The story so far pt2 - initial moves
16 Jul 2020Orion Blacksun
One thing became clear very quickly. I needed a better ship. I decided to go for the adder as something affordable but better. It was a good choice with a medium hardpoint and enough cargo space to do transport missions. I did a bit of fighting in it too and it went alright. I soon had enough cash from missions to be able to upgrade again. I decided to go for a cobra3 and eventually found a station that sold it (I didn't know about finding ships on inara at that time). Anyway, wow, what a ship! This thing was amazing. With two medium gimbaled MCs and a pait of small gimbaled pulses it was so much better than the adder at everything. I used it for missions and could do a lot more cargo missions now. Combat was great in it too. This was the first ship that I upgraded the core internals for. I switched the pulses to beams when I had the power. I named this ship the dark star. Once I had upgraded the fsd to A I realised that I could go much further. But where to go? And what to do?
I was still reading lots of stuff online and saw many references to the bubble. But how could I see that? I spent an hour or so in dock just exploring the menus on the ship and discovered several things. I learned how to switch the map view to powerplay and thus observe the bubble. It's huge! Then I zoomed out all the way... The bubble is tiny.
What else is out there? Can I get my name on a planet? The seeds of exploration were starting to germinate. But what is exploration? How do you do it? More reading!
https://www.alpha-orbital.com/news/the-ultimate-guide-to-elite-dangerous-exploration
http://remlok-industries.fr/the-complete-explorer-guide/?lang=en
https://spansh.co.uk/riches/
Many thanks to all the CMDRs who provided the above info. It also became clear that you could make serious cash doing this. I decided it was time to buy an asp explorer. I was still doing missions to earn cash at this point but the cobra allowed me to haul a reasonable amount of cargo and it wasn't too long before I had the 7mil I needed. I kept the cobra though. It had served me well. But I haven't used it since. However, I now am considering a different use for it. More on that later.
So I now had my aspx, upgraded the fsd to A (wow, by the way, I was getting close to 40ly range) and did some misions in it to get a feel for it. It's huge! Handles much worse than the cobra but you have a fantastic view from the cockpit. It actually felt a bit like vertigo at first. Glass on the floor? Like the ship wants to spit me out.
More next time.
CMDR Orion Blacksun