Pirate farmers lol.
Fess up ye fertilizin', arr
I mentioned a couple days ago that the core mining racket was ticking off goals. Sure enough, another night of dedicated mining took me to Trade Elite/Double Elite.
After getting home from my son's flag football game yesterday (they lost in the rain 28-7), I decided to get Selene Jean unlocked. So I looked for pristine metallic rings, and found some not far away in a system called Zeta Octantis. Flew there in Poison Whiskey (Krait II), and probed the rings on a couple of gas giants. Found a number of hotspots, but no painite. Then I noticed that planets are listed as having more than one ring. So I flew back to planet 4 and got down in tight so I could probe the small sliver of brownish inner ring. Close, so that the probe didn't get gravitationally sucked toward the planet and went in the ring instead.
Sure enough, when this probe stuck it revealed about 20 more very small hotspots, including several painite, around the inner edge of the ring. In business now. Dropped in, and prospected around. Found a rock with a good percentage of painite. But it soon became clear that neither abrasion blasters nor seismic charges would get at the painite, which is a 'subsurface deposit'. Mining Lasers?
EDDB'd it and found a nearby station selling mining lasers and flew there. That's when I noticed a new whizbang called subsurface displacement missiles. Hmmm, that sounds like just the thing. How does it work? No matter, how hard can it be?
Flew back to planet 4 and dropped in to the hotspot, found another rock and spent a couple of minutes wasting drill-bangrockets until I worked it out and 15 minutes later had my ten painite. These things are neat. Good one FDev.
Flew to a nearby tech trader, sold the mining stuff, bought a class 5 GFSDB to make it less painful and flew to Kuk. In another thread I advised using exploration data to increase engineer rep to save mats. I unlocked Selene Jean, then went to cartographics and sold 400k of the 1 million in data I had on me. That took me to access level 3.5 and then I G5 lightweight/deep plated the Krait's armor which took me to access grade 5.
I pinned lightweight and flew back home to Dvorsi to do the FDL. But the lightweight blueprint didn't show in the remote workshop. Clearly a bug as it is certainly pinned. So I had to fly the FDL all the way to Kuk. I would have needed to do Deep Plate eventually anyway, so whatever. Did G 4.39 since I only had a couple military composites, and added deep plate and heavy duty'd the HRPs. This netted me a whole +2 m/s! But it's a little faster, and has better integrity and resistances. So a win-win.
Then I flew the FDL to my hunting ground in Exioce and raised combat rank another 4%. And so it goes.
Now, only combat rank remains. That will be true for a while
