This week I’ve been hanging around my adopted home station, Aleksandrov Gateway, in LHS 115. It’s a small station in a small system with about 10.4 million inhabitants. However, it’s got a lot of ships available and modules available in one place so I’ve parked all of my ships here for the time being.

I’ve been working on gathering the materials I need for the pre-engineered FSD and DSS that are available at the human tech broker. The best way to do that seems to be running missions and taking the materials reward and using the material trader to convert materials I don’t need into materials I do.

When I returned home and handed in all of my explorarion/exobiology data I instantly became allied with the stations governing faction C.O.N.T.R.A.I.L which happens to be a player faction. I hadn’t run many missions out of Aleksandrov Gateway so I had very little reputation with the other factions. Better reputation leads to more missions with better rewards being available at any given time. I started taking missions from everyone but C.O.N.T.R.A.I.L to increase my reputation and expand the available missions so I had a chance of getting the materials I actually needed.

At first, I was tasked with running data to other stations, picking up food for the station, and delivering goods that the station produced. As my reputation increased, I started getting missions to source minerals and raw materials, presumably whatever industry needed in the station to make goods. It was like this for a few days but at some point things started to take a darker turn. The factions started feeling more comfortable asking me to get some military gear. Where I was sourcing and returning consumer appliances now I was asked to source some armor or non-lethal weapons. I didn’t think much of it as these requests were from the military faction on the station. Maybe they were serving as the stations security force.

Then I noticed non-military factions started wanting things like personal weapons brought in. They offered materials I needed in return so of course I’d go source them some guns. They may not be legal on the station, strictly speaking, but I had a great relationship with the guys in charge so a few fines wouldn’t be a big deal if I got caught.

Now that I’m friendly with almost every faction on the station they all want one thing and that’s landmines. Why? You might ask. Landmines don’t seem like something you would want to use on a space station. Probably not even something you want on a space station and yet it seems to be the number one requested item to import into our little station. It’s not just one faction either, it’s all of them, they all want landmines and they’re able to pay with high grade materials for them.

We’re not just talking about a few either. Cargo capacity is measured in tons so when someone asks me to source 107 landmines that’s 107 tons of land mines. I don’t know how much your typical landmine weights but that seems like a lot of landmines. But like I said, they pay with high grade materials and the factories that produce the landmines are only a jump away. So the runs are quick and the materials flow in and so far I haven’t been caught smuggling them in.

At this point, the station may have more landmines on board than people.

The trip back to the Bubble included a bit more sight seeing along the way. It did take quite a bit less time though, mostly because I wasn’t stopping at every biological signal I found. With the credits I made from my trip out I had more than enough.  Still I made a point to only stop and scan systems that either weren’t fully scanned by Canonn or logged in the Elite Dangerous Star Map. I still stopped at planets that potentially had biologic signals I had not seen before

On the way back I stopped by the Triford Nebula (above left) and the Lagoon Nebula (above right).  As it turns out, once you’ve seen one cloud of space dust you’ve pretty much seen the rest. Still, they were good stop overs to break up the journey back.

One of my current goals is unlocking the pre-engineered size 5 FSD which boosts jump range. To unlock it, I need to turn in a bunch of materials to a Human Tech Broker. One of the materials required is Tellurium which can be found surface mining on planets with the SRV. As I made my way back, I tried to stop at some planets that had geologic signals and more had a composition of more that 1% tellurium. This type of planet can contain Needle Crystals which can be mined for tellurium. However, I never found any of these in my few hours of scouring planets. I did find some metallic meteorite and Mesoiderite nodes but they were few and far between. Before I abandoned my search I was able to scrounge up 3 units of tellurium over about as many hours. I later learned there are Crystal Shard forests in HIP 336601 where I can fill up on tellurium and other raw materials rather quickly. It’s 1600 light years from the Bubble so once I gather all of the manufactured materials in the Bubble that I need I’ll head out there. Now that I’m back, I’ll have to figure out the best way to do that.

If nothing else, exploring in Elite leads to some awesome screenshot opportunities. I’ll leave you with some shots from my adventure:

It’s been a long time since I was this engaged with Elite: Dangerous. In fact, it’s been about 5 years since I’ve posted about it which is probably the last time I was playing.I made a few attempts to play in VR earlier last year and, while it looked amazing, re-learing all of the controls with the headset strapped to my face left me uncomfortable and frustrated. But on a whim a few weeks before the holidays I fired it up and I’ve been playing every day since.

Earlier last year, in my infinite wisdom, I deleted my old profile to start fresh. I thought it would be easier to learn the game from scratch after being away so long. I didn’t play very long so I came back to a profile with a Sidewinder (starting ship) and a handful of credits. In retrospect, I should have just kept my old profile. After a few hours it was all coming back to me and I missed my stable of ships. I also missed being called by my call sign. When you enter some stations, the control tower operators will address you by the first three letters of your name. I got so used to hearing “Juliet Echo X-ray” when docking at stations that it didn’t feel right being called anything else. So I restarted my profile again, and recreated my old commander, Jexi Tomlin.

I started my career as a glorified space mailman. Taking on data courier missions to nearby systems delivering everything from poll data to secret missives. They didn’t pay much but they got me back in to the swing of things and gave me much needed docking practice.

Every once and a while I would find a mission to deliver commodities from one station to another. These tended to pay more but the Sidewinder’s cargo capacity is pretty small. There were fewer missions with small hauls but I took them when I saw them.

After a few hours of space trucking I made enough credits to upgrade to a Cobra MK III aka the bigger Sidewinder. Even with stock modules it’s quite an upgrade and is a great all around ship for activities in the Bubble. Most importantly for me was the option to add a whole lot more cargo space to take on higher paying delivery missions. I also started taking on sourcing missions where the goal is to find a certain commodity and return it.

I tried my hand at mining, which is something I used to enjoy once I could afford the proper modules. While mining was still fun and brought in decent profit I had a nagging desire to get back in to exploration. I ended up buying a Diamondback Explorer, a ship I had never flown before, and outfitted it for a journey and set off in to the black.