Yeah, I did consider the ingle-player combat thingys (I've done about the first four, aaages ago not long after they first became available to me, shortly before the Beta went live), but those are pre-set ships with specific weapons and stuff - they're not
my ship. I just don't want to risk being utterly terrible at combat and getting nuked by a Sidewinder or something. I'm not even entirely sure how to ID a ship without actually turning round and trying to target it or look at what shape it is and don't want to risk wasting valuable escape time only to find out it's an Anaconda or something (if NPC pirates even fly those).
I need to check how much it'll cost me to re-buy my Cobra if it gets blown up (seem to remember seeing it listed in the right-hand panel of the cockpit, which I hardly ever look at). If it's not a huge massive amount then I may risk some combat once I'm well over the amount I would need. But for now I'm okay just doing trading trips/missions around Tau Ceti and TZ Arietis (the latter being where I bought the Cobra in the first place and where I go to get my upgrades). One day I'll look and see where the capital of the Alliance is and head out that way - they seem like the faction I'd be most interested in joining as the Feds are all military and stuff (or something...there was a reason I'm not that interested in them) and while the Imp ships tend to look all snazzy and cool, they're all a bunch of stuck-up show-offs, really, aren't they?
Plus slavery
.
. Well, there was one back in Beta but that was more of a buggy Beta thing - got Interdicted by a pirate and decided to fire first, which got me a bounty even though the NPC was blatantly gonna attack me at any second. Ran away because it turned out I was no good at trying to kill stuff, arrived at the station and got blown up by security for trying to dock with a bounty.
.
