I fitted it to a sort-of ninja speedy Venture spec: combat drones for defence, microwarpdrive for high-speed getaways and a cloaking device as a last resort.
A few problems materialised:
- all that lovely exotic lowsec ore is pointless if nobody will buy it. I have to ferry the bloody rocks light-years to bring it within range of others' buy orders.
- my Ninja Venture was defenceless against what NEOCOM classified as a 'Blood Raider Clone Soldier Cruiser' that I caught lurking in a belt in Gousoviba (0.1). A Maller, no less, that lit me up from 80 km away and one-shot me with pin-point accuracy. Seriously. A sniper job. The damn thing carried a bounty of 1.75 million ISK. Clearly it's been operating there for some time. If you see it, say hello from me before you kill it.
So my lowsec mining strategy needs work. I need something more substantial than a Venture.
In the meantime, the nuisance over the 'wardec' reached farcical levels with no less than eight alliances/corporations wardeccing us at the peak. Intel reached us that 'Space Warriors', the instigators of this thing, started losing members at around the same time for some reason - an exodus by all accounts, and that all the other war declarations were some sort of bureaucratic consequence of this, so it meant nothing. Then a mass of messages from CONCORD arrived that stated all the 'wardecs' were invalidated and cancelled due to an unspecified violation of the Yulai thing. In reality, they'd all failed to pay the fee. Some of these 'wars' lasted less than a minute...
So now we can go to Amarr and Jita again, and life in Khanid is, er, exactly the same as it was before.
I'm going offline for a few days as I've got a trip to the sand dunes of Danera V arranged. Since I've been based here in this system I've found out that Dan V is an unexpectedly interesting world:
- it's classed as temperate, so you can walk around outside without a pressure suit. You'll need a breathing mask if you're outside for more than half-an-hour or so as the pressure is lower than standard, but gravity is only slightly lower. The climate is even stable too as its year is 4.7 standard years long with no axial tilt. Not much changes except on a cosmic timescale that may see the large ocean sublimate away in the low pressure. At 11.2 AU, Dan V should be an ice ball, but it generates a lot of internal heat through tectonic activity associated with the tidal effects of having previously had two moons, so the average ambient temperature is only slightly lower than standard, hence the liquid water.
- there's not much in the way of vegetation because of the thin air and that tectonic activity, combined with what in the past must have been a period of bombardment from the remnants of the shattered moon that created Dan V's asteroid belt at only 90,000 km distance. So today it's mostly tundra, some mountains, large flood basalt traps and desert; with the remaining moon exerting weaker tides than before, resulting in a more benign environment. Liveable.
- here's the interesting bit: there are loads of archaeological remains spanning several thousand years. It seems that in the deep past, starting before the Dark Ages, Dan V had a human civilisation that dated from the Terran era that may have persisted on some basic level up until the time of the Reclaiming. Unearthed temples, relics and other artefacts have been found on Dan V that indicate the planet was known as 'Al-Kaukab' for a long time; that the Danera primary was, during the same period, known as 'Said al-Akbiyah' and that the two nebulae visible from the planet - the Cauldron and the Vapor Sea - were called 'Al-Khiba' and 'Al-Udhi'.
Fast-forward a couple of thousand years and the star was known as 'Dhanab al-Asad', by which time the population had almost died out. Then sometime around the arrival of the Amarr, the name 'Danera' appears for the first time and the standardised 'Danera V' designation sticks.
Today, it's a relatively unspoiled and underpopulated world that is away from a main trade route and home to various strict religious retreats and temples, amid small low-rise cities that are a product of the tech and personnel pipeline to the three Khanid Navy facilities elsewhere in-system. If I was describing Dan V in a tourist brochure I'd say it was a 'compelling fusion of ancient architecture and modern high-tech amenities - cave dwellings with holovids".
Time to go planetside and breath some real, albeit rarified air instead of oxygenated capsule fluid. Here's where I'll be for a few days - I'll send you a holopostcard:
In fact if the ongoing thing with the Drifter faction, the Sleepers and the Jove keeps on escalating, Dan V will be the perfect place to ride it out for a few years.
May you live in interesting times...
