I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

Fri May 05, 2006

The Long Run

The elongated, city-sized Industrial hauler slowly drifts towards the last stargate. Impatiently, I engage the afterburners - there is danger out here still. This will be the last jump of a long and dangerous journey, bringing most of my possessions to my new home.

I have found a relatively quiet, statistically safe and reasonably profitable system, where I can work for the security arm of Lai Dai, while still dabbling in mining and manufacturing.

In the hold of my hauler, the “Freedom III”, are several small ships and shuttles (packaged - essentially in compressed kit form), packaged equipment to be mounted on these ships, some ammunition and materials, several combat drones, blueprints for three different kinds of missile, a blueprint for an increased range cruiser-class railgun charge, and another blueprint for a versatile kind of frigate.

Finally I dock at the assembly plant, a giant space station orbiting one of this system’s planets, and unload my hauler into my personal cargo bay. I assemble a fast shuttle, and hop in. I have to take that dangerous road all the way back - to pick up my mining cruiser (the closest thing I’ve encountered to a jack-of-all-trades in this game - it can mine, carry some cargo, and bear arms all at the same time) - as it is far too massive, even packaged, to fit into my hauler.

Of course, there are ships that could easily fit a dozen it into their holds, packaged or otherwise. These cost about two thousand times what my hauler did, and require skills I am not even close to approaching.

The tiny shuttle passes my immense battlecruiser, “Wrath of Khatar” on its way out of my personal hangar. I gaze at it longingly; it will be about an hour before I get to play with it again.

I’m unfazed by the prospect of more long travel. There is at least one dangerous system I will need to navigate manually both ways, and I have some in-game email to respond to - an invite from a player corporation - and I can always peruse the market and plan my next move. The sheer amount of data in this game is boggling. Outward bound, I open the map which I have set to colour solarsystems based on the number of player ships destroyed there in the last hour. The pirate system on my route is still the same colour and size on this custom map, and still listing two ships destroyed in the last hour. Good. This implies no new pirate activity.

Whump! I’m past the system. It wont bother me for another twenty minutes or so.

If you’re wondering by now, what the fuck I am talking about, its a massively multiplayer online game called Eve. It’s a lot like frontier or elite, only with other people. It can be found at http://www.eve-online.com/.