Into the Long Dark - a sort of Captain's Log

[Bunny]

NNNNNnnnnnnooooooo!!!!

The end my arse - we need to hear the next instalment!

Fantastic read as every Broadsword - too funny

[Broadsword]

Howdy, space-fans!

I've been fiddling for a while now with the ongoing adventures of Commander Blackblood, as previously detailed in this thread. However, having not written anything since January 2016 there was a lot of ground to cover, and I found myself moving away from the previous irreverent, picture-heavy travelogue in favour of something a little more story-like, which of course meant that it went in a few unexpected directions

I'll still throw in a few pics for fun of course, but since the whole thing is over 12,000 words long I can't find an image for every two sentences like I did last time (especially as each picture is apparently worth another thousand words ). I've no idea if people will have the time or interest to read all this, but I've written it so I'm gonna post it anyway, and hope that there's at least a little enjoyment here for some people. With the words already done I'll post it in chunks just as soon as I've found a few pics for each segment. Enjoy...



Into the Long Dark: Interregnum

Chunk One

"Well," I mused out loud, sinking back into the rich gronk-leather of my pilot seat, "3302 has been one hell of a year."

For a moment I considered resting my boots on the virginal white marboplast of the instrument panel, then thought better of it. She was likely to look battered enough by the time we got home, and there was no need to start early. Instead I just ran my hands gently over the sinuous edge of the board, taking in the feel of her. She was delightful, luxurious, seductive even. But there was so much more to her than that. Something about this ship was just... right. Someone somewhere had put a great deal of effort into designing her, and following the refit I'd put her through every ounce of her engineering was a match for the sublime potency of her looks. She was, for want of a better word, perfect...



Following my triumphant return to Lave Station in December of 3301, I'd found myself kicking around with an extra twenty million credits in my pockets from selling my exploration data. The discovery of three new earthlike worlds within nine kylies of the Bubble had bumped me a few rungs up the precarious ladder that climbs from 'penniless mud-humper' to 'fattest of the fat-cats', and I was feeling fine. I handed my Diamondback Explorer, the Golden Gobbo, over to the maintenance techs for an overhaul and a new spray job and took myself off on a week-long celebratory bender fueled by Migson's Beer, several vintages of Glenfiggis single malt, and a wad or three of Bentlam leaf. But even before the hangover had fully cleared I started to get itchy feet and my mind turned to planning my next voyage. There were rumours bouncing around the bars of Lave that something strange had been found out rimwards - some kind of weird capsules drifting through space emitting strange signals - and a lot of people were starting to mutter darkly about the possibility that they were of alien origin. Something like that comes up, it's time to get on the road again. Some of us would fly towards it, hoping to find answers, and some of us would fly away, hoping to find safety, but the time for sitting on my ass in Hewitt's Bar on Lave Station had definitely passed.


Came back a week later to find I'd left the lights on...

I'd returned to the Bubble with the idea of purchasing one of the new Scarab surface reconnaissance vehicles, but this plan soon began to look a little shaky. The SRV wasn't that large, but to fit a suitable vehicle bay into the Gobbo I'd have to throw out some critical components like my shield generators or field maintenance units. This would make a long range exploration trip pretty risky, so with a heavy heart I realised that I was going to need a bigger boat.

The received wisdom amongst the explorers who had converged on the bars of Lave Station was that the two ships best suited for voyages of exploration were the Lakon Spaceways 'Asp Explorer' and the huge Faulcon DeLacy 'Anaconda'. At around 350 million credits, a fully kitted out Anaconda was well beyond my means, but a decent AspX could be built for 50-60 mill - an amount that was perhaps within reach if I traded wisely with my bankroll.

With this rudimentary plan in mind I boarded the Gobbo (now repainted in a nice dark grey, the better to avoid any lurking pirates) and set course for the Sol system - not for any sentimental reasons about wanting to visit the cradle of humanity (though of course any explorer worth his salt would have at least a passing interest in seeing Earth, Mars and the rest) but because Sol is a very rich, very advanced system, and her shipyards were sure to have everything I might need.


Stealth Gobbo!

The crossing from Lave to Sol made me realise how much my perspective had been altered by my last voyage. This journey halfway across inhabited space from poor little Lave on the outer edge of the Bubble to coordinate 0-0-0 at the very heart of humanity's domain, a trip that might have seemed daunting back in my days as a cargo hauler, was in reality little more than a hop for the Gobbo - an afternoon stroll along the spacelanes to build up an appetite before dinner. As I coaxed my trusty ship down to a landing at the opulent Galileo Station in orbit around the Moon (which moon? Just 'The Moon' - I guess one big advantage of being the site of humanity's crawl up from the primordial ooze is the opportunity to call your moon 'The Moon' rather than 'Sol 3a') I realised that I hadn't even had time to fully adjust my seat.

I couldn't bear to part with the Gobbo after everything we'd been through together, but some of her more expensive components were stripped out and sold to build up my nest-egg to around the thirty mill mark. If things went as planned I could restore everything and get her back to full working order later, and the extra cash allowed me to put the Gobbo herself into safe long-term storage and buy a big ugly Type-7 Transporter, one of Lakon Spaceways' finest flying bricks. I stocked her to the gills with high value crap and began a painfully boring month or two of running bulk cargo in the core worlds. Every light year of the job was a painful slog, but I had a goal in mind and by abusing enough grog at every landfall (and then taking enough stims before takeoff) I could bear anything for a while.


Honestly, she's about as much fun as she looks...

Credit by agonising credit my bankroll crept up until my goal was reached. With fifty mill in the bank I was able to return to Galileo, sell off the Type-7, and buy a shiny new Asp Explorer fresh off the production lines. A few days in a refit hangar with mechanics crawling all over and through her was enough to get her set up for a maiden voyage that would take us who knew where? She could jump even further than the Gobbo, about 34 light years at a time, whilst carrying two SRV's, plenty of shields, and a dozen crates of Glenfiggis. She wasn't exactly a looker, but that didn't matter where we were going. I christened her the IEV Vance Garamond, after a probably-fictional explorer who discovered a Dyson Sphere in an old spaceman's myth from the dawn of interstellar flight. Another day was all I needed to port over my bespoke AI system to help me run the ship and all her sensors.

"Good morning, Esmeralda. How'd you like your new home?"

"Good morning, Commander. This ship feels roomier than the Golden Gobbo, but equally fast. I'm sure it will prove to be adequate for your needs."

"Well, let's hope so. Would you please bring the drive online and start the preflight sequence."

"Of course, Commander."


Thank heavens for self-cleaning diamondite screens.

