Remembered to pay a visit to my holiday home system. It's a holiday home because it lacks outfitting, but it does feature some of the best skies in the bubble, I think.
Aside from that, ticked off my goal of getting allied with all 4 minor factions present at Jameson Memorial, then went off looking for materials in a bit of optimise the engineering of this cutter. It was a pretty good ship to start with, but I've fitted it with a new SCO drive, so obviously that needed a lot of tweaking, plus I discovered my life support wasn't engineered at all.
The ship is currently rigged for mining, with 512t of cargo space, and 39.97ly range. Sadly I couldn't quite get over the 40 without taking things out, or swapping my long range sensors to light weight instead, and I'd prefer not to. I get a lot of random scan data by pointing at NPCs from 10km away
Tomorrow I shall make sure my new Mandalay has collector limpets, then take it on the same route. At this point, I can probably ignore HGEs since I today's tour basically maxed out several grade 5 material bins. The degraded emissions sites had way less at them, but are providing a more useful variety. But I'll focus on trying to do the job with material trading.
After that... I am not sure. Tempted to head into the black with the Mandalay, but alternatively I may finally pick a power and pledge. While I can make cases for Nakato Kaine, Pranav Atal and Lee Yong-Rui, I suspect I will go with Aisling Duval, for no better reason than there seems to be some level of player organisation there, with regular reddit posts suggesting target systems, plus a decently sized discord. In the long run, credits become meaningless, so as much as extra payouts for exploration data might sound good...I'm already sitting on over 2 billion in the bank with no desire for a fleet carrier, so... what would I do with that?
(Although it would be nice if more than 2 powers paid bonuses for exploring. That's a little bit stingy. Surely everyone would be interested in potential new territory?)