Empyrion!
Took my ship back into Aestis (lava planet) orbit to the space station we captured there, to begin the upgrade and refit process.
You don't HAVE to "drydock" to upgrade stuff, strictly speaking, but it makes for neat screenshots.
The ship started out with basic steel hull plating, which has 50 hp per block. Taking some fire on the last couple planets from aliens made me understand that I really needed to upgrade before we went to the alien homeworlds. Heavy steel armor has 200 hp per block, and combat steel has a whopping 500 per block. It took a whole lot of iron and sathium (and time spent in zero G with multitools) but we got the upgrades done. However, that also increased the mass of the SkyBitch from 2400 tons to a whopping 8200 tons, which meant I then also had to upgrade the thrusters. Poor girl could barely lift off a 1g planet with stock thrusters. After engine refit, she's still on the sluggish side, but at least she can move/stop at a somewhat reasonable rate.
Unfortunately, alpha game is alpha, and it crashed on me after that and corrupted my character file so that I either couldn't log back in at all, or would log in as a brand new player. Fortunately, one of my friends is the server admin and he got my character file restored to the previous night's backup. So I didn't lose anything really (ships aren't stored in character files, just XP/level and personal inventory and location).
Even with all that mucking about, we still managed to go on our raiding trip to the Alien homeworld. I thought about taking screenshots of that, too, but honestly they would all have been even murkier than the lavaworld screenshots. It was darker than under a nun's habit, and what little was visible was tinged dark green and engulfed in fog and smoke. Hostile bases, drones, and troop transports everywhere. It was a good thing we upgraded that armor, as I took all kinds of AA fire just trying to find a place to set down. Fortunately I soon located a valley whose walls shielded me from the weapons of the surrounding alien bases, and I parked so that we could deploy our fighters and get to business.
I'll spare you the details of what went on, because how many different ways are there to describe running, gunning, explosions, blood and slaughter that I haven't already used, but I'll say this - the loot was really good. I even managed to detect and breach a secret storage room in one base (seriously, there was no door to get in/out of it and once inside, the wall literally had the words "YOU FOUND A SECRET" painted on the wall in 2-meter high lettering). Good amounts of Zascosium were found, along with high tech plasma weapons, pulse rifles and other nifty junk.
It was a good time, and a good closing to my friend's gaming sessions. Today he drives back home to return to his wife who considers him playing a video game as tantamount to domestic abuse.
) 