Slipping out of Galileo Station, I pointed my nose rimwards towards the Pleiades and spooled up the oversized frameshift drive that would hurl me off in the first great leap of my new voyage. What new vistas would it bring? What bejewelled worlds lay out there just waiting for me to stumble upon them? What mysteries would reveal themselves to my astounded eyes? As the stars poured themselves out into the familar streaks of the witchspace transition, I was grinning in anticipation.


To be continued...

[Bunny]

Hurrah!!

Love the fact my descendants are still plying alcohol - almost made me weep with pride

[Broadsword]

Chunk Two

Ten jumps later the grin was gone and I was developing a severe case of buyer's remorse. Now, I want to be very careful what I say here - I don't want to give the wrong impression, and I certainly don't want to be on the receiving end of any unpleasant communications from Lakon Spaceways' legal department. So it's important to be clear on a few things. The Asp Explorer is undoubtedly a fine ship, and does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin. She jumps smoothly and securely, flies briskly enough, has good visibility all round and essentially gets you exactly where you want to go with a minimum of fuss and worry. But, and for me unfortunately it's a big but, I swear by Holy Klono's curly eyebrows she's the most boring hunk of spacejunk I've ever flown.

Now admittedly I'd flown an AspX before, when building up my bankroll prior to my first exploration trip, but at the time I put the intense feeling of monotony down to the fact that I was hauling washing machines and coffee back and forth between two star systems not ten light years apart. I amused myself at the time by imagining how their economies would crash if the coffee growers found a way to farm their berries without getting their clothes so dirty, or the washing machine builders discovered a more interesting vice than caffeine, but despite the undoubted distractions offered by mapping out the imaginary consequences of a make-believe economic apocalypse, my time as a commodity trader was intensely boring. So boring in fact that it utterly masked the fact that the ship I was flying was also unbelievably tedious. But now that I was embarked upon that most stimulating of enterprises, the exploration of unknown horizons, the intrinsically exciting nature of the activity only served to throw the achingly dull behaviour of my new ship into sharp relief.


Even the colours are muted

Nothing about her really commanded my attention. Her handling was... fine. Her jumps were... okay. Transitions came and went without issue but also without any real... oomph. All her systems did what I wanted with a minimum of fuss and a total absence of... (**you can't see me here, but I'm kind of doing 'jazz hands'**). She'd make a good ship for a junk-hauler who needs a reliable tub to keep his business on-track so that the future is secure for his fat wife and boring, moronic children. Or a government courier who needs a reliable but nondescript ship to chug middle-grade documents between minor regional hubs without making a fuss. As a vessel of exploration, tasked with bringing me to the most awe-inspiring sights the Universe can offer, she was sadly lacking. She did it all, but with so little passion that you sort of wished she didn't.

After a couple of days my mind was made up. I scrubbed the course I'd plotted, turned her about and started to hop forlornly back to civilisation.

So what now?

Maybe I'd refit the Gobbo, take off into the black without shields and hope for the best? Or maybe it was time to look at other ships, see what else I might be able to make a go of. I'd heard that the new Keelbacks were a bit of fun and could go to most places.


The Keelback: something... something... lovely nozzles... something... something

Something nagged at the back of my mind. A confluence of two things actually. Thinking about new ships always brought me back to my adolescent dreams of flying an Imperial Clipper, Gutamaya Shipyards' gleaming executive runabout. As a kid I'd had a huge poster of one pinned up on my wall, the lithe, liquid lines seeming almost alive even in two dimensions. She was the ship that made me want to be a pilot, and even now I'd get a little secret thrill if I happened to pass by one on my way in or out of a station.

Sadly she was no ship for an explorer. Great if you wanted to zip about the Empire doing business in style; impressing sniffy governors with your impeccable taste, subduing rebellious peons with a glorious flyby or two, and like-as-not seducing coiffured minor noblewomen with the promise of a quick tumble in one of the luxuriously-appointed cabins. She was all ramgold and whale-fur on the inside, but carried enough firepower to give you a good chance of fighting off anything you couldn't outrun. Nevertheless, she was most assuredly a ship for the Bubble-bound. She could only manage about three hops without refuelling, and even then her best jump could only take you about twenty light years. She ran a little hot, needed regular maintenance and carried too much dead weight to seriously think about taking her outside the bounds of civilisation. Pretty as all hell though, and a joy to fly by all accounts.


Wing collars, Eldredge knots and wookiee bandanas - the Empire takes style very seriously

Lamenting her unsuitability as an exploration vessel tickled at the second grain of sand nestled in the oyster of my subconscious - a message I'd received in the middle of my celebratory bender on Lave Station. I'd filed it under 'spam, scams and other investment opportunities', but something about it was compelling enough to stop me from deleting it altogether. I pulled the file up and read through it again.

"Hey there Blackblood! I see from the GalNet reports coming out of Lave that you've had yourself a good bit of luck as an explorer. Knowing you wanderer-types I'm sure you just can't wait to get off and away from humanity again, but before you go you should drop in on me and have a chat about what I can do for you. Over here at Farseer Station in Deciat I've got a crack team of the best damn engineers in the 'verse offering bespoke engineering services to get the very best out of whatever ship you're flying - I'm talking real engineering here, not just module-swapping and wire-polishing like those glorified spanner-twisters you'll no doubt be used to. Whatever your vessel of choice, from the nippiest little fighter to the most ridiculous bloated space-yacht, you just give us a few bits and bobs and some thinking time and we'll have her performing out of her skin. Whether you want more speed, more agility or (as I suspect in your case) more range, you get yourself over here and let us surprise you with what we can make happen. Looking forward to hearing from you. Felicity Farseer, Farseer Inc."

I thought about that for a long while on my way back to the Bubble. Even if she was the crash-hot engineer she claimed to be, rigging up a Clipper for exploration duty seemed like a big ask. On the other hand, trying to turn the Asp into an exciting ride seemed even less likely, so why not shoot for the moon?


But which moon..?

I arrived back in civilisation at a dismal little orbiter called Hildebrandt Station in HR943. The place doesn't have much to recommend it, except for an automated Universal Cartographics depot that sullenly registered the meagre contents of my exploration log and spat out a payment slip for less than a hundred thousand credits. I wasn't surprised, but I cursed anyway. Sitting on less than eight million credits and facing yet another refit, I could really have done with more, but there you go.

I decided to put a call in to Ms. Farseer before I spent any big money that I couldn't get back. The vid-call itself cost me around two hundred credits but was enough to set my mind at ease - after she'd stopped laughing and actually considered my proposal she didn't call me crazy and she didn't tell me it couldn't be done. Eventually she even seemed to develop a little enthusiasm for the project.

