CMDR Spiff: An Unexpected Journey. 3301-3304
25 May 2018Raumfahrer Spiff
I was feeling nostalgic while recently reading through a few questions and stories from some green Commanders, so I thought I'd sit down and chronicle a sliver of my adventures so far. If nothing else, maybe some new space pilot out there can get a bit of inspiration for how they plan to tackle the open-ended enormity of our galaxy.I came from a poor farming family out of Panem in Kappa Fornacis--as soon as I was old enough I left for the academy with no intention of looking back. My journey started in April of 3301.
Federation license in hand, and like so many other Commanders of the Pilot's federation, I set out from LHS 3447 with barely any credits to my name in a rickety stock sidewinder. For the first time in my life I was now an interstellar traveler. Though with that stock frame shift drive.. hardly. I made credits early on by scavenging bounty claims from system authority squads in nearby nav beacons and resource extraction sites. And as I slowly built up credits and learned how to best outfit and utilize my ship, I was able to start taking on more challenging missions. It quickly dawned on me however that I would need more than just a Sidewinder if I was going to make any kind of impact on the galaxy.
Before joining the Pilot's Federation was even a remote dream of mine, I had always looked up at the stars and imagined myself out there, leaving everything behind me to find new worlds and new horizons. Once I thought my trusty Sidey was prepped enough, I set out on my very first exploration trip. After weeks of seeing Barnard's Loop looming in the skies of my bounty runs and trading loops, it seemed like a good enough choice. I opened the galaxy map and without even checking for distances I just shoved off in the general direction of Orion, confident in my expedition's success.
It was a failure. I can't remember exactly, but I imagine I only made it some 300 light years before I hit this massive wall of an enormous (for my 9ly sidewinder) gulf between me and rest of my path to the Loop. As far as I could figure, above and below my position in the galactic plane, I had reached a point where just could not reach the other side. In my hubris I keep trying to snake my way through to hopefully find a bridge, but somehow I got lost in this tiny pocket of stars. As hard as I tried, I couldn't find my way back out of the cluster and in my frantic haste I found myself facing down a brown dwarf with an empty fuel tank.
First self-destruct, check. If only I had known about the Fuel Rats way back then.
My overly ambitious trip was cut short, and I went back to the drawing board. A few more days of bounties and missions put me in place to finally buy a new ship. In my Adder I had a better jump range, better utilities, and a better plan. I mapped out a preliminary route for my next expedition, taking me past a couple near-by notables like Sirius, the Pleiades, and ending at Canopus. I made my way through my +3000ly trip as happy as a Lavian clam.
This was before I could afford an Advanced Discovery Scanner--so if you are between the Bubble and the Pleiades and see some 200kls bodies with my name on them, know that they were found completely manually. One of my proudest finds was a black hole in the Pleiades itself. Though I wasn't the first discoverer, It was a rewarding challenge to figure out the barycenter of the system and fly straight into a dark void, with no guarantee of success, looking for the faint effects of planetary parallax and far distant gravitational lensing against the backdrop of the nebula. After a good few of hours of searching through the system I had found it, scanned it, and parked myself just outside the exclusion zone for a rest.
Bathed in the warped light of the entire galaxy wrapping itself around the black hole, I had one of those rare perfect moments. I marveled at how far I had come and just relished in how happy I was to be in the Pleiades at all—my favorite object to look up at way back when in the Panemian night-sky.
I lazily sauntered though the region and slowly wormed my way toward my expedition destination in the brilliant UV light of Canopus. From there I set off for a couple more local round trip expeditions, including to the inky wastes of the coal-sack nebula. One planet I found there had a striking 22km mountain that I spent several hours on, scaling to the summit in my SRV. After a time I had earned a nice little nest-egg from my cartographic efforts, and figured it was time for an upgrade. Though an explorer at heart, I'd had enough experience with bounty hunting and defending against pirates and hostiles that I decided it was time for me to get in a proper combat ship. I spent most of my savings on a Vulture and set to the task of becoming a decent combat pilot. Early excursions into riskier RESs and CZs drove the point home that I needed quite a bit of practice. I spent weeks fine-tuning my build, doing drills in empty asteroid fields and around station hab-ring spokes, and losing thousands and thousands of credits in rebuys while pushing my skills to the limit in war zones.
