Elite:Dangerous has quickly become one of my favorite games recently because of its amazing design wide open world (universe). Despite that I've had trouble putting my feelings for this game into words without awesome, amazing, and intense showing up as every 3rd so instead of telling you that I'm going to share my experiences in the game with you and hopefully that will get both my feelings across as well as what to expect.
Everyone who starts this game starts this game the same way, with a Sidewinder and a thousand credits to their name. From there on out it is an open game you can either start trading, being a courier, hunting bounties, mining, or pirating though I wouldn't recommend the combat ones because those thousand credits aren't enough to cover the insurance on your ship if you blow it up. I started off at a small remote outpost in Eravate that didn't even have a market or a ship repair station but they did need some data transported to a hub station in system and promised to pay me a few hundred credits for my trouble. After this I took another small transport mission that would take me to Eta Serpentis so after I loaded up the necessary cargo to meet my quota I also loaded up on fabrics because I noticed they were exported Eta Serpentis as well. After that I started filling up my little Sidewinder with as much cargo as it could carry trying to turn as big a profit as I could on each trip. After a few hours I found myself back in Eravate and I bought myself a Zorgon Peterson Hauler but I'll never forget that little ship that I started out in because its still in Eravate waiting for me to pick it up.
Once I got into my hauler I outfitted it for well hauling in space. I easily had triple the cargo capacity of my un-outfitted Sidewinder and room for a fuel-scoop to boot so that I could travel farther without having to make expensive stops for gas. In my hauler I started clawing my way through trading and courier missions trying to earn enough credits to get myself into a Faulcon DeLacy Cobra which was my dream mid-size ship. Unfortunately in my hauler I was just big enough to pique the interest of pirates and suddenly at about every third or fourth jump I was fighting to avoid interdictions trying to pull me out of super cruise. There were a few times when I was almost to a station when a pirate would hook an interdiction tether to me and pull me out of super cruise and a few of those times it was really scary when they got through my shields to scorch my hull.
Once I earned enough to trade my Hauler for a Cobra I decently outfitted it for some light trading and doubled the amount of cargo I could carry. At this point I wasn't really looking for good trades but just seeing where the universe would take me. After a few jumps I ended up in a system I'd never been in before and saw some weird signal types in my navigation panel labeled "combat zones." Being curious I stopped at a local station and outfitted my ship for combat (the cobra is an excellent multipurpose ship). Almost a million credits later I entered the combat zone and encountered two warring system factions fighting for control of the sector with the port in it. I picked a side on a whim and started picking off a few ships that were fighting on the fringes of the battle. First one here, then one there and suddenly I saw 3 red blips on my radar peel of from the main battle heading in my direction. I quickly scanned them and saw that they were 2 eagles and a viper. Figuring that I outgunned and out defended the two eagles and had a lot more armor than the viper I could handle this if played properly. I decided to take out the eagles quickly so that I could focus on the viper alone and I turned to fight. I took down the first eagle's shields with my pulse lasers only losing a ring of shields to the other eagle and the viper. I glance down at my radar to discover that while dog fighting I ended up almost in the middle of 20 or so enemy ships. Suffice it to say I didn't waste much time pulling in my guns and trying to hightail it out of there. When I activated my Frame Shift Drive I was halfway through my last ring of shields. I was spamming the boost trying to gain distance. My shields went down before I was 25% charged because the other ships were mass locking me in place. Then my drives went and I was helpless and spinning through space. It didn't take much time after that for them to finish me off. After my excursion into the combat zone paying the insurance on my Cobra took half of my credits and to add insult to injury I didn't get to turn in my combat bonds because my ship blew up.
Since my insurance took so much out of pocket I was severely set back and decided to stear clear of combat zones until I had a bit more experience under my belt, but on the bright side I was now ranked as Mostly Harmless instead of just harmless. I made contact with some friends over comms to find out they'd stationed themselves in a faraway system named Amarak. It took me a long time and many many jumps with my fuel tank at least refilled once over by fuel scooping. They offered to share bounties mad while protecting miners from pirates in resource extraction sites. After making a couple million this way I headed over to the main hub of the system and traded in my Cobra for a much more nimble Viper and with the money I'd made bounty hunting I also bought a Lakon Type-6 Transporter. The Viper was a sidegrade to my Cobra offering more maneuverability and better thrusting power due to reduced weight in exchange for lighter armor and a smaller power plant. The Type-6 is a peculiar ship shaped like a brick and made purely for transporting goods from one system to another and despite looking very juicy on a pirates radar they don't have any more firepower than a Sidewinder making them easy prey if they are successfully pulled out of super cruise. I sort of made a home for myself in Amarak protecting the local mining populace when I was on a trade run, accepting larger bounties and assassination missions from local officials with good intentions. It was a peaceful enough life for anyone living on the fringes of Federation space until the news of impending war came.
The ruling faction of the Federation system of Lugh was in dispute between the current Federation allied party (Lugh for Equality) and an Independent party native to Lugh (The Crimson State Group). The conflict was the first of its kind. A war for independence brought about by the actions and encouragement of certain members of the Pilots Federation (laymans terms: Players acted in such a way to bring the CSG's political and economic power to be equal if not greater than that of the LE's causing war in the system). I dragged my feet for several days before leaving my viper behind in Amarak and setting out for Lugh in my Type-6 because it would cross the 150 light year distance faster. On arrival in Lugh I signed up for active duty for the Federation aboard Hartsfield Market and exchanged my Type-6 for a Core Dynamics Vulture. The Vulture is a small ship made up entirely of 2 large guns, a shield generator and a pair of thrusters. Its a ship designed for one thing and one thing only, to blow other ships up.