A CARBON Based Life

Marco! Polo?...

2012-02-29T02:31:00.005-05:00

or~ Null IS Just Like Wormholes…Only Completely Different…

Cyno Green

Getting comfy in the new corp, getting ok with not being a Director, getting a kill & getting killed, but… AFK Cloakers [in null] suck.

Now, you MUST understand that as a wormholer by trade and at heart, I live by the cloak. I live in a CovOps when in the hole. Unless I have to be in another ship for a reason, I am in either a Cheetah or a Hound. Without the cloak on my Mastodon, I would have never gotten the POS tower and many, if not most, of the mods, out from a station four hops deep in losec… In the hole, the Cloak, is life… but in null, in one specific use, it is badly out of balance.

AFK Cloaking:

What is an AFK Cloaker? Any ship fitted with a cloak, especially CovOps frigates, that enter a system, cloak up and remain logged on and are used to gather intel, make BMs, safes, warpins and hotdrops and wage PsyOps (Psychological Operations) and financial aggro via “Income Denial Ops". In my limited experience in null so far, PsyOps and Income Denials are moar common, but I have seen all of the above.

Income Denial Ops are tied to PsyOps in that you cannot know if the cloaky in local is just sitting there watching local and dscan or actively warping around making BMs and gathering intel on your POS(es) and what ship movements do occur while he is active or if he is actually AFK and off eating dinner with the wife and kids at MacDs or playing Tanks on another screen…

You can’t ‘know’ so you HAVE to assume he is there and just waiting to break cloak and pop a cyno and drop a fleet on you while you PvE (to make ISK [to buy the ships the PvPers wanna asplode] and loot [to sell or melt for minerals to make mods and ships to sell for PvPers to asplode] and salvage [to sell or produce rigs to sell for the ships PvPers want to asplode] or mine [produce ore for minerals to make mods and ships to sell for PvPers to asplode] on a combat/mining/exploration site… there is currently NO recourse, no way to fight back against this tactic… the AFK Cloaker is SAFE (while cloaked) as no PvE/PvPbear can ever be except when docked up in station.

We had AFK Cloakers camp our hole many times… lost ships to em, and killed a few. I never felt it was ‘unfair’ (a word badly, and incorrectly, overabused in EVE, fair = balanced, it does not = “I can’t [blank] safely!”), nuthin they could do I couldn’t. The difference in null is, in the hole as soon as we knew someone was inside, either through seeing probes or catching a lucky glimpse of a ship on Dscan… or when one (or two or three) uncloak off your starboard bow…

We responded similar to the way we do in null:

-warp to safes or a POS;

-reship ASAP to either a CovOps or a DPS ship;

-see if we could catch em, if not;

-see if we can determine where they came in from;

-if yes:

-if we decide to fight, bubble and camp or actively try to engage;

-if not, well…

Well, in a word here is how it is different in null, "Cyno"…

Depending the info we had gathered, we would sometimes break off activities for the night, but sometimes not, it depended on the level of perceived threat… you see, there are NO HOTDROPS in wormholes. Very often the threat assessment was ‘medium’, we knew there was say just one ship in the hole, with moar of us online we could defend, or flying solo and fully AWARE tactically (IE always aligned to a warpable and at speed while running sites or savaging; watching Dscan like it’s Svedish pron; being constantly prepared to defend and GTFO).

There are them as have made arguments against ANY changes to cloaking as it currently stands such as:

“If they're AFK, they can't hurt you.

If they're cloaked, they can't:

- Target

- Use EWAR

- Fire Weapons

So, with that said, the mechanic is balanced, quit crying and trying to get it nerfed because you obviously suck at life.”

(https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=420056#post420056)

The idea that a pilot, in null most often a cyno-alt, can come in, cloak up, stay logged on and then that player may go to work or go and play on a PvP char or a hisec ISKbear char and just check back every now and again to see if there is any activity he can hotdrop a FLEET on, is out of whack… and here is the really out of whack part, the AFK Cloaky is, while cloaked, safer than any carebears dream… this needs to be balanced.

There… I said it. Cloaking needs to be balanced. In wormholes the cloaking mechanic, as it stands now, works beautifully and by that I mean that it is balanced for both aggressor and defender. In Null due to the cyno, it is used by PvPcentric players almost… almost… to the point of abuse because with a cloaky cyno you can bring a fleet into a system via an indefensible hole. Bubbles on the gates in a system are useful but mean very little to cloaked ships. Yes they make it a little harder, but an experienced CovOps pilot can usually make it in and out even if the residents are very quick to respond… and with a cyno you do not ever need "risk" bringing in a fleet via a well defended gate… you can open a hole within 5Km of a station, right off the undock and bring in your fleet directly.

Hotdrop O’Clock!

As far as I can find out, there is only one counter to this ingame… the Cynosural System Jammer, what this Module does is (and I quote): “Creates a system-wide inhibitor field which prevents cynosural generators except covert cynosural generators from functioning.” Really? so you can jam a regular fleet but not a CovOps and Black Ops fleet? What good is that? So we put up a cyno jammer and force everyone to train up for Black Ops battleships? Oh yea… we all wanna do THAT.

This all boils down to the same age old argument… PvPbears vs PvEbears… which is a grand over-simplification. My corp and the corp I am in now, don’t really fit either type exclusively. I am beginning to believe this is probably the majority of those in EVE. Most do some of both PvP&E to some degree. But there are those who will argue vehemently for PvP to be the be all and end all of the game just as there are those who will argue just as vehemently for PvE to be the be all and end all, ya-da ya-da.

What I want… is balance. There are no pwnmobiles in EVE. There is no one ship and fit and skill set that can give anyone a very high probability of success in PvP. Every aggression mechanic has a counter, every defensive mechanic has a counter. When a mechanic favors one side of this equation, it needs to be addressed and the equation needs to be balanced.

AFK Cloaking with cyno chars does not have a counter and is therefore unbalanced in favor of aggression.

Cloaky Loki on overwatch

There have been a number of suggestions for a balancing mechanic for AFK Cloaking in the forums and on blogs, among them I have read: (NOTE: none of the following address botting issues)

Cloak needs fuel to run:

Places a limit on how long a cloak can run based on cargo [or fuel bay] capacity and ability to refuel [IE Cloaky hauler].