"Tell you what, son. I've never really had a chance to work on one of those shiny Imperial ships. Truth be told, what most of my clientele are really after is to turn their wretched little garbage scows into somethin' slightly less painful to fly, so takin' a bird that's already a pilot's dream and makin' her even hotter sounds like it might be fun. You're on, I guess."


No, honestly, she does a lot of laughing. She just looks glum in the only picture I could find of her...

"Just a second, Ms. Farseer. I'm going to need you to be just a little bit sure about this. We're talking about an expensive ship here, and a big investment of time too. I can't afford to go through all this just to have you tell me you were wrong and it can't be done. As she comes off the line she can make ten light years. Any fool can refit her to jump twenty, but she's no use to me unless she can make thirty, and carry a rover or two, decent shields, auto-repair units, and a full scanner suite while she's at it. That's quite a task."

"Now, now, don't go gettin' your gimbals locked-up, son. Alright, I'll admit that every new ship rebuild is a bit of a leap of faith, but my Daddy didn't raise no liar. Ship like this, she's just born to go places - I reckon I can get you your thirty lights without too much trouble. Figure you won't mind me throwin' out a bunch of those luxury cabins and suchlike, so that ought to give us a bit of workin' room, and if we dump the champagne fountains and caviar dispensers out the airlock she'll be down to a fightin' weight in no time, you'll see," she said with an oily grin.

"Fine, you're on," I replied, my foreboding mixed with just a tinge of excitement, "what'll it cost me?"

"Won't know that till I've seen her, son. Like I say, every ship is different. But to be fair, I guess I can tell you this much - ain't gonna be cheap, no sir. 'Bring everythin' you got' would be my advice, and we'll see how far it takes us." She showed me the oily grin again and snapped off the link.


To be continued...

[Bunny]

Damn you and the cliff-hangars

[Broadsword]

Chunk Three

As it turned out, money was going to be the least of my problems, though at this point I couldn't have guessed it. My tentative inquiries about purchasing the Clipper had thrown up a much more daunting hurdle. It turns out that Gutayama Shipyards are not merely 'the Official Shipyard of the Empire' - they're actually an arm of the Imperial Government and restrict the purchase of their ships to Empire loyalists. By law. Imperial Courier ships were available to anyone who had been granted the title of 'Master', a relatively straightforward task requiring only a few formalities and maybe a donation or three, but to get authorisation for the purchase of a Clipper I'd somehow have to become an Imperial Baron. I'd sort of assumed that somehow there would be a back-alley, black market way of buying either the ship or the rank, but the more I dug into it the more I found that shortcuts for this kind of recognition were absolutely not going to happen. On the upside, with thousands of planets and untold billions of citizens, there were a surprisingly large number of Imperial Baronies to be distributed, but on the downside they definitely had to be earned.

Having had the feasibility of actually building an explorer-Clipper dangled in front of me by the oddly charismatic engineer from Deciat I knew I'd never be able to get it out of my mind, but becoming an Imperial Baron was going to take a chunk of work. I started by refitting the Asp for more speed, a few weapons, a small cargo bay and a couple of passenger cabins. I got down to my last million credits but I had everything I might need to start running errands for the Empire. Short of marrying my way in, the best way to earn myself some kudos with the Empire was to play mercenary captain, doing chores for minor Imperial outposts too poor to have their own naval fleet. Being a total outsider meant I would have to accept all the scummy jobs before anyone would trust me, but even that turned out to be more fun than hauling coffee and washing machines. The rewards were scant at first, but by bouncing from system to system hauling documents and diplomats I started to build a name for myself as someone who could be relied upon.


They assured me the post box was around here somewhere...

Gradually my few contacts started to trust me with more important jobs, but even so it likely would have taken me years to climb the greasy pole of Imperial appointments were it not for a stroke of good fortune. One of my growing network of contacts, having exhausted his own use for me and my ship for hire, informed me that a civil war had broken out in the far off system of Wu Guinagi. Forces were flocking from all around to support one side or another.

"Listen, I know I carry a few guns for the just-in-case, but I'm not exactly rigged for a war."

"You don't need to be. Let others do the fighting, there'll be plenty of work running officials and reports back and forth. As long as you've got the legs to avoid trouble and the balls to keep risking it you'll make bank my friend."

With those words ringing in my ears and a letter of recommendation in my datapad I set course for Wu Guinagi and introduced myself to the local Imperial representatives. Before long I was running Officers up to the front lines and coming back with safe-fulls of intelligence reports. With a little interior re-jigging I was even able to transition into running small spec-ops teams to and fro, or hauling wounded soldiers back to the relative safety of the orbitals, and all the time my reputation was growing. The missions gradually became more and more urgent, more and more secret, or more and more dangerous, and in completing them I took greater and greater risks in return for greater and greater rewards. Every so often one official or another would make a formal recognition of my contribution to the war effort, and in time my rank inched up from 'Outsider' to 'Serf' to 'Master' then 'Squire', and eventually through 'Knight' and 'Lord' before finally, agonisingly, clawing its way up to the all important title of 'Baron'.

On the day I received the call from the local Imperial Commander to confirm my appointment, I walked straight down to the station bar at Zeigel Dock and ordered myself a bottle of Glennfiggis and half a belt of Bentlam leaf before retiring to the Vance Garamond to bid her a figurative if slightly premature goodbye.


That'll do, pig...

I came round the next day to the sound of an Imperial Intelligence Officer banging on the airlock demanding entry. "Good morning, my Lord," he sniffed, seeing my dishevelled state as the airlock whispered open. "I bring urgent orders from General Morgan. Your vessel is needed within the hour to courier the General and his staff to Bode Hub as part of the new offensive. Please make all necessary preparations."

I paused for several seconds whilst turning over in my leaf-blurred mind the various pieces of data that informed my next words. It was the kind of order I'd received on numerous occasions over the last six months, but today was different. Firstly - I had now achieved the single goal that had led me to get involved in this gods-bedamned war in the first place. Secondly - in the course of running hundreds of missions for the Empire in the last six months I had almost accidentally accumulated nearly a hundred and thirty million credits in reward payments. Thirdly - I had never really liked General Morgan. He was too fat, too blustery, and for a man who routinely ordered thousands of men to their deaths he was way too confident. Fourthly, and most pressingly, I was hungover as all hell. As a result I took great pleasure in what I had to say next.

