Monday, October 29, 2012

Meh...

or~ NEVER Volunteer...

The HDF =Phergott= docked at the Lab

Just a note to let ya'll know I'm still here, just not much happening to write of in th' hole of late... runnin PI, runnin Sleepers, making some  ISKies... no ganks, no roams (that I have been in on)...

We did have some good friends join us for a welcome back Sleeper Run a few night's ago... 12 sites, an easy 500M ISK.... other than that all's quiet (and therefor lucrative and boring) on the other side of the sky.

On another note, I am struggling with the latest BB on eSports... I am not, nor have I ever been a 'jock' or a sports fan... I was a wrestler in high school, but you don't see 'real' Graeco-Roman wrestling on TV or in the sports pages & mags now do you? I mean the WWE and it's variants, as everyone except the genetically challenged knows, are acting and therefore belong on the 'Reality TV' channel right?

I have also for some unaccountable reason volunteered to 'sum up' BB:39 "Home" which might take a bit... sheesh... =]

HBHI's C3 Homehole


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

Wednesday, October 24, 2012

Things That Go Gank in The Black...



or~ Anatomy of a Gang Kill…

[my background is the lead pic for this post]

To catch up…

I have been busy w/ some RL stuff (and it is not over yet) but I do log on daily and tend to my flock of planets and I have been able to join in a few corp ops and make a couple'a store runs and am starting to see an ROI (Return On Investment for them as are not finanshally profishent…). Granted I get a real glazed over look in the eyes when I scan down page after page of PI cost overruns… I felt like it will take months of steady sales to put me back in the black… or I could just shoot the CPA’s and burn the ledgers… hmmm… what to do what to do?

Uh, I’ll be right back…
<door hisses open and hisses closes>
<muffled sounds of gunfire and screams cut short>
<door hisses opens, few wisps of acrid smoke curl in the air as the door hisses closed>
OK, please ignore the smell of smoke, it’s being… taken care of…

So, with the two P3 products I am making for sale on the market I have generated almost:
ISK 100,000,000.00!!  Woo    hoo    …oh well.

OK, ok, I din’t really kill the CPA’s, or burn the ledgers (as much as I would like to…) and they report that, over the fiscal period between 17.07.113 and 24.10.113 (EVE HQ API data pull) I have spent, ONLY on Planetary Construction and Import/Export Taxes, on the one hand: (build, tear down in frustration and rebuild, tear down in frustration and rebuild, tear down in frustration and rebuild…)
ISK 128,734,300.08

…so I am not quite as far in the red as I had thought… over the same period my income from all sources, PI sales included, was, on the other hand:
ISK 1,340,730,701.53

…so you ‘could’ say I am catching up on my outlay. And keep in mind my outlay included a lot more than just PI… initial fuel prods for the POS while we were getting PI setup, ISK to support Hiril’s RvB habit, ships n mods, Quafe n Hookers baby!! So, my ‘miscellaneous’ outlay (minus PI) during this time was, on the third hand:
ISK 1,194,358,896.65

… that’s right, I spent over a Bil on cheese-n-crackers (and many Rifters n mods for Hiril) in just about three months. This still left me with a net cash inflow, for this time period, of:
ISK 17,637,504.80

Now this is just a snapshot between the dates of 17.07.113 to 24.10.113, approximately three months, my actual current balance is near ISK 200M… like RL money, I tend to go thru it faster than I can make it, even in th hole.  =]

Now you gotta admit, for just one guy, inna very small corp, having greatly decreased my OL time,  to pull down 1.34 Billion ISK in 3 months is not too shabby. Not like I’m out there grinding FW sites and ganking 3 Billion ISK Freighters now is it?

Which leads us to the main topic of tonight’s flow-of-consciousness… ganking for fun and profit is alive and well in New Eden. This is a Picturepost… I hope you enjoy it…

===============================================

A funny thing happened on the way to the forum…

I had made a store run in my Prowler and was making my way back home with an empty hollow hold. I warped thru the gate at Niarja and as the screens loaded I realized I was at the edge of a really large gank fleet…


I insta cloaked and immediately pulled a hard vector change and went to max cloaked speed. It looked like one or two of the gank fleet might be interested in me but then a Providence landed on the gate…


