Ladies and Gentlemen, I am now a qualified explorer and fighter. I got through all of their respective tutorial missions and only have one left of industry, which will be over in an hour when the damn ship finishes building. 
 
So I began the day with the last few exploration missions, which were far easier since getting some sleep and having the experience of yesterday to work with. There were Radar, Ladar, and something else types of signatures which were all very similar in the tracking down, just using different methods of salvaging. After getting to grips with using probes last night, these missions were a doddle and took hardly any time at all. 
 
Next came the military career path tutorials, which were fairly standard fighting missions. Ten times. I don't actually think I learned anything new between the first mission and the last, but I got some new equipment. That's something. Combat in this game seems initially simple; lock-on, orbit, attack. No doubt it will mix things up with some rock-paper-scissors mechanics, but I'll worry about that when I get to it. Toward the end of the career path there was a horrible mission where I had to go find a hotel, but everyone was dead and there were thick radioactive clouds everywhere. This gave me a sadface.
 
Then there were the industry career missions, which seemed to be a mix of mining and courier missions. Nothing to difficult here, though toward the end I was forced to equip my ship with both mining lasers and weaponry as there were people to kill before mining. I'm not really sure how courier missions fit into industry, but whatever. There were also a few missions that taught me about refining the ore that I mined and using it to build new equipment, and even ships. That seemed fun. 
 
So far I think I'm going to keep a seperate ship for each career and just use them when necessary, probably leaning more toward the exploration side of things. Heading out to ruins of old space stations just appeals to me a lot more than "BANG BANG YOU'RE DEAD" or the repetitive nature of mining. I'm also looking forward to seeing how the actual game works, as I get the feeling the tutorials do not reflect it at all. The idea of assembling a ragtag group of ships to head out into the black, some mining and exploring while the soldiers keep other players off their backs is kind of amazing. Can't wait to get through the two remaining tutorials and get my teeth into it. 
 
To-Do List: 
-Find more music for the jukebox, three hours of Firefly soundtrack was awesome, but I could do with more variety. 
-Stop getting distracted from the game by the draw of logging in to other people's facebook accounts. 
-Still not watched Star Trek yet. Remedy this post-haste.