30 Jun 2021Trickyhicky

On the 23rd June 2021, I finally reached Thor's Helmet Sector FB-X c1-5 Sagans Research Centre, 5 five weeks after leaving Col 132 Sector CX-Z b30-0 on the 15th April.

In that time I have had two really big mishaps, which cost me dearly in time credits and real-life money the first was a couple of rather clumsy crashes on planet surfaces which caused me to lose Black Rat V v2. On both occasions, I didn’t realise how large a part gravity plays in life. Well, I know that there is gravity, that Issac Newton was able to put a paper together explaining it in his Theory of Gravity.

So my problem was when I came to explore a planetary body for Biological or Geographical or just for the plain hell of it, you must pilot your ship, in my case Black Rat V, down to the surface. This requires the use of the throttle to take you from Orbit into a glide then power to fly to the surface where one is expected to deploy the landing gear and shift power from engines to Systems so that shields can take an amount of rough landing.

I can hear you saying “Get on with it your waffling”. Well, each planetary body has differing levels of gravity. I didn’t know where to look for this info or to be frank that I needed to. Hence powering down to the planet surfaces I powered into it.

This doesn’t matter in the bubble because you will be able to get a replacement through your insurance at the last station you docked at. This becomes a problem when in the black and the next space station is your final target several thousand light-years away.

For the story to continue I have to go back several hundred light-years, I had already been in a similar pickle and searched for the closest Fleet Carrier, which turned out to be the Robbers Roost (K8T-87V) for a repair job in the HIP 63151 system, in space travel time and distance a short 10 jumps from my position at the time. Trouble was it had moved since, some 1500+ Lyrs away since we had last had this meeting to Cubeo.

Replacement ship purchased through my Insurance, what the insurance doesn’t cover is about 10 million credits worth of exploration data, Virgin New Systems discovered, Virgin New Bio and Geodata accrued, the list goes on. All lost. Oh, Bollocks.

So now I was back on my way to my target Sagans Research Centre but first I had to get back onto my route before I could carry on. Oh, Bollocks. Wish I’d called the Hull Seals now, pride is the biggest killer in this Galaxy.

This, as it turned out wasn’t that big an issue as my route took me through new Virgin Systems, well you get the point.
Then mishap No. 2. Oh fuckitty fuckkity fuck. My PC crashed, not just a little bit but massively. Hard Drive said fuck off Cmdr Tricky, The graphics card not to be outdone stuck its middle finger up to boot. The worst part was all my graphics/pictures went too. “You should have backed up Cmdr!” Yes, you smug fuck I KNOW.
So off to the local IT space station and there began a whole other story. Cut to four (4) yes four weeks later, £500 from the bank account and a week to rebuild all the software, links, connections, well you get the picture.
Then five weeks of flying, Honkin & Scooping, Mapping Scanning Bio and Geodata to Sagans Research Centre. It is cold & dark out here, I don’t just mean cold & dark, I mean cold & dark with a capital F for “Pass me my fucking Parker and Mag Light”.

There are also very few if any In-game Cmdrs out here. I haven’t come across one in OPEN Play. It also took me a while to get the camera suite fixed as it refused to play. EDSM shows me as the latest visitor registered through a system in months.

To say that there are very few stars out here is an understatement and the planetary bodies as such are very dark. Just look at the images I have taken since the rebuild. I’ve seen more light leaking from a politicians arse than the systems out there.

More T Tauri Stars and non “KGBFOAM” non-scoopable stars than you can shake a stick at. You have to start being very careful if you don’t want to call the fuel rats. But remember pride before the fall out here.

I discovered a useful addon for exploration to go along with my other resources, and that is EDScout .

In short, this add on will give you a lot of information, has it been discovered as per EDSM, Value of planets, System main star, if it is a fuel star and lots more. My only issues are if you click on the app to copy a systems name or for other info, the app locks up. Also, it will not update to the next system when you honk and scoop. But it is less than a year old and the team have real lives to live and are doing this for free coffee or donations to EDSM, as such this is brilliant work guys, please carry on it is so good.

I am now heading to Flamin Star Logistics in the Flaming Star Sector LX-T b3-0. This will mean a bit of backtracking as there is no direct route from Hell Port in the Seagull Sector DL-Y d3 system for a DBX.

Well, Cmdrs o7 and I’ll catch you up soon.