Though my training was far from complete, the timing was kismet. As I started to get more and more confident and lethal, trouble was brewing in my beloved Empire. The controversial new Emperor had been crowned and a traitorous faction was quite unhappy with that. They attempted a massive coup. I entered the war against the Emperor's Dawn and fought for all I was worth. It was in this conflict that I actually claimed my first kill against another venerable Pilot's Federation Commander. I wasn't happy to attack a fellow CMDR, but it was war and he had chosen the wrong side.
Eventually we won the war and the coup was thwarted. I had done my duty for the Emperor and continued on as a bounty hunter and mercenary to fight to maintain peace and order throughout our borders. As a reward to all those that had helped secure the Empire, a substantial discount was offered on all Imperial Clippers. Though still a massive expense for me at the time, I wouldn't miss the chance to fly such a gorgeous vessel. However, in doing so I had to break rule number one. I barely had a couple thousand credits left over after the purchase. The next couple of days were very stressful as I kept a paranoid eye on every single blip on my scanners, flying as slow as I safely could to avoid any damage. Eventually I mothballed her to hop back into my Vulture to make some buffer credits and earn enough for better outfitting. But I am so glad I did. That Clipper ended up taking me to Colonia and beyond in a short matter of time.
After the end of the war, I began assisting the Emperor in her galactic power standing, flinging myself all over in imperial space. At one point I found myself next to my home system of Kappa Fornacis. A home I hadn't been to in years since I had left to join the Pilot's Federation. In a fit of nostalgia, I set course for Harvestport, just to pay respects and get a glimpse of my home-world. While there, I noticed a new faction had taken hold—the East India Company. This faction had come in and began ousting corrupt factions that had been long allowing illegal slave trading to decimate our economy. I looked into this band of imperial traders and privateers and decided I owed them a debt of gratitude for their work in turning around our once failing and now booming economy.
From there I joined up and put in the work to slowly rise up the ranks. In my time with the East India Company I have contributed in many economic and military operations over the years to expand and solidify our control throughout the sector, acquiring many populous systems and several important strategic assets, including Freeholm asteroid base and the Midas Wells-class carrier. Whether it was joining in on strategically fighting in patsy wars and manipulating the local political landscape through our daily operations, or planning/joining in on publicly hosted Company events and competitions, the East India Company had become my new home and family. The Company facilitated my way into higher trade rankings with an extensive proprietary list of profitable trade routes, and I was able to further hone my combat skills through organized duels and friendly scraps.
Secretly, our leadership had begun the legwork for supporting the new interstellar alliance of the Galactic Cooperative. Shortly after it was announced that Gal-Cop would be taking part in the galaxy-wide competition to become the newest galactic power. It was then that I had taken my Clipper out, fully fit and tested, on its maiden expedition to Colonia. After my second trip out there, the EIC's involvement with Gal-Cop was dissolved, so I took that opportunity for a long exploration respite near the core. After getting my fill of ELW and Neutron discoveries, I made the long journey back home. With my earnings I decided I needed to upgrade to an even bigger ship that would make me even more effective among our ranks. That's when I finally got an Anaconda, after only a couple of years of interstellar work. It took a little while to afford to fully outfit it and engineer it a bit, but it quickly became the pride of my fleet. It was around this time that news had broke about Ram Tah's breakthrough in narrowing down the locations of possible ancient alien archaeological sites. My explorer's heart began to tug, so I set aside my factional duties to go join in the search efforts.
After combing through pages and pages of theories and speculation among the Cannon researchers, I made my way out to the search region 300ly from Meene on the outskirts of the Bubble. I joined the hundreds of other CMDRs who were sifting through system after system, flying low-altitude for hours on end over dusty barren terrain, looking for any possible anomalous shadow that could indicate the monumental discovery waiting to be had. My recon flights had been in vain, but quickly word spread through the Cannon back-channels that someone had found the first site! I made a bee-line for it as soon as I had heard. It was a late hour on the first day of the discovery, so when I got there I was alone. I hopped in my SRV and drove around the site under the dim dusky light of the brown dwarf star. The warbling moans and alien mechanical sounds emanating from the ground were ominous, but hinted at just how important these finds would eventually be.
