I'm just curious.. about how many shots from a turret does it take to kill a single aetherbeast?

And what about mines? How many of those does an aetherbeast have to run into before it dies? Also, do mines hit all beasts that enter the room at the same time, or just a single beast?

And here I was thinking this might be a thread about ship to ship combat

Well, these are rough estimates but assuming a full crew (3 gunners) most beasties take about 3-4 rounds, with cloiers taking less from what I noticed. No idea about mines.

So 9-12 shots? Wow.

Might be more like 7-10. Will check for sure when we go out there again (which happens pretty often in Celest )

You should test out mines too while you're at it

Oh, and how's the XP now since the most recent change?

Eh, pretty poor for me although I'm only 73 (like 6% in a one hour trip) but we got this novice up to level 30 in two runs and he had fun too! Win

Have you guys gotten good at trading with the gnomes? Found any good routes that result in a nice profit? Or do you guys just trade with the nearest gnome ship and call it good?

Well, today we hunted those forestal gargantuans on Ethereal, got some power and about 60 dust, then spent a bunch of time visiting trade ships. As far as I know, the pilot types plotted some trade routes but we struck out today, didn't manage to land any good deals. Someone probably beat us to the good wares. All in all, we made only about 20k.