Log 8 01.19.3303
19 Jan 2017MBaldelli
Something got into me after dictating my last log... While it's great that I had been earning money hand-over-fist out there in the Ceos/Sothis area, there was something rather disheartening about the second part of the Deep Space Exploration Mission Payouts that when I took advantage of some downtime in my billet, I was thinking it might be high time to check out other parts of known and unknown space instead. As I was winding down for the night, I was watching the PR Representative for the Wing that I'm part of -- Wickedlala -- and she was reinforcing the reason why I had originally joined the wing for... To be able to do what I wanted, when I wanted.. Well that and the rules for the Privateer's Alliance match my own personal ethos of being out here in space...
However, the one point that she had made during her presentation was to defend the home system: HIP 33368. And so this morning, when I got into the cockpit of the Eiriksson and launched from Newholm Station, I pointed my nose through the mail slot, charged up my FSD and headed toward what is going to be my new base for a some undisclosed amount of time: Barjavel Station.
Getting the money for transferring the Heyerdahl and my modules for the Eiriksson were easy enough; I was able to pay for it for the exploration data I had collected during the trip to HIP 33368 alone. I was even left with about 20K credits in my pocket even after paying for standard wear & tear repairs and touching up the paint job on the Eiriksson.
I got around the system a bit to check out what was going on and found at least three conflict zones and extraction sites of various difficulty: perfect for when the Heyerdahl gets shipped in. Compared to Sothis or Ceos, HIP 33368 is busy. From Barjavel Station you can see Rand Dock and at least five different planets, conflict zones and extraction sites.
It certainly made me feel like the country mouse visiting the city.
Putting my nose to the grindstone, I tried to grab as many jobs as I could going in one direction, and headed out to make some money before I stopped back in to call it a short day... In 1 hour 49 minutes, I made a measly 150K credits.
Seeing that pay for the same amount of time for less than half of what I'm used to making when working in the Federation all I could think was: How the hell do you folk scrape up your pay within the Bubble?
And then it dawned on me... Too many of the pilots I've chatted with in the Cantina and watched the various vids on VidNet rely on the adrenaline rush of Bounty Hunting for the average amounts of monies I typically made running from Ceos to Sothis and back again.
Tomorrow, I'm going to be heading toward one of the conflict zones to feel how the Heyerdahl handles in a firefight and then I'm going to be heading past HIP 33388 to start to perform more DSE work. It pays better, it's peaceful, moderately monotonous and I don't run into the hustle and bustle of the Bubble as it tries to make sense of the chaos and making money in the process. Don't get me wrong, I like credits in my wallet, but there's a difference between scraping by at minimum wage rates to being comfortable when I come back into port. I prefer the latter more than the former.