Cloak hunter/breaker, ship/module:

Variations on this are:

-A ship, module or probe that can transmit a system wide pulse (similar to a subhunter sonic “ping”) that will cause an active cloak to break after a number of pulses with a timer delay on the frequency of pulses. This will alert a cloaked ship it is being hunted and give the pilot time to ‘attempt’ to GTFO.

-A ship, module or probe that can transmit an area (50Km, 100Km, 1000Km radius?) pulse similar to the above.

-A POS/Station module, battery or upgrade that does the above.

Periodic (or random) popup: requiring confirmation and/or data entry for cloak to remain ‘on’.

Cloaky is removed from local: and loses access to local after a period of inactivity. Returns to local and regains access to local on ANY movement or module activation.

-Supposedly forces the cloaky pilot to be active if he wants to keep access to local intel.

Detailed post on above idea: The Ultimate Guide to Life, the Universe and Cloaking.

[And my personal fav]

Cloaks cannot run ‘cap stable’:

Running a cloak WILL cap out ANY ship it is active on, in time (length to be determined). This effect is cumulative, cycling the cloak quickly or a quick log-off/log-on does not reset it. To reset the cloak cap-out, the cloak must remain off for a cooldown period long enough to put the pilot at risk of being dscanned or probed out or force the pilot to remain logged off for the same period (length to be determined).

I like this because it is simple and forces the AFK Cloaker to be an active player, not AFK. If you want to use a cloaky to run ‘Income Denial’ ops, cool, come on in, cloak up and you decide how much risk you want to take… (given times are just examples not recommendations):

-Stay cloaked 15 mins, cap timer resets with 2 mins downtime;

-stay cloaked 30 mins, cap timer resets with 5 mins downtime;

-stay cloaked 45 mins, cap timer resets with 9 mins downtime;

-stay cloaked 1 hour, cap reaches critical, cloak deactivates and the cap timer resets with 15 mins downtime …

Oh, and jumping through a gate or a wormhole... resets the cap timer also.

Note: I do not feel this breaks the role or usefulness of Stealth Bombers either. I am a HUGE fan of stealth bombers and feel a competent FC of a bomber group should be able to work with the 1 hour max cloaked timer, seeing to it his group has transited a gate or docked and waited out the cooldown timer or reship to a backup SB and immediately undock... who ever heard of an AFK SB fleet?

You have to BE there, actively engaged and flying your ship, if not… well, I know I can scan you down in less than 5 mins… mebbe less than 2…

I mean, the AFK Cloaky came in looking for some PvP... he should have a chance to get some, whether HE wants to or not... just like his targets.

Balance = "Risk = Reward".

Safe

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

PS. OK this is down in comments but I am going to add it here too as I just thought of it...

You can fix AFK Cloaking as used for cyno'ed hotdrops in Nulll by making it so that NO ship can fit a Cyno and a Cloak at the same time.

https://forums.eveonline.com/default.aspx?g=posts&m=872521#post872521

Blog Banter 33: “The Capsuleer Experience…”

2012-02-21T03:14:00.004-05:00

or~ So, How Was It For You?

Like manna from Valhalla (yes I know I'm mixing my religious metaphors), the latest Dev Blog by CCP Legion asks questions which make for perfect Blog Bantering. To quote him "...we want to make the first days, weeks and months in EVE enjoyable and not just something ‘you have to plough through in order to get to the good stuff’" and the newly formed Player Experience team will focus on "...where and why people lose interest in EVE..."

"We invite you to pour your heart (or guts) out and tell us what you think is good or bad with the current new player experience and what you think could be done about the problems."

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

Some background may be in order…

My Experience may be somewhat non-standard… I was 50 years old when I joined EVE. I started ‘gaming’ in the modern computer based, on-line, multi-player sense via DOOM v1. Hence, my primary gaming interest has always been FPS’s. My son is my CEO and our partner is a RL inactive duty Marine corpmate of my son. One last thing, I am a voraciously avid reader…mostly Sci-Fi and military history & fiction.

I also tried many of the MMO’s when they first came out… even gave a few a second try a few years later… nope, no go. They ALL bored me to tears. I just could not get ‘into’ them like I could a good FPS. I dunt know why. The ONLY fantasy stories I have ever truly enjoyed was the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, and is still the only one, so WoW and all its variants are not for me. And no, I dunt wanna “be” Frodo or Gandalf either.

EVE Subjectively…

OK, so my son shows me EVE one evening just before Thanksgiving 2010... it takes something like fifteen minutes before I am totally and completely hooked. I start an account, my son sends me 10M ISK as seed money and I run through the tutorials which are… well, IMHO they gave you just the very basics of click ‘this’ to do ‘that’. Then I did Sister Alitura’s SOE Epic Arc missions in Arnon as do all new players. After that… well, for me it was just fine. I stayed in Arnon for a while just enjoying having a spaceship of very my own and the freedom that came with that.

During this period I wanted to do something easy, something you can do solo and still make ‘some’ ISK if not great ISK… so I solo ratted in 0.5 systems. I learned very early how to avoid can/wreck flippers, by simply ignoring them. I learned anything under a 0.5 was DEADLY, and to avoid losec until I was moar confident and better skilled.

Everything of any real depth that I learned came from extensive online reading. I read player guides, I read blogs and yes, even from Battleclinic, etc. I googled EVERYTHING first. I read at least several returns and followed links on a googled subject and then tested, cautiously, what I had learned thereby.

End product for me was that my experience as a noob was fantastic. Yes, I lost a ship or two early on to noob mistakes. Even got killed and podded upon not warping away letting my jump cloak break when I did not realize I was in a 0.4 system.

EVE Objectively…

OK, so with that in mind, what do I feel needs changing…

First: New & Improved Tutorials…

1. I believe the Tutorial System that currently exists is fully capable of preparing a new pilot for EVE.

2. I do not believe that it does a good job of it as it stands presently.

I also do not believe it would be too great a stretch to make it a lot better. Start as it is now with the basics. Ship handling; fitting and using mods, simple missions and on up to the Epic Arc which is a kind of Graduation Mission for most New Players. This gives you the basics and prepares you for dealing with Agents and NPCs, as stated above… but they do nothing to prepare you for "Player Interaction".

