Cobra session

A half price Cobra, coupled with the wish to use my EDtracker in a cockpit with a better view, made me sell my beloved Anaconda. Wow, I say. I am so used by now to the clumsy steering of the Anaconda that the Cobra feels like a flash.

Starting in Eranin, I sell the terrain enrichment systems which I left in my hold at the end of my last game session. Prices were too low then, and now they are back up with a high demand and I am able to profit 300.000 Credits for 228 units. With a load of Grain, course is set to Aulin, where the Cobra sells. On my way to the station in Aulin, two unidentified signals identify as wanted ships and the bounties yield me 1400 Credits. An interdiction (they are much rarer these days than they used to be), sports a yellow Eagle with a big mouth, but it warps out when my Anaconda shows its teeth.

Having bought the Cobra, my cash is up to 12 million Credits; a nice financial cushion for things to come in beta2, I hope. There are no indications so far that Frontier would reset the accounts.

The Cobra´s jump range without any equipment is 9,08 ly. When you select a mission in the bulletin board, it shows the range required for the mission and your ship´s current jump range. Added 10 tons of military armor reduces the range to 9,03 ly. Fully equipped with 2xC3(g)multicannons, 2xC2missiles, the range drops to 7,7 ly. In Beta2, we will be able to modify the ship´s equipment like the frameshift drive, so we will be able to play a bit around to achieve an optimal range. For now, 7,7 ly is enough to reach the next anarchy system of LP 98-132.

My plan for this session is combat, and in order to spice it a bit up, I want to reproduce what Isinona found out about the kill-warrant scanner. However, I found that it works reliably only in said asteroid field. When I tried it at the nav beacon near the sun, I did not get any bounty vouchers even though a blue message popped upn [Addendum later: Now it works also at the nav beacon, must have been a bug].While trying so at the nav beacon, I was in a shooting competition with CMDR Cams Lamenance. It was a bit confusing there anyways. First, I dropped out of hyperspace a split second after I had overshot and thus lost lock and thus I was about 80km away. I boosted in with FAoff and used the time to play around with stealth/heat settings. When I arrived, said dogfights were already happening and some cargo floated around. Trying to collect the more valuable titanium, I found myself being shot by an NPC. Since I had come freshly out of stealth, my shields were down and I was at 85% hull at the end. After about 10 NPCs which I had scanned and then shot, got the blue message that I had received a bounty but never was accounted for any voucher or cash, I gave up. On top of it, in some confusion with my module settings my cargo scoop was still offline, so I sat there helpless in front of some valuable personal weapons while CMDR Lamenance happily scooped them up in front of my nose.

Finally in the nav point of the extraction site, I could finally confirm that the k-warrant scanner indeed makes you get bounties in an anarchy system. I collected quite a number of them, but I also wasted all of my missiles. Coming to the end of my game session, I docked in Freeport. My railguns and missiles were empty and I wanted to get rid of the stolen titanium. Then I jumped to Asellus, Eranin and I Bootis in order to cash in the various bounties. Net gain: -6000 Credits. Whut? Missiles/ammo: -19.000 Credits, bounties: +13.000 Credits. Sigh. I will book it as a nice experience (the cockpit view is indeed much better with the EDtracker) and combat training.

My game session was riddled with some well known bugs. Having to repeatedly request docking times 10 at several stations, wasting a lot of my time, and encountering at least five CMDR ships which just vanished the moment when I wanted to target them. In fact, both bugs seems to be worse than ever before. I really hope that the beta2 client brings substantial improvements here.