The Progen Warrior is amoung the most feared opponents in the galaxy, there's nothing like having a ship with 5 weapon mounts and hull strength bigger than your shields. However, starting out as a progen can be a little unclear.

Seeing that, here's a quick guide to starting a progen and some tips to help you along your journey.

In the beginning:
*if you skipped the tutorial missions be sure to equip your Diamond Laser asap*

The first thing a new Progen Warrior should do after completing the tutorial session with Megan is to dock at Arx Forgus and talk to Sub-Commander Trask. She will guide you through the first newbie missions and give you VERY important skills.

Here's a quick run down of the missions, for the most part they're pretty straight forward so I'm not going to go into great depth about them:

Mission #1: Use your new "Gravity Link" Skill to slow and destroy 3 drones (these guys can be found at the first set of Navs to the upper left of the star base (if you're looking at the Navigational map). Once you slow/kill 3 of them head back to Arx Forgus and report to Trask for the next mission.

Mission #2: Ok this mission is a two parter. The first part involves heading to the second drone site just beyond the Achilles drones (same direction, they're hard to miss) and using your beam weapon to destroy one of them. Once done, return to Trask and she'll give you the projectile weapon skill and a cheap imitation Silvergun called an executioner (plus 30 rounds of executioner ammo). Equip the new gun and head back out to the drones. This time destroy a drone using the projectile weapon (it should be a little easier, though at this stage in the game you're likely to miss with half your shots unless you get close to the enemy). After making the kill return to Trask.

Mission #3: This might be the most important newbie mission of all; the Shield Inversion skill test. Shield inversion allows you to drain your shields and project their energy at an enemy doing about 10-18 damage a second, not bad, especially considering Progen Warriors can max out Shield inversion and Shield tech Very quickly at the beginning of the game allowing you access to an extremely powerful weapon. Anyway, Trask will give you the skill and instruct you to go kill some even tougher drones. These guys are found ever FURTHER away from the station, in the same direction though :) Destroy a drone or two or three using your new SI skill. It shouldn't be too hard, but you'll need to get pretty close to them in order to successfully activate the shield inversion. Also, remember that SI drains your shields pretty fast, if you're attacking an enemy that is doing good damage to your shields it may be inadvisable to use SI. Once you destroy the drones return to Trask and she'll give you a GOOD lvl 2 shield and a free skill point. Since you're probably still lvl 0 at this point (unless you've been a go getter and went out and leveled a bit already) use the skill point to upgrade your SHIELD SKILL to lvl 2. This will allow you to use the new shield (and therefore take advantage of the extra shield energy with your Shield Inversion skill).

Post-missions: Well now that you've got those main missions out of the way you've gotten 2 skills, a projectile weapon and a new shield. At this point you have a few options. You can try and do some exploring (quick and easy exploration points) by warping to the ? navs on your navigation map and using impulse to fly up next to them (once you've identified the nav it'll change icons on your nav map and you should notice an increase in the blue bar in the lower left of your HUD). While it's not my favorite thing to do, exploring navs at an early stage can allow you to a) level a little faster and b) make it easier to attain a higher level ultimately since eventually all that free exploration experience won't be granted to you even if you do explore the navs.

Another option would be to journey out into the universe and just generally discover what known space looks like. Be warned, outside of the newbie area can be VERY dangerous for low level progen, you haven’t got the equipment to be very combat effective. Still it's not like dieing actually penalizes you.. so have fun... just remember that before you try gaining experience out in the world you REALLY should get to at least lvl 10 within Mars Alpha.

Speaking of leveling in Mars Alpha, that's your other option!!! There are a variety of weak enemies around... probably the best place to start would be with the Alpha Worms found at Nav Centuriata 1 and 2, as these guys get easier you should move on to attacking Beta and Gamma worms (both successively harder, and therefore more EXP rich). Remember to loot the corpses of the defeated worms, you need money and lots of it, so gathering the crystals dropped by the worms can help (sell them to a vendor at the station). Eventually you should be able to start taking out Delta worms, note that these guys drop COMPONENTS sometimes. These components can be used to build a lvl 1 laser... but at this stage you're better off selling them for money (they're worth about 45 credits each, much better than the minerals). If you think you're tough enough, try finding the toughest of the worms; the "Epsilon worm" found on the outskirts of Nav Centuriata 2. If you manage to kill one you have a chance of looting a fully constructed Sparta Prosecutor Laser. This is really helpful at this stage of the game since you'll be able to use the second laser to augment your offensive power WITHOUT spending money to buy a new weapon from a vendor.

Finally a word of caution, The gate to Tarsis is found just beyond Nav Centuriata 3... which is home to the biggest enemy in Mars Alpha; the dreaded "Gate Keeper" I wouldn't suggest fighting him yet, unless you group up with some fellow recruits. At any rate he's pretty slow, so you can skip past him and move to the gate without too much worry.