This guide will be a little bit longer as it is the first guide involving combat. I won't be covering the combat pages in full in this guide, rather just going over them briefly so you know enough to complete the missions. If you would like a full guide on the layout of all the different combat pages you can check out the guide in the screen reader section covering the combat pages.
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Part 7.1: Traveling to New Orion and accepting your mission from Gunny
You need to undock from Starbase-51 and dock at the New Orion planet in the same system. The easiest way to find it is to do a virtual find for the text"w o" this will search for W Space O and jump you right to new space Orion. Dock there and on the promenade find Gunny. View then talk to her and get your first mission.
One important thing to note is that Gunny only tells you to fit a weapon to your ship. She forgets to say you need to fit a scanner as well so you can do a combat scan and find ships to kill. Either way accept her mission and you will be ready to spend IP on the proper skill points for your weapon and scanner.
Part 7.2: Spending IP on Energy or Kinetic weapons and on Scan Tech for your combat equipment
The first thing you need to do is look at your equipment Jonas Hawk gave you so you can figure out how many skill points you need for each one. To do this you need to enter into your ship store. The graphic for it is in the bottom nav bar/footer. You can just search "p s". This will jump you right to ship space store. Click on this and you will be presented with your main ship store page. There is a table at the top which has a bunch of links which are the different categories you can sort your store by. The first one you need to click on is weapons. This is also the first link in the table. You can hit control home T then down arrow to get to it, or just search "weap". No matter how you find it just click on it and it will put another table under the first one which contains all of your weapons in your ship's store.
As said above navigate to the second table on the page, you can do this quick by pressing control home then T twice to jump to the second table. Once there use table commands, alt control down arrow to read down until you get to the weapons. You will have to choose what one you want to use. I chose energy simply because it is always what I have used in the game. Once you find the weapon you want to use alt control right arrow to move through the table cells until you get to the skill column. For the energy weapon it requires 15 skill points in energy weapons. Remember this as now you need to go check how many skill points are required for your scanner.
Go back to the first table and choose to view your systems. Then navigate to the second table on the page again and repeat the same steps as above to find out how many skill points are needed to use the scanner. You will find it requires 15 points in Scan Tech skill.
Now you need to go purchase the skill points. To do this you can just search the text "skill" from the second table and it should jump you right to the skills link in the bottom nav bar/footer. If it doesn't you may need to press f3 to search again. this is because the second table also has the text skill as a header, so depending on where you are on the page when searching it may not jump you directly to it.
Part 7.3: Purchasing the skill points for energy/kinetic weapons and scan tech
Once in your skills screen you need to find the energy weapons skill. You can do this by searching "energy". this will probably first jump you to your ship's energy graphic at the top of the page. Just hit f3 to jump to the next energy text which should be your energy weapons skill. Using table commands or down arrow you will see you have 0 points in it. then there will be a spend button, a view button, then finally a number which is the IP cost per 1 skill point. For energy weapons it is 275 IP per point. I don't know what kinetic is, so you will have to figure that out on your own if you want to use the kinetic weapon. Now go back to the spend button you passed and click on it. This will bring you to the standard spend skill points screen. double check you are indeed spending IP on energy weapons, then put 15 into the edit box and purchase the skill. on the conformation screen hit the button to return to the skills screen and repeat the above steps to find your scan tech skill and buy 15 points of that as well.
Now you just need to put your new equipment on your ship and you will be ready to go kill a training drone.
Part 7.4: Equipping your weapon and your scanner
You do not need to exit your skills screen directly, instead you can just go right to your ship loadout screen since it is located in the bottom nav bar./footer. To do this just search "p l" and this will jump you right to your ship space loadout. Click on it and you will be brought to the main loadout page.
The first thing you need to do is take off your mining laser as you will not be needing it anymore. to do this click on the first button on the page which will read as your mining laser. This will bring you to a page with a button to un equip it. Click this then proceed past the conformation screen by clicking on the return to ship loadout button. Now the first button on your main ship loadout page will just say weapon 1, this is where your gun will go. Click on the weapon 1 button and on the next page you will have a table which contains all of your weapons. Find the weapon you chose to buy skill points for and hit the button to equip it. Proceed past the conformation screen which returns you to the main ship loadout page again.
Now you need to equip your scanner. This goes in one of your three system slots. You can simply jump by button by pressing B. This will first read your newly equipped weapon, then weapon 2 which you need to leave empty. After this you will have your system slot 1, this is where you can put your combat scanner. Click on the button and follow the same steps as above to equip the scanner, it should be the only item you can equip.
After equipping both of them check your ship loadout to double check they are both there and equipped. then you can just hit V for the first visited link from the top of the page and exit your ship loadout.
Part 7.5: Getting to Far Point 1 and scanning for a training drone to kill
Undock from New Orion and dock at the jump gate. Far Point 1 is just one jump away from Feris so jump there and undock. After this orbit combat range 1 by clicking on its button once. this puts you in orbit of it.
