Chapter 8 .. It's just a jump to the left ..

[screechy singing] Let's do the time - warp again !

Meh, that's showing my age. Anyway .. In light of the fact that I pretty much wound up making stuff all from that venture once I had repaired everything, and also that by the time I could get a freighter into the sector, most of the flotsam had been collected. So I went back .. way back .. well just a week. I spent a day of so moving all my ships around so they're all together near where I found the Xenon last time. Me and all my mates managed to dock at the Ore Mine the sector relatively safely, though I did have to escort one ship through the pirate sectors in between, as I could not afford a jump drive for it. :( Since I went back a little further than I had hoped, I only have 6 ships, an M3, an M4, M5, one TS (freight transport) and 2 TP (passenger transport - they hold a good chunk of cargo but nothing like a freighter).

I left one of the TP ships at Herron's Nebula where the space fuel distillery is, and during the few short gaps in the battles, I managed to keep it stocked with energy, and have a route going PowerPlant -> Distillery -> Trading Station, selling Fuel at the DIstillery when it will take it and otherwise getting energy which is a small-profit reasonably sure journey. The most you'll make it 7cr per unit tho, buy for 12 sell for 19. At one stage I got some Fuel for 685cr .. I filled the ship (985 units, 675K) which made me broke. However selling 166 to the Trading Station for 1252 netted me a nice sum. At that price I can sell it all for a total of 1,233,220cr .. almost doubling the amount I outlaid. Problem is that it will take some time to sell it all. So while it's doing that ..

I docked all my ships and shuffled all of my already collected stuff into the TP and stripped it bare of shields and weapons to make some room and to make sure I had some spare stuff in case stuff gets busted (as it does). Annoyingly, there was nowhere near as many Xenon this time around but that just meant it was able to be sorted quicker. Besides I can always go back there later :) I kitted out the Nova with 3x25Mj shields which is the most it will carry, threw some heavy weaponry on it, set the M4 and M5 to follow me, and the TS off to a safe corner behind an asteroid and set to work.
This pic is a Xenon M4 getting hit from several directions at once. Dead aliens .. don'cha love it ?

Anyway as always the battle's not so one sided. I found myself saving frequently - not 'coz I got killed but because my wingmen are idiots. In the end I sat the freighter on 'collect wares in sector' and the M4/M5 protecting it. I trailed around behind them and blew the shit out of anything that looked at us sideways. Of course i got close to as good as I gave (I nearly died a few times :) )

In the shot here it's me, on fire. Lower left shows shields (10%?) and hull of 100 just under my rego number. Nice fire though.
In the end after 2 days of heavy biffo I managed to mostly empty the sector of bad guys, and collect all their stuff. Way to go .. there was 5 'unknown objects' which turned out to be $80K missiles. I was happy to sell those, as you can imagine. In addition I got some weaponry and nice cargo, probably made a million out of goods I 'found'.

The last ship in the sector was an M3. He was the only Xenon to bail, so I decided I'd have his ship too. It'll cost me 310K to repair or I'll get around that to sell it. It carries the same shields as the Nova but has no rear turret and only has 6 front weapons instead of 8 (plus turret). It is 33% faster (97vs125) and a good 40% more agile, so I am tempted to keep it and kit it out .. then see if it's a real death machine or not :)
I know there's a Xenon cap in recent posts but due to the Time Warp Factor (©) that never happened :)