I'm having a lot of fun with Eve Online, and I'm glad I decided to give it another try. It's amazing what a little reading can make in experience! Yesterday morning I was running a few missions in my Incursus and definitely noticed that the missions are getting harder. I was still getting through them, but I notice I'm taking a lot more damage than before and the missions themselves are taking significantly longer. Part of which might be that I'm not using drones yet and I understand that I probably should be. It's something I'll have to look into very soon. But the point I took away from those few missions was that I couldn't simply waltz into a mission and finish with my hands tied behind my back. It also meant that my ISK per hour was decreasing and my expenses were going to go up.
As I described yesterday I bought a Catalyst Destroyer and converted it to my mining effort. It cost me about 820k ISK, literally leaving me with a little over 2k ISK after the purchase. But by the time I logged off last night I had over 1.4 million ISK. I would undoubtedly have made much more but I was mining the slow way. That is with one single basic miner. I'm still in that period where I can claim noobness! So anyway, by the late afternoon I had figured out (with some more reading) that I should strip out the gun I also had fitted and add a second basic miner. At my level of training it's all my poor little CPU can handle right now, and also not impact my available cargo space. After all, that's why I bought the Destroyer in the first place. A lot of guides will tell you to but a mining Frigate and to use that until you can get a Cruiser, but with the rather limited cargo space of a Frigate you end up running back and forth to a space station all too often. With my Destroyers 430 m3 cargo hold I can at least hold 4000 m3 ore. With the two mining lasers it takes me 7 mins to fill that up, and less than a minute to travel back to the station and back. Which means I can make about 7 fully loaded trips in an hour, whereas I'd have to make about double that in a Frigate.
In any regard I more than made up for my investment yesterday alone and everything I make in the next several days will go toward the purchase of a Cruiser where I'll begin to make some serious money. I know there are different schools of thought on the best way for a beginning player to make money, but Mining seems to be the best way I can tell. In the next few weeks I'll work my way up to a Hulk and from there I'll buy the heavy combat equipment that I want for my combat fix.