Now you need to find the graphical link at the top of the body section for a combat scan. To do this you can just search "combat", "t s", or hit control home, B, then use up arrow to get to it. After clicking on the Combat scan you will be presented with your scan results. These are located in a table with info for each ship you found. This scanner is very basic and will only show you three ships at a time. You can navigate in this table and see how it is laid out. I won't be covering this right now, if you need that information click on the link at the top of this guide to view the screen reader's section combat pages guide.
The quickest way to see if there is a training drone in your combat scan results is to just search the text "train". If you hit on a result that is a training drone. If you don't then you need to scan again. To do this just hit control home then V twice. This will put you on the rescan visited link.
Once you do find a training drone then you can jump by button from the name of the ship. the first button will be a threat rating. This should read as 3/3 bad for the training drone. bad just means it is an enemy. the second button will be an attack button. hit this and you are brought to the main active combat page.
Part 7.6: The active combat page and attacking the training drone
This next page seems to be confusing for a lot of people, both sighted and blind. The first thing you should do is jump by graphics to see the layout of them. first you will have two shield graphics, then two armor graphics. followed by that two hull graphics, then finally two speed graphics. the speed ones don't matter at all on the active combat page. now hit control home to get to the top of the page. hit G to jump by graphic until you get to the second shield graphic. there are two numbers under it. the first one is your shields and the second is the enemies shields. Jump to the second armor graphic and two numbers will be under it as well. the first is your armor and the second is the enemies armor. The same applies for the numbers under the second hull graphic. This is the quickest way to check your stats and your enemies stats while doing combat.
There are a few buttons at the bottom of the page, but you only need to worry about one of them, the wep 1 button. This is the button you click to fire your gun at the enemy. Since you are fighting a training drone you don't have to worry so much about losing the fight. After you shoot at them three or four times you will have three tables on the page. The first one lists the stats, the second one lists your shots at the enemy, and the third one lists the enemies' shots at you. You can check the stuff in these tables to see how you are doing and how hard they are hitting you. For some reason the enemies' shots don't show up in a table for a few shots, but this isn't a problem most of the time.
After you take a few shots you can see how hard you are hitting, how hard they are hitting, and you can jump by graphics and check the health of your ship and the health of their ship. You need to keep shooting at them until one of you are dead, hopefully it is them.
Right now you can only shoot and nothing more, but down the road you can use special items like drones and matrix. Once the enemy is killed you will get a page telling you that you won and listing the xp and credits you got for the kill. Right now it is very low but down the road you can get thousands of xp per kill. Click the button to continue to the loot screen.
Part 7.7: Collecting your loot
This page is confusing, and it is best if you listen to the audio guide for this, or if you read or listen to the combat pages guide.
The loot screen is a big table with 5 different loot items. these are called windows by everyone in the game. above each window is a rescan button, and at the bottom of each window is a collect button. Rescanning will do just that, rescan for a different and hopefully better item in that window. The collect button tractors it and puts that window's resource in your ship store. You can rescan 3 times, it uses one action point per scan, and you shouldn't have used any action points during the combat. There is also a link to "loot all" which will put all the windows into your ship store assuming you have enough space to hold them all. if not you need to choose what ones you want to tractor.
Though I don't do it in the recording there is also links at the top of the loop page to do another combat scan or to repair your ship. If you do choose to repair on that page there are multiple combo/list boxes. the first one is for repairing your shield, second is for armor, third is for hull, and the fourth is for using kits. You should only have to repair your armor after this fight, so you can do that if you wish. In this guide I will just repair when I get back to New Orion via the promenade's repair service. This cost a few credits but it is cheap enough. It also lets me save my EBK kits for when I can't use a repair service, like in the later missions from Gunny.
Part 7.8: Returning to gunny, using the repair service, and selling your loot for credits
So now you have hopefully collected all the loot and are ready to return to Gunny and complete your mission. Dock at the jump gate, jump to Feris, undock and then dock at New Orion. Go talk to Gunny and get your mission rewards. Click through the buttons until you are back on the New Orion promenade.
Now you can choose to repair your ship while docked. From the top of the page search "repair" and it will jump you to the link for repairing your ship, click on it and you are brought to the promenade's repair page. the repair button is the first button from the top of the page. click on it and you are all repaired. Then to exit back to the promenade just hit V from the top of the page to get to the first visited link which is to exit the repair service.
Now once you are back on the promenade you can visit Joe's supplies to sell your combat loot. This is the worst place to sell items but also the fastest way. If you want more credits you should find a GBM and sell your stuff to other players in the game. for this guide I just need a couple quick credits so I'm selling to Joe for these missions only. View Joe's supplies then enter his store. When in his store the first button on the page is to sell all cargo to Joe's. Do this and he takes it all and gives you credits. on the page after selling all cargo to Joe's you can read up from the first button to see how much he paid you total.
After you return to the promenade you are done with this mission and ready to move on to the next mission from Gunny where you will be killing more stuff.
Continue to the getting started guide part 8, gunny's second mission.
Return to the getting started home.