Tales from the spacelanes...

[Cody]

This game never ceases to surprise, does it?

Certainly surprised me - and I felt sorry for the poor miner, who was still pottering around, doing what miners do.

[phkb]

(Note this story involves elements from Ship Configuration OXP, Bounty System OXP, Wildships OXP, GalTech Escort Fighters OXP, Bulletin Board OXP, and an WIP missions pack.)

Flying a Cobra Mark I is fun. It's zippy enough, and has a great turn rate. It's a bit cramped inside, though. Even with the most basic of upgrades my equipment has still managed to eat into my cargo space, bringing me down to just 6t. When you're plowing milk runs with just 6t it takes a long time to upgrade things.

But I was getting by. My stash had grown to about 6000cr, and I was thinking about upgrading my forward laser to something with a bit more punch. And then it all started to unravel.

Assassins, I dunno, they just never seem to get over things. I'd flown one lousy parcel mission, but now after virtually every jump into a system I was usually facing down at least two of the blighters. Great for my Elite rank, not so good in other ways. A few bad encounters had meant I had damaged equipment and a maintenance routine to pay for. Suddently my 6k of cash was turned into 2k. And then there was the police.

Police, I dunno, sometimes they just seem to get the wrong end of the stick. I was the innocent trader, I was the weaker ship when compared to the assassins. I was fighting for my life and would have appreciated the help from their combined force. But no. Based on when my foe and I became visible on their scanners, I had apparently fired the first shot. Now I'm an offender. And they start firing at me.

To make matters worse I had just accepted a small mission to collect some cargo dumped at the next system. I have fuel for this, barely, so I decide to forego any station visit here and jump directly to my final destination. I was in trouble though, because this system was less than 5ly away - I could be scanned by bounty hunters or police, and my new offender status would follow me. I'd just have to take the risk. I needed the money from this mission, and I couldn't waste any time cleaning up after the craboids. I jumped out.

More assassins! Argh, I hate these guys. By now I'm kind of sick of the whole thing, so I use much of my precious fuel to try and run away. One of the assassins decides he's going to chase, so I try to disuade him with a missile and some tail-gunning. Finally he decides I'm not worth the bother and I find myself alone in space. With almost no fuel.

The massive octagonal ring of a Kiota habitat station rotates slowly in the distance, beckoning me to come and be refueled. I answer the call, crossing my fingers there's no police hanging about. As the torus drive disengages I check my scanner and breath a sigh of relief. No purple dots in sight.

"Ship scan detected". Wha?! I almost swear over the comms channel. I'd heard that some GalCop police units had been issued with GalTech Escort Fighters which sometimes have cloaking devices or military jammers fitted. I reverse course to try and put some distance between us and prevent the scan from completing, even though I have no idea where the ship is, but I'm out of fuel. I can't inject. All I can do is watch my legal status flick over to offender. I'm told to dock and clear my fines, but I can't as that would mean failing the mission.

I turn my ship around and head for the sun. It's my only option now. If I can't dock, I can at least scoop some fuel. Once clear of the station I engage the torus drive and watch the sun grow larger and ever more brighter in my forward view.

Through a drift of asteroids a large, rounded shape becomes visible against the glare of the sun. A Rock Hermit! Perfect! I can dock and refuel without penalty here. I slide my ship through the docking slit, and then sit back while the automated docking system takes control and brings me in to land. In just a few minutes my tanks are topped off, I pay the hermit and wave my thanks to him as I jump back into the cockpit and launch. A short time later I scoop the missing cargo containers and jump out.

I arrive back in the original system, to where I need to return the cargo pods, and am met (surprise, surprise) by four assassins. These ones, though, don't disrupt me too much. No one lobs an hardhead missile at me, and the only real threat, a Yasen, dies in a major explosion under sustained fire from my tail gun. Finally free, I torus into the station, dock without meeting any police, and head to the missions board to hand in the cargo and get my payment.

A few days later, having paid to have my offender status cleared, I was intrigued to receive the following email.

Dear sir,

We are writing to you to express our condolences for the attention you have received recently from members of our assassins outfit. It has come to our attention that your name was appearing too frequently in the schedule of terminations, and an investigation was launched. A software fault was discovered in our scheduling system that prevented some cases from ever expiring, and unfortunately your case was one of the ones affected. The software fault has been fixed, and you'll be happy to know that a contract has been put out on programmer in question.

