Your cmdr, respected tourist
05 Mar 2022Tiffany Yür
As I implied in the last logbook I went back home after the roaming towards cross-spiral area of Phylucs. I didn't reach the junction between Outer and Inner Orion Spur, and the one corewards, what's it called. Did a tourist trip (by myself) to the Jacksons Lighthouse, the neutron star. Almost flew into the emission cone when visiting the tourist beacon. The Neutron is small, but destructive, I believe. Made it back into the Bubble near the beginning of the Hyades-area, Can't call Hyades a sector like the Galaxy map does, since it is just the stars of and around the Hyades cluster. It's a small bubble in the vastness of galaxy. Like the Bubble itself. Got a great reminder of this, since I noticed a signature of a familiar ship just three stars in back in the Bubble. I decided to pay a greeting to the CMDR. CMDR Dzücke is originally from the same area as I am! I remembered him visiting our system some 2 years ago when I was flying supply runs from planet to the orbitals. He was quite quiet of his recent dealings within the Bubble but he did say he's been interested in mining and asked if I had seen any good spots near, but outside the Bubble borders. I wasn't, but promised to keep that in mind. Maybe later I could be a partner in some such operation? After that chance meeting I decided to take on some tourists, I've flown in the bubble so little, they could also show me the places!
Since then, I've seen some ice geysers, humongously deep ice canyons, many planets in the process of terraforming, a few regular earthlikes, and even a couple of planets totally committed to tourism. The passengers seem to generally be thrilled of the possibility of space piracy, once I even got interdicted and the pirate was rather displeased I hadn't any cargo, just passengers with me. Everytime they tried to interdict the Dolphin, no one complained afterwards. Are all tourists thrill seekers, one might ask, but there were also many customers who were just happy nothing untowards happened. One elder fellow likely had his family on the tourist planet, he just left some messages (and likely some credits) to the visitor beacon and was totally content of an uneventful journey. He also paid rather handsomely. After this I tried to estimate the true difficulty of such journeys and chosen the appropriate fee according to that. Get some reputation and influence, less money but what is the price of one jump? There's no recommended price in the pilots manual, so why not the smaller price if you enjoy the flightplan or the flight is very short.
I have to admit, without the pirates looming on every corner (but high security) of the Bubble, the CMDRs are still needed for this kind of work. No docking computer can shake off a pirate, no flight assist can lift off from planet and no automated discovery scan can pick the best angles to see a system, planet, moon, star, galaxy.... I did some totally unnecessary moves while hosting the tourists, flying so they could see other planets in their system, taking off slowly through a canyon etc. Maybe I can do this ok.
Anyway, enough's enough, I stashed the cabins when I landed on a refinery producing silver. I had done rather good with silver trading at home, though the demand in the high tech station had died out eventually. I wanted to see if similar kind of route going through several types of stations was possible here as well. Well, it is, but the stations here are more far out of the drop-points of high-wake, so an additional 15 minutes for each round does make it more of a chore than a joy. Helping terraforming, bringing agricultural products to refineries, industrial or military stations, ending with the 'big pay' silver/another precious load run is ok, but there's more to do than just trade.