So? Add a layer of missions, either before or after the Epic Arc which include, what I call a “PvPAI” [Player vs. Player AI] type of missions to teach the basics of what to expect from Player Interaction.

PvPAI Training:

These missions would be standard missions but with a twist.

(1) At the beginning of the missions the New Player is given a “Dire Warning”, that “There are pirates that have been preying on our pilots, beware.” Before they can accept the mission they must read through a discussion of pirates, gankers, ninjas and can/wreck flipping and their tactics and motives.

(2) The missions should be standard missions except that they will also have a “Pirate” NPC (with the best possible AI) in ships types AND fits normally used by gankers, mission ninja’s, can & wreck flippers and griefers. These NPCs should copy the actions and fighting style as much as possible of real players the new player will run into, “out there”.

(3) The New Player should LOSE a few ships in these missions first (possibly an agent provided ship then thier own), before experiencing it for real if possible (no podkilling, that should be clearly discussed but never allowed to happen in a PvE or PvPAI situation).

(4) These missions will be in closed rooms that ONLY the New Player can access, he will not be able bring fleet members or ANYONE else in with him and these rooms will NOT be scannable by anyone else. IE he will have the ultimate protection available ingame but ONLY once and ONLY for the missions that make up this PvPAI training.

Second: Noob Griefers…

[Caveat: I have no issue with griefers, gankers, pirates and any players who prefer NCPvP ( Nonconsensual PvP) in general.]

The only other thing I personally feel should be looked at is New Player Griefers. By this I mean players who focus on the newest players for NCPvP, especially those who seek to kill and podkill new players “because they are noobs”. I do not know the statistics or how CCP would track this, but I am sure it would be possible to determine if a player was going after the newest players specifically to cause them as much trouble as possible. There are those who do so and do it proudly. I know this is already a bannable offense… but everyone knows it is unenforced. CCP does not want to lose existing players by pissing them off by ‘nerfing’ their gameplay.

“EVE is harsh, it is just a game.” I agree EVE is harsh, I was first killed and podded when I had been ingame only one month, my first kill and my first podkill was a new player in an unarmed ship. But I “did not know” it was a new player and I was not actively seeking out new players. Someone had come into our wormhole and was mining, we defended our W-space. A bit later, I wrote to the player I had killed, discussed the engagement and sent 1Mil ISK in recompense, out of a sense of decency and in the hope to not put the player off on being a part of EVE. Many griefers actively want the new players to Rage Quit, for them it is a ‘win’ to drive someone away from playing EVE.

I feel this should be moar actively protected against, at least until the char has been ingame, say one to two weeks. Long enough to at least have a feel for how things work beyond the tutorials.

EVE may be harsh, but all societies protect thier young, do they not?

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

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Nullpdate…

2012-02-18T21:19:00.005-05:00

or~ Second Impressions of Nullsec…

As stated earlier, I dun’t know a “lotta” of the pilots in our new corp much less the Alliance, and I am like the kid at a dance… I can be very outgoing, AFTER I have had the ice broken… not so good at breakin it myself though. If my guys, or the guys I already know aren’t on, I am uncomfortable just blurting out, “Can I join you?” to a group of people who are to me, strangers.

But, night before last, I had spent almost eight hours in hospital with my eight yr old dottir… once she was in home abed, I needed a break from RL and a cool down period badly so, I took the plunge and did just that. I had done some site running with friends in the last few days, but last night no one I had flown with before was on and I just asked. I ended up running four sites with a guy who had been ingame since ’03 (he was still younger than me in RL, lol), he was very cool and was amazing in his Tengu… and he was impressed with my Mael and DPS (once I had em in my optimal, I was hitting in the range of 1500 to 1900 DPS) even if I couldn’t tank the sites solo like he could… very cool, very laid back and fun to fly with.

[Your group of 800mm Heavy 'Scout' Repeating Artillery I hits Pith Dismantler, doing 1987.4 damage] …granted that 1987 was done Sumo style, I was within 500m sittin on its face beatin on it with all 800mm barrels… lol.

Running Guristas sites is similar to Sleepers in that they are open sites, no gates no “spatial effects are screwin up your gameplay” bovinefeces. But, as the Bounty Cycle was split AND we weren’t running ONLY the highest paying sites, my net split hovered around +/-5 M per cycle. Then I Noctised three of the four (having not BMed the first… sheesh), returned and dumped all of THAT into the evergrowing pile of looted mods in my personal hangar bay. I asked for ‘some’ GSCs to put everything into and I got… one… and I filled that on the second day. As there is not where here to melt everything it is all just piling up all over the place… (strike 3 point 5) and I have to wait (strike four) on someone (still not sure whoall I can ask) to Jump Freighter it out for me (after I get a few moar GSCs) … (not counting strikes anymoar… too depressing).

So while I have been told I there is very good ISK to be made from the L&S… I aint gonna be ‘making’ it anytime soon… I am trying to be pragmatic about it… doesn’t matter if it is in my wallet of not… there is no market down here to buy shit from anyway… so what’s my rush?

The big thing here is the Bounty Cycle, and I dunt mean how often you fluffy warm clothes come outta the dryer… I mean, we try to complete sites inside the 20 minute timer between bounty payouts. Like any ISK making endeavor in EVE, the moar pilots you have along, the less each makes per split, offset by the quicker the sites go down, hence moar sites completed. So far I have not been involved in any mining ops… though the Corp bylaws state ‘all’ must attend and join in both sites and mining. I can now run a Retriever so I can pitch in to some degree at least (I’m 29 days from a Covetor or Hulk, and interestingly enough, only 24 days from an Orca… hmmm)…

I may push the Orca skills so I can assist on the Hisec side of moving stuffs in and out for the corp… then people can wait on me… (if you are of the impression I dunt like waitin… yer right).

Fly Safe and if see you in the Sky, yer probably a neut =/|)=

I Am Finding Null To Be… Irritating.

2012-02-14T18:49:00.005-05:00

or~ Oh, I Can’t Do That Here Either?…

HDF =Lochotic= “Engage Cloak!”

Okay… I have moved to nullsec, first impressions are in… meh.

