First stop Clervoy Port, then, hm... Gidtzenko Ring, second of four stations in LTT 7453 sounds familiar. I am sure I have already seen a station with this name some long time ago in my beta travels. Random name generator horray!
At England Terminal, I spot a fight going on. Three security vessels versus a "wanted" Cobra. I am undecided and turn away. Then I turn back and scan and check its bounty. Hmm... 13,454 CR... worth it. Deploy weapons. Am I out of the no-fire zone? Does it matter when the target is wanted? No, and no. As it turns out, I am still in the fire zone and I get fined for shooting at the "wanted" Cobra, 300 Credits. You know what? I can shoot quite a while before the bounty would not be worth it! But I change tactic; I let the security vessels whittle it down. Then finally, the Cobra reaches 25% hull. However, I is on a course directly to the station. Nonono, no firing now, if I hit the station, I will be in big trouble! Instead I try to adjust my heading so that my firing position is free of the station. Then, finally the Cobra is at 10% and amongst the now concentrated fire from the three security vessels on it I am lucky enough to score the kill. Or, maybe, Frontier changed the rules here a bit; there had been quite some complaints about AI ships stealing kills from CMDRs. All in all I get fined for 700 fine and receive a considerable bounty voucher; deal!
- hold fire, hold fire...
Zaragas clearly is also an extraction system. There are two ring planets with stations close by which have extraction zones. To have some diversification, I drop into one of those. I am rewarded with freqent appearances of "wanted" Cobras; their fines are all in the 10k-range. After I have bagged two bounty vouchers, a hollow triangle makes its appearance, closing in. A CMDR Cobra. What I do not like on these occasions is when they point their guns at me. So I repay in kind and start circling around him, however, he still manages to finish a scan on me. I return the favour, but he is clean, too. So, after about two minutes of circling around and supposedly getting into the best firing position (the Eagle clearly is superious in that regard), I send him a message "You are clean! Move on citizen." We both then break off and continue our bounty hunting business. Once I realize that we tend to kill steal (it is notable because CMDR ships usually hit the enemy much more accurately and consistently), I move a bit farther away.
- in competition with another bounty hunter
Since I had forgotten to turn off the option in the rightmenu "report crime against you", more and more Federation security ships appear. They hunt the "wanted" ships, too, and as it gets more trafficy, they do collide with me on quite some occasions. It is perhaps time to leave this crowded festival. So, with roughly 100k CR worth of bounty vouchers later, my bow points up towards the stars and my Eagle streaks away. Back to documentation duties.
Some times later, having finally finished my registration duty, I check the new entries, from altogether five systems and numerous stations within. It seems I am a lucky guy; the trade route I did last session still is the most profitable one. Also, the appearance of empireal slaves as a trade good is more common as I thought; however, the profit ranges I found so far are bad.
Not believing yet that there is no better trade profit to be found, I cross check this data with Thrudds Website. I also check with the famous trade of rare goods, as e.g. suggested in this thread. I have to realize that a profit of ~900 CR/unit per jump (15ly range assumed) is already one of the best profits to fare. Sure, there are higher profits shown on said website, but you also have to jump farther for it, so measured on a per-game-time level, I might as well turn back to my old trade route and fare resonable good credits/hours. How long, I ask myself, did all those CMDRs play who already own an Anaconda or Dropship? Maybe I am something missing here. Maybe a higher jump range, coupled with some trading of rare goods, yields somehow still higher credits/hour?
Not content with my findings, the next stop is Eravate. The last system to note down, I swear! Back in gamma, there was some good supply to be found there. And, yes, Ackerman Market still has that supply for doing a tobacco trade route, however, it still yields less profit than the one I used in my last game session. I even try to find three- or four-stop routes, but nothing is more efficient than what I have already. So, basically, I have spend all of my game session tonight taking notes, just to find out that it was useless to do so. Profit this game session, so far; about 150k CR in bounty vouchers Sigh. I resign myself back to my old route so that I at least have some closure.
As I make way, I check my status with the factions in Yakabugai. It shows a red arrow down on my Federal reputation. I have no idea why that is. Maybe because I shot at that "wanted" Viper which was cheekily interdicing me shortly before Serebrov Station before it fired on me? Sigh. I wish a message would show when what happened, reputation-wise (e.g. "Federation acknowledges emergency call from vessel xyz").
To go back on trading, I have to go to Serebrov Station and fetch my Lakon Type 6 there and then fly empty to Levi-Montalcini-City; there is virutally nothing to trade with on the former station. Once I arrive at the latter, I realize that I do not have enough cash to fill my cargo hold. I should have sold that advanced scanner on my Eagle again! Fed up as I am, I decide to start trading anyways with what I have. The auto-fabricators on my trip back are cheaper so that my cargo space will be fully used. Again, lost profit per hour. My investments this session really payed off poorly. But at least, my experience about what profit ranges to expect on markets has increased and my fighting skills should be good to go again.
- this guy sits there and blocks the landing pad indefinitely
Then again there is a waiting queue at Levi-Montalcini City. While I sit there and start to ponder whether I should try a relog, CMDR Aramis in an Eagle greets me. I think I faintly remember him, even though it seems ages ago; ashamed I have to admit that I apparently did not log his name in my blog entries, so I cannot look up when we would have met last time. He asks me whether I still was trading, so we for sure chatted about that. Concerning him, he is mainly mission running and could not convince himself to become trader. Yeah, after this night, I somehow sympathise and look forward to the next patch where we will finally be able do jointly accept and complete missions.
I always wondered about those pecks of small clouds in the distant stars. A kind of scattered nebula. While waiting the queue, I use the galaxy map to zoom over there and locate a system close to it, so that one day I might travel there; Pipe (Stem) Sector GW-W C1-26. Then I wait a bit longer, typing on this blog entry. But the landing pad is still blocked by that hauler! I start to wish I could fire off that guy who is blocking the landing pad! Maybe you even can, but I have removed all guns from my freighter. There is no need for guns, since I can escape any interdiction, anyways. I just yesterday learned this on the forum; thanks to a design-flaw, when you submit to an interdiction, your frameshift drive does not have a cooldown time. So, all I have to do is to submit by throttling down to zero and I can immediately re-engage my frameshift drive without any cool down period. I learned this from the forum, because naturally quite a lot of CMDRs are not content that interdictions and pirating of other CMDRs are practically useless like this.
- not a background painting, but acutally reachable; fascinating again and again
After about 20 minutes of waiting in the queue, writing for my blog here and pondering things, I am fed up. That goddamn hauler still sits there. Log out. It is late, anyways.
Well, at least during the forced wait, I gathered two interesting sources of information from the ED forums. One guy posted a link to a ship calculator called Edshipyard. And another guy pointed the community towards a great organized data collection on rare commodities in a google spreadsheed.
I use the former to check for maximum jump ranges for each ship type, and the later I might use at some point to try out rare goods trading; maybe I am wrong and there actually is more profit/hour by doing those?
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