"I'm very much afraid, Captain, that I must disabuse you of a serious misapprehension that you seem to have regarding the nature of my relationship with local Imperial forces. I am not a Naval Officer, and neither myself nor my vessel come under the direct command of the General or any of his staff. I am in point of fact a private citizen who has, entirely of my own volition and with no assurance of future assistance, made my vessel available at such times as seem suitable to me for the performance of certain duties in the service of the Empire. Furthermore, I am an Imperial Baron and do not for one moment feel that it behooves a member of the nobility to spend his time grubbing around in a rather petty civil war doing odd-jobs for the local garrison. My vessel will indeed be made ready to lift-off within the hour, but I shall be travelling alone and to a destination of my own choosing. I wish you luck in finding berths on some other vessel, and bid you good day, sir."


...and then I legged it...

The poor Captain looked somewhat flummoxed, but to his credit realised that any protestation would be entirely wasted. He muttered some vacuous pleasantry in accordance with Imperial custom, saluted smartly, and stalked off the ship. As soon as his feet hit the station deckplates I sealed the airlocks and shouted to Esmeralda to start preflight. I didn't expect General Morgan to actually make much of a fuss, but I hadn't survived the last six months in a warzone without learning to be cautious. Rather than waste time working out a full course to my destination I just ran a quick plot into the next system, and as a result I was able to call in my request for launch clearance within two or three minutes. Esmeralda flashed up the green light that signalled 'go for launch', and I heard the mag-locks release before I had even strapped myself into the pilot's seat.

Thrusting gently away from Zeigel Dock I breathed a sigh of relief that my involvement in this whole dirty business was over. It took only a few minutes to plot a new course taking me one hundred and eighty light years to the Gutamaya dealership at Libeskind Hub in Arakapajo, safe and serene in the heart of Empire territory and seemingly an entire universe away from the hard graft I 'd just left behind. So it was that in a vaulting, air-conditioned hangar, the towering walls almost glowing in immaculate white and the whole area suffused with the gentle murmurings of Imperial loyalty hymns, I finally came face to face with my dream ship. Walking around her in the company of one of Gutamaya's most obsequious salesmen (at least that's what I hoped - if there are others out there with a greater competence in servile boot-licking or sycophantic flattery I hope I never meet them) I gradually became aware of just how big she really is. Her sleek lines and surprising agility in the promo vids always seem to give the impression of a smaller ship, but here in the display hanger, gradually walking backwards to try and take her all in, the numbers I had all but memorised as a child began to solidify into a slightly daunting reality. 107m from stem to stern, and 104m in the beam, she stood nearly 30m high and weighed in at a still-impressive 400 Imperial tons. I whistled quietly to myself, turning her over in my mind and wondering if we could really make this work.


Also, where's the door?

Misinterpreting my whistle the salesman turned his ingratiating assault up to full beam. "You have a good eye, my Lord. She is most assuredly a thing of grace and beauty. One of the most desirable ships in our line, a distillation of everything that Gutamaya stands for, and sure to turn heads in any port across civilised space. The perfect vessel for a discerning man such as yourself, if I might make so bold."

"Sure thing, bud, whatever you say. But you can rest your lungs, I already know exactly what I want."

I handed him a datapad listing the A-grade off-the-line specs I'd decided on, enjoying the momentary look of surprise that crossed his face. Any annoyance that he might have felt at my brusque manner swiftly dissolved when he realised that he was about to make a seventy million credit sale with minimal effort. With no need of persuasion he instead turned his every effort to making me comfortable whilst the details were worked out. I soon found myself relaxing in a more than adequate suite at the Arakapajo Hilton, sipping a '56 Glenfiggis and dining on an inch-thick ogopogo steak, and all on Gutamaya's ticket whilst waiting for their techs to fit out the Clipper to my demanding specifications. Little did they know that their efforts were to be only a starting point, and that as soon as they were done I intended to turn their handiwork over to the eccentric engineer from Deciat.



To be continued...

[Broadsword]

Chunk Four A

Three days later my new ship was ready for her maiden flight. I thanked the Gutamaya team, made arrangements for a ferry pilot to shuttle the Vance Garamond over to Deciat, and finally made my way aboard. In her off-the-line trim she was nothing short of magnificent - every surface finished in gleaming white marboplast, hyperreflective onyxite or ion-depleted ramgold. She looked more like a flying temple than the kind of cargo scow I'd been grubbing around in all these months, but despite the ostentatious decoration she was just about exactly as much fun to fly as I'd always imagined her to be. After a slightly nervous time slipping her through the docking port - the slot seeming to give me only a few metres clearance on either side - I was soon getting to grips with her. Swooping and spinning my way around Libeskind Hub for half an hour was exhilarating enough to convince me I'd made the right choice, and with a grin I laid in a course for Deciat, eager to get on to the next step.

The journey took a while - the Clipper's relatively short jump range necessitated plotting a pretty convoluted route to avoid even small voids in space, but I didn't mind a bit. Even though I knew I needed a much better range to turn her into an explorer's ship, I was in no rush for this maiden flight to be over, and it was with a tinge of regret that I eventually tuned in traffic control at Farseer Station and requested a berth. The ferry pilot bringing the Vance Garamond over had beaten me here by several hours and had already shipped out on a passenger barge back to civilisation, reinforcing the importance of the tune-up job that Farseer was offering.



"Hoo-ee, boy," exclaimed the engineer when she got her first close-up look at the ship. "You sure do got some style, I'll give you that." Even crammed into the claustrophobic hangar bay carved from the umber rock of Deciat the Clipper looked wonderful. If anything the contrast of her soft curves against the angular background of broken rock, steel beams and exposed cables made her seem all the more angelic. "She is a mighty-fine lookin' bird, and that's no lie," my host went on. "But goddam it, I swear whoever designed her must have been high as a Fridihan fog eagle all week. Any fool can see those dimensions are all wrong - she's pretty as a princess, lithe as a cat, but weak as Uncle Darv. Leastways when it comes to jumpin', that is."

"Uncle Darv?" I asked quietly, my eyes savouring the arched lines of the Clipper's radiator housings.

"On account of his only havin' the one leg, you see? Nasty crash on the final lap of the '85 Buckyball Championship. Halved his cobbler's bills but broke his spirit. He weren't the same man after that."

"Depression?" I muttered, admiring the elegant panel work that encased the dormant fuel scoop.

"More of a crater, really. Hit the canyon wall at 600kph, blew his reactor lines, tore his ship to itty-bitty bits. Amazin' he survived at all really."

"Huh?" I tore my eyes away from the Clipper to find Farseer beaming at me with her increasingly-familar oily grin.

