I'm sorry if I sounded snarky above. I was serious... the hands shaking as I desperately tried to plot a course with 2% hull, and the pit in my stomach when I realized how failing to do a little arithmetic had put me within a razor's edge of being back in a Sidewinder (okay, honestly could probably have afforded to restart in an Adder, but saying Sidewinder's more dramatic)... that's the stuff that I look for in a compelling video game I keep coming back to:
real emotional impact. (Though I'm not entirely sure the "masochist" comment was joking, either, as the only other game that has ever provoked so much emotional investment in me is
The Last of Us. The fact that E:D does it entirely with game mechanics and can have comparable impact to a contender for the best-written narrative video game of all time is pretty amazing.)
RJW, I definitely didn't mean to say, "I'm not blaming anyone else, but because of your bad advice, I..." and my apologies that's what it sounded like. If TorTorden is right, your advice was at worst a little out of date and would have been spot on just months ago. I know
for a fact (because I wrote about it at the time) that I accepted missions here and there back in my carefree halcyon days last year running a Type-6
with no shields (because, you know, that's what traders do).... It does seem like the mission-hostile-NPC mechanic has been radically revamped from before, when it seemed to just make the haulage cargo much more valuable-looking to interdicting NPC's and ticked the chance of pirate NPC spawnage up a bit; the "wildly overpowered NPC on an implacable mission to kill you over a MacGuffin you're happening to carry" is a sort of feel-bad mechanic (and video game trope) that I'm surprised Frontier would put into the game, but I'm sure it was a case of the "how to make 10 MCr in three minutes" YouTubers ruining it for everyone. ;-)
I'm totally with GlobusDiablo on the "I'm a trucker" thing, though; for me, I was about ready to switch to doing something else in a different ship this past April, after just a few days in the Type-7, when two things happened that changed everything:
- I got an HMD (an HTC Vive);
- I got rudder pedals.
These two things made the Type-7
so compelling, just because of the immersiveness, the damned beauty and
scale of it. The bridge (and in the Type-7, it
is a proper bridge, not a "cockpit") has a canopy towering
15 meters above you—something that is just impossible to really internalize until you see it in 3D and can move around it; the way that the wraparound canopy combined with the T-7 being the only ship with (relatively) quick yaw—and my now having pedals to control that yaw—made the T-7 an unexpected blast to herd around. During the Engineers beta, when I could try out a bunch of ships I couldn't normally afford, I found that only the Type-9 Heavy has a more expansive cockpit view (and the Type-7 even beats the T-9 in terms of what you can see
below bridge deck level).
(Incidentally, it isn't just a visual thing, it turns out to be really useful: On planetary approach, the fastest way I've found to get from orbital cruise to a dirtside base is by entering orbital cruise far closer than you would with a straight approach, maybe with the base bearing about 30° below, and then helixing around the target using pitch, roll and yaw in a coordinated way, letting yourself take enough rotational gees in glide to grey out but not
quite enough to black out. This is a move that is pretty much impossible outside of VR in a T-7, T-9, or Asp S/Asp E, since you need to keep the base at about 80° green or red and about 15–20° below horizon, and those four ships are, I believe, the only ones that have glass in that bearing. Trying to do this maneuver using just the ball target might be possible, but would take a
lot of practice.)
Now, back in the Asp Explorer, the fact that the cockpit is much smaller really is noticeable (even though I think the two variants of Asp have the third-largest field of view externally after the T-7 and T-9 Heavy). The thought of grinding out commodity runs to build back my credits is much less appealing, so I'm probably going go for an armed trader buildout and do some missions and bounty hunting. I'm thinking there's an optimum point where I can get a few missions in for decent return before my rep with the particular system gets high enough to make the missions dangerous, at which point I'll move to a new system I'm neutral with and do it again. (I might give mining a try, though, I hear it's a lot more interesting—as a chill-out activity at least—in VR.)
Anyway, sorry again if my last sounded like sour grapes, it wasn't meant to be. And thanks (really!) for the advice.