We do apologise for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Yours sincerely,

Ben Applegate
Operations Manager
Assassins Anonymous

Programmers, I dunno, I've never had the pleasure of meeting one in person. I'm sure he's a nice guy, but I still want to wring his neck. Or at least get him to pay for my repairs.

Maybe I'll take on the contract kill.

[Cmdr Wyvern]

** This tale is in character, from the viewpoint of Thi'ena Roh'i.

As all pilots soon learn, pirates can be found everywhere, even in politically safe, rich, and well defended corporate state systems where many would expect a gentle and uneventful cruise. All well and fine to believe that, but to let your guard down even then could spell a swift doom. My esteemed father drilled that into my skull to the point that I cannot forget it if I tried.

And it was in such a system that I got a rude reminder, in the guise of a 10 ship strong force of pirates, that were somehow fortunate enough to evade the watchful eyes of the vipers. One no doubt illegally modified Python, and a score of medium and light fighters. As can be expected, they locked weapons, then demanded tribute. An amount that I didn't have in the Ad Astra's modest hold, and anyway, being a Roh'i, I was not about to be bullied by a bunch of opportunistic parasites upon polite society! What I did have to offer them, was two cold beam lasers and a recent passenger on one of my hard points, a Nexus missile.

Locking the Nexus on the Python, I lit the injectors and turned full burn to charge into the middle of the pack, releasing the torpedo as soon as I reached the center. Then I performed what Father calls the "stomache twister", a hard dive, hard to port yaw, and hard roll simultaneously. There are few pilots that can follow such a turn without losing their lunch, and worse so at high G. hehehe!

As I completed the stomache twister, the Nexus struck home, obliterating the Python. One down already! The remaining warheads pursued other targets, while a Krait found itself in my foreward sights. I pressed the trigger, the laser sang out, and soon there was hot gas and rubble where a Krait once was. Next to follow the same fate was a Gecko that recovered enough to take potshots at my exhaust plume. My aft laser taught him, her, it the folly of doing so. Two more down!

Then the Nexus warheads struck a pair of Sidewinders. Boom boom goodbye! And with my shields only half down, purple blips appeared on the scanner grid. I can't have all the fun spanking these boys, so I turned to lure the remaining hoodlums towards the vipers. Time to let the police earn their pay, yes? I'll certainly celebrate in the station bar tonight!

[UK_Eliter]

Good to see my missile (I made the Nexus OXP) being put to effective use!

[Cmdr. Aiden Henessy]

Hope this isn't too bad an example of necromancy. If I recall correctly, it's a month with no posts, correct? Hope I'm not an offender now...


I'm a bit ticked, to say the least. Ticked like an Anaconda pilot ferrying food when he scoops a pod full of Trumbles. I was recently visiting my favorite anarchy system – favorite, because the fighting is always the bloodiest in the chart, yet still a jump away from my hideout on a safe LT15 Corporation system – and decided to go give the Space Bar a visit. It was situated, of course, in the middle of an asteroid field. But, it was an especially large field, for just outside of scanner range were not one, but two, pirate hide-outs. And, just outside of scanner range of those, there was a sentinel station. There were of course very frequent and very brutal firefights going on in that region. Well, after fighting my way through probably five aggressor ships, I circled in for docking maneuvers. Lasers were lighting up my aft as some disgruntled offenders were eking out revenge, but the large turrets on the bar helped cover me. I spend in right quickly, and sauntered over to the fun place. After a bit of searching, I got hired out to go assassinate this high-level target, flying a Purgatori. Now, that made me do a double-take when I’d first seen it. I knew there were such beasts flying around, but I’d never managed to spot one on my own. As vague specifications of combat stats flashed through my head, I thought to myself that this would be a fight to remember, indeed. I go trundling out there, about six systems down, with some nice gear and escorts. I spent about fifteen minutes in system, jumping back and forth between the beacon and the station. Finally, I get mass-locked by several cut-throats and hired guns. My finger itches over the missile button, and I preemptively arm one. The fight is on.