"Got your attention?" she chuckled. "Son, you really need to lighten up. You stare at that pretty little ship of yours any harder, you're gonna pop an eyeball out."



I raised a smile of my own. "I guess I'm still getting used to her. I've spent the last eight months dreaming about this ship, and sometimes it's hard to believe she's really real."

"Oh, she's real enough, kiddo, but we got a lot of work ahead of us before she becomes the ship you've been dreamin' about. Like I say, those dimensions are all wrong. She's over a hundred metres side to side, that's way bigger 'n an Anaconda mind, but her main hull is only, what, thirty-five metres across? So the biggest drive you can fit into her is a 5A, and somehow that's gotta project an Alcubierre field broad enough to fit in those oversized outriggers? No wonder the field gets so attenuated. You try and jump more 'n twenty lights and you risk leavin' your kidneys behind. So that's the first thing we'll have to fix... now what in the nine hells is wrong with you, boy?"

I was looking at her in horror, visions of metallic carnage filling my mind. "You're not seriously suggesting removing her outriggers, are you?"

"Hell no, boy! Where'd you go gettin' a damned fool idea like that? I ain't no heathen, an' I sure as shit ain't no spaceship designer. I just do innards. Gutamaya made her the pretty little thing she is, an' that's the way she'll stay. I'd no more take an arcsaw to those beautiful lines than I would to my own two legs! I'm just gonna have to figure a way to project a nice stiff field out of that slinky little waist of hers. But don't you worry, boy, I already got a few ideas about how we're gonna do that."



"Okay," I laughed nervously. "Sorry. It's just that I've sunk just about everything I've got into this ship. And I'm not just talking about credits, though Holy Klono knows she wasn't cheap. Hopes and dreams, I guess you might say."

"Don't worry, son, I'll keep her safe. And you just give me a little time and all your money and I'll have her performin' out of her skin, you'll see. Now, how about we get you settled in and then me an' the boys can spend a good bit of time figurin' out how to give you what you're after?"

The Engineer helped me move my kit to a guest room, dingy but clean, complete with a bed, a vidscreen and a sparsely stocked bar. The contrast with the luxury suite that Gutamaya had provided was almost comical, yet somehow I felt far more at home here in these standard starpilot's digs. The engineer popped in from time to time to make sure I was ok and ask a few questions about the work, but otherwise I was left alone in the room with my thoughts for about four days. Supplementing the meagre pickings of the bar with a few bottles from my own stock, I whiled away the time planning a hypothetical new voyage, watching newsfeeds and drinking. The Galactic News Network was full of reports that a couple of crashed alien ships had been found on barren planets in the Pleiades, and since the stories didn't go away when I sobered up I figured the discovery must be real. Maybe they'd been there for a thousand years, or maybe they crashed last week. All I knew was that the itch to get moving was growing stronger.



To be continued...

[Broadsword]

Chunk Four B


Eventually Farseer reappeared clutching a datapad and a bottle of beer. Her grin was wider than ever, and it was obvious that she'd had some sort of breakthrough.

"Alright, son, we are in business!" She dropped the datapad down on the table and clinked her bottle against my glass. "Call me a wizard if you like, but I think I've come up with a way to get you what you want and then some." She took a long swig from the bottle and looked at me expectantly.

"Okay," I ventured carefully, "what's the plan? And what'll it cost?"

"Well, for the first part, I've figured a way to physically separate the Alcubierre field generators from the mass inverter in your frameshift drive. Don't ask me for the details, it's magic. But the upshot is we can place slaved-in secondary generators in your outriggers and project a field way stronger than the one you got now. The downside of course is that it's going to take up a whole lot of space. Plus we have to somehow keep the protonium feeds hot and smooth all the way out to these auxiliary generators. That ain't easy, but it's easier than tryin' to split the mass inverter three ways without losing synch any day of the week, and in any case I got an idea that should stabilise your feed lines well enough. Now fillin' up those outriggers with a whole load of extra doodads is gonna play havoc with your rotational stability, so we'll need to beef up your outboard thrusters to compensate. The good news is we can bleed out the excess plasma from the condenser lines and feed it back into the reaction chambers to compensate for the extra overall mass, so she shouldn't be much slower in realspace than she is now. If at all."


"I feel the need... the need to hopefully not lose too much top-end speed!"

What she was saying sort of made sense, though the end result sounded outlandish enough to have me wondering once again if this was all just an elaborate scam. Still, in for a penny as they say. "So what about the cost?"

"Well, you won't be able to fit anything bigger 'n a peashooter into the outrigger hardpoints, so unless you want your enemies to laugh 'emselves to death I guess I'd forget all about goin' armed. Plus, to build in the new feed lines and insulators, and brace the mass inverter against feedback from the parasite fields, I'm gonna have to use up pretty much all the space forward of the sublight engines and aft of bulkhead seventeen, so you can kiss goodbye to all that classy white interior decor. My stuff will be functional and neat, but I don't do gold-cladding."

I must have looked alarmed as I followed her finger across the Clipper's blueprints as far as bulkhead 17, square in the middle of my SRV bay, but Farseer was one step ahead of me.

"Of course," she went on smoothly, as though she hadn't seen my grimace, "that'll mean shoving the buggy bay up as far as it will go, but that should help offset the extra back-end weight and keep her nice and nimble. You'll lose most all of the crew quarters, but I figure you wont mind that too much if it all works."


We tried fitting a waterbed, but in zero-G it gets pretty messy...

She was right of course. If it all worked as advertised I wouldn't mind being left with just a pilot seat up front and enough space for a sleeping bag on top of the reactor. But there seemed to be a question she was still avoiding.

"You still haven't told me what it's going to cost."

"Well now, that's where it all gets a mite tricky. Best I can figure, I'm gonna need you to bring me about four dozen baked-out chemical manipulators, the big ones you see in cargo haulers and the like, plus a couple of terabytes of data on high-wake exception residues, preferably from jumps over twenty light years, and about half a ton of arsenic."

"Huh?"

"Well, I guess it's probably safer to bring me a ton of arsenopyrite and let me do the rest. But the point is, to keep the protonium feeds smooth and hot all the way out to those auxiliary generators in the outriggers we'll need to replace the standard phosphorous microvanes throughout the injector system with arsenic-based ones. That way we can run a lot hotter at the core without the flow gettin' all foamy every time you blip the throttle. " The face she pulled as she said the word 'foamy' gave me the impression that this was definitely a bad thing.

"Uh-huh," I managed. "Arsenopyrite it is then. What about those other, uh, things?"


Arsenopyrite - 46% arsenic, but the other 54% is perfectly safe-ish.

