I started at Freeport with my heavy Viper craft. If there was PvP, I would have joined it, but there wasn´t. No player ships. So I went into slow supercruise to test the random generator in an anarchy system. And I struck gold. Literally, because the first unidentified signal (US) consisted of 10 units of cargo of gold, of which my Viper´s cargo hold can scoop 8 of. This yielded me about 36.000 Credits.
I launched again, and lo and behold, I spotted a player steered Viper! CMDR Cog, lets dance! I approach, he lets me get close to his six, which is already weird, and then... poof... vanished. Not jumped, just vanished. Might be the faulty instancing, but could also be the infamous "switch on-the-fly to single player to avoid unwanted combat"-tactic. Sigh.
- station glueing; my patrol route when I am looking out for PvP
Another US, and I again stroke gold. I think I discovered now how some players made a fortune very quickly. Three of these finds and you can already buy a hauler and start profitable trading. Only the thing is, from my already very elevated cash pile, if I want to make money, I rather buy a Lakon Type 9 and do bulk freight shipping.
I decided to switch to exploration and visit again the planet next to freeport, which I learned now is called Anahit. I want to try out how close I can get. Somebody probably already did and I surely can look up the results in a post in the ED forum, but I wanted to try it out myself. So I engaged supercruise and directly headed towards the planet. At around 5000 km distance, I got bolted out of supercruise and I continued with boost/FAoff. However, after a while I had to realize that I did not really get any closer. Hardly a surprise, so this experimental exploration ended here.
- so close yet so far
Next station: I Bootis B and C. I saw a funny and interesting post about a video in the forum. I hadn´t realized before that there is a double star in this system, as it is a bit farther out from the jump in and you cannot see this from afar. So I approached it to see it for myself. Nice to see something special, however, I am not sure if it would really look like this. I imagine that the gravitational pull of both stars would morph the double star more into a flat hourglass-shape, with a lot of eruptions across the contact area. So I was rather kind of underwhelmed, to be honest. It just looked too artifical to be real.
- way too tame; I imagine all kind of hellish eruptions when two giant eruptive masses like this do touch
Close to the double star, to my surprise I also found an US which turned out to be a nav beacon. Out of curiousity I hopped in, fully expecting the usual random generator at work, i.e. freighters and ships of all kind jumping in and out at random. I was pleasantly surprised as I discovered this to be a staging point for the Federation military forces. Three or four fleets of Anacondas and Federal fighters, some Lakon type 9 ships which were labelled as "tanker"; it makes sense to put something like this a bit off from the public prying eye. There was also plenty of military chitchat in the chat-communication. Nice! Add some real voice comms and this would be a place for perfect immersion.
- fleet action; reminds a little bit of the good old "Wing Commander" days
After this little exploratory detour, I was out of ideas. I did not feel like doing PvE and patrol US. Thinking about what I did not do yet, I realize that I might have given the Anaconda an only superficial pass. There are still turret-guns to fit and I would like to get a feeling on how useful they actually are. Although I do not have much hope, judging from the weak, almost non-existant counter-fire I received while attacking and circling the NPC Anacondas so far. Also, I still bugs me that I could not try out the allegedly most powerful gun in the game, the C8 plasma launcher.
Getting again into an Anaconda means I had to travel the long way "down" to LHS 3262. My Viper had not the jump range to do so. This is when I decided to get into a Lakon Type 9, so the long travel at least yields me some more funds. besides, the latest newsletter hints that the endless supply of goods might come to an end soon. So better trade some more now while these supplies have not fallen dry yet.
Since I am hauling high value loads, I spend the cash to fully arm my new freighter. While equipping the Lakon-9, I wondered why I could not fit a C4 turreted laser in my C4 slot; maybe a bug, maybe intentional, but not very clear. A full missile loadout worked well last time, if not to say it saved my expensive butt, so I stick to it. I start my trading runs and travel as follows; I Bootis - Ithaca (fish, 129k), Ithaca- LS 3262 (palladium, 664k; wow, the cargo load is worth 5,5 million Credits!), LS 3262 - Tilian (consumer tech., 593k), Tilian - LS 3262 (food cartridges, 36k; yep, not much profit but it felt like fun to load up with food cartridges!). With this, I end my session around midnight. I am already a bit bored, there is nothing really new with hauling and it is too late to start buying and equipping the Anaconda, thus getting some sleep gets my bid.
I wonder if the Anaconda will really proove to be entertaining. Maybe I should rather start doing things which I would not do in the released game, i.e. pirating and becoming a most wanted player, like those two guys mentioned in the last newsletter? The only reason barring me is that it would probably make it later difficult to access new content in later beta updates. We will see.
Addendum: Nice write-up about Elite and the Ocululs Rift here.
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