I was all ready in my new Cloaky Loki, fitted with Interdiction Nullifier which means I can warp cloaked AND I can warp right thru/past warp bubbles so I “should” be able to just totally ignore gate camps. I had dropped corp from HBHI (again this was harder on me than it should be in just a game) and joined the corp from our Alliance that had left and joined an Alliance in null and rented a system and station there, if I had not joined their corp I could not ‘safely’ travel in null anywhere as I would be a ‘neut’ (neutral) to everyone and neuts are Kill On Sight in nullsec, at least the area’s I am going to be in.

So there I sat… cloaked 100km off the gate leading from the last losec system before entering nullsec on the route given me by a Director… Hmm. I look up at the Route S.A.R.A (Semi Autonomous Rational Array, the ships main computer) has set based on my orders... 15 hops though nullsec. Hmmmm… You see I have never been, willingly and/or by intent, in nullsec before. I have never had any interest in it. The politics sound awful… as I understand it very, very few make it solo in null… you are best off in a large corp/Alliance… etc., etc. All of which I have NO interest in whatsoever.

I order the jump into Nullsec.

Eventually I take the plunge. I warp out and back to the gate at 0 and, “Jump jump!” and I am OMW. On the other side there is one med bubble up off of the gate and a Blue tagged ship watching. I went directly to “break jump-cloak & cloak and warp” as I had been advised so I dint get to pull info on the guy on gate. On landing at the out gate, again one med bubble but no ships… SARA autojumps us and “break jump-cloak & cloak and warp” to the next gate. Through all 15 systems, same e same… SARA autojumps and I “cloak and warp” to the next gate. We pass through mostly empty systems. A few have one or two in local, but only one has a lot of people in it, but they are all Blue to me and I warp thru quickly anyway. It was only in the last system, our “home” system that I finally saw a real bubble camp on a gate… and even then there were no ships on gate, just a large number of bubbles… (and I was told this was not an impressive bubble camp, you should see ya-da ya-da).

I warp to the only station on OV and there are a few of the guys I actually know outside. I dock up and take stock. Some, not all, of my ships have been delivered. Meh… I start renaming them back to their original names and get the crew busy opening crates and shipping containers of ammo and mods etc. then oversee the on-boarding of ammo and supplies and the settling in of my crews and myself in our new quarters. I am at the time talking with my friends and a few of the corpies I have not met. A few are running some sites and the subject of salvaging comes up. I offer my services and the friend backs my claim of skills and such, but it is at this time that I find out the first really unsettling thing about null…

A bit of background first..

I am a very independent person. I like a small corp, where I am a Director and beholden to, at most, one or two other guys who I am equal with and in whom I can place complete trust. We had that in HBHI. Now, in this new corp… I have no roles (and expect none either) but this means I have NO SAY, and I cannot access ANYTHING (yes there is a general bay… meh). Both of which will eventually wear on me. Other issues have cropped up…

(1) Moving ships in and out is, in a word, irritating;

(2) ISK making variations is, again irritating;

(3) Selling & Buying stuff you need is really, really irritating.

Moving Ships…

Getting my ships down to the null home station was nuthing short of a pain in the ass. Get em all to the staging system, unload the holds, rename all ships to a set convention then wait on others to jump freight your ships from a lowsec staging system, then waiting on them to deliver is all very irritating as compared to Hisec. Granted in Hisec you do it yourself, either one-at-a-timing or get the skills and buy an Orca (which I am working on). But you have to wait on NO one but you… And even if I had my own Orca… still dependant on others for a cyno jump. May I take a second to state for the record, it is not the people I am irritated with, the Allies and friends who assisted were nothing but great… it is the process, the need for such a process that I abhor.

Strike One.

Tur’s Fleet

Making ISK…

One of my very favorite ‘things to do’ ingame is Salvaging. I have never understood why, but I really enjoy running the Noctis. It was my first dream ship and is still just about my favorite ship to work in. Turns out, loot & salvage in null ‘sites’ is most often simply ignored as, in comparison to the bounties, it is a low percentage of the income

In Hisec, Loot & Salvage in missions, L1 thru L4 could be upwards of 50 to 100% over and above agent payout, bonus and bounties. And in W-space Loot and Salvage is EVERYTHING. You make not one red ISKie off of killing Sleepers… NO agent payout, NO bonus and NO bounties… if you dunt Lewt and Slavage you make NUTHIN, period. However if you do L&S your Sleeper wrecks, you can make moar ISK than in almost all of the other ‘Killing Ships for Fun & Profit” venues ingame.

I have salvaged two (large to me) wreck fields (again told... that's not a large wreck field, you should see ya-da ya-da), I asked what to do with it all and was told “Who cares?” Add to this the fact that there is virtually no open market to sell it on… well crap. There goes one of the things I enjoy most. In nullsec… this skill that I worked so hard for and enjoy so much, that I bought 40M of implants for, is simply not really valued at all. Great…

Strike Two.

HDF =Choppy= on final approach… with a full hold of trash.

And yes I can, and will, of course run sites and such… but running a Noctis is a LARGE part of my game… I dunt care how much ISK I can make in other ways… I will miss being able to contribute through the investment I have made into salvaging..

Selling and Buying Stuff…

As stated I prefer to run a Noctis… the guys said it doesn’t matter what I do with the L&S… OK, so can I refine and sell? Nope. This station does not have a refinery and no one wants to buy this ‘crap’. OK, so what do I do with it? The suggestion is made to can it all up for shipment (at some point) to Hisec where I can then melt & sell… Really? So what the fuk am I doing in null?

Corpie - “Oh and while yer at it Tur, you need to tank for Guristas.”

Me - “Oh OK, where do I get mods?”

Corpie - “Uh.. check the General storage Tab, if not there, mebbe some of the guys can scrounge some mods up for you.”

Me - “Uh guys, there is some stuff on the market, who can I buy from?”

Corpie – “Don’t know… but check the station and make damn sure they are in our Alliance… you’ll get killed if ya don’t.”

HUH? So no ‘Market’? I check the market and there are some things, limited and pricy, for sale in the region (but not at this station), and you have to do ‘research’ in order not to accidentally get killed just runnin out for ammo…? Screw that…

Strike Three.

I aint been here but one day and I am not enjoying this. I am told, “Hey get out there and run some sites! Give it a chance.” Uh… can’t refit, ship setup for Sleepers, can’t refit as there is NO effin market and the Mods I want are NOT in the effin General bay, and I HATE bein beholden to others… and don’t wanna run sites in null inna ship with a half assed effin fit.

