Space Marshal Christoper Blair
This high risk affair was led by Evan in a warden flying with his buddies in a hornet and a buccanneer. Lost my shields after meandering behind the slower warden, had I recharged them sooner I would have emerged without a scratch.
No sooner than I had taken down the first hornet, two new targets jumped in. We won’t be seeing that mantis again. 5 kills total.
This ERT bounty was going to be tough, a hammerhead.
As luck had it, coming in behind some asteroids, a PVP target “Mastrum” came under my pip first. Not my best flying with a bit of lag, still, I got in some nice hits before Mastrum knew I was there.
I switched off Mastrum to engage Les Shadwick, and while I got the kill – Mastrum made me pay registering Aggravated Criminal Damage against me.
My mistake, only thing left to do was to point my guns and pull the trigger.
Soon enough, Mastrum became a Citizen of Interest.
This affair must have caught Liam at a bad time, fretting over the echos of the many Valiant kills permeating the comms. When my Valiant appeared on radar, Liam knew he was dead before he was dead.
Yushiro Tomczy was the mission assigned by Hurston’s Bounty division.
Arrow smack down ensues.
Hurston’s jobs don’t pay market, but the 10% bonus at Level 4 works.
A lowly VLRT target, easily handled by my gladius as are most VLRT targets, just a single pass and I am on my way.
Got to love the updated comm chatter, now this is Privateer!
With the release of the Alpha 3.13 patch all previous reputations and bounty certifications have been reset. One of the first certification you will encounter is the Tracker Training Permit Certification. You can tackle this certification in any nicely equipped light fighter.
I like to keep familiarity with the Gladius, in my case the Valiant, to keep sharp in the fighter that will no doubt be your starter ship in the upcoming Squadron 42 adventure. Best guess is that we will see the release of Squadron 42 sometime next year.
So it seems some of the live bounties just jump away whenever you get close. So I updated my Eclispe with all Grade A stealth gear and took it for a test drive bounty hunting.
Although the torpedos have 10,000m locking range, they only track for 8000m as demonstrated here. As is typical with the Skyline star map, it fails to work and I manually navigate back to Everus Harbor.
Tracking bounties, the stealth way, in my Eclispe
With the update to the reputation system CIG has filled out the bounty hunters game play with a new UI and mostly all new missions, including some missions which are on the ground in some of the caves – also new for this patch.
An early issue with the insurance claim system failing to insure critical ship component upgrades and the return of the dancing hornets(spoke too soon) are two confirmed IC issues that seem to have been quickly fixed after a hot patch.
There are some notable improvements with the HUD for Quantum Travel as you no longer need to set a way point to jump to various targets and game locations, just point and click. Setting a way point still lays out intermediate jumps automatically for you to follow, but long gone is the pain in the ass by the seat of your pants navigation when the Skyline star map fails to fully function. The star map is still quirky.
Wait time on bounty missions after arriving at your target’s location is a bit too long in most cases. Stealth is working great. There are reports of torpedoes failing to resupply on the Eclipse, but I could not duplicate the problem, instead, noticed rock bottom prices. That stuck ladder on the Eclipse – WTF.
So far the servers have been stable and I have yet to see a dreaded disconnect or crash. So much improved that finally cargo may be an option.
We will be “Yela Yell” with much less frequency!
Chasing bounties continues to be one of my favorite “grinders” in the verse. You can easily collect on half a dozen bounties in an hour. This is one such bounty.
The updates to the super hornet during the 3.4 patch were cruel. Not only did the SH lose it’s armor, the default loadout failed to impress as it was plagued with divergent PIPs. Fixing the super hornet up for use in the verse was an expensive proposition and quite frankly, not worth the risk and I ended up melting mine in favor of a larger LTI pack.
Fortunately the super hornet remains in my fleet as a loaner in the 3.5 patch and I have been quite impressed with the new gimbal system which turns the default loadout into a rather formidable package capable of running most of the bounty missions. If you replace its nose turret with a size 3 distortion repeater that I like to call the Doctor – the DR Model-XJ3, you can tame the larger multi-crew ships.