Ashley: We did it. We made a thing and it’s a beautiful thing. Now we have to make an estimate of how much it’s going to cost us and there will be some grinding ahead.
Misha: It’s beautiful.
Gwen: Majestic.
Ashley: And the inside is cool too.
Ashley: It’s officially “Hidden Dragon” but we’ve been calling it “Crouching Turtle” and you might see why, but hey, we’re working with the modular components we got. But two things that will keep us from dying next time are the fact that it will fly in atmosphere, not only that, it can get into space on it’s own. One thing I considered when we were building it was if it was all ION drive, then we might make a 2-stage system that we could detach, but then I added big ole atmos and it flew fine and looked good, so meh. It’s not going to fit in a standard hanger, but no one’s bugging us here, let’s just build the thing.
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Ashley: A couple challenges have erupted. One, we’re getting scanned and that means a fight is inevitable and we have nothing to help that. So we’re going underground ASAP. Two, we need tantalum and the closest source is the moon. So looks like our miner needs to be spacefaring. That’s fine, we can do that with Hydrogen thrusters, but what a long haul through potentially dangerous space just for that? It better be a fast ship. We could also use Uranium and platinum and the moon has that too. This ship better be big enough for such a tall order. Whew.
Misha: Dangerous or not, it’s all fun!
Gwen: We have the component list for our ship and it’s not too bad except for the missing ingots. Sounds fun though!
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Ashley: There’s been a change of plans. We’re updating the scout as an intermediate driller so we can turtle up into the base. This exposure is tenuous and we don’t want to get wiped out. We need to move some things around and cover up some stuff with heavier materials. There’s a bit of faction cross talk and a faction named CORP is saying we’re “contacts” and talking about insurrection. They’re looking for us. We had to turn off our antennas, but they’ll eventually see us.
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Misha: Well we got a lot done! We fixed up the scout to something respectable, we added a couple more turrets, we reinforced the base so a few pot shots wouldn’t destroy us all, and we upgraded the ore processing to include purifiers so we get more out of the ores we collect. This is all good news and will save us time.
Misha: Next, because we realized there’s a lot of power being drained by all this production for the escape ship, we added 10MW of solar panels and more batteries.
Ashley: CORP is still looking for us, they almost got us on the way back to base, but lost us as we zoomed away and didn’t trace us back home. I think their scanners must be 5km and luckily they were further than that from our base when they spotted us. That was scary because we don’t have guns on the scout/miner. We just wanted some more gold ore but now we have to be smarter about when.
Gwen: I had the idea of proposing peace with them, we’re waiting for a response, they at least accepted our request.
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Gwen: So far so good, it looks like they accepted our proposal for peace. Also, we haven’t seen any pirates yet, so this is all good news; we must be in CORP space. We don’t know if they’ll demand anything in the future, but peace is good.
Ashley's Blog 