Firstly, it's great to hear that you're still, you know - alive. I was a bit worried after I, uh- well, I didn't stick around to see if that Hunter wanted a piece of me, too. If you need any spare parts for that Manta - assuming there's anything left of it after the thing, then I might be able to fix you up with something. Nothing factory fresh, and some of the bits might have come off Sabres or something, but at least you can get the holes plugged.

Anyway - yes! As far as mapping data and telemetry goes, I need an up-to-date set of files on Liberty space - both core and outer regions, like Kansas, Humboldt and so forth - and anything you have on the Barrier pass through Cortez, Coronado, and Baffin. I was thinking about what you said, particularly about the recovery of all the previous failures experiments, and I'm really giving a S&R mission for the last two prototypes some serious consideration. Accurate data on celestial object drift and gravity wells would help a ton with that - but don't worry about sifting through the data for all that! Just grab as much raw data as you can with your scanners and send everything over - I'll put a program to work dredging through the numbers to find what I want.

Swing by the Spire anytime and I'll have a look at that malware you picked up, too! It shouldn't take long to fix, and you can come by later this week. Beep One through Beep Four might have gone down the tube, so to speak, but I'm going all-in for Blip. Hopefully, this time I won't end up another few hundred k out of pocket - I put a few extra failsafes in, and I think I fixed all the major glitches with the pathfinding. The sims are showing good, but the other four all looked fine in testing too.

I haven't picked a test site yet, but it'll have to be somewhere relatively remote - these things are in a legal grey area, honestly, and I'm not really keen on pushing my luck in court if one managed to ram into something expensive. Once I have the charts at hand, though, I'll be able to work something out.

Until then, try to steer clear of those Hunters, okay?

I already know Humboldt like the back of my hand, so it's no big deal. It's not particularly hard to map, either, since there's pretty much nothing out there. I had to take a Collector on a sort of shakedown run through there earlier today anyway, so I'm all up to date with all it has to offer. Kansas could be a problem, particularly since - I think I already mentioned this, too - I think Beep Three might have ended up in there, depending on how badly her routing algorithm wigged out on her. I might need to run a survey of my own there - the Technical Pacifist is a modified Salvager-class I use as a sort of mobile, uh- actually, it's like a Swiss Army knife in spaceship form. It does pretty much everything, including scanning for all the stellar and cosmic data I could ever ask for, thanks to an array I set up on board the thing a while back. Crude, but it gets the job done.

The rest are all perfect, though - not much has changed, actually, which is always helpful to see. I won't have to adjust my existing calculations too much, although a new Royalist battleship in Magellan is, uh- a little disconcerting, to tell you the truth. I'd hate for my pet project to be turned into scrap, particularly since I think this one might actually work.

Sure thing, by the way! The Spire's always open to the Maltese and their, uh- their affiliates, too. Just try not to pick up any trouble on your way in. I estimate it shouldn't take more than a couple of days to have the Blip (name pending) ready for launch. Her heuristic pathfinding algorithms are responding well to any procedurally generated maps I throw at her on the sims, so in theory, all I have to do is plug in the data you sent me and she should gobble it up without any problem. There's always some nasty glitch lurking, though, so I want to be absolutely sure she's watertight on the code side of things before I move onto finalising the hardware - I still have a couple more things to plug in, and that's not even getting started on the welding.

Stay tuned for more detail on the 'rescue', by the way - I have a few extra goodies for the Blip that might help her track down her sisters, which will be particularly helpful if they've managed to drift somewhere inhospitable. I can't imagine there's much worse out in either Coronado or Humboldt than the Grande Negra can be, but I'm also not entirely willing to, um, dive into a sun corona or something quite yet.

Pennsylvania won't work - there's still too many eyes around for my liking. I want to get out of Liberty core space altogether for the test run, which means a border system of some sort. Alberta could work, as could Humboldt, Kansas, or even Coronado or Baffin. Of those, Kansas and Humboldt are probably the less busy pair by far, but any of them could work in a pinch. I'll run a few tests, maybe get out there myself in the meantime to scout out potential sites prior to the big day, and we'll see what ends up looking good.