Had a few anxious moments after I walked in on some sort of clandestine activity. I found a system in which two planets have polonium (gathered 15 units in about 30 minutes) and one has arsenic. On one of the polonium planets, I found some wreckage with scanable empire data (see the screenshot in a previous post). Then I moved on to the arsenic planet (no arsenic found, sadly). I was following a high band return that I had never seen before, when over a rise, a familiar shape suddenly appeared:
My heart skipped a beat. I retreated behind a little hill and observed him hull down from the turret position to consider my options. Was it a CMDR, and if so, what would his intentions be? What was he doing out in the black and landed on this untagged planet in an uncharted system? Maybe that high band return was his SRV somewhere to the north? Would I give myself away if I scanned him? What if it was an NPC? How do they behave in the black? I had no idea. I used terrain to approach a bit unobserved and since there was no reaction, I plotted a well covered escape route and decided to scan.
Turns out that it was a security forces Asp Scout that reported no faction. Since it wasn't reacting to the scan, I went around it to follow the contact and came up on some wreckage with nothing salvageable a few hundred meters north. I continued and a couple of kilometers further, I sighted another landed Asp, went around that one and found nearby wreckage, but this time with scanable Federation data. I decided that was enough contact with civilization for this explorer and quickly get back to my ship and out of the system. As I high waked out, I realized I was sweating and hypervigilant. I didn't stop in the next two systems and only started exploring again at the third. Here is a pic from one of the polonium planets just to relax a bit after this adventure:
