The story so far pt5 - building a fleet
27 Jul 2020Orion Blacksun
I had three ships at this stage but wanted more. The most important roles that I needed ships for were mining and adventuring (by which I mean a ship that can do most things and can be used as a main ship rather than having a specialised role). For the adventurer I wanted something that had a fighter hanger and could land at outposts. I decided to go for a krait mk2. Wow, what a ship. This thing is brilliant. Good at combat, good jump range, good internals, fighter bay, and looks really good. This was to become my main ship for ages and was good at gathering mats, light combat, cargo transportation, surface missions etc. Now that I had a fighter bay I neded a pilot. I wanted to get one who was harmless rank and build them up as it costs less money doing this. So I looked in every station I docked in for a harmless pilot who didn't have an annoying stupid face. It took ages. Honestly, so many of them are really ugly or otherwise look mutant or wrong somehow. You'll be seeing that face a lot. Make sure you pick one you can live with. But I found one eventually, Kiera she's called. The fighter is cool. I've not yet tried flying it myself but it's nice to have a friend in space. At the time of writing she's up to novice and is actually doing reasonable damage to my enemies.I also neded a mining ship. My credit source is laser mining LTDs at a triple hotspot just outside the bubble. LTDs sell for 1.5mil+ so this is a good run. I wanted a ship that was better than the aspx in terms of cargo space, could jump well, and could survive in combat for a bit. My eye was drawn to the python, but I could also happily afford an anaconda. I got the anaconda and kitted it out as a miner but kept the modules fairly cheap. I also put a shield cell bank in it because I wanted to try it out. The anaconda is great. Looks good (I love the window along the side) and has loads of space for stuff. Mine is kitted out with 320t of cargo space and 6 collector limpets with two medium mining lasers. It chews through asteroids! The only thing is the handling. It's slow, cumbersome and turns like a brick. It also uses a ton of fuel to jump and I only get three jumps before I need to scoop, so you have to be careful when picking which stars to jump to. Docking this thing is also interesting. If I can get through the slot without scraping it it's a rare victory. I could engineer it to make it awesome, but for mining it is great as it is. Not so good in combat though, at least not with my build, I had to flee from a krait which got me to 20% hull. But I think that this is because I built it on the cheap. Still, the build I have serves its function really well.
Now up to five ships and was spending my time engineering the krait and mining with the anaconda. But what next? What do I want to do?
CMDR Orion Blacksun