The bad news is that we need a new get-rich-quick strategy, because ours has dried up and we're still not rich enough.
I'm really wondering how I want to approach this situation. I know that even once I cross that glorious threshold and have enough Credits to afford a Victory-class carrier from that goddamned Brewer monopoly, keeping up with its maintenance and paying the crew that I'll have to hire is going to be a pretty penny, so I'll need to overshoot my expenses to give me a buffer. This means that there's still so much to do... but it'll be so worth it once I can finally have my ship to myself again. I've had to clear out some of the space on the Inferno of Fomalhaut to throw together a conference room and some smallish labs for The Macho Gang.
...we don't have a real base of operations. Well, we do, but it's planetside and fairly out of the way of most of our members. We're pretty spread out and our expeditions leave us consistently hundreds of lightyears away from it. Sooo... I set up a mobile base on my ship. It sucks. It's embarrassing. I hate it. This megaship will change the game for all of us.
You know, I think that ultimately it's not a bad thing that The Motherlode is dead. It's unfortunate, yes, but I was getting so so so sick of shooting at rocks. I much prefer shooting at moving targets that shoot back and kill other people.
We went bounty hunting today, me and Mina, just like the old days. Brought in a good 25,000,000Cr or so in combined bounty vouchers and mission payments. Clearly it's not going to pay the bills for this megaship, but ironically it's given me more motivation to make this happen than the 4 billion Credits I've grossed in the last month or two has. Because I really felt like I earned that 25 mil.
What's more, I ended up befriending one of the miners I found cleaning up the remnants of The Motherlode. I wanted to be angry that he was in part responsible for unknowingly sabotaging my schemes, but... what can I say, I liked the cut of his jib. I ended up joining CMDR Alot in his mining endeavors for the night, and even though we ended up making chump change for our efforts, it was refreshing to be in new company. Turns out he used to be a famous Buckyball racer in a previous life with some damn impressive record times! I saw some cockpit cam playbacks of his, and... the guy definitely knows how to take a ship fast and land it on a pin.
If there had to be a moral to the story, it would probably be something corny about friends making everything better. Maybe I need more of those. Who can say?
That's all for now. CMDR Valanga out.