what would you name your life?
16 Dec 2018WilliamReace
Last night I spent time in a bar, listening to the music and staring off into the distance of the white wall opposite the room. 3 separate times did 3 separate strangers approach to talk to me, none of which ask to sit with me; As such the 'conversations' were quite short.
Alone I waited for nothing in particular, only the passage of our perception of time.
Twice was I avoided by faces I had seen before with a history, they pretended to not even notice I was there, but of course I knew they had seen me. For such was the orientation of the tables and the entryway that it would have been impossible to not see the lone person sitting at the table with 8 other empty chairs. I made note that they chose to sit at the opposite end of the room from the entryway, another table which had not one seat taken. I was hoping they would not sit with me, for I desired no interaction with them that night.
Later 2 strangers did sit at the same table as I, but without any earnest attempts at conversation. Maybe they thought I had other things on my mind.
The night ended uneventful, I went home myself, leaving the other party goers to their own devices. Having no desire to partake of vomit from over drinking or blacking out. And knowing that my presence would not be missed, if even noticed, or required.
After arriving home, I sat in my pilot's seat, having it been adjusted for my stature and build, making it quite more comfortable than some plastic folding chair that I was seated in earlier. I requested then permission from the hanger security to depart. After the pre-flight check was all-green, I left the stations docking corridor with my Python and it's newly fitted asteroid busting equipment.
Deciding to make the first trip short and to more quickly test out the new fittings, I traversed the thousand LS to the nearest ice ringed Gas Giant of Apurui.
As is customary there were three pilots in a wing waiting to scan my vessel, and me having not begun mining yet, they decided to let me go without even a warning.
I entered the ring, deployed my ships shiny new hard points, and flipped the momentary on toggle which would fire off the survey pulse. That was supposed to reveal rocks that had higher contents among the rest of the debris that is normally found in a Mineable Ring.
For my effort there was one nearby, the scanner apparently had a lot more range than my ships own sensor array. It was also designed to mark the objects on my front window with a subtle glow that increased based on concentration intensities; Kind of like the adaptive sun shielding and speed/target/weapon indicators, among other things.
I approached and began to glaze it's surface with my single class 2 mining laser, after a few moments I then triggered the cargo hatch and the launch of one of my collector limpets simultaneously.
While the limpet was out doing it's job, the rock was certainly taking it's time to deplete, it must have contained three times the load of what I would have gotten from any of the ones nearby that had not been painted by the scanner. Then finally asteroid depleted.
But I was curious and launched a prospector limpet, indeed asteroid depleted came back, and yet the probe found more deposits which were unable to be reached by the surface glazing laser. I thought, perfect time to check out those new sub-surface missiles.
I fired one, then it exploded right next to my ships canopy. Obviously that was a bit close for comfort and I was wondering what I did wrong.
I had apparently failed to read the directions, these sub-surface mining missiles explode the moment you release the firing trigger, I guess that makes it better for us with the mining equipment to find what were looking for and not be left with smaller chunks. Fired the second shot after the deposit had rotated back to my firing angle, waited for impact, then watched the scanning bar for the blue zone which indicated a deposit. Huzzah, second try a big piece, 53% water. By the look of it out the window, it was a much Much bigger piece than normally comes off from the surface grazing. I was relieved that I still had the collector limpets with me.
Fast forward, couple hours later, still mining, limpets just ran out and I'm still harvesting the subsurface from this one rock. I figure i'll just use the scoop the old fashioned way, we all know how vacuum cleaners work, ha ha ha!
I adjust speed and heading, the chunk is in the same position on my cargo scoop's alignment window and I'm approaching at nominal speed (20m/s and these things will still scoop at 40). Proximity alarms as normal, then I hear hull scraping and the hull damage alarm go off. Obviously, these chunks are larger than the ones I'd been used to scooping, well, that's going to leave a nice big gouge in the hull right in front of the cargo scoop.
Switch to outer cameras to see if I can get a look at it, nothing appears to be leaking, that's good, but there is definitely a nice chunk of the hull scraped to one side.
I say to myself "Well, appears I'm finally going to have to install a shield on this old girl, and maybe upgrade the armor plating while I'm at it."
Spin around to leave the ring's debris cloud, and there's the pirates that let me pass when I first dropped in, popping up on my sensors.
I retract hardpoints and hit the booster, nothing happens, uhh. . . . Cargo Hatch!
After hitting that switch, hit the booster again, make sure I'm aligned to get out of the mass lock field, and as soon as the light goes off I toggle the super cruise engine charge-up sequence.
Maybe they didn't see me, I didn't get any message from them and no ship scan warnings. Well, not gonna let them get my cargo that easy anyway.
Halfway back 500ls to go, Interdiction Warning, ah the suckers did decide to come after me. No big deal, I can shake them here easy, it's like they weren't even trying. They had a wing of 3, each one could have tried, but only one attempt on the interdiction. Could be perhaps they didn't think I was actually worth their effort. Anyway, back to the station for me, to drop off this load and see about some other needed upgrades.
Back to the station with a nearly full cargo of water and such other related materials. High demand at this station even though they have a Ring in system full of the stuff. Well it isn't a ring around this planet their station is orbiting here anyway, so of course they'd want more supplies in this finite space.
While on station, I ask about their shield modules, and they have nothing to fit my Python, so I gotta look elsewhere. Armor plating is not something they provide either, almost feels like a wasted trip, but the water needed to be offloaded, so some pirate wouldn't harass me for it.
Time to check my Galaxy map for the next destination and the ship parts I'm looking for.