Eventually, after weeks of building and learning from the starter planet, my explorer skill made level twenty.
As I admitted in my first retrospective post, things had become rather deplorable on Lucky-1: smog, litter, a generational rift over how to play checkers, and an ugly fued between members of the uranium guild after one guy's daughter hooked up with some dude from the coal union.
But, bygones being bygones, we got explorers out. After twenty-eight tries, and a few doomed missions, we found this beauty:
Aco
At the time, it was one of only sixteen rare atmosphere planets. Pure and virginal, my colonists soon defiled this new planet with an orgy of resource extraction and flatulence (the plant life here holds high percentages of methane.) It was fun while it lasted, but, like sand through an hourglass, we would soon need a third planet.
At the time of this writing, Aco is my home base (so to speak.) It holds thousands of battleships waiting to be unleashed and, if I had any idea on how to start, I would unleash them.
For now, stay tuned for part three.