He banged into the gate so hard he bounced approx 50 to 75 Km away from the gate… uh oh. The whole effin fleet turned almost as one and began closing on him as he desperately tried to turn and burn for the gate…


A fat ol Domi finally caught up with him and smashed into him from the side right on the nose… Thrown off of alignment his fate was sealed… The rest of the gank fleet, more than 15 ships from C0NVICTED Alliance <A.I.F.>, closed into range. I had ordered silent running and station keeping at 90Km out from the engagement. I sent my camdrones in and all I could do was watch in fascinated horror as…


@ 2012.10.21 05:15:50 - “Thydon [EXOP] A.I.F (Brutix)” has started trying to warp scramble “tabson [PCS](Providence)”

Once everyone was in range, the end did not take long…


As the Prov exploded my camdrones lost vector lock warped back and this was what I saw…


I sent the cams back and watched as CONCORD did their thing on 15 ships…


CONCORD completed mopping up and, as usual milled around afterwards like drunken automatons… (I personally believe that after they pwn everything in sight they all go back to the mess or wardroom and have doughnuts and kaffe… cops gonna be cops).


Act three, scene one… the cleaning crew arrives. A Charon and an Orca with a Crane in support land on grid and hoover up all the L&S…


After it was all said and done… I must admit I was humbled as I quietly ordered alignment and warp spool up initialized for the next jump gate on our route.

The bridge crew was silent as they went about their duty… often glancing up at the main holoscreen, all thinking such things as those of us who make our living in the black think when faced with such utter destruction, and such callous and staggering loss of life.

The wrecked hulk of “tabson’s” Providence floated still smoking and still glowing in places on the thermal sensors as internal fires burned up the last of the trapped air or as bulkheads breached into space… she drifted, abandoned in the harsh and cold hard reality of life and death in New Eden’s deadly skies.






Fly Safe out there  =/|)=

Wednesday, October 17, 2012

It’s Muggy Out Thar…



or~ The War on Fog

The ‘Fog of War’ is the uncertainty in situational awareness experienced by participants in military operations. The term seeks to capture the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign.”…

This is becoming a thing with me… I start a comment in response to someone’s post and a few hours later I find I have written a post… sheesh. So, this is where I responds in a very tl;dr way to Mabrick’s latest, “Getting Round to Make Eve more Real”…

OK, I “basically” agree with the ‘FoW’ (Fog of War) basis, as Intel is THE KEY in all battles, numerical & firepower superiority are always second to Intel and FoW is very, very  real…  Mab says, “Those FCs with the skills to parse this spreadsheet quickly and efficiently do best. But this isn't really warfighting. It's list management.

Whomsoever sits in Kirk’s Favorite Chair, be ye Captain or Admiral, warfighting (FCing) boils down to Asset & Intel Management, period. This is known as ‘C3’, Command, Control & Communications. The whole basis of C3 is Intel. Without Intel you are just guessing your fleet to a quick death…  A good a definition of the value of Intel in C3 is as follows from an archive from Old Earth at the beginning of the 21st century:

Information management and distribution provide the backbone infrastructure to allow near-perfect, real-time knowledge of the enemy and the ability to automatically disseminate that information to dispersed forces and command centers. Technical challenges relate to heterogeneous distributed computing environments, distributed database management, multilevel information security, advanced human-computer interfaces (HCIs), and automated information distribution.

In this Mab is absolutely correct, in New Eden, approx 22,000 years after the above was written down we have achieved the desired for ‘near-perfect’ Intel… We in New Eden have highly advanced (far above 2012 Earth standards) Information Collection and Sharing Systems, IE: Computer Networks, IE: the NEOCOM (I mean it’s WAYYYY in the FUTURE right?). The technological basis for New Eden’s “Local” is:

(1) NEOCOM (FTL - Faster Than Light) communications combined with;
(3) all Stargates are networked via NEOCOM and real time update each other on ship movements;
(2) no ship can enter or leave an Empire system without using a Stargate OR a ‘Jump Bridge’ or ‘Cyno Jump’ the last two of which are readily detected and updated to the NEOCOM Systems AND;
(4) ALL of this information is accessible to all ships via the NEOCOM network.

The basis for the HUD (OV – Over View) is:
A ‘Tried and True’ human-computer interface (HCI) methodology for C3… the spreadsheet, or orderable/searchable data table. This was invented long ago on Old Earth, which has been refined and database input and updating are all now AI controlled, but it is still the ‘man in the chair’ who ‘uses’ this data to exercise C3, and the ‘spreadsheet’ data format is the best HCI methodology found so far.

