Log 3 - Leg 1 01.14.3303
14 Jan 2017MBaldelli
There's something rather soothing about the Sothis Mining/Newholm/New Dawn Stations run first thing in the morning as I have some ambient jazz and my coffee at the desk. It might be well out of the way when it comes to much of what the Privateers are currently doing with Jacques and Colonia, but at the moment I want to max out my Federation Reputation before I move onto either Alliance or Imperial Reputations. There's also the want to try out one of those Tip Off Missions that should occur now that I'm doing my shuffle out there in the small Federation Bubble. Of course, now that I have an SRV in storage, these sort of missions don't seem to be occurring. But then that's just the Briere Luck™ coming into play and I'll just have to ride it out.
Learned something "new" last night that sort of has me miffed. Apparently plotting courses on the Galaxy Map comes in three flavours: Economical, Fastest and Micromanaging. I knew about Micromanaging because as a DSE Pilot -- it's necessary for scanning and charting new and unexplored star systems. It's long, it's tedious, but it's the sort of thing necessary for unknown areas of space. I admit I've done it a couple of times, but not something I would want to do within the Bubble.
Economical can best be described as the "Sunday Drive". It allows you to check out *ALL* the points between Source to Destination. While this is good for unexplored systems -- 120 Jumps/300+ LY year jaunts can be long, tedious and especially time consuming.
Finally there's Fastest. I learned about it during the last third of my traveling back to Ceos/Sothis where my jumps went from 20 down to 6. It had cut down my trip from 45 down to 10 minutes thereby allowing me time to cash in half a million in hit & run system scans to the Federation before calling it a night.
Thankfully I've learned something about Fuel Scooping from Commander KzFusion that the fuel scoop isn't on the bottom of the ship or the top, but the front of the ship -- thereby making it easy peasy to speed around the star to replenish the fusion fuel tanks without falling into or out of the gravity well in the process. And with that, I was able to top off my tanks before making it to the next location and only modestly drained by the time I arrived at Sothis.
I might have to have a word or three with the developers that the slider bar for maximum jump distance is useless in Economy Mode and should be further investigated and/or improved. This entry will be made public for those that would rather read than ask...
During the second leg of my trips today, I'm going to be looking into Military Grade Armour at a station I hadn't seen before. Some of the sources have been terribly sketchy when it comes to DBX outfitting and I'm sort of surprised about it. Even the Wiki doesn't even list it as possible and some of the other sources of information are in the lacking. But hope spring eternal and I would rather be safe than sorry. That and it'll allow me to check out parts of the Milky Way I haven't been to as of yet.
It's time for Lunch at the Mess Hall, and I need to look into plotting my trip for the armour upgrades.