Flyin the Deadly Skies on the Friends & Family Plan

Yesterday was a very good day... My RL Bro-in-law joined us in EVE.

You see me, my son, (a RL Marine and yes I am PROUD AS HELL), and an RL jarhead friend of his started our corp together. AI and SL had been ingame bout a year or so when I joined... and after I had a month or so solo under my belt, running the tutorials and just in general kicking around by myself... and yes, getting killed and podded a few times... I got together with them and we started our own Corp.

We spent a few months shaking down, doing basically just the 3M's... Missioning, Mining and Mucking about. We had a couple of noober-than-us-noobs join, and some leave... basically we were running along the lines of what I believe is best described as the "Bunch of Boobs Method" in Arcdragon's Absolutely Most Excellant Wormhole Guide, "Everything Wormhole"... as far as I am concerned, a "Must Read" for anyone, even if you never intend to go into WSpace.

My Bro-in-law Rus, is a cool guy who I am incredibly lucky to say is also my friend, and there are far too many of us out there who know how often that is not the case with in laws. We are both very much into wrenching, wheeling, and then fixing, our Jeeps. Rus is a RL mechanic and a damn good one and I have been a jack-leg shade tree wrench most all of my life, plus there is that we sorta just 'click' and just kinda get each other thing that you so rarely get in RL.

Now Rus is not as huge a Sci-Fi fan as I am, and while into computers, he is not quite the Geek I am, so I never really thought EVE would be something he might cotton to in a big way. But I had showed it to his older son and him once over the holidays and Rus emailed me and asked for a Buddy 21 day trial so he could try it out... Well HELL Yea! Anyhoo, he loads it up and while his sys does meet the minimum specs, it is a bit closer to min than max. So it turns out he can't open Incarna and make his toon... He petitions and CCP support does try, but it just can't handle the video output from Incarna and so he gave up on it.

Well sometime later I was up @ his place on what turned out to be day 20 of the original 21, and we logged him onto my CAD Box and low and behold, he was able to create his toon and get setup in EVE. After we got him ingame on his system, he petitioned and CCP reset him back to day 1 of his 21 day trail, schweet.

So he gets ingame and I get him in our corps public channel, intro him around and then I did 2 things right off the bat...

(1) send him 10M I$K as a grub stake and

(b) told him to DO THE TUTORIALS. And if he didn't get it the 1st time, do em again.

As all of us who fly the deadly skies of New Eden know. the learning curve in EVE is, well more of a Learning Cliff, looks kinda like this.... And if you don't know... well, go back and look at the link again (I'm the guy driving the bulldozer!).  =]

Anyhoo... that was a week ago and I have not seen or heard from him until last night. He has been runnin the tutorials and starting to get the hang of it, at least a weeks worth of the hang of it... I asked if he wanted me to join him and he said yes, so I exited the hole stage left and swung by my home station to drop off  my Drake "ShitFit". I then sat there... tapping my foot while staring into my Ship Hangar Bay trying to decide what the hell to wear.

Should I take "ShitFit" my PvE Drake and throw my PvP mods in a can in the hold? Maybe I should take "Sensei", one of my PvP Rifters and show him what to  train up for... Or should I dress to impress and take my 'Cane, "PoisonCandy" to show him what he has to look forward to? Or I could go stylin in one of my Faction Frigs... "Orcrist" my Rep Flt Firetail or "Glamdring" my Rep Flt Hookbill...  or the...  or...  ahhhh, decisions decisions...

I ended up choosing "Orcrist" as, (1) I had yet to actually DO anything with her and I really wanted to try her out, and as (b) I knew Rus was getting into his 1st Dessie, a Thrasher, that day, I felt he might like being in the 'bigger' ship... plus if we ran any L1 mishes together I could protect him better in a fast tackle frig while allowing him to do more of the DPS as the Thrasher is such a glasscannon.

So I set course for his station, 15 hops, and send "OMW" in chat. While I MAP... I must digress here for a sec here and 'esplain...

MAP is my acronym for Manually-Auto-Pilot. You see in EVE you set a destination and you can set your ship to Auto-Pilot to that destination. But there is a catch... AP drops you out of warp approx 15Km from each gate on your course. You then have to cross that 15 Km at your ships normal speed. If you are in an Indy, or a BS your std unmodified best top speed is usually something around 100 to 200m/s... it can take quite a while to cover that 15 Km which can now be written not as Kilometers but as "Kill-o-meters"... Many, many ships are lost to gank attacks in that 15 Km no-man's land. The way to avoid this is to manually pilot your ship from gate to gate and not use the AP at all.

If you manually select the gate and warp to it, you will drop out of warp 'inside' the warp range for that gate allowing you to immediately warp through thereby giving no one enough, or at least a bare minimum of time to target and gank you, plus you get where you are going MUCH faster obviously... The issue is this that doing all of this manually is a major pain in the arse when doing long flights.

