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My name is Elvis and this, this is my story.
I'd just had some great news. My uncle - who'd been close to me and my mother since my father died in an accident - had left me a spaceship from his company's fleet. My very own spaceship! Five years, I'd been working in the Equipment Dock near Argon Prime, helping outfit Novas, Centaurs and Mercurys... plus the occasional Buster. Once, I even saw a Titan! That more than made up for all the Discoverer-class shitheaps that came limping in.
So as soon as I got his message, I had my personal assistant AI compose a letter of resignation and found the first ship heading for Herron's Nebula, where my uncle had hidden the ship.
As the strange-looking ship dropped me off on the wrong side of the asteroid from my gift, my mind starting racing with the potential ships that could await me. Maybe a Solano or a Eurus, possibly even a Venti! He'd been talking for years about how far his company's probes had penetrated Queen's Harbour, maybe he'd found the schematics for the Skate Prototype
As my spacesuit slowly moved around the asteroid, I turned to look at the Rimes Fab that had previously been the furthest I'd ever travelled from my mother's home on Argon Prime. Silhouetted against the turquoise glow of the planet below, it would have looked graceful if it wasn't for the billboard nearby. My mind wandered further, thinking about the stories I'd heard of the galaxy...
Of fearsome giant cylinders
And Pirate battleships...
That put up a real fight
Ferocious battles between deadly alien races
Sectors that must surely have been designed by the gods themselves
And spaceships so powerful their might would leave you breathless.
My suit negotiated a rocky outcropping and I got the first glimpse of the behemoth my uncle had left his beloved nephew...
That Goner-loving cuntsicle. AND WHY DO EVA SUITS ONLY COME WITH FUCKING REPAIR LASERS?
Let's Play X3:Terran Conflict (X3:TC)
X3:TC is, as Wikipedia so elegantly puts it: "a space trading and combat simulator from German developer Egosoft and is the culmination of their X series of computer games." It was released in late-2008.
What can you do in X3:TC?
Fly spaceships and build space stations mainly. You can then spend your time shooting other spaceships or making money by trading with other space stations. If you make lots of money, you can goon the whole thing up by greatly reducing the need to trade with other space stations. At some point your wealth will become so vast you can basically do anything you like without needing to spend any money yourself.
What can't you do in X3:TC?
Anything involving planets that isn't eye candy or breaching the artificial limits on sector exploration.
Have fun with anything involving space station management if spreadsheets aren't a source of joy for you.
A whole bunch of shit if you don't download the mods that let you do it. Vanilla is seriously limited.
Why LP it now?
Well, Egosoft are working on their reboot of the X franchise - something about a catastrophic explosion at the centre of the X-Universe (it's probably the Paranids' fault, it usually is) - which is due out at some point in the next 12 months.
The franchise itself has a reputation as being hideously complex and utterly unforgiving. In previous games, this was a fair assessment, but TC softens the edges slightly - we're talking papercuts rather than amputations.
On a personal note, I actually have enough free time this summer to have a decent stab at showing off almost everything the game has. Make no mistake, the X games in general have enough content to fill hundreds of hours of play.
How will you be playing the game?
I'm choosing the Anonymous Argon start. For anyone unfamiliar with X3:TC, this is absolutely the worst start possible for personal enjoyment. (Seriously, choose any other start.)
I'm choosing it because you start off with next to nothing and from a narrative point of view, this gives the most flexibility. I'll also be cheating liberally. My aim with the LP is to provide a coherent narrative, but I'll probably take shortcuts rather than spend 500 hours grinding Xenon/Khaak chaff. This is my summer break, I don't want to spend half of it wanting to kill myself. I also have a few mods/scripts installed to allow me to be more creative.
My aim is to stop and ask for community feedback on certain decisions.
Will you be doing the plots? And will this be SS only?
At some point. The plots are pretty shit, but they deserve to be shown, if only for comedy's sake. And yeah, while this will mostly be a screenshot-LP, if I can sort it out, I'll throw in some videos (Final Fury missions, probably). I haven't ruled out showing some of the more interesting starts, either.
[Note: Text in italics between square brackets is out-of-character explanation. Even though X3:TC has a gentler learning curve - by some distance - than previous games in the series, it's still a very dense game to try to get into.]
Update #1:
Handing in my notice without waiting to get paid was looking like a bad idea. I had 2500 credits in savings, useful for a dock-monkey indulging in Space Weed at the weekends, but not nearly enough to buy upgrades for my ship. Trading was an option, but checking the ship revealed the cargo bay was barely big enough to fit my own luggage; trading 10 Energy Cell packs at a time is a slow, slow way to make a living.
Running errands seemed like the only way to make enough money to upgrade my ship so I could last any time at all outside of the Argon Core sectors. So I set off around Herron's Nebula, looking for a station offering a mission I could do in my piece of shit Discoverer.
[In the X games, space is divided up into a lot of 'sectors', basically parts of space in which stuff can happen. These sectors are linked by Jumpgates - fly into a jumpgate and you'll come out the other side in a new sector - and this is, broadly speaking, how you can travel around the X Universe. Any sector can, at one time, be linked with up to 4 other sectors via Jumpgates. They are arranged as per a compass, with North, East, South and West. The size of the sectors varies as well; Argon sectors, as a general rule, are the smallest. Early-game, this isn't hugely important, but it's nice to remember when you enter some Teladi or Paranid sectors]
No-one had anything interesting except one of the local Ore Mines, that was offering a combat mission. The drunk spacecop I spoke to said it'd be easy, clearly not noticing the lack of any weapons on my ship.
