This is the log of Sebastian Heap, captain and owner of the mining ship UMS Concord. Mining is a dangerous occupation, so I am making a log of all important events should anything happen to me or this ship.
As I am writing this up, the supplies needed for our first mining exhibition are being loaded into the cargo hold. We are going to need a large stock of food and water, since we will be out mining h-fuel in sigma 13 for several days. The plan is to deliver the mined h-fuel to Manhatten, New york.
If all goes well, I should get enough cash for basic upgrades to the ship, which has the same basic equipment it came with.
Things have been surprisingly uneventful. We located some hydrogen astroids and used the equipment aboard the ship to process the hydrogen into usable h-fuel. It took 3 sirius days to mine and process all the fuel. Nothing to report on the trip back to fort bush. All that is left to dock with fort bush and to unload our... ***Alarm sounds in background*** What is going on?!? Report!
Officer: "Sir, 3 outcast ships have haulted our vessel just outside of fort bush."
Uh-oh.
Outcast ship: "Follow us if you want to live!"
Those outcast ships have enough firepower to blow us to pieces. I guess we have no choice but to follow the outcast ship.
*Complete silence for about 30 seconds*
Officer: Sir. There is a jumphole ahead. It seems that the outcasts want us to go through the jump hole.
Looks like this will be my last log entry. Either my ship is going to be torn apart in the jump hole, or it will become property of some outcast smuggler. Either way, I have no choice but to go through the jump hole.
Well, here in the Concord we have good news and bad news. The good news is that we survived the jump hole, and the crew is ok, aside from a few bumps and bruises. Bad news? I have to squeeze this massive ship through a asteroid field with giant asteroids and not much room, we will probably all be killed when we reach the base, we are going to lose our cargo, and my beloved ship is probably going to be sold to the Junkers as scrap.
Oh no, the pirate base is in sight. Either we dock and we die, or we don't dock and we die. Docking has a better chance of survival though, so we try to dock (tight squeeze) The h-fuel in my ship hold is about to get unloaded.
Hopefully this will not be my last log entry, although it probably will be.
Well, we made it back to Fort Bush ok. After the cargo was unloaded, we were gives 5 minutes to get out of the pirate's scanner range. Between the torpedo that took down our shields to get us moving, the lack of room to maneuver, the giant rocks that slow us down, and the collisions with said rocks, I was worried that we would not make it home in one piece. It took us 3 minutes to get out of scanner range. Luckly we eventually found a trade lane in the giant cloud. As it turns out, the trade lane took us to fort bush! Knowing where we were at now, we docked at fort bush for emergency repairs.
I am running short on money, so tomorrow we will head out to mine silver in Colorado to fund future deep space mining operations. Hopefully we won't run into pirates this time...
Wow. The Silverton Asteroid Field really is depleted. It took us a long time to fill our hold 10% full, with help. And we only make 200k profit, factoring in expenses. Time to launch an exhibition into the taus to looks for ores.
For our deep-space exhibition, we have recruited 45 crew members, working in 3 shifts of 15. That way there is always somebody on station in case anything happens.