So in order to refit my Mael for Guristas, tank and ammo, I have to make a run BACK to Hisec… or wait on and hope for the kindness of strangers, something I dislike intensely. I am now in a large corp which is part of a large Alliance… again both are situations I dislike intensely. Basically I am “taking one for the team” as it were. I am here only because my corpmates wanted to do this.

I’ll admit it… I’m spoiled. I got to live the nullsec life, hell better than null… -1.0 sec status, NO-local, no sec hit for ANY engagement, regardless of who aggro’ed who, owned our own POS, and made damn good ISK… PLUS I had access to the Hisec market, without any sec stat issues, and the higher security for hauling (as compared to Lo, Null and W-space) afforded to those who live in Hisec when out buying or selling goods.

Action on the undock at Dodixie Station

So far… null aint’ measuring up for me personally… but, I’ll give it a week or so afore I rage quit and go back to W-space where I belong. But then… I’ll have to wait on somebody else to get my ships n shit out I guess…

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

Caught ‘tween a Lotta Losec and a Hostile Hole…

2012-02-13T00:12:00.005-05:00

or~ Massclosing Wormholes For Fun and Survival…

Mastodon Lowsec Runner

This is not a pew pew story… it is a story of pewvoidance, something many here in EVE see as dishonorable or cowardly even. But as for me, well, ‘tis sometimes the better part of valor, well, if not valor, mebbe the better part of logistics? …the better part of Risk Management? Not as exciting sounding, but far easier to understand. You see with just two PvE fitted BS’s and a PvW(reck) fitted Noctis and a few CovOps frigs and such, we were NOT in any position to get into any kind of a brawl with anyone except Sleepers… LOL.

It starts with the move out of the C2 we had been living in, I had recon’ed the stat C2 and found a treasure trove of sites in an empty hole, so we had setup a Sm Minnie Tower and a few modest defenses, moved in a just enough ships to run the 30+ sites, then went back and finished up the move out.

Over the next week things did not go as well as I had hoped. Aside from me, the other guys in our little band were either busy, or away or sick or whatever… and running sites solo in W-space can be quite risky… especially the Lootin and Salvagin part. You see you can at least go down fighting in a PvE fit ship… heck, I once drove off a Proteus that jumped me in my Sleeper Phoon… the tank on that thing is impressive and he wasn’t breaking it as fast as I was his… lol, so he bugged out (only time that ever happened!).

But a Noctis now… well, that aint nuthin but a big ol fat assed god-I-hope-its-full-of-nanoribbins defenseless TARGET in W-space. The smart WH raider waits until you have your Noctis at the last site you ran and are almost on the last wreck… maximize the value of the gank you see, a Noccy killmail is sweet… but a Noccy killmail AND some Melted Nanomonies… well, that is soo much sweeter. So I rarely run my Noctis solo, preferring to run my Salv Thrasher or my NinjaVigil when all alone in W-space.

Noctis’isn solo

The Thrasher carries four Sm Tractors Is and four Salver IIs, same as the Noctis though without the tractor range bonus, (Thrasher, 20Km as compared to the Noctis at 55Km). I run a single Sebo II (Sensor Booster = greatly reduced lock time [or increasing range]), an MWD, an Analyzer I (for hacking the Magnetometric archaeology sites in W-space) and an Inertia Stab II to reduce her align time. The Thrasher is smaller and faster than the Noctis and stands a much better chance of escaping an attack, especially if I am aligned to a instawarpable (= something I can click on in the sky as compared to digging into even one onscreen menu and R-clicking) and at speed. [This is different from Instawarping because you are not using a cloak, this is for a ship actively doing something such as salvaging where you cannot cloak.]

On the Vigil I usually fit one tractor and two salvers, or three salvers, but my Vigil is ‘dual’ Sebo fitted so she locks targets in, well I can’t click the stopwatch twice fast enough, it’s well under a second, and like the Thrasher, she has a MWD and an Inertia Stab II but I add a Nanofiber Internal Structure II and she has an align time of just over 4 secs and a top speed of 3500m/s.

Out of sheer curiosity, I timed her acceleration several times for an average of:

Standing start, MWD on, 0 to 1000m/s = 2.0 sec

Standing start, MWD on, 0 to 2000m/s = 3.0 sec

Standing start, MWD on, 0 to 3500m/s = 20.0 sec

A dual Sebo fit cloaky T3 Cruiser, uncloaking in range of me, just might be able get a lock on me, but I doubt he could engage a web or scram before I got out of range. If I am aligned and at std. speed, 450m/s (MWD off), all I would have to do is (1) scream like a gurl and (b) panicmash the MWD “ON”, and I’m outtathere!

HDF =Vigilante= & HDF =Salvatorius=

The Thrasher and the Vigil are fitted so I can Lewt and Slavage wrecks under Highly Adverse Conditions AND be able to GTFO, “RUN! Forrest, RUUN!!” if/when things go south saving POD and hard earned L&S. The vigil is my Ninja Salvager, highly successful at L&S’n wrecks with Flashy RED guys on grid with me. And either one is a far, far easier hit on the wallet if lost when things ‘go south’, which they do with nervous-tick developing frequency in the hole. =]

So, we have this “tent” in this C2 we want to raid, we have ships and we have the need for ISK and we have 30+ sites to run... Oh yea! So with everything that had gone on that day my CEO is crapped out tired and calls it after we nom nom’ed up three sites. The next day, moar of the same… Go back to the old C2, got the last of everything out and took the Spike down and finished moving out, then corpmates AFK, one left for null, busy, sick.. crap. I ran three sites solo. We did great, for just six sites we pulled 27 MNR’s (Melted Nanoribbons for those late to class…). It was during this that I decide to stay in here and rape this hole until I have my Loki. I passed the skills a few weeks ago and now all I need is the ISKies, (for me, a lotta ISKies, ‘bout 600+Mil ISK to be approx… ) and this hole has enough and to spare all tied up in Sleeper droans and ships… all we gotta do is asplode em, lewt and slavage em and get it out to the store.

The next several days we were back to runnin round getting all the POS mods etc. consolidated in our Empire HQ hangars… Ervything had been taken outta via three different holes, and was therefore spread ALL over New Eden… sheesh. But, it hadda be done and nuthin to it but to do it, so we did.

