Contemplating Moving....
04 Sep 2019Scubadog
Wait, What? Commander Scubadog moving? It's possible. I mean, not from the Colonia region, not on your life. I love it out here, and don't understand why more aren't drawn here. Well, good people, I'm referring to. The pirates, gankers and griefers can kiss my bright and shiny and stay in the bubble. Now, I've called Colonia Dream, in the Ratraii system, my home for over three years. I'm pretty sure it has the largest shipyard in the region and a pretty wide selection of modules. And, it's one of the three material traders (data). I have 19 ships in my fleet (three of which are back in the bubble), so home has to be a station. And I much prefer the relative ease of entry and exit of an orbiting station as opposed to a ground-based station. But as peachy as life is on Colonia Dream, there are some drawbacks. There are no universal cartographics services there. There are no interstellar factors services, either. And, let's just face facts here, people...Coriolis stations are as boring as they come. Because they are the fastest to assemble, they are usually the first ones planted in new areas.
So, I was chatting with a fellow commander while cashing in my bounties from doing good works out at Tenjin's compromised nav beacon and getting repairs done on my ship and he mentioned a beautiful station out in the Benzaiten system. So, once my ship was cleared I headed out to visit Bisley Landing. And he wasn't wrong.
Bisley is an Orbis type of station and, as you can see, is primarily focused on tourism. It's quite a change from the more utilitarian interior of Colonia Dream. And I'm well off enough to be able to afford a nice condo with a pretty darn good view, too. But, what are the down-sides, you might ask? Well, Colonia Dream has 19 ships in the shipyard. Bisley has a whopping 2 ships. Granted, of those, I've already purchased any ship I had a hankering to. That big a shipyard, though, attracts a lot of traffic. I've struck up a few friendships with folk who've made it home as well. The module selection on Bisley is also quite weak, pretty much nothing higher than would be needed by a Sidewinder or Hauler. But, to be honest, most of the higher-classed modules I had to go to the Colonia system itself or Ogmar to outfit my ships with. And everything is only 1 or 2 jumps away around here.
When you're just building up your fleet, being at Jaques or Colonia Dream makes perfect sense. But now that I have a pretty mature fleet (it's mostly all about engineering at this point), it's the more mundane services that I find myself missing...cartography, interstellar factors.
What's my plan? I think over the course of the next week I'll use Bisley Landing as my forward station and do all my local work out of there. Bounty hunting, mining, a little short-distance exploration. I'll start getting to know the rhythm of the place and the residents. If I find that I don't miss what Colonia Dream has too much I may just work out an arrangement with station management and start migrating my fleet. I'll have to weigh the cost of transferring 15 ships to Bisely against just shuttling back and forth to cut my costs in half. My little Sidewinder may get the biggest workout it's ever had.
Stay tuned.