I want to say a little about my engineering experience to this point. First, I want to say to Ice and Wingnuts that you guys were right. I spent some time arguing my philosophical high ground as to why I thought playing without engineering was preferable. And while I haven't completely abandoned those views, the engineering experience has at least made me hide them under the sofa cushions.

One of my main objections was that I didn't feel like investing the time it takes to gather materials. I envisioned a grindy grind as I searched for 78 units of flux capacitors in order to gain two light years or 20 m/s. So far though, it's been nothing like that. There may be requirements down the line that do indeed have some element of this. But to this point it's not been.

The sum total of my efforts has been:

-- Regular wake scanning whenever leaving or returning to a port. Just hang about the entrance and get a few scans in. Simple.

-- Two SRV landings. Each was about 30-45 minutes.

-- Entering maybe a half-dozen threat 0 USS sites.

-- Two very long trips to gain materials required to unlock the engineer (two unlocked so far)

And that's it. From this I've managed to upgrade the thrusters, FSDs, shields, sensors and power plants on all four ships in my fleet. All are grade1 and some have grade 2 modifications. I've been at it for just a few days. Not only has it been easier than I had reckoned, it's been fun. It's got me out doing things I wouldn't have otherwise. I had never been in a SRV. But I like it. It''s fun. I had never entered a USS, and done that now. I had never bothered to scan wakes.

Maybe eventually I'll see it as a grind when I reach the highest grades, I don't know. But so far it's been fun, not just the actual ship building, but also gathering the stuff that's needed. I am a strategy gamer at heart. Engineering gives me choices and decisions to make. A sense of opportunity cost that I find so compelling.

What I do is fly a ship that I want to upgrade to the engineer and do whatever I can to it. I then pin one blueprint that I would like on my other ships, and fly back to home base. I then bring out each ship in turn and apply that upgrade at the Remote Workshop. It seems you can only pin one blueprint per engineer at a a time, and you cannot apply experimental effects at a Remote Workshop, so it has limits. But I don't have to fly each ship out to the engineer to upgrade them one at a time. That's been a nice surprise and eliminated another one of my objections to the whole thing. It was simply misconception.