Hey everyone,

I subscribed to this game for a month right after the release went live, played for about 20 minutes then did other things and never came back.

Over the past couple years I've been playing EVE, and to be honest I'm getting burned out playing by myself.  I've flown everything from mining frigates to Rorquals on my mining character, from T1 combat frigs to Nightmares on my combat character and no matter how you look at it, when the people you played with for so long in a corporation split up and go their different ways, there comes a time when you just want to do something else.

So I resubbed up my Perpetuum account for a month came back to find that I hadn't ever really made it out of the tutorial area and decided to look a little further into mining.  I've gotten down the basics of area then tile scanning, using the different charges, and I refitted my ship with two mining lasers instead of the original 1 gun/1 mining laser fitting.

So here are my questions:

I have about 74,000 EP that I haven't used yet.  I took a couple skills up to level 5, just some basic mining skills, but still have that 74,000 left over that I don't want to waste. 

I guess before spending any more of those I need some help deciding where to go from here.

My biggest problem now is locating ore.  Right now I have a bunch of different area and tile charges in my cargo, but scanning even just one area takes forever.  I tried using the universal charges, but they seem to cover a much smaller area than the area charges, so I'm guessing they are kind of useless if you are trying try locate ore within a reasonable amount of time. 

Is there a certain bot that has a lot of "high" slots that I could fit multiple scanners with different charges to to cover areas more quickly?

Next up, I've heard that some areas you can be attacked by anyone (like lowsec/nullsec in EVE) and others you can't.  How do you differentiate between these areas? 

Lastly, back to the locating ore topic - are there certain ores only located in certain areas, so that when say I am in area "X" I don't waste my time scanning for ores that are located only in area "Y" or area "Z"?

Ok, 1 more, what kind of distance should I be keeping from the terminal as a starting miner?  Traveling is painfully slow it seems, this will take some getting used compared to the "align -> warp -> drink - > jump -> eat food -> etc" process of EVE, so the less time I can waste running around in circles with my bot the better.  I checked out the patch notes for the next release, the idea of the accelerated highways is REALLY cool.

Thanks for any help, I have to say that I think this game has a TON of potential.  It takes the fun of being able to really control your own "vehicle" with a system more complex than align, warp, orbit, fire guns-style game and combines it with an environment that is controlled by the players - pretty cool.