Apres-Sol

[Badger]

Hello Cmdr's
Having spent the last..... well...... good few sessions focused almost exclusively on earning my Sol Permit, I'm sitting now inside the silently spinning tons of Abraham Lincoln, a tiny bit underwhelmed if I'm honest . No acknowledgement of what felt like a huge milestone. No Earth landing.. well this much I knew already. But no standing on the moon to see the Earth rise? Disappointing.

Anyway, I've investigated a couple of signals on planets since I got here and bagged a little loot, but it felt a little empty and hollow after the laser focus of getting here and now I'm wondering what goal to set next.

So I thought I'd ask my fellow space travellers. After achieving Sol, what main goal did you embark on next. Not "what can I do next". There's any number of directions of course. But rather what did "you" do next. :)

Badger

[dave46563]

One of the first permits I worked on was Sol. Glad to be able to visit the home system, but a bit of an anti-climax. First thing I did was visit Voyager, which is a bit easier to do now with the FSS.
Sol became my home system, with Abraham Lincoln being where i parked all my ships. I went on a long exploration journey shortly after which lasted about 5 months. Colonia to Sag A* and back to the Bubble. The credits I got from that gave me Elite in Exploration. I moved to Shinrarta Dezhra soon after and Jameson Memorial became my new home (still is).

Apart from scanning all the tourist beacons, Sol became just another system to me. I still like to park close to Earth though, switch Flight Assist off and gaze at her.

[Jeebs]

Check out Li Qing Jao. It's a much nicer-looking space station than Abraham Lincoln and I use it as my home base for that reason alone. I like coming home to Earth after a long trip, and while you can't land on it as you said, LQJ has lakes and statues that I enjoy taking in as I fly in.

As for what you can do next, Sol is one of my favourite places to stack missions. Because there's three stations around Earth and one around the moon a short hop away, it makes it easy to stack multiple missions.

Once you reach allied status (which won't take long if you're doing this) it's a good way to make a lot of credits earlier on, and a decent way to get some engineering materials too., They're also more friendly in how they greet you when you request docking permissions at one of their stations.


If you like combat, you can stack pirate massacre missions. The neat thing about these mission types is that you can go to each faction in Sol and take on missions from each one to kill pirates from a certain faction.

You can take on 5 missions to kill the same pirate group and as long as you took those missions from 5 different factions, each pirate you kill will count for all five missions. For example: if you take on 5 missions to kill 20 pirates, you only need to kill 20 pirates and not 100.

You can stack several missions to hunt the different pirate groups in the neighbouring systems using this method. Avoid Alpha Centauri and you can make good money and build up your rep to allied status with every faction in Sol very quickly.

Stacking cargo missions is another way to go, if you prefer that. Though if you stack 20 cargo missions, you will almost certainly get a whole mess of NPC pirates coming after you. I recommend that you either fly a ship that's nimble enough to easily avoid interdictions (the T-9 is not a good choice here) or something that you can fight back in.

The cops will jump in to help you pretty quickly if you reach allied status with the controlling faction, so you can use that to your advantage. Just don't risk mission-critical cargo.

I'll usually take on delivery missions to a station that sells goods that I will then bring back to hand in for a fetch mission. The goods I have to deliver can't be replaced and you can fail the mission if they are lost, so I avoid interdictions until I deliver them. Even if I'm confident that I can take on my attackers.

The goods I have to fetch can be replaced however, so I submit to interdictions on my way back and blow up the pirates for a bit of extra money and to change things up a bit. That's why I started using my Anaconda, but you can do this in a T-6 or T-7 and just avoid interdictions entirely.

Last thing to consider is passenger missions. Play taxi to a bunch of brain-damaged rich morons and take on sight-seeing missions. I know that doesn't sound appealing on the face of it, and I acknowledge that it's a weird way to sell it (but it is accurate).

However, it will take you to different places in the bubble that you may not otherwise have gone. There's more than a few neat places to see in the bubble, and that's an easy way to see them while getting paid.

Just read the job description and the passenger's requirements carefully so you know what you're getting into. Some passengers are laid-back, some are more demanding, some are priavate/paranoid and don't want to be scanned, some are criminals and you'll get attacked if you're scanned.

Sorry for the novella-length reply. Hope it helps. There is really a lot of things you can do in Elite, so the "what next?" question is always a tricky one to answer. I tried to confine myself to what you can do from Sol, and didn't even touch on everything there is to do there.

[Dolphin Bottlenose]

Originally posted by Jeebs:

As for what you can do next, Sol is one of my favourite places to stack missions. Because there's three stations around Earth and one around the moon a short hop away,

... and another station in a nearest star system, Centauri. ;)

naughty naughty ;)

[0Samuel]

The reward for permit locked systems is that you get to scan the tourist beacons, and/or get a discount from certain ship manufacturers. And the discount is never very large.

If you didn't scan the beacons, or reading tourist beacons is (understandably) not something that seems the most engaging to you, then yeah, getting permits is going to feel more than a little underwhelming.

This is especially true for Sol. See, all the other systems may be novel and interesting, especially if you haven't been trawling through the wiki, but you already know why Sol is a big deal. It's where you are sitting right now.

As for new goals.. there's so many to choose from. Have you been to Colonia yet? (Used to be quite a challenge, but you could fly the Colonia Bridge now) Soloed a Hydra? (may want to manage your expectations on that one) Flown and fitted a Corvette? (That one is an easy pivot since you are doing fed stuff already) Done the Ram Tah missions?

Recently I decided I wanted to fit shock cannons. I'm almost certainly going to regret that, but a goal it is and I will earn that regret honestly.

Some goals are obvious, and carry a sense of progression with them. Some are arbitrary, and ultimately pointless. Some, like learning to fly FA-off, you can do while pursuing other things. But this game has far too many for you to ever truly run out of them.

[Badger]

Thank's for the food for thought folks.