Protecting, moving, being promoted and hunting ...
27 Sep 2015Grey Pilgrim
A day in the life of a bounty hunter.Yesterday I went to Amitrite for the first time, trying to defend the refugees, and even found two Ressource Extraction Sites, one low intensity one and a HRES. Both were impossibly crowded, though - before I could lock my sights on a pirat, he was already shot down by at least two fellow CMDRs. Good for the refugees and the Community Goal, bad for me. I found me a more ... solo place then, and that worked out: a nice steady stream of people asking me for my (non-existent) cargo, and getting shot down as a result.
By the way, I really don't understand those pirats. They scan me, they ask me - and themselves -, what I may haul and they discover: nothing. And then they have the gall to ask me how a fool like me can make his living ... Would I have been flying my multi-role ASP which can carry quite a lot of cargo beside its firepower, I could understand their questions, but my shiny Imperial Courier does not even have cargo racks! And what, I have to ask, may a heavily armed ship without any cargo capacity do in a HRES? Some of them even veer off and show me their back, even though my hardpoints are already deployed ... So I show them how I make my living: I'm a bounty hunter.
I never needed most of my SCBs, and I even had quite a lot of ammo left, but got tired of all those Eagles, Vipers, Sidewinders, Adders and the odd Cobra after a while, so I cashed in my vouchers and went to Shinrarta Dezhra, moving my ships one by one from there to the Phiagre system. Great things will happen there, as I have heard. After that I changed ships and went to Tun with my multi-role ASP, flying around a bit and polishing my reputation with the Federation. I got promoted to Petty Officer from the start, but didn't get another promotion today. We'll see. However, my habit of scanning all unknown systems I pass through - when I have a scanner mounted, that is - paid off handsomely: I am now officially a Surveyor.
To end the day I went back to Amitrite and made another trip to the HRES, meeting CMDR Blazing in his big Anaconda. At first I thought he might have scared off all our prey, but after that we had a non-ending stream of small fry again - none of them did last very long. It was harder not to bump in one of those five (!) Anacondas - the ISS had shown up with a wing of four Anacondas, too - than to fight the pirates.
While my wing-mate went to fetch a smaller ship I had some happy hunting time, but back at the station (he took a bit longer ...) I got a pirate hunting mission in the Mandra system for a bit more than 1M Cr., so I had to leave and change ships, too. The trip to Phiagre in my ASP was short, the way back to Mandra with the Courier ... not so.In Mandra - a system with three stations, but all of them more than 120,000 Ls out - I checked out some signal sources. The first one had four pirates, but not the ones I was looking for. I took them down anyway. The next signal source had two missions targets: both Anacondas. I thought about it, got my shields nearly stripped by the first volley from one of them and prudently decided to run. After some other encounters with other 'condas (what is it with all those Anacondas?!) and one time even seven Vultures, and after another case of "shooting a wanted ship before it was scanned as wanted" I had a bounty on my head that would expire only after jumping out of the system - didn't make it easier to hunt those pirates down.
I managed to interdict some privateer and the other here and there, and then I hit gold at another signal source: a wing of seven pirates, attacking some helpless ships! I came to the rescue, the pirates decided to attack me only with two or three ships at the same time, and so I took them down, one by one, until only the Anaconda (again!) was left. I went ahead and shot her down, too, taking some damage in doing so, but also getting more than 2k Cr. in Bounty. Ha! Finished off the last two buccaneers I had on my list, cashed in my bounty vouchers (on an outpost, as I was still wanted ...) and left for Amitrite. Time to call it a - rather successful - day!
Regrettably, I didn't get to meet CMDR Blazing again. Another time, perhaps.