Oh little Rifter
Shooting wrong ammunition
At the tech 2 drones

This gentle reader sums up my evening sadly. After days of patrolling the belts around Heimatar and even up into Metropolis a little, I found that most miners seem to be using properly anchored Giant Secure Containers for their ore collection, and thus I have found no violations in need of a TEARS intervention. This is both blessing and curse I suppose.  Knowing that the spacelanes are not in immediate danger certainly lets me sleep better of an evening, but having nothing to investigate finds me getting that sleep behind the throttle as it were.

I took my Cheetah “Mr. Peepers” out for a spin to blow the cobwebs out of the afterburners, and decided to look in on some of the neighborhood mission bears.  I must assume that the mission bear biological clock differs slightly from their furrier, honey-loving cousins, for in all the system I found only THREE that were out about their business.  Swapping for my trusty Payload, I proceeded to the first mission area to find it in disarray.  Wrecks everywhere!  Unfortunately, these particular wrecks were mostly comprised of scrap metal which quickly filled the limited cargohold available to me, and forced me to abort my efforts prematurely.

Dropping in on our second industrious bear, which was actually a pair of bears, I made a much more significant impact in clearing the debris away from the acceleration gates and their consequent avenues of travel, going so far as the final pocket of wrecks without ever encountering our elusive bears.  Cleaning the largest pieces of debris first, I then returned to the initial pocket of space to proceed with the detailed cleaning of the smaller messes.  No sooner had I salvaged the first wreck for this foray, but a bear appears in his cozy Hurricane and promptly opens fire on his friendly local TEARS representative!  Obviously my sweet little Payload is not equipped to handle such wanton acts of violence, so I quickly guide her out of range of Mr. Denfior’s (our not-so-gentle bear) warp disruptor (the fact that he was equipped with the disruptor in the first place should have been my signal to let this one be) and returned to the station to slip into something a little more… aggressive.

Unfortunately selection is pretty slim when it comes to fitting new ships in my current system and I found myself left with only my trusty Citation Jr.  As eluded to in my musing above, I didn’t take the care I should have in preparing her for this adventure. After many minutes of cat and mouse before settling in for the finish, I made a valiant attempt, but was found wanting in the end.  Then again, not paying attention to my sector population readings and being oblivious to his friend who brought a Nemesis to the party…  well, the best laid plans of mice and men, and all that.  This was definitely not my best laid plan, but days of being starved for action pushed me over the bounds of prudence.  Alas my poor Rifter paid that ultimate price.