Attempt to get Colonia ended in disaster

Canopy blow out because my ship's helm laptop lost connectivity to the ships control systems ( I knew my EE router is useless but this took the biscuit.

It was all going so well. I had been using the Netron star highway to head towards colonia and been getting 170 Ly super charges from the stars with hardly any damage (see screenshots below).

The connection went and when I powered it up again the ship had drifted further into the Neutron star.

Check out the jump range!!!

 I love the volcanic planets!

 This Neutron start was super fierce - check out the other sun right by it!!!!

 A much more leisurly one - easier to get super charged!

My first passenger mission ended in disaster.

Unfortunately it turned out that the passengers I was transporting were wanted.

Here is the transcript of the letter I wrote to my insurance company and their response

"Really weird - as I approached Taylor City in the Vega system suddenly the station & all ships said a no fire zone violation had occurred (I didn't even have hardpoints deployed) and my ship was destroyed in 2 seconds!!! My first class passengers died too and their lawyers are furious.

I'd like my insurance company to make a claim against the Taylor City Management and re-reimburse me please - unless that is they can prove there was some wrong doing. There was no indication that my passengers were wanted or any such issue but if there is a genuine reason I'll eat the insurance cost.

Thanks & best wishes,

CMRD Hyford"

My insurance Company came through again - those guy really have my back:

"Thanks for getting in touch, apologies for the delayed response, we've all been very busy over the last 2 weeks and have been working tirelessly to get our response times back to normal.

From looking through our logs we can confirm that the station killed you due to a bounty being placed on your head for carrying a wanted passenger.

I'm happy to reimburse you for the cost of your re-buy and this won't affect your no claims bonus. We are currently building a case against the Taylor City Management and we WILL make them pay for the psychological and financial trauma that their actions have put your through, and this is a case that we will not settle on." 

As an interesting aside the insurance company also confirmed an upcoming update to the galactic regulations:
"You will be happy to know that as of the update on 15 November 3002 stations will no longer open fire on players who have bounties, you will still receive bounties for carrying wanted passengers but the station will no longer fire on you, it will only send fighters out against you. It is also much clearer whether the passenger you are picking up will be wanted or not."

Below is my new sand coloured paint job for my Corvette the Midnight Sun in Neche (Descartes Station) and Rhea (Ito Orbital).

Customising my Federal Corvette

Having A-rated all the important combat modules of the Federal Corvette I have found it is still susceptible to a few pirates in Vultures.

So I've decided to take leave of absence from my fortification runs for Felecia Winters and get my ship upgraded so I can hopefully deal with pirates more effectively.

The good news is that my first upgrade I did a while back was with Felicity Farseer. That upgrade gave me a 21.5 Ly range unladen. This has meant heading out to see the other engineers I've met over the years has been much less painful.

My first port of call was to visit Blaster and get my multi-cannons upgraded. Then off to see the Dweller to fix up my Power distributor to increase weapons re-charge rate and see if he can squeeze any more damage out my bean lasers.

I'll post a new entry as I visit each new engineer.

It wasn't me who cracked the glass! Honest.

There is always one isn't there? Why is it always me?
Visiting an Engineer's base in the Sol system (Dekker's Yard) I couldn't resist driving over one of the geodesic domes.

The cracks were there already.

Closeup shot:

After the panel gave way and I fell through you can see inside:

It wasn't me who cracked the glass! Honest.

There is always one isn't there? Why is it always me?
Visiting an Engineer's base in the Sol system (Dekker's Yard) I couldn't resist driving over one of the geodesic domes.

The cracks were there already.

Closeup shot:

After the panel gave way and I fell through you can see inside:

Planetary rings viewed from the surface

Egineering

So it has been a wile now I have been running back & forth to Deceit and Farseer Inc getting a few minor modifications done. The minor modifications (even if I didn't need them) have increased my standing with Felicity. I need to get back to my fortification runs but in the meanwhile here are some shots of my recent visits.

 Wrecked Diamond Back

Collecting materials from a wreck

 An old crash site

The milky way

Where are the Moties?

On Materials and their signatures

Here I found 3 types of signature all in one locale You can see the difference between and Outcrop (left with 2 distinct widely separated bands) Metallic Meteorite (Middle with two distinct bands closer together) and Bronze Chondrite (Right with three bands close together).
Not shown below in the 3 below but you can see further down is the single band of a Mesosiderite.

The ones which tend to have the most useful elements are the Mesosiderites and above all the metallic meteorites (that is where the Yttrium shown below came from).

Here are the items up close:

Rating 5 three weeks in

I've been able to retain rating 5 fairly easily with two 30 minute sessions or so each day (morning & evening) delivering fortification. Last week I did need to top up by buying fortification packages which cost around 7 Million CR.

Still worth the price given the 50M CR salary it generates. My assets & Credit have been increasing well:

Here is a shot from a little break I took from usual fortification:

Rating 5 Week 2

Week 2 is now complete and I didn't have to buy ANY fortification packages to hit the 10k Merit point  thanks to the 50 allocation I now get per half hour.

Odd aside: the scanner seems to be showing the wrong configuration (see green image) for Balandin?

Here is a pointless image of a watery world:

Power Play Rating 5 - Making my way in Felecia Winters' organisation

So I finally went for it - I saved up 150,000,000 CR in order to spend around 50 M of fortification packages (Liberal Federal Packages).

I managed to hit the 10.000 merit with 116,000,000 left by doing a lot of fortification runs and paying for full holds in my Corvette (550 cargo). Before doing it I did some maths (see below) to make sure that I would make the money I spend back again once my 50M salary comes through next week. I'm pleased to say it is MUCH easier now I get 50 packages each time and I'm up to 8k merits this week without having to buy any packages at all! Federal commanders should get in touch with me (find me in Rhea) if you want to know the secret to success!

The Class G Start Paid off with a weird double whammy

So one of the first gold coloured outcrops had some Yttrium in it and as I picked it up it registered as a new material and - what a weird coincidence - exactly that point I gained my Pilot's Federation Trailblazer wings!

Result! Now I just need some Niobium & Polonium and I will have PREMIUM FSD boost. Oh and of course I need a place I can regularly find this stuff so my Corvette is any use at all as a trader since its jump range is fairly lame otherwise (I still won't trade it in!).

A point to note was that the Mesosiderites in this system had some good levels of Vanadium and some Molybdenum.

Stop off at a Class F Star With Major reserves called Quariti

En-route to the class G star  I was heading to which has pristine reserves of materials I stopped off at Quariti which has major reserves and is a class F star. It has a metal rich body around it which I thought might a a promising source of materials.

So far I've found the usual Iron & Nickel and Manganese plus:
Chromium (Quite a lot) & Ruthenium

I found some Germanium in a Mesosiderite but I'm not sure this counts since it could have been on any planet as opposed to the outcrops. It obviously does correlate to the F type star.  Now I'm off to try the Class G I was originally heading to called Delkar.

Moving on to a Class G Star

Having found a little Cadmium, plenty of Vanadium a tiny amount of Mercury in the Major reserves of the rocky body around a Class M star I've decided tea head back into Winters space and try a Class G star with Pristine reserves. So after a little salvage from the skeleton of a forlorn SRV I left this dusty world for the Delkar system.