The engineer flashed her oily grin again, the bit well and truly between her teeth. "Alright, son, next up are the high-wake exception residues. When a ship engages its jump drive the initial plot is based on a mixture of long range sensor data and catalogued parameters for the jump. But of course those tricky little stars are all moving, all the time, so as the jump is actually made the navcomp pushes the sensor field out alongside the Alcubierre field and uses the feedback to adjust the drive parameters and keep the jump accurate. Any difference between the original field entry and the final jump trajectory will tend to produce a sort of... smear, I guess you'd call it, in the wake residue. Most of the time the difference is tiny, but once you start to jump over about eighteen or twenty lights then the errors get bigger. At that range probably about one in a hundred jumps will show a correction fingerprint big enough to be useful, and we need a few dozen examples."

"Erm, why? And how?"

"Boy, did you never watch detective shows when you were a kid? Wake residues are temporary quantum fields left behind from using an FSD drive. If you scan them quickly enough with the kind of wake decrypter the cops or bounty hunters use, you can get all sorts of information about who jumped where and when. In case you want to follow them, say. Now, we don't care about that, but we do care about the last minute adjustments their navcomps have had to make, because we're gonna use that data to teach your navcomp to anticipate the kind of errors it might face. Our little triple-bubble Alcubierre field is likely to be a mite unstable, and I don't want your outriggers to go haring-off in opposite directions the first time you spool her up. Get me the data and we'll run her through a whole bunch of jump simulations until she's learned how to to handle it."


Wake Residues - Like little space farts with... wait a second... what the hell, Jeb? How did you get here?!?

"Alright. And the last thing?"

"Ah, yes, the chemical manipulators. Big, ugly lookin' clumps of things that control the mixture feeds into the mass inverter. Bigger ships have bigger drives with bigger manipulators, as you might guess. Sadly you got a medium sized drive that we're tryin' to con into behavin' like a big drive, which for all my genius is likely to put a huge amount of wear on the manipulators an' end up leavin' you stranded halfway to nowhere when they burn out. So unless you want to carry a whole bunch of heavy spares along with you, we need to figure out the likely wear patterns when projectin' a bubble this size. We could just run her around here for a couple of years and then strip her down, but I figure you want to be on your way sooner rather than later, so we need to take a look at some old, worn, baked-out manipulators from ships at least as wide as yours. Which by my reckonin' means something like a Type-9, okay? You get me the old manipulators from about four dozen Type-9's, and I'll build you a set that will last from here to doomsday."

"Sounds good. But you still haven't told me what you're charging for all this."

"Tell you the truth, boy, I haven't really thought that far. How's about this - how much you pay for her?"

"Sixty-nine and three-quarter million."

"Alright, so nearly seventy mill for a ship that jumps twenty-two lights. That's about three point two mill per light year. Now, forgettin' for a second that anythin' under thirty is useless to you anyway, so the money you've spent so far is a dead loss unless I can help you out, I could tell you that a fair price is three mill for every extra light year I can give you that Gutamaya couldn't. But I ain't no Imperial crook, an' in any case you're gonna be providin' a fair amount of the raw material yourself, so how about we say two mill per extra light year?"

I mulled it over in my mind and decided that this was a cost I could live with. If Farseer managed to get the Clipper jumping more than thirty light years I'd be on the hook for over sixteen million credits, but I'd also have the ship of my dreams. "Deal."


It's only money after all...

I gathered my kit and headed down to the hangar bay to say goodbye to the Clipper. She looked sublime as always, and I drank her in, wondering exactly what I was going to come back to.

"Don't you worry, son. I'll treat her like the lady she is."

"I believe you. If I didn't, I wouldn't be leaving her here." I smiled and offered the engineer my hand. "Any advice on where I can find all these bits and bobs you need?"

"Now just what in the nine hells do you think I am, boy, some kinda half-assed tour guide? You'll just have to go and hunt down that stuff for yourself. It's not like I asked you to fetch me a bucket of unicorn farts, now is it? Everythin' we really need's just waitin' for you out there in the 'verse. You're an explorer, go find it! Meantime I'm gonna get started on breaking your precious baby here into little pieces, see if I can't figure out where she hides her balls." The grin appeared once again, then Farseer turned away and headed off to work, shouting out orders to the swarms of men and machines that surrounded the Clipper. I made my way over to the Vance Garamond and prepared for what would hopefully be the last leg of my quest.



To be continued...



[Note - this one has a fair bit of Star Trek type technical mumbo-jumbo in it, but there is method to my madness. In the game, getting an engineer to improve your drive (or anything else) is a little random number game. You hand over two or three raw materials, and then the dice are rolled for a variety of factors at once. In the case of engineering a frameshift drive for extra range, each attempt requires one unit of arsenic, one 'Datamined Wake Exception' and one Chemical Manipulator. No explanation is ever given of what these things are, or why they are important to the process, so most of this chunk is my best attempt to explain why making a ship jump further requires these particular ingredients.

The final twist is that because the modification changes several parameters at once (in this case the mass of the drive itself, plus the oomph of the drive system (the combination of which gives you the final jump range) and also the toughness of the resulting system to damage or wear, its power draw and finally its tendency to overheat in use, you're relatively unlikely to get a really good result on all the factors at once. As a result it's generally advised to gather enough materials for thirty or forty attempts, in the hope that somewhere along the way you'll get a good enough combination to give you a killer drive (in the good sense). I really wanted this to work, so I collected enough materials for fifty goes. Which took me a couple of weeks. Predictably, the best result I got was on roll one of fifty...]

[Donkey]

Great stuff as ever, Broady. Makes me want to dust off my various ED ships and get back into it. And with regards to your last few words ... I feel your pain. I haven't used the engineers much because the Gods of RNG are bastards with a warped sense of humour.

[Broadsword]

Chunk Five


Sourcing the arsenic would be straightforward enough, so I opted to start with this whilst working on plans for the other items on Farseer's list. Most planetary markets didn't deal directly in non-precious minerals, but it took only a few minutes to find half a dozen mining outfits within a hundred light years who listed arsenopyrite amongst their products. Picking one out that looked reasonably unlikely to be a front for pirates, I plotted a course and turned my mind to the problem of wake residue data.

By the time I'd gained permission to land at the private mining outpost, negotiated a price for a ton of arsenopyrite, and loaded the resulting crates into my hold, I had come up with a workable plan for recording the jump data that Farseer needed.


Open-cast arsenic mining is a blight on the galaxy, but it keeps the prices low so I voted in favour...

"Esmeralda, pull up a list of all the Imperial systems that have declared famine conditions in the last month."

