DAY 7 PROPER
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Okay, first the 'research'. I was about to leave Terran space when I remembered that I still hadn't tried flying my Vidar. That wouldn't do of course, so the Springblossom was left in Asteroid Belt and off I went in a grossly slower ship. After hours and hours of visiting shipyards, comparing factory prices, noting any presence of TL ships in the general vicinity and writing down appropriate plots of space... I gave up and picked a random location from the list. An Ore Mine L in Queen's Retribution? Sure. Whatever. I'd only got into this for quick extra credits anyway and it had already taken too much time. Thinking dismissive stuff like that, I jumped to location. Luckily the local shipyard was properly stocked, and I found a TL for hire in the same sector. Though its pilot may have been drunk. Or tripping. "Follow me" I'd tell him and he would rush in the opposite direction or just sit there twiddling the Boron equivalent of thumbs. "Drop my freight here" I'd say, and he would do a gigantic completely unnecessery and exagerated turn and then randomly go to either the far left or far right of where I had indicated on the map. "Not there, here!" I'd repeat and he would randomly dissappear from the sector. Huh. Come to think of it, maybe he was trying to saddle me with extra jump frees.

Anyway, after he'd finally put the factory in its proper place, I went through the property list for my TS ships. None of them had a jumpdrive installed.

Damn.

Fortunately, two of them were five sectors away from Queen's Harbour, where they could get brand new jumpdrives before coming to the mine, so I ordered them to make the trip. Unfortunately, three Xenon Qs with an entourage happened along the way, while I was transfering funds to the Ore Mine.

Double damn.

At this point it was either mindnumbing hours of micromanaging other TSs all the way to either Queen's Harbour or Legend's Home and hoping not to stumble into any surprise ambushes along the way or going back to the shipyard and ponying up for replacement ships. I ponied up.

Two tricked out TSs and a jump to Argon space (for Commodity Logistics Software) later, the Ore Mine had started production. I then noticed that the sector has Crystal Fabs so I also built a Solar Power Plant M and connected it to the Ore Mine with a Complex Construction Kit (I wonder if that will affect things for better or for worse. It will be
interesting to see either way). It was finally time for revenge. I went looking for the Xenon Qs and almost died the moment I went within range of them because, fool that I am, I'd forgotten to transfer the 200 MJ shields from my Springblossom to the Vidar before changing ships. All this time I'd been going around with only 2 25 MJ shields equipped. I'm getting the vague impression that this has also happened before.

Well. -_-

I got away with my life at least. Ship upgrades were all destroyed though so I had to rebuy everything and get proper shields from the Terrans. And repairing the ship by myself instead of paying millions at a shipyard took forever. By the time I was ready and went looking for the Xenon again they were nowhere to be found.

After that I went traveling again, this time focusing on simply taking out any hostile ships that would pop up in my field of view and somehow ended up on Ore Belt. So many asteroids! A bit like Savage Spur but with the Plutarch Mining Corporation instead of pirates. Some random Split wanted to sell me asteroid yield data for 911000 credits. Yeah, right. Dream on buddy! I spent the rest of the day manually scanning the asteroids. Found two with a silicon yield of 64 and one with 50something. Since Plutarch Corp seem to be only mining the ore here I think I'll be making use of that silicon for myself. Tomorrow.