What Starter Ship to Choose & Why
Welcome to some more Star Citizen today I wanted to talk about what ship you want to start the game with in Alpha 3.3 if you are new to the game and why it should be the Mustang Alpha, what you can do to make money in your starter ship or if you want a little bit more the thinking about upgrading to the Avenger Titan.
The Mustang Alpha – Starter Ship Package allows you to get into Star Citizen as cheaply as possible.
A Game package & a ship for star citizen is needed to play and it comes with a ship, the Mustang Alpha OR Aurora MR.
Why not the Aurora MR – The Aurora can have missiles and has a bed (which is useful for easy logging off and respawning in) BUT when I look at Starter Ships I look at trying to get to the next tier of ship as quickly as possible. You are going to do that by earning aUEC as quickly as possible (at least in the short term)
The Mustang is faster & more agile making it more suitable imo for combat and small cargo hauling.
The Aurora MR has 3 SCU of Cargo
The Mustang Alpha has 4 SCU of Cargo
Both ships have the ability to equip more weapons, at the moment the Aurora can equip 4 s1s but the Mustang Alpha can currently equip 2x S1 and 2x S2 weapons.
The Aurora does have better stock equipment when it comes to systems tho, with Industrial components over the Civilian ones in the Mustang.
But at the moment being able to have more powerful weapons, more cargo & be faster the Mustang Alpha is a no brainer to me.
Missions & Uses
So what missions are you going to be doing?
Well it’s a 1 person ship & it has no space at the moment for pick & deliver missions.
Unless you want to try glitching someone or a box behind the cockpit you should not take transport person service beacons OR pickup box, Maintenance / Delivery Missions.
You are going to be able to do any of the Combat, Patrol & Mercenary Missions, Literally patrolling an area or killing pirates or scanning down & destroying probes. Investigation (so Covalex) gathering data on foot and uploading the results, Find a Person in a wreck, ECN Alerts NPC distress signals, Killing NPCs running around Kareah. Also Combat Service Beacons are a good source of money these are generated by playings to escort them or save them from a Quantum Interdiction / Pirates or another hostile player, there will also be Space Scramble Races, weapons free shooting each other while trying to destroy race beacons.
On a side note there are some appointment “missions” that have you meet NPCs like Recco Battaglia, Ruto & Miles Eckhart but box pick/delivery are typically parts of the missions they give you, tho you can certainly do the appointments. Read any other offers before accepting.
If you have a bike or Vehicle you can also do the Ground Racing Missions.
Another way to earn money is small scale cargo runs, although you can’t carry mission delivery boxes you can buy and sell commodities, 4 SCU mean 400 units at a time. This does mean you are not going to be earning a huge amount of credits each run BUT if you combine this with missions sensibly buying cargo when you are near somewhere that has a good price and then selling it when you are at somewhere you can make profit from it then it will augment your income.
In 3.3 you mission really should be to get a Dragonfly or Cyclone so you can participate on Ground Scramble Races, Upgrade your Mustang with better systems and Weapons & try to save for either a Cutlass or Prospect (which will allow you access to more things, like mining from the prospector, BUT from the Cutlass it allows you to pretty much try out all the other parts of the game, delivery missions, pick up players, much larger cargo runs, carrying your own bike to a scramble race.
In 3.3.5 you’ll be able to rent ships & there will also be more to buy from New Deal in Lorville.
In game aUEC and purchases made with aUEC will reset at least every major patch until they have at Full Persistence, which is a ways off.
You will start each of these patches with any UEC on your account added to your aUEC in game.
Avenger Titan
Once available to buy in game the natural progression from my point of view would be from the Mustang Alpha to the Avenger Titan as it will be significantly cheaper than the Prospector and Cutlass & is apart from the Mustang Alpha the only other ship I would recommend starting with.
Currently it’s available for a $20 more upgrade from the Mustang Alpha, you literally can upgrade your starter ship later, so there is no rush, might as well start with the Mustang Alpha in the short term.
The Avenger Titan has a cargo bay with much more space, you can bring boxes on board allowing you to make money from scavenging & access to the Delivery & Maintenance Missions, larger cargo runs, basically it can do everything that that game has to offer other than mining and racing on the ground. It’s a solid Dogfighter with a lot of system and weapon upgrade options It has a giant nose gun & missiles too. It has a bed which means you can log off from it and spawn where you left off from rather than having to land OR reclaim your ship.
I hope that helps some of you choose which ship to start the game with and what you’ll have access to in the short term.