"Putting it on screen now, Commander," replied the AI almost immediately.

With roughly nineteen thousand inhabited systems in the Bubble, less than a thousand of which boasted earthlike, open-air worlds on which to grow their own food, the outbreak of famine was a more or less constant threat. At any given time a few hundred systems might be expected to have declared the need for emergency relief, which meant that I could afford to be picky. By limiting my search to just the Imperial systems, I figured I'd be able to throw my rank around to get what I needed. As it was, the list Esmeralda dropped onto my main screen still gave me one hundred and fifty-eight options. Hard times.

"Okay. Filter for those that are between twenty and twenty-five light-years from their nearest Imperial neighbour."

I figured Imperials being the snooty bunch they are, even in times of need they were likely to prefer getting aid from other Imperials, and I wanted those relief ships to have to jump a good distance. Anything over twenty-five lights though and most transport ships were going to be doing it in two shorter hops. The list dwindled to just four systems.

"Which of these has the highest population?"

"Kantrosteri. A Mining and refinery system with a population of 4.8 million people split between two large orbital facilities and several surface outposts on the fourth planet. Famine conditions were declared four days ago."

"Exactly what we're looking for."


"Of course the crops failed, there's no air, no water, and my brakelights are brighter than both suns put together!"

After a short detour to find a hi-tech system where I could buy a wake scanner I high-tailed it over to Kantrosteri. As expected, the Imperials were following standard procedure and had set up a central collection depot for all the incoming relief ships, in this case at Seymour Orbital around Kantrosteri D.

"Seymour Control, this is the IEV Vance Garamond under the command of Baron Blackblood of Tresach. I'm here to conduct efficiency studies on relief convoy routing, I assume I can count on your cooperation?"

"E-efficiency studies, my Lord?" My opening salvo had had the desired effect of putting the local busybodies on the back foot. Now to capitalise on their discomfort.

"No need to worry, I'm not here to assess your in-system distribution arrangements... yet. I just need to gather routing data from your supply ships. I'll record their wakes as they jump back to their home systems, that way I don't need to interfere with the very important work you're doing here."

"Ah, yes, of course my Lord. That should be quite satisfactory." Their relief at not being the subject of my 'efficiency study' was enough to get them on my side, and before long I was floating in space just outside Seymour Orbital merrily scanning the steady stream of departing relief ships and recording their FSD wakes as they jumped away to pick up another hold-full of food cubes.


Hard to believe, but by about halfway through day two the fun had gone out of this.

It took over a week and thousands of scans to get the 'few dozen' exception residues that Farseer had requested, but it was simple work that I could happily leave in the hands of Esmeralda whilst I investigated how to get my hands on a whole bunch of outsized chemical manipulators.

The engineer had suggested that what she really needed were the manipulators from Lakon Type-9s, but try as I might I couldn't think of a clever way to get them in bulk. I could probably buy as many as I wanted direct from Lakon of course, and four-dozen would probably only set me back a few million credits, but what Farseer needed were old, used, burnt out manipulators, so that was no good. As far as I knew there was no large 'Lakon Graveyard' where old trading vessels went to die, and even a second-hand Type-9 was likely to cost around forty mill, so I couldn't just browse through the 'ships for sale' boards and buy up fifty of the things.

I was nearing the end of my week of scanning food convoys before I finally came up with a solid idea.

"Esmeralda, pull up any high-bulk material appeals from the tradenet, ten thousand Imperial tons and above."

My screen overflowed with the details of thousands of 'goods wanted' requests from across inhabited space, specifically those involving quantities of raw materials far greater than a single ship could supply.

"Filter for those offering bonus pay for high percentage contributors, then show just the top one hundred requests by tonnage."

The list shrank down to show just the largest deals which were also offering incentive payouts for the biggest suppliers. In theory these requests would attract whole fleets of trading ships, but in particular would attract the big ships that could haul enough materials to earn the big bonuses. I read through the list until I spotted a likely candidate, an order from the Imperial Navy for seven hundred and fifty thousand Imperial tons of titanium at the Gutamaya shipyard in the Morai system. It seemed that Admiral Patreus had ordered the construction of three new Majestic-class interdictors as part of his efforts to challenge the Federation for control of the Pleiades, and you can't build ships that big without a whole lot of raw materials. The numbers seemed to add up, and should be enough to ensure a steady stream of big cargo haulers jumping in and out of Morai over the next few weeks.

"You have an idea, Commander? Are we about to turn pirate?"

"No, Esmeralda, nothing quite so dramatic. Besides, if I was going to turn pirate the last place I'd want to do it would be within spitting distance of an Imperial Navy shipyard. No, I'm just going to make a whole bunch of independent traders an offer they can't refuse."


The Imperial Navy is so cool even their shipyards have mood lighting

As soon as I'd finished the last of my wake scans I put in a call to Farseer.

"Well hey there, Commander! I was beginning to wonder if I'd scared you off. Guess I shoulda known you wouldn't abandon your little darlin' back there." Her head twitched briefly to indicate the unseen hangar where the Clipper was undergoing her refit. "What can I do for you, son?"

"How would you feel about taking a break from abusing my ship and coming with me to Morai? I've got a plan to get my hands on those chemical manipulators you wanted, but I need someone who actually understands how they attach to the drive."

"Have you got a crack in your gourd, boy? Has all that jumpin' shaken part of your brain loose? You ain't gettin' me up in no starship, not this week, nor next week, nor never! I value my hide way too much to go flittin' about the 'verse in some glorified cargo-can with only three millimetres of diamondite screen between me and..." She made a popping noise, then clawed at her collar and made gasping noises before slumping forward in her chair in a convincing portrayal of gruesome asphyxiation.

After a brief pause she opened one eye and stared at me intently before breaking out in her characteristic grin. "Not buyin' it, eh son? Haha, I guess you're finally learnin' not to be so gullible. Truth is, I'm real tied up with guttin' your baby right now, so galivantin' around collectin' parts, as temptin' an offer as that is, just ain't gonna happen. But I got a guy I can lend you, should be more'n good enough to help you pull those manipulators."

"Fine. I'll be there in a couple of days to pick him up. I have to speak to the guys from Lakon on the way."

There was a Lakon Spaceways depot in the Saleno system, three jumps from Kantrosteri. The managers there were clearly puzzled as to why anyone would want to buy fifty sets of chemical manipulators for their Type-9 series Transporter, but my credit line was good and at the end of the day a sale, even one as odd as this, was a sale.