[Mission Types: Red targeting reticules are Combat Missions, they don't always require you to be able to shoot guns, but they're much MUCH harder if you can't]
Leaving that cesspit behind me, I headed through the East Jumpgate to The Hole, hoping to find something of interest there.
The pilots I'd heard bragging about how much money they'd made in The Hole had obviously forgotten that they spend all their time staring at the monitors, rather than out the cockpit window. The nearby star is visible, as is the planet, but nothing else is until you're almost dangerously close.
The whole North-East-South-West jumpgate system isn't strictly applied with The Hole. A couple of other sectors are similar, but the combination of poor visibility and jumpgates skewed off the axes make the sector probably the worst in the game to map
Flying around aimlessly, I found this Cattle Ranch and was briefly excited that there might be a mission I could do. Sadly, the greedy fuck was only trying to sell sector maps. I flew around some more, but saw nothing but more green, so I changed course for the Jumpgate I'd come through, heading for Argon Prime.
Boring though the sector is, there's still tons of stuff orbiting homeworld. One of those things is the Shipyard and one of the military guys had a mission. He said that one of their pilots had bailed in Cloudbase SouthWest and they needed someone to go and get the ship back before important secrets were compromised.
Something seemed a bit strange about the mission. Firstly, Cloudbase SouthWest is one of our sectors and the newscasts are always talking about patrols in the area. Secondly, the Harrier is a Teladi ship and the only Argon who'd ever be seen dead in one would be a Pirate; except Pirates don't tend to fly the Vanguard design - increased hull strength and lower speed isn't really their style.
[Almost every sector has a race that owns it. The type of sector is determined by the level of security. Border sectors (strangely) have low levels of security, Core sectors have loads. Cloudbase SouthWest is s Border sector that is adjacent to a Core sector, so the lack of military presence is odd.]
Still, they were going to pay me to go in, get the ship and send it back to them. So off I went.
I passed through Ringo Moon and Red Light sectors on the way, but aside from a Titan-class practicing maneuvers, nothing much was going on.
[When you have an active mission in your log, your HUD will display Orange markers around either jumpgates (if the objective is Out-Of-Sector) or the objective itself. Here, the markers follow me through this jumpgate to the next jumpgate along and then to the target ship in the correct sector.]
I found the target ship a reasonable distance East of the North gate in Cloudbase SouthWest. Nothing seemed too unusual about the situation, so I approached and prepared to follow standard Salvage protocol.
Once hull integrity was 100%, I returned to my Discoverer and interfaced with the Harrier's navigational computer, setting it to move on Autopilot to Argon Prime and dock at the Shipyard there. The ship began the journey and I got myself a drink.
[The lower Hull Integrity is, the more your ship's systems will be damaged. As a ship gets damaged, upgrades, hardware and software are destroyed. A ship that's got a hull integrity of 1% will have a severely restricted top speed; repairing it to 100% will restore the factory setting top-speed, minus whatever upgrades may have been installed in the past. With 'Ship Retrieval' missions, it's almost always worth repairing the ship to full before sending it to its destination, since you'll usually make up repair time thanks to the quicker speed the ship has afterwards.
As I reclined in my cockpit chair with an ice-cold vodka, I idly gazed at the sight before me. The Harrier would take about 15 minutes to make the trip to its destination. 4200 credits isn't a huge amount, but I could get a couple of Engine and Cargo Bay upgrades out of it and... what was that..?
I put my drink to one side and got the ship moving closer to the jumpgate.
Even with the dreadful equipment on my Discoverer, it didn't take long for a number of ships to appear on my sensors. Moving even closer made the picture clearer still:
A Paranid raiding party, led by a Heavy Nemesis. I noted the lack of Argon military with a sinking feeling. Still, on the bright side, there was no indication the god-fearing nutjobs were the slightest bit interested in me.
And also, the Buster my sensors had noticed didn't have a pilot and was floating free in space. 
I waited for the clay-faced psychopaths to move out of the way and approached the derelict ship.
Salvage protocol was observed and the ship was sent back to the Argon Prime Shipyard. The Buster is an old design and has been superceded for a good reason, but I'd still seen second-hand ships selling for tens of thousands of credits. A windfall like that could really set me up.
The lack of any response to the Paranid fleet - which was doing nothing to the stations in the sector - was still nagging at me. I was distracted enough that I didn't notice the flash indicating a ship had jumped into the sector. The sound of Flak Arrays firing got my attention.
A Boreas! OTAS said they'd designed the class as a Light Destroyer. Usually their very presence had persuaded enemy forces to go somewhere else; successfully enough that they'd never had to fire their weapons in anger. This time, however, they did. The salvos lasted less than 30 seconds. In that time, the Heavy Nemesis was destroyed, as were half of the fighter escorts; the rest headed for the South Jumpgate.
It was at this point that I got a message
I terminated my link to the Harrier and the Military sent me the agreed payment. Thinking about the strangeness of the whole situation, I realised how tired I was. The Trading Post was nearby and I decided to dock so I could sleep onboard for the night
With the Autopilot engaged with the docking procedure and the station increasingly filling the cockpit windows, slowly rotating all the while, I fell asleep before the ship had even come to a standstill in the docking bay.