80% of the pilots you come across are local yokels. The local socialist parties, democrats, partisans, dons of La Cosa di Oro and such finance the purchase of a spacecraft and pay a pilot a living wage to use it to make them money. That’s most traders, pirates, security vessels.

It’s really rare you meet a fellow member of the Pilot’s Federation. But as I was dickin’ around in Erevate, waiting on a docking traffic jam in a n outpost, there were about 3 of us Commanders (that’s what the Pilot Federation boys call us, on account of us commanding our own ships rather then being a piloting associate) waiting for a spot to open.

Some old bears were talking about bounty hunting. I decided to cut in, ask if they had any pointers for a new-bro like me to get into it. One of ‘em said, bring friends, another says he’s about to go on a run himself, invites me along.

Unfortunately, as detailed in my last post, I had stripped my ship down to bare essentials to scare up money to pay off my bounties. Dude didn’t seem to care. I shrugged it off.

So, you’re thinking this is the part where we go to a resource extraction site and he turns on me to blow me up for no reason, right? Nah. We get to a belt, place is already full of black-and-whites, but there’s also a lot of wanted guys still stupid enough to stick around.

My good buddy is in a cobra Mk. III, powerful stuff with great armor, basically the big daddy of my little Sidewinder. But, because I’m so stripped down, I’ve got very little mass, so when I light my fire, I go FAST!

For a good part of an hour, I was burning all over the belt, flagging down targets, waiting for him to show up. he’d take them on face to face while I spun around behind them and tore their unprotected backsides to shreds. I made about as much as I had in the past few days of trading and light combat on that hour of bounty hunting.

I guess it’s time to get hunting pirates.

