DAY 6
It's amazing what you can learn by sitting down at the end of a long day and looking through your ship's logs. Just giving my overworked brain a moment to recover and take stock. It's a ritual I've come to relish over these last six - incredibly busy - days out here in outer space.
For example, I just discovered that one of my wheat tankers over in Black Hole Sun was destroyed by a friggin' Q, many hours ago! Urgh. For the moment I'm just going to assign my other wheat transporter to do double duty, taking care of both stations (it has easily enough capacity for that, what with the never-ending taste for wheat that these cahoona bakeries have), and later on I'll try out the tractor beam I newly installed on a random unassigned Mercury to tow the two farms closer together and turn them into a complex. Should've done that from the beginning, anyway - much more efficient to just have a single TS deal with the output of one complex. Ah well, live and learn. And I'm learning, indeed! Took up a "teach yourself economy in 12 easy lessons" course which I saw hawked about on the Outernet, and gained my certificate earlier today, now being able to call myself a bona fide "Economist". My aunt would've been so proud if she could've lived long enough to see this!
And my thirst for knowledge doesn't end there, oh no! I had this spare Vidar laying around anyway (yeah, yeah, "mission to the moon", "urgent", yadda-yadda. I'll get to that tomorrow, Command, now that I think those nitwit marines you had me babysit have finally gained some real skills), and so I stocked it up with a bunch of Advanced satellites and set it to map lots of interesting regions which I hadn't gotten around to exploring myself yet. Consecrated Fire, Mists of Elysium, Clarity's End, Spaceweed Grove, ... so many interesting sounding places. Really must take a day off sometime soon to go on a vacation and see the sights!
But anyway, that's not how the day started. The day started - of course! - with disappointment. The Goners - remember them? - had politely asked me to go and destroy a pirate base for them, and - ever the obliging gentleman that I am - I had consented to look into the manner. So I took my trusty Cutlass, my three M8s (each with their very own jumpdrive, ferried over to order from the Atreus Headquarters at great personal expense!), which had been idly doing nothing for so many hours, and my Vidar, and - ace in the hole - my Truelight Seeker, which I had equipped with two Concussion Impulse Generators and two Point Singularity Projectors over at the Moon (where I'd sent it to inform Command about me having gotten turned around in Omicron Lyrae, so being just slightly delayed (that one just never gets old, and they still buy it!))
Now, I hadn't yet had the chance to see these babies in action, but the brochure I'd gotten sure sounded promising. And sure enough, when my very own fleet of badassness popped into existance in Gaian Star, and I saw that pirate M7 waiting there for me - *gulp* - those PSPs more than paid for their initial investment by saving my bacon with a few well placed shots, while my Vidar took care of the assorted chaf of M3s. Rubbing my hands in glee at a plan well executed, I started heading toward the pirate base... only for those Goners to suddenly inform me that oh yeah, oops, they'd forgotten to tell me that they had an agent on board, and I needed to destroy the station through subterfuge rather than awesome firepower of badassness! GAAAH!
I tried arguing with them, believe you me! "What's one small life given for a just cause if we can wipe out this pirate terror thread once and for all right now?!", but nooooo, they just didn't want to see reason. Hrmph. So much for finally getting to use my M8s. :( So instead I had to jump back and set my Vidar to gathering these highly illegal SQUASH mines wherever it could find them (had to shuttle over supplies at one point just to get those factories up and running), while I just flew around haphazardly doing some missions in Paranid and Boron space and working remotely on fine-tuning my supply and demand chains.
Anyway, I did finally gather everything I needed, jumped in with my Cutlass to distract the new pirate fleet (wimps; only an M6, no M7) by heading one direction, then having my Vidar jump in and head the other direction, and then jumping after it to personally take care of delivering the goods and blow up the pirate base. Anticlimax! The Goners were happy though, and threw me some fireworks from their newly finished temple. And they also... I only discover just now, looking through my computer logs! ...apprently fiddled with my jumpdrive! I sure hope they didn't break it! I mean, sure, I've been jumping all over the place since then, none the wiser and without apparent ill effect, but who knows where I might end up if it suddenly starts acting up?!
Anyway, with all that excitement over, I've been putting my economy lessons to good use, promoting my more successful sector traders and telling them to go roam the entire universe, and starting up a new complex over in Third Redemption, one of those groovy new sectors my Vidar explored for me, where I sensed a lot of Paranid in want of soja husks. That whole complex started off with a bit of a minsunderstanding, as the shipyard over in Cardinal's Domain apparently only sold large soyeries, which apparently can handle as many soy beans as two and a half medium soyfarms produce. But some minor clerk must've rounded that down when putting together the sales package, so here I was constantly running out of soy beans. And then, when I belatedly realized there was a much better stocked shipyard right there in Third Redemption as well, I figured I could just add on a large soyfarm and two medium soyeries and go from there. But of course, I'd need ships to transport all those soja husks, and decent shields were hard to find, and workers in these shield factories apparently love them some soja husks... so that was a rather obvious addition right there! And what's a TS without a way of defending itself, particularly with a pretty decent weapon like a Fragmentation Bomb Launcher? So, erm... yeah, my complex now consists of 8 stations, and so far most of my soja husks have been used for producing my own shields and weapons, rather than for supplying the other stations in this and neighbouring sectors.
The two large solar power plants in the sector are starting to struggle with supplying me as well (at least at the low prices I prefer), so I'm pondering adding on just a medium-sized solar power plant of my own, and maybe a crystal fab (there's two large silicon mines in the neighbouring sectors, so I don't think I'll need one of those, but just in case I do, I did scout an interesting looking asteroid right here, too).
Unfortunately Third Redemption has just now been invaded by a huge Argon war fleet. Apparently the Argon aren't very pleased with the Paranid for some reason or another, so they've laid waste to most of the shipping in the system. I don't mind that too much (lots of free wares floating around!), but they seem to have taken down the TL as well, which is putting a serious dampener on those renovation plans for this complex! Ah well, I'll have to go off to the moon first anyhow, so hopefully these Argon will have moved on when I return...
Post edited January 09, 2017 by gogtrial34987