In other words, a “good” General, Admiral, etc. (FC) actually IS “…a better accountant.” His ability to parse, understand and USE the data provided are still human qualities that no AI has been able to truly successfully recreate and none of this reduces or alleviates the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent (ref FoW definition at the top).

Case in point:
HBHI lives in a C3 wormhole, last night we were running  a “Forgotten Frontier Quarantine Outpost”. We are up against the third class of the toughest AI in EVE. In C3’s the Sleepers Web, Neut and Scram. All of us were online and in fleet. Our CEO had setup multiple on grid Tactical BMs. Before going in we went over tactics, primaries, secondaries and operational goals. Our CEO was over all FC and our Fleet Cmdr was Exec. The majority of us are highly experienced wormholers, we are well shipped and fitted, we had solid and clear comms AND we had PERFECT Intel… and even with all that, we still lost a Tengu.

We were fighting and maneuvering and he got scrammed and went down before we could get enough ships in close enough to save him. No one “failed”, no one was to “blame” it was the Fog of War. In the best possible engagement scenario in EVE, PvE, against the 3rd best AI, the FoW still exists… in PvP it is very much alive and well and assisting in ship and pod kills every day… you die and learn. The upside was we pulled Eleventy One Million ISK from just that one site alone.

You discuss how, “…perfect intelligence about who you are fighting is terribly unrealistic.” Again, “basically” true… but what about Cloakies? Alts? Neutral spais & scouts? Corp Infiltrators? Logoff/Logon Tactics? AFK Cynos? There are still many unknowns in New Eden… we just have vastly more advanced technology is all… better ‘tools’.

You cannot equate the Pearl Harbor attack with warfare in New Eden, any more than ANY such ‘surprise attack’ would have been possible just 50 years later. The advances in technology between the late 20th and the start of the 21st century were sufficient to bring the advent of SOSUS, the rudimentary beginnings of what they called “Smart Weapons” and the earliest beginnings of Combat AI systems such as the Predator MAE UAV, and Tomahawk Cruise Missiles. You cannot begin to compare the Technology available on Old Earth in AD 1940 with the Technology of New Eden in the year YC 113 (AD 23,349) [no matter how new the system you play EVE on is…].    =]

In re:  “CCP has already said Dust Bunnies will be able to take down local for brief periods.” HURRAH!! THIS is Virtual REALITY at its very finest. I have several friends who will NOT play in W-space ever due mainly to ‘no local’… the loss of NEOCOM Intel makes applying C3 VASTLY more difficult as we who live on the other side of the sky know only too well every day. Keep in mind also I am sure CCP will have counters for this… Hire and send in a DUST Team to take out the other team and re-establish Local Comms… Fun to be had for ALL!!!  =]

I do have one concern though… you say, “…and the Overview was gone?” Where do you read that the Over View was going to be removed? I read ALL the Dev blogs while the recent patch was loading and that was not what I read. The UI is mentioned in “Stay On Target!” but there is no statement that the Over View will be removed. Do you know something we don’t? My understanding is the OV will probably have icon changes to match on screen icons, but basically remain as is. And while the screenshots don’t show the Over View, they also don’t show any Chat, Selected Object or any other windows either… It was a screen cap with extraneous data removed to show just the onscreen icons.

As re: “Blob Tactics”… please see the US M4 Sherman main battle tank of WWII. And I quote:
Shermans were often outmatched by the 45 ton Panther tank and wholly inadequate against the 56 ton Tiger I and later 72 ton Tiger II heavy tanks, suffering high casualties against their heavier armor and more powerful 88 mm L/56 and L/71 cannons. Mobility, mechanical reliability and sheer numbers, supported by growing superiority in supporting fighter-bombers and artillery, helped offset these disadvantages strategically. The relative ease of production allowed huge numbers of the Sherman to be produced. This allowed many divisions, even many infantry divisions, their own organic Sherman assets. Some infantry divisions had more tanks than German panzer divisions did. This was a huge advantage for the Americans.

