Spent the last couple days grinding down the Infernvm 3 and rebuilding a new design, with alleviating some of Inf 3's shortcomings in mind (specifically the single layer of heavy armor). At 10 tonight, I finished the DPF Bizarre Adventure (DPF is our pirate faction, the Dusty Crow Pirate Federation, so it'd kinda be like "USS").
Here's a shot of the Bizarre Adventure leaving our deep space base.
So I patrol the asteroids as usual, picking off and looting small bases and even a derelict spacecraft I found drifting with several armloads of gold and uranium still in its unpowered refinery... when I spot a telltale red reticle in the distance and head for it.
After about a 15 minute flight, I come into visual range of a base positioned above a previously unknown and not-on-the-beaten-path asteroid. PRIME real estate! When I get close to there, I notice I'm being locked onto, and my turrets are returning the favor. I stop dead (turrets start to acquire locks around 200m before they come into firing range), and go EVA out for a closer look. Just as I'm getting close enough to pick out details on the enemy base, I get a face full of rockets and gatling rounds. Oof.
I respawn in the medbay on my ship, and get as close as I dare without being in turret firing range. I arm my rocket launcher, and start poking holes. On about my 7th or 8th rocket, I get lucky and knock out his reactor, and his turrets go dark. I still can't close because MY turrets will open fire still, and I would like to take the base intact if I can (or at least as intact as it still is after a half dozen rocket impacts). To my surprise, the OWNER of the base comes whipping out around from behind the base in a drillship, bearing down on me. I declare that this is now DPF territory, and he'd better clear off if he wants to keep anything at all. He doesn't listen and tries for me in his drill ship. I'm not particularly worried about him ramming me, I'm in much thicker armor than I was previously. But he doesn't even get the chance... as soon as he's closer than 800 meters, my turrets light him up and tear him to shreds. He leaves the server, probably never to return, I'd bet.
Then comes the tedious business of jetpacking over to the base, grinding down each individual system, then welding it back up again from blue line (this is how you "hack" ownership of something that belongs to somebody else). 15 turrets, a half dozen cargo bays, a medbay, a refinery, an assembler, a beacon and a newly-rebuilt small reactor later, I've managed to capture myself a base! I pull the Bizarre Adventure alongside it, finally.
Most of the damage is on the other side, hidden from the camera, of course.
And as I said, it floats above its own personal asteroid that nobody else probably knows about, if one scrub was able to get this far without interference.
It's kind of funny, the "base" is really only a couple blocks in each direction bigger than my ship, really.
I can only imagine that reticle lit up from him accidentally doing something that got his turrets to target one of his own ships or something.
At any rate, I've got it completely under my faction's control now, and reported to them the events. I suicided and respawned at our space base to retrieve my small 3x3 drill ship, and moved it to the captured asteroid base as well, to facilitate getting started there. The plan is to get the base secure enough for now, which really it probably is, so long as the Bizarre Adventure is parked alongside it, and drill that asteroid empty, sending the valuable minerals inside back to the space base. I'm not sure if we'll process them into ingots here, or move the raw ore (processing the ore takes time and we'll have to build more refineries here at the base, but refined ingots take up much less space than raw ore, so each shipment would actually bring more useful material at once back to the space base).
Then we use those materials to finish the George Dub.. and then it'll be time to build my capital ship... But first I need to refit the Adventure with more thrusters, turns out it handles like a barn on roller skates.
