4C-B7X, Outer Ring - Upwell Consortium executives have been celebrating the successful launch to the capsuleer market of their new refinery and moon drilling technologies. Made available as blueprints through Upwell Consortium member corporations, the new technologies are anticipated to make their first appearance in capsuleer structures later this week.
In the meantime, Upwell has made freely available an update to moon survey probe software that will improve the resolution of the deep penetration scanners that the probes deploy when landing on target moons. The expectation is that new resource layers will be detected below exhausted and mined out surface workings on existing moons.
Upwell's refinery and moon drilling tech launch comes against a background of increased concern among the CONCORD powers as to rising pirate threats. Just today, there are confirmed reports of a Joint Harvesting corporation mining operation being attacked by Blood Raider forces raiding out of one of the Covenant's new "Forward Operating Bases".
CONCORD has made it clear it considers pirate FOBs to be a serious threat and the DED is offering substantial bounties for their destruction. Strategic resource security is a particular area of concern for the empires across the board, and opportunities for capsuleer freelancers to assist mining expedition operations are being advertised through a revamped Agency network.