Going to Warp…

Back to the raid hole and… wha? Huh? Oh Dammit! We got raided in the raid hole we were raiding! We went from 35 sites, we had knocked out 6 and now there were only 20 left, sumbody raided up 10 of OUR sites (1 additional site had spawned), oh well, so it goes… And everyone is again gone, sick or semi-permAFK… and I am tired of waitin, so I decide to risk it, fly as defensively as possible, and knock down as many as I can for the so sweet 100% split. So while I am working the sites a good friend gets on and we’re shootin the breeze, I tell him bout my Loki Quest and he replies, “…just so happens I just ran across an abandoned Shadow Serpentis wreck in this belt a few mins ago. It has Low-Grade Snake Epsilon implant and a Shadow Serpentis Warp Scrambler in it and you are welcome to them...” Hmmmm… See one of my “things” in EVE is I don’t believe in loans, making my way in EVE, on my own, is important to me.

But… a Low-Grade Snake Epsilon implant and a Shadow Serpentis Warp Scrambler, huh? And you already warped away from the belt? Why dint you take em? Oh, you have X.X Bil in your wallet and moar than that in ships and assets… huh… really. So you dint ‘need’ em… Weeeeellll… if yer just gonna leave em… sure, I’ll take em. Why not? I mean, otherwise they just go to waste out there, right?

(Self deception is moar important than sex. If you don’t think so, try and remember a day you went without at least one good self deception… then think on how many days you’ve had without sex.)

Anyway, I talked myself into accepting this blatant charity, this multimillion ISK hand-out, this, this… 215,000,000.00 ISK TY VM gift! =] As I put it to Oz, “OK, I’ll take em, but sell em first, then send ISK or let me sell em... dunt want/need a hand out... but will take ‘spensive trash ... LOL.” Hmmm… now that gets me a wee but closer to a Cloaky Loki. So my CEO joins me and we run five sites for 18 MNRs, meh. But, my cuts plus the ‘gift’ and I have a Loki hull and two subsystems, I call that a good start.

HDF =Lochotic=

I log on the next day…. And we have 5 sites left. Damn! Raided again! 20 moar sites gone into some other corps wallets… crap. My CEO and I hammer through the five combat sites, one moar spawns while we’re working and we do that one too for six… and 20 MNRs. That gets me all but two of the subsystems AND all the mods for the fit I had PYFA’d up. I searched through my Mods back in the HQ, rummaged around in all the Corp mods in the corp hangars… and all I had to buy were the x4 425mm Med ‘Scout’ Autocannons; Expanded Probe Launcher; Experimental 10MN MWD; Large Shield Booster II; x2 Stasis Webifier IIs; x2 Gyro IIs and a DCU II. Everything else was already in the can. 180MISK moar and I’m in my Loki... but we’re now outta Sleeper sites in this hole.

As we have been workin the sites we have also been doing the daily chores of wormhole life... scanning down the daily sigs, keepin an eye on Dscan and the status of the static holes, checking POS fuel status, checking the stores: ammo, droans and consumables for the crews and POS staff. Additionally, those of you who have read my logs know, HBHI is also a WH Reclamation Corp… we sell the holes we find that are (a) empty and (2) have good PI and decent weather… and this hole was sellable Etherestate!

AI had put it up on the forums and we already had serious takers. We needed to wrap up operations and get out if we get a down payment. We know the hole is as we have offered, we just need to have the buyer come in and see we are being honest, then see if he comes through with the balance. So AI gets a down payment and get the prospective buyer inside, he’s inna CovOps and goes off scan ASAP, and I dunt see him again. AI says he is satisfied, and will pay the balance upon seeing our POS is gone. Okay, we move out, we get 350M ISK for a bookmark… and I get a nice 15% finder’s fee right off the top, I LOVE W-space!! We SELL solar systems!!! You can’t do that in Empire... =]

Get Away From it ALL! Come Live in the Country…

(but bring guns, lotsa guns…)

OK so we find out newest A239, the stat Losec, is a very suc hole… 10 lowsec hops to the nearest Hisec… crap. And then the D382 turns out to be occupado and they have a massively over built True Sansha Deth Star POS w/ a Nighthawk command ship on scan… AND probes immediately appear right after we start our recon. Oh dubble crap.

Talk about bein trapped tween a rock and a hard place…. We were trapped tween 10 losec hops and a probably very hostile wormhole. This was the first time I had ever really felt trapped in W-space. And I had been lost in space moar’n once in my time in the holes... (I call em, “Adventures in Wormholes”) and I LOLed at the chance of bodyloss… secure in the knowledge that at best ‘they’ might get my Cheetah, and mebbe my current clone… but that was it.

This time however, I really felt the bad guys next door might just jump at the chance to bash a Sm POS into a largish cloud of smoke and debris filled with the scattered burned and flashfrozen corpses of our gallant crews and POS staff… and then delight in cracking the egg of our Maintenance bay and stealing some of our best ISK making ships. And the option of skedaddlin out the A239 was, well, not an option with 10 losec hops to cover in fat, slow, PvE fit ships, one-at-a-time’in it out, then back 10 lows in pods or shuttles… all yer doing then is chumming for sharks with your ships as bloody meat.

Damn damn damn… So, I go out and pop a Med Warp Bubble on the D382, can’t hurt right? And we give massclosing the A239 a go. AI in his Armor fit Hyp and me in my Shield Mael, both MWD fit. We are careful taking turns, watching the status and appearance of the hole with utmost care and attention. Finally we get the critical drop… OK, We are (1) both on the inside when one of my return trips takes it to critical… good, and (b) we “should” be able to close the hole with the Hyp… once out w/ MWD off, and back in 30 seconds later with MWD ON…

AI warps though, and… the holes still there, good good… I wait for the longest thirty seconds of my virtual life… and “Jump Jump” and the Hyp warps back through… and the hole beautifully closes right behind him. A huge sigh of relief is heard all ‘round the command deck… =] OK, warp back to the POS and let’s find that new A239.

Relief on the Bridge

Probes out! One new sig, probing… probing… probing… probing… Got it! Warp to and out and… five lows to Hisec. Damn… again with the fat, slow, PvE fit ships, one-at-a-time’in it out and then back… yer just as dead in five hops as in a hundred… We get on the Neocom and consult with the Directorship. A vote and we are to attempt to massclose this A239 and hope for a better one.

