Once more unto the breach, dear friends...
22 Oct 2015Tiger61378
I was lurking around the rings of HIP 16607 A tonight, just minding my own business and hunting out some painite and platinum, when a message came over my comms. There's a call out for all loyal Imperials to head out to destroy the Emperor's Dawn terrorists, from Emperor Arissa herself! At that point I had to go, so I packed up, detonated my remaining limpets, and ran back to Thome to sell my mining haul. Not a bad night, around 1.5 million...Once I was docked, I shut down the Lady Sandra and dashed over to the hangar where the RDS Centurion was parked. I'd rather take my FDS into a heavy combat area than my fragile, expensive, newly purchased Clipper! Yes, it feels a bit wrong, but I'm doing the Emperor's work, so it dosn't really matter what ship I'm flying, as long as Emperor's Dawn is dying. Once I was aboard, I checked over her systems, sold a few heavier modules off to save some weight, and stuffed a class 4 fuel scoop on board, then launched on the run to Namarii. 15 jumps later, I was landing at Hughes and checking out the selection of outfitting...which is, let me tell you, horrible. But, there was enough there to upgrade a bit, accept the combat bond to execute as many Emperor's Dawn scum as possible, and head back out the door. Its about 1500ls to the combat zones from the stations, which gave me time to calm down after the long run, go over escape plans in my head, and prepare my power settings for when I arrive. Surprisingly, I saw very few ships around Supercruise on the way in...and found one of the prettier CZs I've been to hanging in space near a blue gas giant with very shiny silver/white rings (if I had to guess, I'd say they were Metallic, judging by the number of RES sites nearby). When I dropped in, things went wonderfully right from the start...Clippers, Clippers everywhere! And mostly are Emperor's Dawn! Dive in, open up, kill one, and move along...I managed that for about 45 minutes, ran my multicannons dry, nearly ran my chaff launchers dry, executed around 10 Clippers, 3 Pythons, 1 Anaconda, and I'm not sure how many smaller ships....and suddenly things went...strange. I was chasing this Courier, had him down to about 10% hull, and a strange black cloud hit my ship. Not sure where it came from, but everything went dark for about 5 minutes...and when it went away, there was NOTHING nearby. I was sitting dead still in the heart of what had been a massively active combat zone, and then POOF, nothing. I figured that since my weapons were running dry I may as well head back to the station...and after I popped out into supercruise the system started to get pretty crowded again.
Well, after about 5 minutes of uneventful but tense flying (there was a wing wanted of Elite Vipers that seemed interested in me, but then they saw a tasty shieldless Type 9 and wandered away), I was back at the station. So...down to the combat bonds office, go to turn in my million plus......wait, 640k? Huh? That strange blackness seemed to have wiped out a good chunk of the work I did too. I'm going to have to check out my ship's systems, see if there's anything else missing or wrong in there. And maybe I should report this to the Inquisition...they might want to know about some sort of strange new weapon that the Emperor's Dawn have deployed. Well...that can wait for tomorrow. For now, I'm heading back to the ship to get some rest before my sorties tomorrow.
(out of character...I really did have a blackness in the middle of a fight w/ a Courier, Elite crashed hard on me, and about 500k of bonds was lost when it did....maybe they broke the combat zones when they fixed the mining?)