Pardus/Starting with the Empire

Congratulations on joining the Empire! The Empire specialises in weapons and missiles, and has the largest trade ships in the game. An Imperial player will always be on the attack, able to deal heavy amounts of damage in a small time, but defensively is the worst faction.

Your first Imperial ship
For starters we'll take a look at your first ship choice; the Ficon.

Many players will swear by this ship for their first few weeks, and you will as well. A good skiller and ranker in the first days. But make sure to get some money before buying it to equip it with some goodies.

Climbing the ladder
Now let's do some missions to rank up!

Essentially ranking, as described here involves either moving things around, or killing NPCs(Non Player Characters), for money, reputation(important for gaining rank 14, or if you plan on joining EPS at some point), and rank progress.

If you have the Ficon, doing some early package missions are possibe, but mainly your focus will be on doing kill or "Assassination" missions. By using a mapper and by remembering where you have aready seen certain creatures, kill ranking can be pretty easy. There are dragon dens in every cluster, and can make excellent end-run destinations. However at the start all you want to do is go to the bulliten board and look for missions to kill space maggots; a highly common and easy to kill NPC. They are in almost every sector, and respawn every six minutes. Go to a few different bases and planets collecting missions to kill one or two maggots(not location specific), and then also one or two location specific missions(try to stack these as well, as in three missions wanting a maggot dead at the same spot), and then by killing said one or two maggots, you should have already gained a rank. Nice work!

This will become a daily activity until you reach a specific rank you want to get a specific ship or piece of equipment, but beware, missions times will shorten as you rank up, and missions needed to gain the next rank will also increase, meaning ranking will become harder, and take a lot longer later on.

I'm bored and I want to shoot stuff!
Yes yes, calm down. We all want to just shoot stuff sometimes, and not worry about missions. Good news; at only rank four in the Empire(That's Sir/Dame) you can purchase the Shadow Stealth Craft(or SSC for short). This little piece of wonder has less space then the Ficon, but much more armour, four gun mounts, and is absolutely tiny. It's great for skilling in, and you'll be shooting down those pesky pirates in no time. This is a good time to take a break and get your skills up before you continue ranking. This is also a good time to start looking at the Imperial alliances in your area and looking into joining one(Alliances provide financial support sometimes, as well as advice, economies for you to build in and make money, and they offer cheaper ships at their starbases then the planets.).

Well, what now?
Surely you can think of that yourself, yes? Do more missions, train your combat skills, make money, and reprisent the Empire in times of war for a lot of fun and social interraction, or if you find the Empire is not for you, try another faction, or remain neutral and go exploring the vast neutral zone, void or the factions and filled with player pirates and other dangers.