3 Days To Get Home--New Personal Best
20 Dec 2018Scubadog
I can't tell you how glad I am to get home to my sky. I love Colonia. For all its faults--lack of A-rated modules, certain ships missing from shipyards, no Guardian sites--the sky is glorious and there are no Thargoids. So, to make my way back from the Core Systems, I chose a more straight-line path, only stopping at three stations along the way. The traditional Colonia Highway zigzags and, frankly, I don't need to make that many stops. I still acquired enough cartographic data to easily cover the ridiculous cost of having all those upgraded modules transported from Arexe to Ratraii.It was a bit funny that I met with absolutely no issues during the trip, but it was while I was supercruising to Colonia Dream that some damn fool interdicted me. My scanner identified the would-be pirate as flying an FDL. My Corvette was engineered pretty heavily and very well armed. So, I submitted to the interdiction, whipped out the hardpoints and proceeded to melt his shields within seconds. My incendiary multi-cannons aided my beam lasers, and once the FDL's shields went down the MCs made swiss cheese of his hull. Within 90 seconds I was scooping up materials left over.
I pulled in to my pad at Colonia Dream and cashed in the bounty, measly as it was, and stored The Ceti Vixen while the techs cleaned it up from the long trip and the almost-battle. I offloaded my personal stuff to my apartment, freshened up and started taking the covers off the furniture. I hate coming home to a lot of dust covering everything when I'm gone on long trips. This one took me away for three months. A very productive three months, but three months nonetheless. I hadn't actually planned to be away that long, but I'm glad I covered the furniture...I could plop down on the couch without a big puffy cloud being kicked up as a result.
After a couple of hours I couldn't resist all those cartographic credits burning a hole, so I jumped in The Ceti Fox and made a quick jaunt over to one of the outposts to sell the data. It's frustrating to me that Colonia Dream has one of the most extensive shipyards AND module selections in the region, yet we can't sell cartography here. Anyway, mission accomplished. I made about 50 million credits, which came in handy when I got back to Colonia Dream. I had a LOT of engineered modules stored at Janes Horizons (Arexe system) that I needed to transfer here. That was around 29 million credits by itself. Yikes!
Not many days later two new ships were announced at "a shipyard near you!" so I set about tracking down info. The Krait Phantom, smaller sister to the Krait MkII, and the Mamba were the new kids on the block. Now, it's no secret I hated the Krait MkII. Passionately. But the Phantom was being marketed as lighter and faster, with all the benefits and none of the flaws. I took a chance. And, so far, I do like it. I've done some fair engineering on it (I'm slowing helping our local engineers improve their module skilz) and it definitely is better than the MkII.
The Mamba, however, is problematic. That's because you can't get one out here. Inexplicably, there's no shipyard in Colonia that sells the Mamba. This is perplexing because Colonia Dream actually sells and FDL---which is made by the same company. And it seems some of my Silverbacks brethren are making it a thing to get a Mamba, paint it black and fly our colors. And, to be sure, the damn thing is a sexy beast. This leaves me with a choice. Wait impatiently for SOMEONE to sell the Mamba out here or make a trip back to the Core.
Hmm.