Last night I warped back over to the third rendezvous system (I’d been one system over doing Explorer’s Guild quests) and landed on my freighter. I figured before taking on the black hole and uncharted systems milestones I would finally swap out my starting expedition ship for the shiny S-class I got as a reward for finding the A-class salvage ship. I started out by fixing the pulse engines and the shield on the A-class junker (damn thing was literally still on fire in the landing bay of my freighter!) then flew it over to the space station and melted it down for scrap, scoring about 2 million units and a couple of nice modules for doing so.
Then I flew my original ship back to the freighter and transferred the inventory to the freighter. I then jumped in the shiny new S-class and transferred inventory back to the ship, installed a few mods I’d purchased for this moment and flew the new ship over to the space station. I don’t want to scrap my original ship, mostly because I’d feel bad doing so, as she was a trusty little ship. At the station I accessed the upgrade drones and applied all 12 of the storage upgrade modules I’d collected thus far in Expedition 2, which pretty much maxed out my S-class in Technology and nearly in cargo as well. I moved all systems to the Technology grid to protect them from the effects of Black Holes (equipment installed in Technology slots cannot be damaged by Black Hole travel), and applied a couple of S and A class Hyperdrive modules to expand my jump distance out to 750+ LY.
From that point, it was pretty easy to summon the Anomaly (from the X menu), chat with Polo about Black Holes (lights up the path to the nearest one) and Hyperion about upgrades (to snag the Emeril and Indium drive plans for visiting Green and Blue stars) and warp over to the Black Hole system. 350,000 LY later and I was on the other side of the black hole and boom, Black Hole milestone completed. Unfortunately that system has already been charted, but I figured as much given the odds someone had jumped through that particular black hole previously. So I brought up the map and looked for systems that were not part of a larger cluster (more likely to attract explorers) and found one about 750 LY out with few neighbors around it. Warped and discovered my first uncharted system. Woot! Installed the Cadmium Drive (reward for discovering an uncharted system) and jumped to a distant Red star. Uncharted system #2 down. Jumped to a third system nearby and the Visit 3 Uncharted Systems milestone was history.
Along the way I stopped at every space station to check for upgrade modules, add suit inventory slots, sweep for nanites and offload some junk for sale. At the final station I used the stargate portal to zap myself back to the third rendezvous system (somehow your ship always goes with you) and flew back out to my freighter to stash some stuff in inventory while collecting all the rewards from the exploration quests. Next up tonight will be visiting a green and blue system and more Explorers Guild fun. I think I only have about 7 milestones left now until the Expedition One is completed.