The game is really methodical, you're a space miner, and you want to turn a profit. It sounds pretty par for the course but the developers have leaned VERY HARD into being a hard sci-fi thing.
Lemme' tell a story.
So I've encountered a few pirates, and have rebuilt my vehicle to have an asteroid-absorbing bumper on one side, and a microwave cannon on the other.
The Microwave cannon I use to melt the ice surrounding ore prior to pickup, rather than the Mass Driver cannon that is spinally mounted. The Mass Driver has been uptuned and is designed explicitly for punching through space-bastards at this point. If I tried to do any precision mining with it, I would end up causing an interstellar incident with the amount of force that would be imparted on any chunk scaled for pickup.
Anyway, lemme tell you about the UIO or whatever their shit is. They rolled up on me and another small tug having a radio communique in the shallow end of Saturn's rings (where I work.) and start spouting some anarchist shit about Ganymede. I fail to surrender, so they open fire. They have FOUR mass drivers on their frigate. I did not realize that they were the frigate that had just pulled up, as my previous experience with a frigate of that proportion involved me purchasing ship insurance that had been very useful.
Anyway, I got shredded, but I gave them enough of their own ass that I was BAAAARELY able to get out of the star system, and they fucked off back to whatever butthole they crawled out of.
Now, for the encounter that made me say "Ah, this game is somethin' special." as though being fooled by pirates wasn't already enough.
So, I'm a cheapskate, and I've developed a strategy in which I save a significant amount of money by only paying to dive to about 20K worth of credits into the rings, and then have been manually pushing myself deeper at roughly 70-100m/s which is an INSANE velocity to be hurling yourself through an asteroid belt.
I'm doing this, and my text feed radio crackles to life. "ANARCHY FOR GANYMEDE" it reads as I am narrowly avoiding large hunks of ice and semiprecious metals. Not today, Asshole! I'm a veteran Kerbal player, and I know that a little rotational monkey business isn't going to affect my dive, so I kick the mass driver on, and deliver about 100KG of furious projectile into these guys as I blast past at 70M/S. I see shells enter and exit their hull, but most notably I see that their thrusters have swapped from accelerating to intercept, to reversing and running like CRAZY.
I have an enemy FOR LIFE and the last time I saw him I kicked his ass. I didn't stick around to be sure I sunk him, but even so it feels great. Can't wait to get a bigger boat and really show 'em whatfor.
