Meanwhile, I seem to have found quite a niche for myself in the EVE Online corp. Life in 'Rockpool' isn't nearly as fraught as I was expecting, and instead of the maelstrom of silent lonely ganking in the dark I was anticipating, things seem on the whole just as placid as back in my previous High-Sec region.
Partly, this is due to the geography of it all. Its a dead end that doesn't go anywhere special, and not on any of the main bottleneck routes to the yawning vastness that is 0.0. This means that there's not much to attract the more feisty spaceship warrior, and while the mining is (apparently) very good. There aren't huge resources of Megacyte lying around, or lucrative NPC spawns and complexes to attract the more militaristic expansion of the bigger players of the Alliance Game, although we hear about fierce battles one region over, from passing soldiers, on their way back from the front.
Partly it's also down to diplomacy, and I find myself a member of a surprisingly tight-knit, but sufficiently large community of locals, who are not exactly allies, but who all recognise the value of a mutual understanding. Blue icons fill the Local list, and this gives me a great sense of security, of not facing the stark badlands of Low-Sec alone. It's in everyone's interest to keep the lone troublemakers out. Not that I'd expect any of them to leap to my defence against a roving pirate mind you, but at least their CEO having to explain an attack to our CEO keeps the peace.
The biggest danger is complacency, I guess. Look out for an outraged and petulant post about how PvP sucks soon! But I've not let my guard down entirely, and keeping an eye on Local Chat is a new and fun subgame I'd not had to worry about before. Every time a new face appears in the list, it's Yellow Alert, and a hasty inspection of their credentials; Sec Standing, Bounty, Corp, Bio, Corp Bio, all these go to make up a basic background check. You can't believe everything you see there, of course, especially the Bio, but it all helps make an informed judgement about the newcomer - time to hide, or carry on as usual? All keeps things fresh.
The Directional Scanner is a handy tool also - a quick ping set to 360 degrees and 2,147,483,647km (14.3au) gives you an instant list of what ships are out and about nearby. And of course, the Star Map itself - Ships Destroyed in the Last Hour, Pods Killed in the Last Hour, Players in Space in the Last 30 mins - all essential tools for low-sec living.
I keep one eye over my shoulder, but its business as usual. This consists of grinding NPC corp standing from the ground up with a new corp I'd not worked for before - Agent 2 missions in a Battlecruiser! The new On-Board Cosmic Anomaly Scanner offers more challenging fare, for pure bounty work, and I've even had the odd valuable piece of faction loot out of those. The belt rats are often Battlecruiser class too, which is fun, and occasionally I even cover some of our mining barges as they try for these rarer minerals. Mostly though, they keep to the small high-sec bit of Rockpool for the day-to-day mining, where five light drones is more than enough cover.
No, turns out that my niche is in the Covert-Ops Frigate, which is fast turning out to be the more useful of the two ships I raced through the blockades. A little training got me the ability to use the Covert Ops Cloaking Device II, a module that changes the game in all sorts of ways. When active, I become invisible, which is always nice in an area where people can and will blow you up if they see you. The Covert Ops version is more expensive, and difficult to train for, but allows full-speed travel, and the ability to warp while cloaked, and lets you get screenshots like this:
If you can see this, you're invisible, a member of the corp that owns it, in a Dreadnought about to open fire, or very lost and about to die!
The Covert Ops Frigate is not a terribly potent attack craft in its own right, but information is power, and I seem to be making myself very useful to the corp as a whole by using my stealth to scout out potential sites for their POS (Player Owned Structures) department, using the scan probe launcher to get resource data from the moons - a surprisingly tricky business that involves manually aiming the ship to fire the probe. Some of these moons are tiny! This is a dangerous business for the Visible, as turning up out of warp at a low-sec moon with a POS tower already in place is almost certainly asking to be kicked in the cockpit by a XL Artillery Battery - not good.
This data is them passed back to the corporate leadership, who make the decisions about POS expansion. The deployed tower and moon harvesters can then mine all sorts of goodies, which form the building blocks of a very long and involved manufacturing chain which ultimately leads to Tech 2 Components. The POS itself is a hungry thing and requires constant fuelling, and the materials need to be hauled out to a base for use, all of which is through potentially dangerous space. Thankfully, none of that is my department!
In times of war, my Cov-Ops can be put to similar use, scouting out enemy positions, movements and the like, and all the while I drift about serenely enveloped in my blanket of invisibility. The only thing I need to watch out for is proximity - the cloak fails if I move within 2000m of another object, and won't re-engage if anything has you target-locked. I've been practicing by stalking neutrals as they unsuspectingly rat and mine in our neck of the woods.
All in all, it does seem a much more civilised way to take part in a conflict I'd probably be ill-equipped to take part in as a grunt - I just hope I'm up to speed in it all when something big does kick off!
The Cov-ops path isn't a lot of use for the soloist in Empire, but I'm suddenly finding that it's an invaluable all rounder for anyone who wants to be useful to a corp.