So what I do "if" I am in a fast enough ship... something that can hit say, at least 900m/s or better, like my speedy little Firetail. A fast ship will almost always have either an AB or MWD fitted, so I set my destination, select the 1st gate and manually warp to it... once in flight I engage the AP, then upon reaching the gate, as I manually warped to it the AP immediately warps me through the gate and immediately aligns and warps to the next gate... now here is the "manual" part of MAP comes in... I still do have to be attentive and take a hand in the trip but it is just one click at each gate... once AP drops me out of warp @ 15 Km, I simply engage the AB or MWD and, in the case of my Firetail, I cross that 15 Km at 1200m/s... and you can cover 15 Km in less time than most ships can complete a lockup at 1200m/s...  but, as I said.... I digress...

So I set course for his station, 15 hops, and send "OMW" in chat. While I MAP to him we chat about what he's been learning and such... found he had been killed in a mission or 2, not news, happens to all noobs, part of the Learning Cliff. He said he was minutes away from completing his Dessie skills and was going to go buy his 1st Thrasher... Shweet. I arrived and waited for him outside at his home station. He shows up a bit later and immediately starts bumpin me all over the place... Yea... I think he just might fit in here just fine.  =]

So I get him to show me his fit... Oh dear god. He had taken the civ and noob mods from his Reaper, the Minmatar noobship, and fitted them on his Thrasher... Oh dear god.

OK... now, I know I am typing here... and yes I work on PC's for a living so I spend all day in front of a keyboard... and I game and blog at night... but you can have no idea how very, very deeply I hate typing. When EVER I can ingame I use either eve-voice or TeamSpeak. So, as he does not have a onboard mic on his laptop we are forced to do everything in chat... let just say it is not the same. Getting a point across in chat can sometimes leave out important stuff.

We get into the Market and I tried helping him understand the market screen and how skills affect what he can and can't use... well, he says he has found the guns he wants, 200mm autocannons. Cool, perfect for the Thrasher and don't need hi skills. He says "I'm off to pick em up." WAIT!!!!!  Where are they?? He gives me the system and thank god it is (1) in hi-sec and (b) only 2 hops away. "OK, then lets go there and get the rest of yer mods" I tell him and off we go.

We get there, dock and I explain how to get into the hangar bay, he has only 1 gun, get him to buy 6 more.... they won't go on... cause he doesn't have the skills for em... OK, OK... I link him the lowest skill 125mm guns there and tell him to buy 7.

I can't... Why?.... Out of money... WHAT!!!!???? ... I gave you 10 MILLION I$K.... Yea, ship and guns ate it up.... Oh dear god. OK, ok... find the "strip" button and strip everything off the ship...  OK.... select all....  OK.... r-click and repackage all....  OK...  Now sell everything for whatever price comes up....  OK.... I am giving you 10M more I$K. We were able to get 7 guns, he can actually use, fitted before we both finally packed it in for the night.

After Rus had logged off I took "Orcrist" out and did a little solo ratting in the 'Roid Belts of a nearby system. There was a Rifter who was working them also, there were a lot of bananas (yellow wrecks) but if you hang around long enough you will usually get a small spawn at least.

To explain what happened next, I dual screen, I have the game on a  22" flat panel to my right and have my laptop screen open at the same time for Google, PYFA, this, etc., etc. ... While waiting for a RAT spawn I started writng this post on the laptop screen and noobishly had my inmail open covering most of the 22" when I realized my ship was getting attacked...  lol... so I quickly cleanup the screen and get to work. Needless to say I was very happy w/ Orcrist's abilities, both in taking down the RATS but in speed/shield tanking their DPS. I ratted a few belts for a bit, went back to the barn and converted all the loot to minerals... made a clean 150K I$K for about 30 mins fun... not much but it at least paid for the Faction Ammo...

I am still a noob in this great game... only a wee, what, 5 months ingame... but Rus's fit, the noobship mods on a Thrasher, brought a great huge grin to my face...   =]    It brought back STRONG memories of my 1st days ingame. I have been here less than 1/2 a year... and I have learned so very, very much...


I have been killed and killed others...
I have been podded, and I have podkilled...
I looted a ship after an Incursion and found an implant worth 168 Million I$K... and I played the market for 2 weeks and ended up getting over 191 Million I$K for it...

I can look over a ship's fit and understand (mostly) what's right and what's wrong, and more importantly, why...

I have lived in a wormhole...

One of the very 1st people who killed me, killed me 'twice' in the same fight.... and podded me after the 2nd kill... now he is one of my very best friends. And through it all... the very best part... the part that makes the Learning Cliff sooo very worthwhile... is the people...


Flyin the Deadly Skies of New Eden with your Real Life Friends and Family.... man, there's absolutely nuthin better.   =]

Fly Safe and see you in the Sky....  =/|)=