Maiden Voyage Complete
03 Nov 2023Oak7603
I'm writing this note with relief in my heart. This maiden voyage of The Mighty Oak, and the Spur to Arm expedition, has been a learning curve, and a journey that won't be forgotten. Although we are calling the expedition to a close, we have made great strides in some respects but some steps backwards in others.Firstly, we had decided to mine Tritium as we travelled and had bought along my old laser mining ship. That turned out to be a mistake, one which I was well aware of but thought that it would be a manageable problem. Many other fleet carrier owners had said that you should always buy the Tritium rather than mine it, however I was thinking that as 150t gets you 1000ly, an hour of mining gets me to the next location for me to start exploring and in all honesty this is a good strategy and one I will stick by for. I do recommend this strategy for those using fleet carriers to explore. However, why this turned out to be the wrong decision for me was because I want to get back to the Bubble quickly, but I don't have stores of Tritium needed to make consecutive jumps.
This issue was bought to light by the Tritium Depot Manager when I ended the expedition and started making plans to return. She did provide a solution and suggested that we advertise for a delivery to be made by another fleet carrier as we had the funds to pay for it due to the excellent performance of the biology teams. I did this, posting a bulletin board message and had two Cmdrs respond. After some negotiations, I had agreed terms with one of them and a few hours later I had a hold with 5000 Tritium in it. My thanks to Cmdr GhostMJ.
Learning Point - Explorers should mine for Tritium as they go, but always have a supply of Tritium onboard for any urgent long distance travel that may be needed.
The second part of the expedition was the exploration. This has been a resounding success and once the business in the Bubble is dealt with I will be returning to the black. We made over 1.6BCr in a few short days and managed to increase our Biological Codex entries from 16% completed to 25%. This is a great achievement by the team and they should feel proud.
All in all, The Mighty Oak has performed exceptionally well. The biology and Vista Genomics has performed incredibly well. The Mining Team always worked well. We just need the Tritium Depot to ensure we have sufficient stores onboard next time and we will be well on our way to becoming an exploration team of great success and recognition.