So last night I decided the cure for the post-lost-my-ship blues was to get right back on that horse and go cause trouble. I borrowed Crow's lightest ship, the Tiny Dancer, and went looking for marks.
Tiny Dancer is as basic as a pirate ship can get - the minimum required, one cockpit, one gyro, one small reactor, one beacon (ships in multiplayer require a renamed beacon to not be deleted during daily maintenance/trash cleanup), six thrusters... that all makes the basic ship.. but then you tack on a medium cargo bay, connector, a grinder and a gatling gun, and you go from cute to worrisome.
So as I patrol the asteroids, I spot something in the distance - the barest discolored glint at the top of this asteroid -
So I get closer, and find a helpless base, ready to be pillaged! Not a bad start to the evening.
Thanks to having a nose-mounted grinder, I barely even have to get out of the ship to reduce it to components and tuck it away in the hold. I do get out to "hack" the reactor so I can get the uranium out of it before it is destroyed, but there's not a whole lot there. Ah well. Then as I pull away, I use chat to notify the faction to whom it belonged that their asteroid base is no longer there.
So I continue along my patrol, and at the fringes of the asteroid belt, I find this -
A giant chunk of somebody's (DOG faction is the somebody, apparently they named this the Doge) large 49-drill drillship holding stationary in space. I say "chunk" because the back end of it shows obvious signs of damage and there's no cockpit, forward, or reverse thrusters. I'm guessing that it just "came apart" in flight like some of my ships did yesterday. So I fire up Tiny Dancer's grinder and get to work.
But the tiny ship's hold fills up before the job is done... so bursting at the seams I fly her back to base, intent to come back with a larger ship and finish the job. It only occurs to me 3/4ths of the way home that I had enough parts right there on hand to simply add another cargo bay to Tiny Dancer. DOH.
So anyway, I go and get my new raiding ship that I just built, the Hammertime. It's not the bruiser or base that Bizarre Adventure was, it doesn't have a medlab or refinery or assembler, but it's slightly more agile and has its own mounted grinder.
There are a LOT of reactors on this drill ship.. so I make sure to hack them one by one to get the uranium out. Turns out to be very worthwhile, there was about 25 uranium ingots in each reactor!
It only occurs to me now, as I look at the screenshot, that it looks like a very bad idea to take an angle grinder to the access door of an operating nuclear reactor. Oh well.
So I finish up grinding and packing away the Doge into my cargo hold, and on the way home, I happen across somebody's base! Two jackpots in one night.
Incidentally, Major Twitch is one of the faction who took over the base I captured and stole Bizarre Adventure. The text in the above screenshot is him complementing me on my layered hull design - apparently it prevented all damage to the internal parts of the ship as they rocket-sniped off the turrets to be able to approach her. Wunderbar. Also pictured above, you can see I built on two more grinders to make the grinding of the Doge driller go faster.
But at any rate, I approach the base, jump out, disable the medbay so I don't get any unexpected guests that way, and start grinding away the base.
I hack the cargo bays instead, and find a huge stock of supplies. A hundred thousand steel plates! 400 missiles (which is good, because I was running low)! 32,000 construction components! Various other ingots and parts. There's so much, the 3 cargo bays I brought (which were half full already from the doge) quickly fill up, and I'm forced to build TWELVE MORE cargo bays (and 3 more grinders for good measure) on the outside hull of the Hammertime, just to get it all in.
But Deerslayer, the owner of the base, comes back from his own raiding just as I finish up grinding away the base platform, so I don't get a chance to get to grinding the drillship parked nearby. I kick Hammertime into high gear for a quick getaway, because I don't know the combat capabilities of the ship Deerslayer's flying, and would rather not test an unknown with 900,000 liters of booty stuffed into and strapped onto the outside of Hammertime, which has fairly minimal armaments for a large class ship - two missile turrets and a missile launcher. As I thrust away, I kick the turrets back on, and they start slinging rockets aftward to discourage pursuit... and I escape into the big empty, free and clear to make the long haul back to my own base and offload my ill-gotten gains.
It was a roller-coaster of a day... started off pretty bad, but was looking up by the end.