After Sunday's Anaconda crash, I didn't have any chance to play, having been away on business - ironically I drove through Cambridge, probably only a few miles from Frontier on Monday and Wednesday. Didn’t see their offices on the route I took though!
My funds were just under 11 million, having been depleted by 6M after crashing the Anaconda, so the objective was to revitalise the bank account.
Last night was my first day back in the game since Sunday and first play with my new GTX 970 graphics card. I got the Oculus wired into the new card and ran up Elite with the graphics options on Ultra and the resolution set to 2560x1440 down-sampled. I cannot describe how sharp it looked and how fast it ran! The best I can say, is it’s like the super-realistic video you see shot with 48fps. Anyway, enough about how shiny my rig looks; back to the game!
I took out my Anaconda and started doing a Palladium run from Gliese 868 to LHS 3802 which netted around 1M CR per return trip. On my first leg, CMDR SneakTiger logged on and came on dMw’s teamspeak, so I suggest he join me as he was trading. We joined a Wing in Gliese and started doing the run together. At the end of each leg, as soon as both of us were in the station vicinity, I could sell my cargo and Sneaky got a dividend of 20K and I got a dividend of 6K (his 100T Type 6 doesn’t carry as much as my 420T Anaconda). The dividend payments are a bonus, like an extra few tons of cargo every trip. We did three runs, then Sneaky had log off, so I flew back to Zeta Trianguli Australis to pick up my Fer-de-lance. By this point I was up to 14M CR.
I went over to Lugh and found when docked at Ballandin Gateway, that the Trade Community Goal had completed while I was away, so I cashed it in collected 2M CR. Now I had 16M CR. Kerrching!
Also, while I was out of commission, the Spear of Lugh had continued without me and I had dropped out of the top 40% into the top 70%. That wouldn’t do at all! I launched my FDL out to the high intensity combat zone and started picking fights with Anacondas and Pythons. After around twenty minutes in “the zone” I had racked up 200K CR combat bounty, so I returned to Ballandin to reload and cash in.
Three days of missed TV was calling, so I logged off and called it a night. After the evening’s trading and combat I was 5.3M CR up on the night.
I see this morning that the Spear of Lugh mission is now over, so when I log on tonight, (if I’m still in the top 40%) I might be 12.5M CR better off, so despite my setback of last weekend, I’m still quids in.
That A rated thruster for my Python will cost 14M CR at Jameson Memorial, so the money won’t sit in the bank for long…
Or… How I crashed my Anaconda.
Over the weekend I had been doing a mix of Wing trading with other members of dMw getting lots of trade dividends and spending some time shooting ships at Lugh, racking up credits with the “The Spear of Lugh” community goal.
I had bought an upgrade to my Python (Class 5B thrusters) which hit my bank account by 5 million credits, so with the bank balance at 8 million, I needed to do some trading to bring my account back to the 12 million mark, so I would have twice my Anaconda re-buy value.
Over the course of Saturday and Sunday I went from 8M CR to about 16.5M CR, which was great, because with the mixture of combat and trading I was doing, nothing was too repetitive and it only took a few hours on the day.
Sunday evening, everyone else had logged off and I was a bit tired, but I had a 600CR fine at a station around 50Lyr away, so I set sail for “one last trip” to go and pay the fine.
Leaving the station at Gliese 868 I was on too high a throttle setting and realised it too late I also had upward momentum! Frantic use of thrusters failed to arrest my collision with the edge of the station exit and boom! No more Anaconda and six million credits then left my account to re-buy the ship (thankfully with no cargo on board).
So, the moral of the story is always have your insurance, but if you don’t want to NEED it, don’t fly tired; you make mistakes. Really costly ones.