About five minutes later, two of the five hired guns are down, I’ve been down to half my total energy capacity at least twice, and I’ve sustained pretty heavy damage. Most of my pylons were used in the fight, but I still had a few ticks up my sleeve. I found myself suddenly confronted with the blood-red ship, it’s angular and aggressive design being in stark contrast to my sleek and narrow Veloce Et Apputita. He turns to face me. Alarm bells ring, and I narrowly dodged a missile. The automated defense turrets were blown up by his mooks just a few seconds earlier. I fire one in return, a rapid acquire interception missile. He begins evasive maneuvers. I watch the small purple trail as it inches closer and closer, preforming the “spiral of death” around the target. It explodes. The Purgatori weathers the damage but is showing signs of it - plasma is leaking everywhere, and his engines begin to flicker dangerously. I turn around and light his rear, smiling grimly to myself as he fails to ignite injectors to escape. I target one of my last missiles and let loose, hoping for a clean kill. He goes up with no escape pod. Satisfied, I turn on his mooks; Contract was clear: no witnesses, no survivors. As I turn and flip around views to try and find my next target, I am jolted rudely as my hull screeches in protest. The now-angry mooks seek vengeance for their leader. I watch my forward shields fall in seconds, and my energy banks take a beating. I spun and expose my rear shields, trying to line up a shot with my tail laser. It too quickly falls, and my energy banks further plummet to dangerous levels. I watch the growing list of damaged equipment, and notice with a sinking feeling that my injectors are now molten scrap metal.

I decided then to jump out of there but, alas! My hyperspace system was damaged. The AI beeps at me, her cold and lifeless voice repeating “Warning, warning, warning…” I watch the seconds tick down to jump.... I have no clue what would happen if I tried to jump with a damaged system. At the literal last second I slam the button to end, and my craft shutters from the pent-up energy it was forced to release. I corkscrew towards the surface of the planet, watching lasers flash by, hoping to Lord Giles that they won't fire a missile. Realizing though as I watch my systems begin to rapidly fail I have no other option but to fight before my craft totally shuts down. I spun around and open fire, causing him to duck away. I tear my lasers into him, watching the shields disappear under my brutal assault, and I quickly closed the gap between the two of us. I realize that, if I kill him too slowly, he may panic and fire a missile at point-blank range. Without injectors, it’d be death for both of us, but most importantly for me. I hold off the attack and wait for my laser to cool down, hoping to finish him with another long burst, before he has time to react. The temperature goes green. I fire, and am rewarded by a dire scream, cursing my spawn to the 16th generation. No escape pod. Breathing heavily, I turn the ship towards the planet. I zoom out the scanner to regular range, and watch my two remaining escorts finish the last hired gun. My hud begins flickering dangerously, so I check the damage control. I was blown away. I had over twenty damaged or outright destroyed systems. My ship was a floating wreck. As I nursed my dear Personality Crisis II along, I tried out the torus drive. The ship gave a deep sigh, and didn’t budge. At this point I was in more danger inside the ship than outside, though, so I moaned and hit the escape button. That’s something I haven't done in many a month, not since I first started as a green Jameson. I was rated Deadly now, just one step away from the coveted Elite, and had over 2.5k confirmed kills to my name. It was embarrassing, to say the least, when from the space station I saw the dinky and under-maintained Search and Rescue ship come trundling along with its dirty hitch attached crudely to my half a million credit luxury frigate. The thought did nothing to improve my mood.

A few days passed, and my trusty insurance gave me my ship back, complete with most of the accessories. It was my first comfort so far. Logging in to the ship’s data base, I checked my assassin score... and saw no improvement. Refreshing, and checking again, I still saw none. The mission was marked uncompleted. There was no joyful ringing of bells, and no transfer of credits to my name. Then it hit me like a cargopod of Lave-Fried Trumbles: When the missile blew the ship up, the game must have glitched somehow, and didn't count it as a kill for me! I had to start the whole mission over again! I angrily clicked the red X at the top right of the screen and went to the internet to bemoan my tragic tale of loss.

[Cody]

Good tale! <mutters something about assassins - spits>

[Cody]

The end of a long courier run - Gebeti to Tilala via Arinra. Having made the last drop, I was heading for Ededer to refit. I'd dealt with the aegis-botherers from the previous system, evaded their witchpoint-loitering associates, blasted my way through a bunch of pirates, seen-off a lone fugitive in an Asp, and was approaching the aegis. Gexean main was in sight, and I was starting to relax - then the heavy mob pounced. They're rare but nasty - only took 'em two minutes to reduce Spindrifter to this:

[Commander Talbot]

