Entry #001-24122954
Aginor94

A fresh start

With the 4.0_Preview launch just a few days ago, all attention is on money making. What works best and fast? I have ships to buy and fun to be had!

Mercenary missions will pop up briefly before they disappear. Although I did the Certification on Crusader I am not getting any mission other than “Provide Backup”. No biggie, I am not big on FPS as money making anyway. But its entry cost is so low, it was nice for making my first 300-400k aUEC to get the ball started.

Salvaging: the ball is not big enough to buy the Vulture just yet. There should be a Vulture rental.

Bounty Hunting: Bounties tremble!! As I fly in with my green Cutter! I did the first certification and a few VLRTs. I stopped when I downed a Hull-A with a lot of cargo. Until then, I was not aware that 12SCUs could fit into the Cutter! The Medical Supplies sold for a pretty penny 😀 And sure enough, you can rent the Hull-A!

Many Nomads were doing they first money with Bounty Hunting. They already had fighters of they own, and a new feature OR bug (we are not sure just yet) will give full payout to all members that are sharing a mission. So it became a Bounty-Sharing fest! (To bad, you need to have the reputation of the mission to be able to accept it).

Player beacons: why even bother? In the mission description they will not tell you your distance to the rescuee, or even if it is in Pyro or Stanton.

Ship Mining: You can rent the Prospector and also the MOLE! Only thing is, with the stock mining-lasers, your rock selection is very slim (max ~5k Rock with the Prospector).  Although nice to try, I will enjoy it a lot more once I have bought the ships outright!

After 4 Months of no mining, still got my dynamic Prospector landing dialed in 🙂

Hauling: Tricky but worth it! With only doing 4 trips and about 2 hours, I did a little more than 1M aUEC! That is the “worth it” part. You just need to take ALL the Seraphim -> Orison hauling missions. There are 6 of them, and each pays 50k. By investing about 10min loading and 10min unloading, you can move all 50 SCUs of cargo (in 1 SCU boxes). 300k per trip from the safety of you hangar. Safety from players that is.

The “tricky” part is as follows. Those 4 trips are the result of about 8 attempts. The issues:

• Hangar might spawn your ship BELOW the platform! And when you call another ship, the platform will lower and squeeze your first ship trough the platform. If you are lucky, it will be fully squeezed trough and flyable, but normally it will just squeeze halfway trough, or end up destroyed. (This happened mostly at Seraphim). Workaround is to first spawn a small sacrificial ship. Have it spawn incorrectly, “store” it, and then with the platform on the lower position call up the ship you intended.

• Hangar might not spawn your ship altogether, but it will always be ready to be retrieved. Oddly enough this only happened with the rented ships (Hull-A and Prospector), the Cutter and Hoverquad were no problem. (This happened mostly at Orison).

• Hailing but no response from Orison. It sucks to have your fully loaded Hull-A floating around the spaceport spawn-hailing for 15 minutes. Before giving up, I tried to fly into the hangar of someone that just left his own. Hopefully the ship will not get impounded and I can unload it straight away, but no. The ship got impounded, but not so my hope. Payed of the fine and tried to spawn the ship (hopefully with the cargo still attached and the hauling mission active), but I got a repetition of the previous bullet-point.
• Hailing and getting an hangar! Flying in, just to explode on contact with the invisible doors…

(recreation of the incident)

• Current classic: stuck cargo elevators. The good thing is, that unlike to the elevators from outposts, your hangar elevators will eventually respond. Patience is required (sometimes 5 minutes for each elevator movement).

 

Some extra snippets from the previous days

My first gold-run: parked the Cutter at a stuck elevator, and spend ALL of my money on gold! Behold the mighty haul of 2 SCUs!

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My second gold-run: While hanging around CRU-L1 with:
WeenerDawg in his Vulture with Memedog26 as box-monkey. In the Corsair is Murphy to transport and sell the RMC. And ShadowGazer in his Polaris.
Shadow and I had not much to do.

So, together with Shadow and his Polaris we did a gold-run! Feeling frisky I again spend ALL of my money on gold (192SCU of Gold for a buy-in of 1 Million aUEC). I only did it, because I had the protection of the mighty Polaris as an hauler! Total profit of 189k, split halfway does not feel enough to risk it again.

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As the Nomads did their first salvaging excursion into Pyro, I was motivated to do my first ever jump through the wormhole! At first I was not sure what to do, I see the hole and some ships nearby. To be able to fly to them faster I switched into NAV mode and then the big semi-circles started to line up the “runway”. Good! Just sitting there and saw how the Jumppoint expanded and contracted, I thought I should be getting some kind of prop as what to do, but got nothing. Flying a bit closer the HUD changed to the full cycle and now I knew I was at the right spot! HUD and MDFs flickering, and with dramatic music I get pulled into the hole! Cool! Oh wait, you have to navigate through the hole and around pillars!? I got this! ehmm, kinda got this? Controls seems twitchy and it feels like there is a constant pull toward whatever wall you are closest to. After hitting a few walls and pillars I got my bearings and got through to the other side unharmed! I am now in PYRO!!! Shit! Murderhobos spawn camping the jump point?? Thankfully the only ships there were fellow Stanton-Pyro travelers that mean no harm.
The jump only consumed 110k of my 1M QT fuel, quite an economic jump! No screen captures were made. The show images are from the trip back into Stanton.

The Nomads were around Pyro V, so I needed to get there. But my Cutter was not cut for that kind of long jump. Had to refuel along the way. Not knowing better I tried EVERY landing pad on Pyro II, but none had any fuel to spare… Upon consultation with the Nomads I got redirected to Checkmate, the ONLY station I had any fuel left to make the jump. After refueling I made the rest of the Jump and joined the salvage Op as a scout for panels around RAB-Victory.

That Op had an abrupt intermission as we all got black-screened! It feels like it is new new 30k. Only way out is to alt+f4.

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Faced with 3 consecutive buggy cargo hauling missions, I decided to look for something else to do. Look at that! Luminalia gifts are till to be had! 18 gifts later I made 9k aUEC 😀

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Did you know, you can park you Hull-A in an hangar and still use the ship elevator? Perfect!

 

Aginor out
o7