Ok. Unless anyone wants to stay a bit longer I’m going to schedule the jump back to the bubble for Wednesday 8th July at 22:00 UTC.
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good for me, ill make a couple more runs between then and now.
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where wil you be jumping to in the bubble? … will start making my way there
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I’ve got a hair over 700 in the bank now, and I’m maybe two missions and a bit of exploration data from the rank required for a Cutter. I do like shiny things, after all. 
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This depends on what the LTD market does. Prices are in a dip at the moment. Come Wednesday, if there is a system with a good price I’ll likely jump straight in there and sell, otherwise I’ll just head for somewhere convenient. Last time we stationed in Lave which is a nice central location, or we could go to where you are if you would prefer? Or maybe you could meet us at Hutton Orbital? 
I haven’t started the Imperial grind yet but I will definitely get a Cutter when I do. I’m not sure I will actually use it for anything other than cruising around looking tasteful and smug.
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I mean, I already drive a BMW, so… 
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Dunno about the former but you got the latter down pat, mister.
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No problem, I have a fair jump range on my mining ship, but not that far as for the cutter go for it it’s a fantastic ship
Given that the LTD prices are still crap I’ll just reposition the FEI PAW straight back to Lave tomorrow. I’ll leave the carrier there for a bit as I’ve got some messing about to do in the bubble. She’ll jump out to sell at short / no notice and probably hop about the bubble a bit too, but each time she moves it will only be for a couple of hours and I’ll bring her back to Lave when I’m done. So if you launch for a bit of mission grinding and then come back to find a FEI PAW sized hole in the system don’t worry, she’ll be back soon. 
Oh, and if everyone has enjoyed the mining and wants another trip (or in fact has any other requests for places to visit) let me know and I’ll schedule something in the calender.
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AWOOOOGA AWOOOOGA
This is your 4 hour warning.
FEI PAW will be departing in 4 hours.
All Aboard - next stop Lave.
AWOOOOGA
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You guys in beta or the main game?
Main
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140 jumps to go… I can make it back tonight…
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Some shots from the last few weeks on the last leg of the return from Distant Worlds II.
Last planet I landed on, to top off on some raw materials. Paint looking a little bit ragged.
The first other ship I’ve seen in well over a year.
After a nail-biting trip halfway across the bubble and dodging an interdiction as soon as I jumped into the Almad system, it’s almost done.
After a VERY rough docking (hey, it’s been over a year!), Above and Beyond in the hangar, getting a well-earned rest. Good ship.
…and the payout from all the exploration data since leaving Sag A*
So @HavlokUK, @Gunnyhighway let me know where to meet you guys once I’ve upfitted a T10 for mining (unless y’all have other recommendations), and I’m looking forward to hitching a ride out on the next trip!
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Well that’s some nice cash. Welcome back to the civilization.
Krait Mark II is quite a good ship for sub surface and deep core mining.
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@Navynuke99 Welcome back! The first few jumps back in the bubble are quite unnerving aren’t they?
This won’t be for another week or so at least. LTD prices across the bubble have been depressed for a week or so, so I held onto them waiting for a better price. That price came in the Areklici system after the Thursday server tick so I headed there in my explorer-phantom to scan the system prior to calling the carrier in. This was so I could jump the carrier in as close as possible to the station to make it easier to dodge pirates and gankers.
However, the game sat on the witchspace loading screen for quite some time before crashing out completely. When I logged back in I found that my save file was corrupted and the game was utterly unplayable - 10 minute loading screen followed by a crash out with a ‘Mauve Adder’ error message within 30 seconds of getting in. I gave up after about 8 tries, and once I realised this is a confirmed bug on the issue tracker.
Today I tried again in the Cai Syraze system and have exactly the same problem. There is some speculation that it’s down to the number of carriers descending on these systems to sell their diamonds, though I have seen one report of the same problem occurring to an explorer KLy’s away from anything and anyone.
