Journal of a Space Miner

Entry 1

“It has been a bumpy ride but, man, it was glorious! Comet dust accumulating in the tube back home and freshly mined, precious gems piling up under Darkshaker’s cargo hatch. My good old Al’Ong Handshaker has truly been an outstanding spacecraft, worth every penny!

Speaking of pennies, the last few days has seen some sort of crisis in ore prices, something about FUD-juice on a remote irrelevant planet, but well… a miner’s gotta mine, doesn’t he? The rewards are still alright and at least the gas is getting cheaper. We don’t really know what awaits us, but we got to keep up the honest work...

Anyway, as a veteran miner and Admiral of the Snails Force I have been asked to petition my fellow guildmembers to come up with a shortlist of the best spaceships for your shillings. We have come up with a top 3 amongst the common raiders, based on their rentability of course, their maneuverability but also more personal reasons like aesthetics and history.

As I record this entry, there are 9 models on the market: Jumper, Explorer, Drone, Pathfinder, Auditor, Nomad, Journey to the West, Konpeito and Detos. They all have pros and cons but 3 of them really stand out almost unanimously.”

# 3          The Konpeito

“She’s the latest of all the models available today but she already has conquered the hearts of many a space ape. The Lunarellan people have a knack for making very attractive spaceships and the cute backstories involving Doki and Azuki certainly add to the growing popularity of these actually pretty rare (only 300 units) tiny wonders. Performance-wise, it’s indeed very good! A good quality radar grants her a fairly large 16.5 km mining area, more than enough even for the most unsure space pilots. She is however a little bit let down by her small machinery and painstakingly long cooldown period of 390 sec which in turn yields a pretty poor rover power of 70%. But the true force of the Konpeito resides in her AI-operated drill that confers her an outstanding 120% mining power! In the “common spaceship” category, only the Journey to the West can compete with such quality gear… speaking of which…”

# 2          The Journey to the West

“Now that’s what I call a proper drill! Maybe not as fancy as the high-tech Lunarellan gear, but it sure can extract precious ore from a comet methodically and efficiently (120%). The origin of these fairly bulky, yet aesthetically pleasing spacecrafts is a bit obscure and they don’t seem to enjoy the same popularity as the Konpeito. In fact, they are a bit more common and the radar just isn’t as good, only providing 15 km of mining range, making the approach a little trickier. The Tianzi machinery however, is a bit more advanced and the mining protocol tuned to perfection, shortening the cooldown period to 360 sec and increasing the rover power to 80%. In short, a Journey to the West is a slightly less special spaceship than the Konpeito, she is however slightly more profitable provided that you can get close enough to the comet.”

# 1          The Drone

“At this point, you might be wondering if there is a good compromise between these last two spaceships? And well, yes and no. Concessions must be made unless you opt for a bigger, more expensive ride. Meanwhile, if you’re a hardened space miner, if you know your way around the cockpit and if you’re dead-efficient at jumping from solar system to solar system, then Drones are what a sizeable part of your fleet should be made of. They aren’t the prettiest by any stretch, they don’t have the best drill, in fact it’s less efficient than in the two other ships on this list and the radar is just ok, like in the Journey to the West. So, what makes Drones so special? Well, for a start, they are old. They work on robust well-known Al’Ong technology and they have nothing to prove. Old space roamers like myself have been driving these for ages, they have a certain soft spot in every space miner’s heart. After all, many of them learned to mine on these old rattletraps. But there’s one more characteristic that I haven’t mentioned yet, the machinery. Drones have simple, noisy, rickety vintage engines but they sure as hell do the job with the lowest cooldown period amongst our top 3. Some other ships like the Pathfinders, Jumpers or the dreadful Nomad have lower cooldowns but at a great expense to the mining power. Overall, Drones are just pretty good at everything with a 15 km mining area, 110 % mining power, 330 sec cooldowns and a rover power of 90%. This means that, in good hands a Drone is a solid choice.”

“Now that being said, I heard there is some gigantic mining competition coming fairly soon and there’s a whole solar system that’s been cleared up by the mining consortium just for that… That’s set to be epic man! Imagine, the best miners coming from everywhere in the galaxy competing for something much bigger than space ores?! I’ll be there, will you?”

** Communication ended **

Info on coming competition

https://medium.com/cometh/summer-2021-climax-the-polygon-galactic-grand-prix-9e3014fe9a76

Common Spaceships Stats