In the following weeks, the sites became more and more popular. A lucrative mission was offered by Ram Tah to help catalog all the newly accessed data from the ancient monoliths. So lucrative that the few sites were quickly swarming with explorers, researches, and tomb raiders. Followed shortly by pirates, mercs, and murderers. I took it upon myself to volunteer my time and my ship for pop-up squads of security patrols. I spent several hours patrolling the perimeters of the Guardian Ruin airspace with strangers, protecting the ant-like researchers in their SRVs droning on below. Sometimes it was quiet skies with lots of silly radio chatter, and sometimes things got tense.
I remember one night when there was a lone hostile Courier that kept picking at the perimeter to draw us off one by one. He was faster than most of us in our Anacondas, and that night was a new crew that wasn't all on the same page, so he got lucky and peeled off the Python and popped him. He kept coming in to take some pot shots, trying to get us separated. I made a risky choice. Not only were some of the other security guys pretty green, if I did get separated, there's no way I could hope to outmaneuver my fat ass against a courier, especially under local gravity. If I could get him to follow me, I'd only have one shot to pull off a maneuver before he managed to position behind me in my blind spot. But I gained altitude to get him to follow me anyway.
He took the bait. I flipped myself over belly-up, hoping he would pitch to stay nose to nose, he did, ending up following me as I full-reversed into a backwards crash course toward the ground, I had caught him in tunnel vision as he boosted to keep up with me. I unleashed an alpha strike, with all hardpoints making full contact. His Prismatics were holding strong, but I had brought him right back into firing range of my allies. As they trained on him, his shield dropped quickly, and his hull melted down to forty percent. I launched my fighter as he began picking up speed to loose us. In my fighter I raced to catch up, my beams swiping him in my frantic chase to reach him. Down to 15 percent hull, the computer alerts me that his FSD is charging as he begun a climb up to escape. I get in a few more licks off his hull, but he slips out before I could finish the job. Never saw him again after that though.
After a few more tours of security duty, more ruin sites began to pop up and so the crowds at any one site started to thin out. There wasn't much more need for security so I hung up my hat and made my way back home. Since then I've been working throughout my home-sector, doing mission to upkeep our political influence, and strengthening our potions in nearby targets systems to fill out our map. I also help in background, security, and sourcing operations in the EIC's CMDR Trading Post. I'll do sensitive targeted black ops for surgical influence strikes, I'll provide trader escorts when conducting large high-risk trades, and I take my trusty Clipper out to the not-too-distant mining rings of Wargis system for brom and painite mining. Outside of that, I sometimes contribute to planning and organizing faction events, I'm a copywriter for some of our various distributed official PR materials, and I help to steer and answer question for new recruits. For fun, when things get a bit slow, I spend extra leisure time scoping out fun-looking canyons to race in, popping into interesting CGs for a good payday, and slowly hammering out and perfecting my fleet of ten ships.
My time as a Pilot's Federation Commander has been a wild ride so far. It's been a long couple of years and I've seen so much, yet there's still so much more to see and do. I've had countless hours of intrigue and violence and boredom and serenity. I've met many contacts who've have become lasting friends, allies, and enemies. I've seen frickin aliens! Just got my second Elite ranking—Exploration to follow soon when I set off on my next big expedition at the end of the year. I just made Duke in the Imperial navy and added a shiny new Imperial Cutter to my fleet--my feet are still wet, but I'm slowly getting the hang of her. I'm so excited for the future, knowing what I can accomplish now. I have a handful of expeditions planned, from a local survey of EIC systems for noticeable tourist stops, to a trip all the way to Beagle point on the other side of the galaxy. There are continual EIC corporate operations in the works. And now we all wait to see how our life in the bubble is going to be affected as the Thargoids continue their advance across all of our homelands.
And that's my story so far. I wonder what's going to happen next. And I wonder where you have been and what you have done, and how different your story is/will be from mine.
Fly safe CMDR, reach the stars.
o7
CMDR Raumfahrer Spiff
25-May-3304