The unfortunate result of this is that I’m left in the unenviable position of having a fleet carrier full (well, not really full full) of diamonds that I can’t sell 
. There’s a patch scheduled for Wednesday and I’m hoping that that will rectify the problem. If so, then once I manage to offload the diamonds I can schedule another mining trip.
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Yikes, that sounds kinda terrible.
No worries- in the meantime I’m figuring I’ll grind out the Imperial rank (and engineering materials) I need.
I have mine fairly heavily engineered for combat at the moment, though I found earlier this evening I’m having issues with my multicannons (I thought it’d be a simple data recovery run, not also fighting off four engineered Anacondas that seemed to be impervious to thermal damage). So I think I have some tweaking to do. I may look at a separate one for mining…
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So I finally managed to offload the diamonds from the last outing today. For whatever reason the Mauve Adders had returned to wherever they had come from. This fleet carrier management malarkey is taking a bit of time to get used to. Selling a T9 full of diamonds for over a billion credits gave me a little feeling of vertigo:
It’s the kind of thing that I have up to now considered an end-game experience. Surely a billion space bucks is more than anyone could ever need? And that was just the first of three runs! But of course it’s not all profit, and almost all of the proceeds are going back into the carrier to fund further outings. It definitely gave me pause, though.
Regarding the next outing: I have a few things I want to do first (a bit of grinding for one, and some experimenting with the carrier). There is a patch dropping on Wednesday which is going to affect mining, and there’s a rumoured newly discovered LTD triple overlap which may or may not be worth a try. So I’m going to keep my ear to the ground for a few days and then likely schedule a mining trip for next week or the week after. In the meantime I’ll leave you with a bit of eye-candy:
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MINING UPDATE:
So I’ve been keeping an eye on all things mining. An update dropped today which is supposed to reduce the benefit of overlap regions and improve the performance of single hotspots but ensure that overlap regions remain better. It is not yet clear exactly how much difference this will make.
There are now 5 viable LTD triple hotspots in the vicinity of the bubble:
- The two originally found in the COL 285 Sector systems (both within about 250 LYs of the bubble)
- Corona Austr. Dark Region OX-U b2-3 planet 6 has two small hotspots sitting on the edge of a large one (approx 500 LYs from Sol)
- SWOILZ PK-R b20-0 planet 1 has a reasonably good overlap (approx 1200 LYs from Sol - we went there last time )
- HIP 4351 planet 10 was recently discovered with easily the best overlap region of the bunch (approx 300LYs from Sol)
Of these, the Col 285 Sector and Corona Austr systems have overlap geometries that make it a bit tricky to hit the best zone. The HIP 4351 system has an almost perfect overlap region that is easy to drop in to and should make it the most efficient LTD mining location:
It’s also within easy reach of mining ships without fleet carriers. However, there are two problems with HIP 4351: Firstly, it is absolutely packed full of miners. The system itself and most of the nearby ones have no fleet carrier slots available and there have been quite a few reports of players having similar problems to the ones I had last week trying to sell the diamonds. It is not yet clear whether today’s patch has fixed that issue. The second problem is that all that traffic has attracted the attention of the Code and others, and I’ve read a couple of reports of miners being ganked.
The flip side to this is that SWOILZ PK-R b20-0 is now less busy then it was and should be a bit easier to mine. It still has the downside of being 1200ish LYs away - no problem for the carrier but it does mean that anyone who comes along is a bit stuck there until the carrier returns. The overlap region here is almost as good as the HIP 4351 and is fairly easy to drop in to - just head for the LTD3 overlap:
So, where would we like to go next week? I’m leaning towards going back to SWOILZ but I’m open to suggestions.
Hmmm, good to know. I was just reminded that I have an Anaconda that’s somewhat outfitted. I’m still grinding Imperial rank out of Nglinn, but should be done with that over the weekend, and can probably outfit the 'Conda for mining, but then I’m gone all next week on vacation…