Grim determination, back out and “Jump Jump”! Back and forth, back and forth until, Critcial! Once again, we are both on the inside, good good… once again, AI takes his Hyp out… and we wait down those long long thirty seconds… and “Jump Jump”… and once again the hole closes right behind him. Reship! Probes out! One new sig, probing… probing… probing… Got it! Warp to and out and… three lows to Hisec. OK, we’ll just have to make it work as we’re getting tired and tired people make mistakes… There is a station in the first losec, let’s get everything in there and deal with getting em outta losec after.

AI starts making Indy runs with his Itty V and I start moving my ships out. I don’t have an Indy in this POS but I have the bulk of ships to move. We get everything out, take down the mods, I get the warp bubble off the D382, and finally, nothing left but the spike. AI grabs his last load and the fuel from the Tower, I offline the spike, then unanchor... 15 mins and counting… finally the Spike unanchors, AI scoops it and we make for the A239, warp out and into station. Safe! Well, as safe as one can be three hops deep in lowsec in New Eden.

Oh, and the buyer? He was a good as his word. The ISK was deposited and I got my cut with the rest going to the corp wallet. =] All told we ran 17 sites for approx 665M ISK plus sold the hole for 350M ISK, approx grand total; 1.15Bil ISK in four days of being swamped with other things and just not workin the sites very hard… I wonder how we’d do if we ever got serious about it? =]

The HDF =Lochotic= …on sea trials.

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

Elvis has LEFT the Wormhole!

2012-02-03T04:48:00.000-05:00

or~ Our Last Day in Our First Home

Yup… <sigh> I’m has sadface. =[ We have taken down Serenity and moved out of the C2 Wormhole we have called home for 8 months. Serenity’s Force Field went up YC 310.06.04, and came down YC 311.02.02.

I ponder the changes to come...

I seem to have strong feelings about this, be it a game or not. You see, there has never been an MMO I could get into even just a little bit. They all (my blog, my opinion) SUCK. I have no interest whatsoever in being a “Mage” or a “Warrior” or a 5^th Level Female Rouge Elf who fights terrible Demons inna Wrought Iron Gold Clad Thong Bikini with a Sword so big she couldn't pick it up if she was on the Moon even. Sheesh…. what juvenile crap (to ME).

Since I was 5 or 6 I have read Sci-fi almost exclusively. Sci-fi, military history, and alternate histories which are really just a different take on Sci-fi, IE possible pasts based on techno, psycho, bio and politico alternatives instead of possible futures based on same. And yes, I love Star Trek and Star Wars (saw both when FIRST time they were aired and/or released thank you very much), but in all fairness I have tried… but I just can’t get into the MMOs for em, it just doesn’t feel right.

Serenity Station.... Ready to Offline

You see, for me, those are… I dunt know how to put it… well, I dunt wanna GO there, I wanna see Kirk and Spock, Han and Leia, Warf and Dax, Obiwan and Luke, Picard and Riker et al do their thing there… I dunt wanna live there, or even play there anymoar than I do in the Shire, or Mordor… “I” dunt belong there, “they” do… just weirds me out I tell ya. Then, my son opens is Mac and says, “Ya gotta see this.”

And he was right. You see, for me, EVE… New Eden… is OURS. We belong here. We are making this as we go… Kirk, Spock, Han, Leia, Warf, Dax, Obiwan, Luke, Picard, Riker… “they” dunt belong in EVE, “we” do. EVE is our space opera, our DS9, our 5 Year Mission of Exploration, our War with The Dominion. Have you ever noticed how Empire (Hisec) is like Star Trek and Lo and Null is like Star Wars? Thinkaboutit… =]

Drake on Final Approach

EVE belongs to us, the Capsuleer Captains of Starships, and the Corpmates and Allies of New Eden.

And Serenity Station, was my corps first real home here. And, yes… I am saddened by our moving out, no matter the great adventures we will have to come, no matter I was the first to say we need to ‘up-our-game’ and find a new hole to bugger till we’re rich. When you live in a POS… it is not like living in an NPC station. It is YOURS. You are directly responsible for it, for creating it, for defending it, for maintaining it.

Aside from some of the mechanics which I wish were better (we can’t dock in the POS Ship Maintenance Array and log off there. We can’t sit in our CQ and look out a window [one of my pet peeves about this game… Hey CCP, you gave us a CQ with a stoopid “Sorry you can’t breathe in there” effin door, why not give us a VIEW fer christ’s sake!] but that’s a rant for another post)…. forgive, I digress, so other than a few fail mechanics, I loved livin in a POS.

Serenity, view from the Secret Squirrel Lab

The thing I keep coming back to over and over again about EVE is, it’s a true Virtual Reality. We live out a virtual life in here. We act and react to and with the other live players. The interactions we have with NPCs are, as it should be, mostly just about virtual work, IE making ISK. The corps in EVE that really break away from the ‘game’ aspects and delve most deeply into the virtual life aspects are corps such as the Tuskers.

The Tuskers are a pirate corp, proud of their traditions with honor and a code and they try, as much as possible, to actually make their living in EVE (IE live off the ISK) from their pirate operations, just as pirates have done ever since man first set sail to wind. They attack ships to plunder and loot their Cargos and their Salvage, but whenever possible, they do not kill first but take hostage and allow the Captains of the ships they attack the honorable choice of ransom. They do not belittle their victims, but treat with them as honorable men, they do not brag or boast and they honor their agreements. This is the age old, tried and true modus of piracy and the Tuskers uphold those traditions well. And they do it in EVE.

AI makes pickup on Serenity while we fly Security

Living in wormholes is closer to that than living in Empire is. You are moar ‘apart’ from the game aspects, as you have a residence you must pay for and pay, and work, to maintain. You must bring in or make fuels, setup and maintain defenses, run daily recons of the holes that connect your W-space to other WHs, Empire and null. If you think on it a bit, you can see that many of these tasks are ‘similar’ to tasks you have to do for your home, for your life, in RL.

And I dunt like the NPC stations at all… cause anyone can live in them for free. You can store literally hundreds of ships up to and including Battleships, for FREE… oh please. Show me anywhere in RL you could permanently park just your ass for free, with a room and amenities. Actually I am a bit of a stickler on that point. Now that we no longer have a POS, if I can avoid it, I do not log off anywhere but in our Empire offices… I feel I have a right to dock my ships and my ass there, I paid for it.

