With many of my engineered modules at G4 and change, I decided last night I was going to dedicate my valuable gaming time to hunting down those elusive G5 manufactured mats. I am in desperate need of Pharmaceutical Isolators, Proto Radiolic Alloys, and especially Proto Heat Radiators to finish the beams on my uberCourier.
But how do you go about this in today's Elite?
My method was to use EDDB to search for high-pop, high tech systems. Once I drop, I drop again in to the nav beacon and scan it. This reveals everything in the system including any High Grade Emissions USSs, which is where we find the G5 mats. Otherwise the FSS will pick them up (as unidentified) but only to a radius of 1000 ls. So this way is a lot better, and allows you to go straight for the HGEs skipping all the others.
Each USS has a timer on it, and some are very far from the star, so I didn't get everyone I came across. But it worked very well on one hand, not so well on the other. What I mean is I found a lot of HGEs, but got exactly zero of what I had been looking for. Lots of trade bait in my holds now, but I'd rather just find the above listed specific mats.
In all I visited about 10 systems. Only two of these contained no HGEs, An 80% hit rate is fantastic though. I filtered by pop, the smallest one I went to was around 45m, the largest 107m, though most were around 90m.
As I am based in the heart of Empire territory, I found way too many Imperial Shielding. I started with 11 onboard, and before too long I had 98. With that full, I added Federation to the search and now was finding lots of Core Dynamics Composites and Military Grade Alloys. Useful (especially for trading) but not what I was looking for. I learned on the FDev boards that what I should be looking for are Independent systems to find these mats. So I was searching the wrong systems. I will try that tonight. After tonight I expect to have a boatload of G5 manufactured mats and can then go on to finish a few modules (and even ships) that have been nearly-so for far too long.
