Eighteen Hours into Our Sagittarius *A Pilgrimage

CMDR Dingo77 and I have undertaken the Sagittarius *A flight together as a wing.

Currently we are just over 18 hours into the trip and are 17,840 light years from Sol with just over 8,100 light years to go until we reach the Core.  We've made over 500 jumps so far, and the starfield ahead has now just "Popped" into light.


 
We are not stopping to scan anything; this is purely a speed run averaging just under 1,000 light years an hour.  We should reach the Core this coming weekend :-)

My Parking Spot for the Night: HIP 49392

High above Known Space, I stop for the night at my waypoint HIP 49392.  Its larger than Spica with a retinue of T-types and gas giants.  Some of them appear to be in orbit of each other, I'll look in more detail tomorrow.

Second planet out is a helium rich gas giant with rings, strange to find a gas giant so close to the primary star.

Look at the Size of that Thing....

The rewards for the Zaonce Community Goal - 16% off Faulcon de Lacy ships ends on Tuesday.  I've already got myself a cheap Python as part of the reward, but Faulcon de Lacy also make the Anaconda.

2 weeks ago, I never thought I would have the cash to even think about buying a reduced Anaconda, at 123m the 16% discount is quite a bargain.  But a good trade route, perseverance and also a sizable amount of liquid assets made that discarded thought a reality for me today!

I've been running a 3 hop trade route in the python for the last 2 days, on paper and stopwatch I could do the run in 20 minutes making nearly 3 million an hour, but reality means that that paper estimates never bare any resemblance to the real thing.  So it has been a hard grind to get some cash together.  It probably wouldn't have been so bad if there wasn't a time element involved.

Nevertheless, I've achieved the secondary goal of reaching the trading rank of Entrepreneur:-

I gave up on trading at that point.  Hat's off to @Fireytoad, he did that route for 2 weeks straight, 2 solid days was enough for me!  Now for a break!

Fortunately, I did have some assets to liquidate.  I sold my Viper and Cobra, both of which I've not flown in months so I won't really miss them, and I've taken the Clipper (god I love that zippy ship so much after flying the ponderous Python for 2 weeks) to Shinrarta Dehzra and downgraded the A-rated modules that are sitting there underutilized.  The way I see it, it shouldn't take long once the Anaconda is up and running to full trade capacity to replace them again.  Make your money work for you instead of sitting in the shipyard.  I feel a bit sad to strip the Clipper, but the Anaconda hull discount means I've already saved over 20 million.  So definitely worth it in the long run!

And the Anaconda!  What a big ship she is.....

 

A pure investment for the time being.  I need quite a bit of cash now to start kitting it out and to replace the Clipper modules as my first priority, but at least I can raise that cash at my leisure with no time pressure.

P-P-P Pick up a Python

I bought a Python.   The money off deal from last weekend's community goal (8 Million off the regular price) is a little to much to turn down and its the next logical step in ship advancement for me.

Beta 1.3 is delayed for another 10 days so I might as well do a bit of trading - hopefully levelling all my ranks and getting Entrepreneur until Powerplay hits at the end of May, as at the moment I feel a bit Pew Pewed out!

I don't exactly feel excited about buying the Python, flew it in Beta 1.2, felt very slow and sluggish after the wonder-fly nippy Clipper, but we shall see.  Of course it does have two plus points over the Clipper, it can land on outposts and can hold more cargo.  But then I didn't really feel that excited about the Fugly Vulture to start with either and look at the fun I've had with that!

I did a few upgrades costing about 15m so I'm not flying the bog-standard Python and of course I had to get a paint job for it to match the rest of my fleet of green ships :-)

Community Goal: Securing Zaonce

I started the #EliteDangerous Community Goal at Quivira, but after certain CMDRs tipped the station factions and spoiled the Community Goal and destroyed the combat zones, I had no alternative but to switch to the alternate goal at Zaonce this long bank holiday weekend.  The Zaonce mission was to seek and kill wanted targets in Alliance space.

My first achievement was to achieve the rank of Dangerous:

2014 bounties claimed and 909 combat bonds handed in means I got the rank of Dangerous at about 2923 kills.

