Being Safer
stargrace 
Much has been said over the years about the learning curve in EVE Online. Sometimes, when I watch streams, I’m amazed at how much of the language I still don’t know. I watched a big battle go down in Curse yesterday with 1900+ players, which was awesome to watch, and while I once again took absolutely no sides in the outcome, I did feel like I was constantly learning about the history and drama that has trailed people around.
To that note, I decided it was time to learn two aspects of the game that I probably should have learned years ago but had never really given it much thought. It’s two (well, I suppose one) ways to keep ‘safer’ in space, since you’re never really 100% safe no matter where you are (unless you’re docked). For the first time ever, I decided to create some insta-dock and insta-undock bookmarks.
I use a lot of bookmarks, but they’re usually to pretty mundane locations already marked in the overview. I have never really paid attention to the tips and tricks of flying around safely, and when you’re a beginner, that’s OK. EVENTUALLY you should learn a few things though, and one of those things is how to set up an insta-dock (and undock). It’s pretty simple. Normally, I warp to my home station using the overview, and dock. There’s a few seconds where I’m not safe, because I need to inch a bit closer to the landing area. So what I had to do was get within 0m the landing area (taking care not to bounce off of the structure) and create a bookmark. I made one for my shopping hub that I frequent on an almost daily basis, and another for my home station. When going to either of these locations, the idea is: Set my autopilot destination to the location (don’t turn autopilot on yet though). Then warp to the newly set bookmark that’s within 0m, stealthing as I warp (or not, if I’m flying something that doesn’t stealth), turn on autopilot as I’m warping, and when I hit that 0m spot, autopilot will turn on, and instantly dock me. I could also manually dock instead of doing the autopilot thing, but it’s easier to just have the game dock me.
I didn’t really understand insta-undock, but what I’ve gathered is – you undock from your station, and don’t touch anything, using a naturally fast ship (to create the bookmark). Then you drift out away from the station, turning on MWD if you want. You have to be careful to pick a spot that’s at least 200m away from the station – but (and here’s where I get conflicting reports) you also don’t want a ‘typical’ number, because someone might be waiting there for you because they know it’s a popular warp area. So to set this one up I drifted out some random number away from the station, bookmarked it, and then went back and docked using my insta-dock. How I believe the insta-undock works is that your ship normally needs time to align to whatever you’re moving towards after you undock. If you set a bookmark out far away from the station in a perfectly straight line, then there’s no time needed to align. There’s also a buffer of (10?) seconds where you’re invulnerable from attacks as you undock in case your computer has lag. I set up the undock bookmarks, but I’m still not really sure how they work. It didn’t feel like I instantly warped off to anywhere, and I’m not really sure I set them up properly. I’ll keep practicing though and see if I can get it all sorted.
Ideally, you’d make these bookmarks for any place you go to. For now, I just plan on making them for the more popular routes I take. As I get better / faster at it, I’ll add more bookmarks. Now that I’ve joined Signal Cartel these bookmarks are really important because we spend a lot of time wardec’d. Plus there’s been some little beginner gankers hanging out at my shopping district hoping for easy kills. I don’t want to be one of them.
Fly safe! o7