I paid up front, and by the time I'd bounced over to Deciat and back to drop off my haul of arsenopyrite and scan data and pick up Farseer's assistant the Lakon team had gathered together the chemical manipulators and had them ready for loading. Even fully crated for transport they took up only half of the Vance Garamond's hold, leaving us plenty of room to work when the time came.


Space truckin' may be dull at times, but the view never gets old

"So what's the deal, Baron? We got a trade lined up for these parts?" Farseer's man was as cheerful as his boss, and seemed to be genuinely enjoying his short trip away from Deciat.

"Well, not exactly lined up yet, Sam, but I think we can swing it. By now the Gutamaya Naval Yard in Morai should be awash with big haulers bringing in thousands of tons of titanium. I'm going to offer them a little bonus payment as thanks for their loyal service to the Empire - replacement chemical manipulators to keep their drives humming along as they do their vital work."

"And they're just gonna trust us to do this?"

"Not all of them, I'm sure. But it's a good deal, so I don't see why a fair number of them wouldn't be open to a free refurb."

Sam looked at me with a dubious eye. "You ever hear the expression 'new lamps for old', Baron?"

I thought about it for a second. "From Aladdin, yes? Crazy old magician goes round exchanging lamps with peasants so that he can get his hands on the magic one?"

"Yeah. Well, that guy didn't turn out to be exactly trustworthy, did he?"

"Fair point," I nodded slowly. "But he did get the magic lamp, and that's what matters."

"I guess so."

As it was, only about one in ten of the traders buzzing around Morai were happy to accept my deal, despite my credentials as an Imperial nobleman. The rest were either too suspicious, or in too much of as rush to let us do the work. Still, the actual process of pulling out the old manipulators and fitting new ones turned out to be surprisingly easy, especially in the microgravity conditions of the Imperial Shipyard, and between us Sam and I were able to change one full set in about ninety minutes. Even so, with the time I burned on just persuading Commanders to accept the trade, we spent the best part of three weeks in the Morai system collecting the parts we needed, before heading back to Deciat.



To be continued...



[A quick note on gathering raw materials, because I feel the need to confess - I have to admit that for this chunk I was mainly making shit up. The actual process of gathering the raw materials I needed for my engineering rolls would have made for a very different story. Despite the fact that Elite is in some ways a game built around buying and selling stuff, for some reason you cannot buy (or sell) anything that they label as 'materials' rather than 'commodities'. And it's 'materials' that you need for the engineers. Marketplace commodities do include many metals and minerals, everything from bauxite to platinum, but these are just tradeable items for the space truckers, they're not useful for anything other than trading.

Materials come in three types - 25 elemental 'raw materials' (like mercury, zinc or arsenic) which are found by scouring the surfaces of planets or mining asteroids; 55 'manufactured materials' (like grid resistors, phase alloys or chemical manipulators) which are found in the wreckage of destroyed ships and occasionally at abandoned outposts; and 40 kinds of 'data' (like classified scan fragments, tagged encryption codes or datamined wake exceptions) which are produced by scanning ships, wakes, satellites or outpost data points.

The idea makes sense for a game - if you want to do engineer rolls you have to go out and find the raw materials rather than just buying them in the marketplace, but it doesn't really make sense for a story, so I had to get a little creative.

In truth, I got my arsenic by scanning a few planets until I found one with a relatively high arsenic content, then driving around on it shooting at rocks until I'd gathered what I needed. It took a couple of hours, but seemed too retarded to use in the story so I just went with 'bought it'.

The search for datamined wake exceptions happened pretty much as described - word on the forums was that you got these things by scanning FSD wakes, and one of the places in game with the highest concentrations of ships coming and going is at the distribution centres which spring up in famine systems. I actually sat for 'several' hours watching netflix and flitting from one wake to another, scanning and scanning and scanning (and throwing out a whole bunch of useless results) until I'd finally found my fifty DWE's. This was not fun.

And then the big one. Chemical manipulators - a rare manufactured material. The real way that I gathered these bastards is the reason I feel the need to confess. It was certainly too unpleasant for me to put in the story. Instead I spent a loooong time during writing trying to come up with a plausible way to get my hand on these things, something that would sound realistic enough to cover my tracks. In the end I think I invented something that works for the story, but I also think it's important to tell the truth about the dark secret that lurks at the heart of Elite Dangerous. So... *deep breath* ... here goes.

My name is Commander Blackblood, and I am a mass murderer. And I'm not the only one.

Point One - For some reason, when deciding on which materials would be required for engineering a frameshift drive for extra range, Frontier Developments chose to add the rare manufactured material 'chemical manipulators' to the list. Manufactured materials are found in the wreckage of ships. Different ship types drop different materials. Chemical manipulators drop from haulage ships rather than combat ships, and because they're rare they're more likely to drop from bigger ships, but still not very often. So to get what I need, I have to destroy large numbers of ships, but not pirate ships or enemy naval ships. Haulers. Big, fat, wallowing, relatively defenceless haulers. So far, so bad.

Point Two - These big haulers relatively rare in the galaxy, meaning that even if I decided to turn pirate I'd probably have to spend months hunting around to find the sheer number that I wanted. But those great guys over at Frontier Developments had me covered. It turns out that there is one situation in which lots of Type-9s all get together to party, and it's a doozy. Ready? They use them for evacuation convoys in systems suffering from outbreaks of space plague. Wow. So I was faced with a choice. Either spend for-fucking-ever playing highly-specific-pirate, or go to a system with an outbreak of Betelgeusian boils, find a convoy beacon to drop in on, then set about blowing up ship after ship of terrified refugees before picking through the wreckage hoping to find the parts I need. Rinse and repeat. A Type-9 fitted with economy class cabins can carry 138 passengers, but this isn't a pleasure cruise, it's an evacuation. So let's say that she can carry 532 tons of 'cargo'. One ton is about a dozen people, but even in an emergency you can't just pile people up in the hold, so lets quarter that and say that a Type-9 in cargo configuration can fit 1500 people into her hold. Make it 1000 to be sure I'm not beating myself up over nothing.

In order to get the materials I needed, I destroyed eighty-six Type-9s.

So, eighty-six thousand scared little peasants had to die for me to build my dream ship. Maybe I stopped the plague from spreading to the next system, who knows? I doubt that will save my digital soul. But I won't be alone in virtual hell - every explorer who's chosen to engineer his FSD will have faced the same dilemma*, and I'm sure I'm not the only one who took the option that could be completed in a day instead of a year.

The media gnashes and wails about kids murdering prostitutes in GTA, or killing hostages in Call of Duty. They have no idea...


*I went through this a year ago. Since then a new way to find Chemical Manipulators in a reasonable-ish time has been added. Phew!]