Anyone want to make bets whether I get Basic Miner IV badge before the economy gets un-fubar (a.k.a. the new economy)? I have 887,000 cu’s left on that badge.

Speaking of which, has *ANYONE* made basic miner IV yet?

No bets, though just getting Basic Miner II was brutally terrible. If you have a mining moth with some HD beams, though, you should be able to crank it out. 6336 trips in a mining moth . . . not sure what the average time per load is, but let's say it's 5 minutes. That's a total of 528 hours, or 22 days of solid mining. You can easily play VO, assuming the necessary free time, for 12 hours a day. So, you should be able to crank it out in about a month and a half of doing nothing but mining. Which pretty clearly proves these badges are set stupidly high.

Doesn't Ecka have Basic IV?

If Ecka doesn't have it already he's probably closest -- he does spend a bunch of time running Escort missions... or used to, anyway.

Poor guy has to find nation war funds somehow! (Without dipping into his own pocket that is) Badges are just silly at the moment in general though.

I still have a bit to go to basic mining IV. Commercial mining is less lucrative than it used to be, but mining then transporting while escorting gives reasonable returns.

I would actually like to see some higher ribbons for pvp and hive activities, together with military decorations tied into BS and similar missions.

you are mad moda :) but i'll take your bet if it based on a real time and not on soon(tm) that the devs say.

I don't think the badges are set stupidly high... if you can get every badge there is in a few days of play, what's the point of staying around long-term? BM2 only took me a couple of days of solid strip mining. BM4 should only be for the hard-core miners, and I think that it's limited award proves that it's probably set about right.