What this amounted to was a defacto US Armed Forces BLOB tactic against smaller although technically far superior tank forces. It worked in AD 1944 just as it works as well today in YC 113. I bet the Germans whined and moaned quite a bit too as the survivors jumped from their wrecked Tigers and Panthers and fled from ‘blobs’ of Sherman tanks and ‘hordes’ of American troops. ANY successful tactic is not a thoughtless tactic, just ask the winners.

If the Germans had access to something equivalent to New Eden’s  ‘local’ and been able to know, instantly, the type and number of the forces deploying against them, yes they would have used different tactics… but that would have been (and is in EVE) a two edged sword as the opposing force probably would have had access to the very same intel.

I also strongly feel that ‘theory crafting’, IE what ships and fits work best in fleet formations also gives rise to an element of ‘FoW’ in EVE, hence as you said, “…that is less a statement about the capabilities of the outnumbered pilots, than it is a statement about the poor fitting prowess of the other side.

Remember, and I cannot stress this strongly enough, the Fog of War is not about technology… it is about the human factor. It is, the uncertainty regarding one's own capability, adversary capability, and adversary intent during an engagement, operation, or campaign.

A man armed with an assault rifle he does not know how to use will lose to the man skilled with a knife.

I am very interested in how things will go once the DUSTers start to get really involved… as the Chinese saying goes, “May you live in interesting times.” CCP is keeping things in New Eden interesting indeed…   =]


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

Friday, October 12, 2012

Ganker's Paradise




[adapted from Gangster’s Paradise by Coolio]

[spoken]
Wanna tell me what this is all about?

[Verse 1]
As I warp through the wormhole into negative sec
I take a look at my CAP and realize there's nut’in left
Cause I've been Scrammin’ and Blastin’ so long that
Even my CEO thinks my mind is gone
But I aint never flipped a can that didn't deserve it
Me be hazed like a noob, you know that’s unheard of
You better watch who you smackin’, and where you flyin’
Or you and your corpies might be left in smoke
I really hate to rage, but I gotta Bro
As they burn I lock they POD in the Missile smoke, fool
I'm the kinda Pilot all the noobies wanna be like
In my pounce in the night
Sayin prayers under starlight


We spend immortal lives
Flyin in a Ganker's Paradise
We spend immortal lives
Flyin in a Ganker's Paradise
We live immortal lives
Dying in a Ganker's Paradise
We live immortal lives
Dying in a Ganker's Paradise


Look at my situation, the choices I was facin’
I can't live a normal life, I was cloned in the Vat Bay
So I gotta get down with the FC
Too much Battleclinic browsin’ got me wanting kills
I'm a educated fool with ISKies on my mind
Got a HAM fitted Tengu an' a neut online
I'm an AFK Cloaker, a gate campin’ ganker
With my corpies in fleet, you don't want my aggro, fool
Death aint nuthin’ but a game we play

Lvin a life that never ends, what can I say?
I'm twenty-three now, will I live to see a hundred-fo'?
The way things is goin yea I’m sho.


Tell me do you see -- that it is we
That the ones we POD – are you and me


We spend immortal lives
Flyin in a Ganker's Paradise
We spend immortal lives
Flyin in a Ganker's Paradise
We live immortal lives
Dying in a Ganker's Paradise
We live immortal lives
Dying in a Ganker's Paradise


Power an th’ ISKies, ISKies an th’ Power
Minute after minute, hour after hour
Everybody’s warpin’, half are AFKin’
Goons are burnin’ Jita, but CCP aint lookin’
They say I gotta skill up but I aint got the books, see
I can’t fly a range fit, they will kite and pwn me
I guess I can’t – I guess they will
I guess they POD; that’s why I know this clone is outta luck, fool

We spend immortal lives
Flyin in a Ganker's Paradise
We spend immortal lives
Flyin in a Ganker's Paradise
We live immortal lives
Dying in a Ganker's Paradise
We live immortal lives
Dying in a Ganker's Paradise


Tell me do you see -- that it is we
That the ones we POD – are you and me
Now do you see -- that it is we
So now you see – We are the Kings of EVE.


========================================

RL is still taking precedence over EVE, so I'm not 'back' yet...

This is just something I started playing with months ago and reached a sorta finished point a while ago... (can't sleep)... but I do so wish I could sing (rap?) well enough to be able to set it to the music... I read it (ok... sing to myself) and I'd give a lot to hear this one done right.


Fly safe... =/|)=