The story so far pt4 - conflict and superstition
18 Jul 2020Orion Blacksun
There are many roles to play. I wanted to give them all a shot. I've been a postman delivering Internet shopping, I've moved a bit of cargo, explored a bit and mined. Next up was something combaty. So we heve bounty hunting (killing wanted baddies for cash and glory), mercenary (going to a conflict zone, choosing the side with the best name and killing the other lot. Honestly, some of these factions have ridiculous names. I'm sure there was one called something like blue lady boys and another that was gentle liberals.), pirate (attacking trade ships until they drop cargo), and marauder (just killing stuff for fun and mats). There are also some missions that involve combat which do one of these things.I don't really like killing the weak and innocent (not much sport, and generally not nice) so bounty hunting seemed like a good thing to try. Nav beacons and res are good places to go. But I wanted a better ship. The asp is too slow, although it is well armed and the cobra is flimsy. I decided to try a vulture. Large hardpoints! Oh yeah.
bounty hunting went ok. Killed a few baddies with help from the local authorities, a bit too easy. Went to a conflict zone, picked a side at random and got stuck in. It did not go well. Shields down and then tried to escape and my engines got trashed and I ended up in a 'spin of doom' getting slowly killed. Ok. Fair enough. Try again. Same thing, just died way too quickly. Stupid vulture, some war ship you are. I wanted something sturdier. And with more guns. Lots of guns. The anwser is the chieftain. Six guns of which two are large, looks very cool too, except.... Requires horizons. I don't have that. Do I want it enough to get horizons? Oh look, it's on sale. One swift transaction later and a new level of possibilities open up. The challenger is fantastic. Nimble, strong and did I mention the guns? I cleared out a combat zone of stuipd names with that thing.
having sampled combat, I decided to go back to exploring. I now had access to engineers and a buggy. One of the engineers needs you to travel 300ly from where you started and I hadn't quite done that. So time for another trip. My aspx (the glorious requiem) was kitted up as a miner and I didn't really want to repurpose it, so I just bought another one for use as an explorer and named it nomad. I went to my zone I had found close to the bubble with undiscovered stuff and started mapping. I found several unmapped teraform candidates and was out there for a couple of days. I landed on a couple of moons to gather mats from trees and rocks (so cool by the way). On the way back, with easily 20mil of data, I made one more mat stop and discovered how an aspx behaves in high G with grade D thrusters. It wasn't pretty. I imagine that planet still has a hole in it considering how quickly I hit it just before exploding. That was a painful death. At least I had the mats. I had travelled the required 300ly now and just needed to supply three relics. This engineer grants you favour if you sell exploration data to them so I decided to grab the relics, explore a bit and then see the engineer. Efficiency. It was all going to plan. I avoided planets. When I had a reasonable amount of data (I had found a few unmapped terraform candidates) I headed to the engineer. I was still 100ly from the bubble, refuelling when I get a contact on my sensor. What's going on? What's an npc doing out here. He started flying around my ship. Was he an explorer? Did he need help? Then suddenly he interdicts me. Ok no problem, they are easy enough to avoid. You are submitting to interdiction. What? I'm doing what? I didn't even know that was a thing. "Give me your cargo or die". Wonderful. Before long my shields are gone and I'm at 50% hull in a spin of doom with no control. I'm now busy searching the menus for how to jettison cargo and I find it at 20%. Fine. Have my relics. But he doesn't care and procedes to kill me.
I appreciate that the things I learned are very valuable. Gravity, submission, pirate spawns. But come on. I came to the only possible logical conclusion. The Glorious Requiem (my first aspx) had cursed Nomad (this aspx). Obviously it had a jealous machine spirit and wouldn't tolerate a rival. I sold nomad, refitted the requiem for exploration and used that to unlock the engineer. No problems at all. Did the engines sound smug?
So if these ships have finikety machine sprits I would do well to appease them. As such I now have my rules for ships so that they don't get jelous or confused.
1) never have more than one ship of each type
2) when you have decided to keep a ship, name it. And id in the format ORI-nn
3) never sell a named ship
4) every ship should have a different role
Glad that logic had prevailed, I realised that I now had a decent amount of cash and could engineer FSDs. Now that the requiem was an explorer I was missing a mining ship and also a multi role adventuring ship (well, I had the cobra, but wanted an upgrade, that is to say a medium adventuter rather than a small adventurer which is a different role). I'll detail that next time.
CMDR Orion Blacksun