Space, The Final Frontier

A couple of nights ago, I finished the exploration career intro missions with my newly-created alt, but instead of taking her out for a spin, I decided to log in as Bekka Jae and see how feasible it would be to have her do the training as well.

Of course the last place I played as Bekka was out in the wilds of 0.0, and I quickly discovered that the corp I used to belong to had moved on and I was in what is now a hostile station. It was a slightly expensive if not difficult decision to leave all the ships and other stuff I had in that station behind to clone jump out of there and back into high-sec.

Once back in high-sec, I called up my Assets window and took a quick inventory. Aside from the realization that I'll probably never want for a Velator as I seem to have dozens of them scattered all over known space, I also discovered a few interesting things I had just lying around and gathering dust, such as a Tech II tricked out, combat and mission-ready Myrmidon. In all honesty, it had been so long since I'd used it that I'd forgotten I had it. I'd been running missions with it before I moved to 0.0 and I'd left it there, ready to fly, as a "just in case I need it one day" thing. Apparently, a smart move on my part.

As nice as it is to find myself in possession of a fully-fit and combat-ready battlecruiser, it's even better because it happens to fit perfectly with another decision I made the other night. Over the last couple of days, I completed the exploration career path missions with Bekka Jae. For some reason, even though Bekka is Gallente I was directed to an Amarr agent out in Kor-Azor and ended up flying a Tormentor (or "The Cosmic Shrimp" as I like to call it) to complete the missions.

Once I was done with that, I got my first refresher lesson in why you can't just go out there and play EVE like you do other games. I started scanning down cosmic signatures in systems near where my Myrm is, knowing that if I ran into something I couldn't handle in my Magnate, which I'd been given after completing the exploration course, I could always come back with the Myrm and (theoretically) deal with it. I did scan down and check out a few wormholes, but aside from one that lead to a system in the far reaches of Amarr space, all of these led to unclaimable void areas of 0.0. Since there was nothing in those places really worth investigating as far as I could tell, I'd jump back through after just a short time and move on.

Mainly, it was practice for what I want to do in EVE for a while, explore. Late last night, on my last scanning attempt before bed, I scanned down my first actual radar site. When I went in, I found pirates there and instinctively warped out immediately, knowing I had nothing on the ship I was in to defend myself with, but I forgot to bookmark the location before I left, nor did I take the time to see what kind of ships I was dealing with. Also, I realized that I hadn't yet installed a codebreaker so there was pretty much no way I'd get anything useful out of that site other than location and enemy force information until I did.


When I got back to my staging station, I bought what I needed and realized that I needed to train a prerequisite skill before even installing the codebreaker. I took the half hour to do this, then I went out signal hunting again. After successfully scanning down another wormhole that led to the void, I decided to pack it in for the night.

Exploration is hard and often frustrating, but it's also a lot of fun. I'll be jumping in a little later to do a little more. Should be interesting...