Spoke too soon
04 Jun 2016Asagao
You've done it, your wingman's done it, your wing commander's old space-trucking granny's done it. Sooner or later, whether at nav beacon or RES point, in the heat of the chase, you've lost lock or mis-scanned or have just been a little too jumpy on the fire button and have clipped an innocent in front of a system security vessel.I went one better and did it in front of a wing of four.
This was probably karma for my criticism of their security management the day before. Going from Njuwar to Mehet to claim some bounties, I was suprised to see a bounty of just over 4k put me in the top 75%; perhaps it was worth staying on a while, then. Everything was going well, to the tune of 400k in bounties in a number of systems (enough extra to pay for the KWS) - too well, in fact. It's when you forget the essential laws of physics that the universe slaps you down, hard. The law I ignored here was, "quit when you're ahead". It was going so well, it seemed idiotic to walk away from it. Just one more.
I'd been fighting alongside the security for about an hour. Every so often they'd scan me, and weren't particularly friendly about it. Thinking it over later, it may well have been that they were on a quota. And having to go cap-in-hand to the rest of the galaxy has got to sting. They were certainly fast in their clean-up, beating most people to any wanteds who showed up. When I hit the unmarked pilot it wasn't even a clip, I'd got him mixed up with someone else and it was a square hit. Within about 3 seconds I had all 5 of them shooting at me; and I was making a brave run for it, until someone shot out my shields, followed by the thrusters. Next thing I knew, I was waking up in the medical centre on Njuwar with a slightly staggering insurance bill and the pain of my own folly.
The insurance paid the medical bills and provided a new ship. And I just had to go and push my fool luck again, and headed straight back to Mehet. At least this time I stopped off at a station first, lest anything untoward happen; and changed the loadout slightly, though from the outside, everything - ship, name, paint job, weaponry, even the insignia - was the same.
Dropping into the nav point, I brought up weapons and got a message about power overload; a bit of tweaking of the new modules resulted in shields and thrusters powering down. After correcting that, I was in no hurry to join the fray again: even bi-weave shields need a bit of time to get to full strength. So I was pootling around on the edge of a group, scanning the other pilots and working out who was who, when the security vessels opened fire again.
I looked and saw a "wanted" sign above the fuel gauge that I know wasn't there when I dropped into the nav point. I'd take an oath in front of a judge that I didn't mis-fire, and there was no ECM in the loadout that could've tripped. This time I at least woke up in the same system, with another staggering bill and a feeling of resignation. With insufficient cash now to pay the insurance on the Vulture a third time, a wander round the shipyard made me wonder... a bit of research later and I'd swapped the Vulture for a Diamondback Explorer. It was a toss-up between that and the Asp Scout, and the DBE won on jump range, though the AS scanner would've been nice. But I've wanted out into the black for a while now, and it seems like as good a time as any. After downloading the latest updates from UC for my planned route, I was off. A shining gem in the Lagoon Nebula caught my eye, and it seemed as good a place to start as any.