Zaonce One Resource Extraction Site proved to be a good place to hunt.  As well as the stark contrast of the well-lit ring system to avoid any accidental asteroid encounters! the volcanic planet made a lovely backdrop.  I was getting quite a few large ships with large bounties interspersed with eagles and sidewinders.  The Zaonce Jet Gang now shoot me on sight as I am hostile with them,   (The Jet Gang hate me so much now they won't even let me have a quiet pee in peace as one time I was literally running back to my command chair pulling my pants up after the "under attack" warning was heard while I was still sitting on the loo!).

Anyway. nearly 8m in bounties turned in means that I've made it to the top 15% and I've copped the 10m reward! Wooohoooo I'm in the money!  There's also a 16% discount on Faulcon DeLacy ships, but I'm a long way off affording an Anaconda at the moment.

And Commanders:  Don't forget to buy your Leathery Eggs before you leave with your reward!

The Vulture is Mightier than the Joystick

I've just had to spend an hour re-calibrating, re-mapping and otherwise fiddling with my Thrustmaster T Flight Hotas.   After re-calibrating the joystick and fiddling with the ED throttle controls, I still had no deadzone control zero speed at all.  Very dangerous if you are docking.  In the end I had to unplug the USB plug and swap it and the keyboard around into different ports and then it was suddenly fixed.

What happened to cause this?

I had a little collision yesterday evening with a rock, well I say rock, but I couldn't actually see it because the thing about space is, it's black, and the thing about asteroids in Resource Extraction Sites that are in Shadow is that they are also black, so a black blob passing in front of blackness is impossible to see until you start grinding into it.  Anyway, I yanked the Hotas into full reverse, then when that didn't seem to free me started thrusting laterally left and right to try and work myself loose, another yank backwards on the reverse throttle finally freed me, damage: none apart from the Vultures outer shield ring.  But it seems I may have scrambled my joystick calibration during the encounter.  Isn't the Vulture a tough little ship?

The Imperial Rank of Earl

Got the final Naval Progression Mission to Rank up in the Empire today to Earl.

I just had to kill 9 pirates in a neighbouring system.  Nothing was in the system apart from a Red Dwarf and an T-Class Brown Dwarf.  So I started hunting the Unidentified Signal Sources.

6 pirates down in the first 2 USS's and then I saw a Strong Signal Source, and decided to cautiously give it a go, but as soon as I saw what was in there I was like "No, RUN!!!"

2 wings of high class combat ships comprising Fer-De-Lances and Vultures???  I don't think so.

The final USS contained a wing of 4 pirates comprising 3 Sidewinders and a Cobra.  A bit more my size.  I popped 2 of the Sidewinders before the Cobra even got involved.  Call yourselves a Wing? lol

So back at the dock I turned the mission in an went from Count to Earl.

However, I don't really want to be Earl, its a male title,  I raised a ticket about the Imperial Ranks being Gender Specific back in January.  Frontier's support said they would pass it to the devs; but 3 months later it's still the same and has started a foray on the forums.

David Braben even was asked this point during the AMA session on the forums yesterday:-

 Originally Posted by Alexandra Wolf 

I'm very much a fan of how Frontier has handled gender balance in its NPC characters, but as an Imperial citizen I'm quite disappointed to be hailed as a "Lord" and then "Baron" and so on. Is there a reason why the Empire has no Lady/Baroness/Viscountess/Countess ranks, or is this fixable? (FYI, there has never been a female equivalent of an Earl, perhaps Marquis/Marquess or Duke/Duchess could be substituted?) Also, will ranks within powers avoid this issue?

"You're right. This has come up before too. There is some context here, but I think it is something we want to look at down the line.
Margaret Thatcher insisted on being "Prime Minister" when she took power (ie not "Prime Mistress") and many female actors are not known as actresses at their own request. Similarly women chairmen. So there is an argument that gender-specific roles will lose their specificity over time".

I think the problem is that yes, Frontier would like to do this however there's a long list of things to do that have higher priority and as the female player base is very small - 1 in 20?  They don't see it as a priority for the developers.

But thanks to Misterjunkz, I'm happy now :-)  #EliteDangerous should take note.

@marajaden FIXED :P pic.twitter.com/JiBmUUHMPt
— Mister Junkz (@Misterjunkz) April 25, 2015