I'm not trying to be rude I'm trying to find out why this particular repetitive activity is a problem. My overall approach to the game is similar to yours, except I've only the one elite rating and no empire rank at all. One of the reasons I think I'm enjoying the guardian stuff is precisely because it's different to what I've doing in game for four years, hence the third expedition upcoming.
It doesn't take hours to get out there, in my explorer ship 56ly range it's only a 25 minute run from the wrong end of the bubble. There are no pirates out there, aside from players probably "protecting the ruins" if you are into open so you don't need a warship with limited jump capability. You can get out there and grab one unlock in an hour, doing it the non reclogging way. Three more hours like that and you have the plasma chargers ready to unlock back in the bubble 25 minutes away, that isn't a herculean effort.
Fair enough buddy, i'll give you an explanation of my experience, best noted by describing how I did the gathering of my guardian materials.
I done the majority of my guardian grind while on an oil rig, you work twelve hour shifts offshore, and its pretty grindy, but my work was less grindy than my guardian grind which I did in a general mission running spec python, not full on combat build, not stripped to a shell explorer, but with twin SRV hangar, Advanced Discovery Scanner etc... I was a full lunch hour jumping out there 25LY, the first site I went to was hoaching with sentinels; two spawned as you charged the pylons nearest the terminal, then there were a further 6 spawn spots as you did the rounds around the other pylons, then another 6 when you charged the last pylon, and two or was it four more once you scanned the data terminal. Couldn't get landed anywhere near it, so it was about a Kilometer if I wanted to go back to the ship, but generally i'd just bug out a few hundred meters, to get out of the hazardous zone, log out, start again. Somewhere about a thirteen of fourteen minute run. If I had ran that twenty two times that would have been four and a half to five hours of SRV time just there and just on the weapon blue print segments. Add time to this if you want to gather every material you see and more again if you want to break up the monotony by filching some ancient cargo to put in your ships hold. I eventually gave up and moved onto some guardian ruins to pursue obelisk data patterns that I called you out on earlier, before looking for a module blue print site....
So pattern wise I was able to get a quick snack for lunch, then do one run in the remainder of my lunch break, and a couple of more runs in the evenings a couple of runs before I got fed up with it. Like I said gave up on that first site and moved onto a module site, which was further out from the bubble,so another lunchbreak travelling to it. However it wasnt as densely defended with maybe max eight sentinels from start to finish, but was more spread out, but faster terrain, so seemed easier but just as long per lap.
This isnt me but this is a video I've pulled off youtube of what I think is the same site I ran, its 13 minutes long and at a couple of glances here or there it looks familiar from the weapons blueprint site earlier.
So while parked there I was able to get a snack for lunch, set up the laptop, then do one run in the remainder of my lunch, in the evenings set up the laptop and do a couple of runs before I got fed up with it. Then I was another lunch hour jumping to my third guardian site for the remaining weapons blue print segments. Fortunately I was able to get landed on the outskirt of the third site I went to, and I could do runs a fair bit quicker than the first weapons site, but by that time I was already scunnered.
Then another lunch hour jumping back to the bubble and....
Still no fragging guardian modules unlockable, so off to the material trader fill in the blanks and...
Still no fragging guardian modules unlockable, they need cargo. Cue muttley style muttering. Fortunately a friend and I share an alt account which is stuffed with engineering cargo from when crafting rolls at an engineer required such things. So, by this time I've finished the trip offshore, came home and installed a second copy of elite on my computer (oil rig bandwidth wouldn't take too kindly to me downloading the game out there), flew two spaceshipps and transferred cargo between them, and went to the guardian tech broker. Did I not have that facility as many players do not they'd be back to preying to RNGesus for some missions to spawn the cargo as rewards. For the fun of of it and forscience I tried this approach and it dimply wasn't playing ball. RNGesus does not like me.
Then I finally got access to the cool guardian toys
