Regrouping at Hese

The closest jumpgate led to Hese and my hull barely held up to get me there. I was glad to see the other side of hyperspace and floored it to the closest habitable platform in case they followed.

The staff at Scientific Base "Quantum" were non-plussed with my report, and chided my escape without any Dominator components. They were mildly interested in the nodes, but mentioned that they had been sending all their nodes to the Ranger's Base. Sold off the lone component I managed to snaffle, a deflector from a destroyed human battleship. That and a score of minerals that made their way into my hold.

With a bit more cash in hand, I looked into their upgrade services for equipment. The scanner had let me down being unable to penetrate the Dominator's shields, so it was the first target for improvement. 1200cr to get it ramped up to 14% penetration, but that should do for now. Unfortuately that's all I can afford at the moment.

After reflecting on my performance against the Dominators, I definitely need more forepower and possibly a bigger ship. I'm super impressed with the repair droids and the extra tunnels through the ship. They saved my bacon through that fight. I need money though, and deliveries are sounding pretty good right now.

Astaron

Hyperjumps were a piece of cake. Point & click on the starmap and everything else is autopilot. I was expecting stars warping and my body being strecthed to infinity, but it's not that bad at all. Inside hyperspace it's like a glowing tunnel; hard to describe really.

We flew from our exit point on the edge of the solar system to Astaron with only minor diversions to fill my hold with rock. Astaron is another Human colony with an orbit close to Earth's, but the surface looks more like Mars.

Digging through the spare parts on offer I found a lightweight Trasion Scanner to further increase my default carrying capacity. The trader let me in on a little secret though, the more expensive the item the more expensive the repair bill. With this scanner being double the price I could expect to fork over double the money in repairs too. Maybe the expensive lightweight Radar wasn't best option?

The chancellor made sure I had refuelled after my first jump before giving another task to shoot down a moving target. Whoah! Space combat! Awrighty!


You're on IP-4.. err .. robot.


Nearly got ya! (and so did the Asteroid!)


And there he goes. Piece of cake!

Tagging along is another pilot called Orollin. He's a wannabe Ranger, but didn't have the credits to get started (thanks again, Dad). He was so impressed that I shot down the droid that he offered to follow me around for a year to 'learn from a real Ranger'. I didn't have the heart to tell him it was only a training mission.