Beaver of Death
13 Aug 2022Final Asgard
The last couple of days have been interesting. I did more upgrades to my Cockpit setup to include an actual Throttle and Stick. Something was wrong with the initial install of it, though. As soon as I got to open space everything started to act weird. Activating the throttle made my ship suddenly decide to boost towards a ship, go into silent running, which drops shields, by the way... which I'm BOOSTING TOWARDS A SHIP by the way... It was bad on so many levels. I finally got silent running turned off when I was at 147% heat. Not a good first start.I thought about returning the whole setup, but decided to troubleshoot it. I doubt the sabotage was intentional...
So anyway, after getting that worked out things went much better. It's actually a nice upgrade, being able to fly with a HOTAS system. It definitely adds more realism to the universe of Elite. I also upgraded the bobble heads in the cockpit. Now each ship has the name of the ship, or at least a shortened version of it, on the dashboard. It's a nice little touch that keeps things personalized and interesting. I spent way too much time trying to decide on the perfect name for these ships, so why not display it more often?
We have made several ship upgrades. I finished the grind to buy a second Pre-Engineered FSD for FA-06a Twiggy. It lets me have a decent jump range without needing to rely on the Guardian FSD Booster, giving me back 8 more tons of cargo space.
After that, I started working with Commander SojournerN7 from the Fatherhood to continue improving FA-05a Grace Upon Grace. He identified some ways I could squeak out a few more Ly in jump range by downgrading some equipment, more than I was originally comfortable with (i.e. smaller Power Plant and Life Support) but, if I want to get the most out of the ship I need to make sacrifices. I am starting to do research in how to engineer my ship to make even more improvements to it, but I don't think that will get me enough of a boost before our expedition, so I may wait until I get back.
Commander Kunkali and I are still working on planning our first exploration adventure. It's still undecided if Commander Jedi_Kai will join us or not. We're thinking about going through Bernard's loop. It's about 2,000 Ly from Sol, apparently. That should be a nice trip that will take a couple of weeks. That's a good time to really stretch ourselves without being gone for too long.
One final thing that I did was to make some changes to the weapons loadout of FA-08 Beaver Tooth, and then headed out to several areas where I knew pirates would be. Oh man, flying around with the HOTAS has been a lot of fun. This combat is definitely a fun way to make money. I made about 8 million credits before.... before I messed up.
I targeted someone, and like I should do, I waited for the scan to complete before attacking. Well, the scan came back clean. Cool, no problem there, just cancel target lock and move on----oh crap why am I being shot at by ALL THE SECURITY!!??!?
Turns out, the button on my Stick that I use to cancel out of menus and actions when on the station, is the same button as my secondary fire when in combat....
I almost had to have a memorial for Beaver Tooth, but I managed to escape just in time. I turned myself in and continued on. Time to change around my buttons to having less destructive side effects...
Overall we had very successful pirate hunting today. I only made about 10 million credits, but it was definitely more engaging and fun than just cargo deliveries would have been.