This story is written in character for one Commander Talbot of the good ship First Blood
Carrying a package for one Nuabce Zaa, on my way to Atius, I entered the communistic system of Esrece. Near the witchpoint marker there was a Penal Colony named Davysby’s Form. I was low on fuel and didn’t feel like going all the way to the station so I just set my compass to it and headed in. To make a long story short, I was told that I was supposed to wait for a couple of ships so I got out of the launch corridor and killed my engines. Three ships suddenly popped out one after another, and two of them were calling for the third to leave the system. Nothing strange about that, except that the third ship was a Galcop vessel. About thirty seconds afterward, Navy and Galcop ships were swarming all over the place. Some Galcop officer must have got in trouble with the Navy and tried to run from it. Either the other cops decided to defend him or there was some crazy juice in the air because after chasing that poor kid away, or destroying him, I don’t know, all the bobbies had turned on the colony and were trying to blast it to stardust. Concerned about my safety I turned a 180 and got the frak out of there. I found out later over drinks in the main station’s bar what had happened. Rookie Galcop pilot had been harassed for some time by a Navy sergeant. One day he up and pulls a blaster and atomizes that guy’s head and runs for it. He makes it out but a bunch of ships follow. Navy idiot blows him away and then gets blown away in return by a Galcop. Bunch a Galcops come out to help and blow off their steam by firing on the stations shields. I didn’t stick around for the next part, but apparently the commanders of both flight wings had to get together and make it up. I don’t think it sat so well with either of them, but they relieved their tension by firing a bunch of officers and giving some fugitive statuses to boot.

[Cody]

A fine finish to a hard run!

[Zed]

Cargo contracts are finally starting to pay off. Minus the deposit, I think it made me something like 90,000 credits. Picking off and scooping a few pirates here and there doesn't hurt either.

[Cody]

Ain't you the lucky one! I always seem to get the 75 Cr, while the cops get the 425!

[Cody]

I'm an interstellar courier - Vipers are my friends, pirates an annoyance, assassins my enemy! I evade and run whenever possible - having deadlines to meet, I don't have time for duels. And I ain't as good as I once was! Thargoids though are a different matter - if I encounter one or two warships along the 'lanes, I get stuck-in. If I'm feeling up for it, I might even take on a threesome - but six of 'em? Seeing six Thargoid warships suddenly hove into view directly ahead is not a pleasant sight, but that's what just happened at Isisan. Luckily for me, they were involved in a firefight with a bunch of pirates - and the pirates were losing. I had enough gas in the tank to go barrelling through on injectors - but I couldn't resist splashing a warship or two along the way. It drew some unwanted attention, of course - but hey!



The RNG and I ain't exactly the best of friends, but throwing six warships, distracted or not, at me is downright nasty!

[Zed]

Ain't you the lucky one! I always seem to get the 75 Cr, while the cops get the 425!

Well, Maesin is an anarchy. Not a whole lot of cops about to nap the offenders. That guy was a pilot of whatever Renegade Stations spit out when you get too close though so he was probably a bit more valuable than your normal baddie.

[Aycheff]

So, after a year and a half hiatus (for reasons I still don't know), I thought I'd take the Mark III out for a spin. I misplaced my previous controller, so I get myself an inexpensive Thrustmaster to use. I also decide to add some Dockable OXPs to make things more interesting (I don't use many OXPs, so for me this is kinda a big deal LOL).

I decide to just play a new commander (because my save game has packages to deliver, and I don't have time to play around with that!), buy some food to take to Zaonce. Trip there is uneventful, but I decide to check out the new casino before docking at the station. Well, my 32 C doesn't last very long, so quickly I'm back in space headed for the station...

Red Alert! In aegis??? WTH? Oh, I see, 'goids. Are you kidding me? This is like the second time I've ever seen them in game. (And the first time didn't turn out so well. No, I actually destroyed the main ship, and cleaned up the mess they left behind, but after that the docking computer decided to ram me in to a neighboring astroid as I tried to dock with a Hermit. Press Space, Commander...). So here I am, second time with a Thargoid encounter that won't actually count. Joy. Well, I do get a few hits on the mother ship, but fortunately there are others that can take it out. I do get the bounty for cleaning up the mess. Now I sit in station, having sold the food, and I've got over 400 C after just my first jump. Probably gonna have to save this game now. Not sure when I'll ever get back to it LOL.

Maybe sometime my main captain will survive a Thargoid encounter, and be able to save it. Sigh, oh well.

But now that I've got some cash, maybe I should check out the casino again...

[Zed]

Red Alert! In aegis??? WTH? Oh, I see, 'goids.

That's a fair bit more exciting that any of the times I've gotten red zoned near a station. I want to say that about a third of the time, it's few pirates have gotten a bit cheeky and follow me in. The vipers come out and chase them off. The remaining two thirds are hognoses. I'll be sitting at the buoy waiting for docking clearance when a hognose will launch and begin to fly off only spout off some gibberish, turn around and start firing. Then the vipers come out and pop it. Weird things, those hognose pilots.