INTRODUCTION TO THE WINSTON & GILMOUR GUIDE TO THE EDGE

  It was the 8th July 3263 when myself and my crewmember, Pam Gilmour, set out for an epic journey that lasted nearly a year and covered 38 different systems. We decided it would be a good project to write a guide for bounty hunters. We happened to be in the Ackanti system at the time, and decided to make this our start point. Ackanti, for those who have never been there, is on the southern edge (1, -9). We decided to see how much money we could make by pure bounty hunting. We didn't realise that we would end up starting a whole series of Bounty Hunter guides this way - it just seemed like a good idea at the time. So we departed in our fighter-configured Asp on our long journey.

  The rules to create this guide were: we would do "pure bounty hunting" - that is, our sole source of income would be from the bounty received from defeating pirates, and any cargo we scooped up from the pirates. We would not perform any other work (such as trading, assasinations, courier runs etc.)

  This guide is the historic first edition. Pam and myself periodically got together to pen new editions of W&G as it became known, once every couple of years. We made quite a tidy sum out of this guide! More recent guides are more comprehensive, covering all good bounty hunting systems in the galaxy. Since both myself and Pam ended up working for the Alliance, we no longer fly the trips, but instead contract that work out. So if you have a system guide you'd like us to include, let us know!

How the guide is organized

  The systems we visited are listed to the left in the order that we visited them. You can change the list to alphabetical order if you prefer. Select the system, and you'll see what we encountered, how many dogfights we got in, and what cargo we scooped up from those we defeated. Also included are some comments on what we found in the system.

BROAD STATISTICS

Here are our broad statistics for the entire mission:

Number of systems visited (includes start system) 39
Number of pirates destroyed 293
Number of close-calls with Imp. Explorers 4
Amount of military fuel used 355 tonnes (approx)
Amount of cargo scooped 72 tonnes
Revenue generated by the entire trip CR 80,726.5
Net profit for entire trip CR 27,723.5
Fuel cost for mission CR 18,603 (approx)
Ship servicing & repair cost (inc. landing fees, wages) CR 34,400 (approx)

A note on our cargo scooping. We decided it wasn't really worth our time going after metal alloys and other low value (less than CR 30/tonne) cargo. Sometimes we picked up metal alloys and other low value cargoes because our enemy happened to explode right in front of the cargo scoop. Our net profit of almost CR 28,000 shows that pure bounty hunting doesn't pay particularly well (to improve on this, see the Combat Traderoute Guide - you can make a much better living by hanging around Reidquat). However, it is good for improving your Elite rating, and seeing some of the more interesting sights in the populated galaxy!