So taking Serenity Station down has had a strong emotional aspect for me. I will miss living there, I will miss the cycle and pattern of life in the hole. I will miss the seclusion, the beauty, the fear, and its rush… but most of all… the serenity of living in the most dangerous space in EVE.


Leaving the Hole… but I’ll be back.

Fly safe and see you in the sky =/|)=

Moving up, by Going Down…

2012-01-31T02:39:00.004-05:00

or ~ Will NULL really be “safer” than Wormholes?

The Indy Fleet ready to pack up and move out

(Going down to NULL that is… yea, I heard those smirking lols…)
KK… looks like we’re gonna bite the apple and learn the cold hard truth about life, the ‘verse and nullsec. For them as follows my mental meanderings here you may remember that back ‘bout a month ago there was some talk about us, our Alliance, going to 0.0, but only one of our Alliance corps ended up takin the plunge, the rest of us stayed in Hi/Lo/WH or wherever we was (if you want, you can find my blatherings about that here).

We needa UP our game:

So… we reformed the Alliance and one of our corps went to null while the rest of us either had no interest or were doin the ‘wait-n-see’… and now we have ‘waited-an-seen’ and it looks like they have settled in ok. One of our Directors took leave of his sens… I mean, took a leave of absence and joined the corp in null and is having a ball and making good ISK. Additionally, during the waitin-n-seein period our corp decided to finally make the effort to move to a C3. We have reached the point in the C2 where we are stagnating and need to shake things up and find some new challenges...

We have reached the point where, no matter how good the ISK is, running C2 Sleepers is getting to be moar like missioning than anything fun. However, we did run sites inna raid C3 some weeks ago and THAT was FUN! We had our usual fleet up, some guys from our corp and some guys from the Allies in our homehole, and we all actually had to warp out at one point to rep and recap due to the damage we were takin! Now that is moar like it! And, as expected, the Lewts and Slavage were substantially better… Now we’re talkin! So I have been sorta pushin for us to find either a C2/Lo/C3 (a C2 WH w/ a static Lowsec hole & a static C3 hole) or a C3/Lo/C<4 (a C3 WH w/ a static Lowsec hole & a static C[anything less than a 4] hole).

The last Sleeper Op for the Nidhogger Class Carrier “HDF Lusankya” under HBHI Command

Why a C<4? Cause people who live in W-space have to be (1) skilled up for the space they live in… which usually goes hand in hand with being skilled higher, or at least usually moar experienced, in pew pew also. If (when) we move up to a C3, the corp we share the C2 with will not be coming with us… so we will lose a POS and a whole corp of support… we will be alone in our new hole and dependant on just us, so we dunt need to have a daily connection to holes what has people in them what ‘have’ to be better skilled and moar experienced than us. What I want is a C2/Lo/C3… live in a C2, have a static Lowsec to Empire with a static C3 to raid... but we gotta find it first… and finding a very specific needle inna large haystack of identical needles would be far, far easier...

But, we have decided to make the move and we have The Three Part Plan:

-Part the First: take down Serenity Station and move ervything to storage in our Empire offices;

-Part the Second: spend some time in nullsec with the corp what moved there… for the change of pace and the experience;

-Part the Third: while in nullsec, grind up some corp ISK in new ways and continue the search for a new homehole;

So yer may be thinking “#1 and #2 I get OK… but how are you going to search for WHs if yer runnin sites in null?” Well, one of the things we do is “sell” WHs we find & raid that are (a) empty and have (2) decent PI for POS fuels… there are forums where one can offer said W-space Ether Estate for sale and conversely, look for hole to buy. And, like most Capsuleer Captains in New Eden we each take on one or two Apprentice Lieutenants (often referred to as our A’Lts), these are Capsuleer Pilots in Training. They are very, very carefully screened and selected pilots in whom we can trust implicitly with corp and personal business. Some will remain in Empire and we will direct their efforts to find a suitable Wormhole for the corp.

Phase One:

So we started taking down “Serenity Station” our Large Minmatar Planetary Orbital Station… Ugh. You see our Serenity, well she was a real Deth Star…

Full set of Shield Hardeners, x2 Photon, x3 Thermal x4 Explosive & x4 Kinetic and 39 fully loaded Guns, x18 Med Arty, x18 Med ACs, x2 Sm Arty, x1 Sm AC… and 36 EWar mods, x4 of each type…

One of the 18 Defense Weapon/EWar Emplacements

This meant that:

(A) we had up a helluva lot moar defense mods than we could ever online all at once (this being the point of course, if you bash us and incap any particular mod, I have MANY moar I can just online to continue bashing you back with…) and

(2) it also meant a helluva lotta unloadin and offlinin and unachorin needed to be done… ugh.

And I put most of this all up before Crusibble and the Great Anchoring Nerf, THAT was Epic Ugh.

We get all but the minimum onlined Defenses down and stored, we get the Assy Arrays, Refineries and the Lab broke down and crated up... all the internal structures but one Ship Maint Bay and “Haven” the Lrg Ship Assy Array packed up and ready to go. Now we need fair weather (a good hole, Hisec or a 1 hop low) and all of us together. Well, “the best laid plans…” as they say, aren’t ours. One of our Directors gets his ships out… and heads for null. The other has ‘things he has to do’ some place he refers to cryptically only as “Floridah” in “RL”, (secretive bastard)… and so he is not around much.

So I start flying my ships out to Jigga, I buy a buncha shuttles in Jigga and do 3, 40+ hop round trips, bringin in 3 of my BCs in only to find out Jigga is simply where the Freighter is docked that we are going to use for the move, not the staging system we are supposed to bring our ships to. The owner is going to bring it to the nearest Empire hole to the C2 in a few days and pick up everthang… the actual staging system, the one where our Jump Freighter pilot can come and get our stuff to take back to the 0.0 system we are going to be staying in, is… 30+ hops… the other way… OH EFF ME.

Needless to say I am a little put out by the news and as the trolling and LOLing begins I am able to pull up the Neocom logs and prove I was told that was where one of our corpmates was taking his ships ‘for the move’… hence I had every reason to believe, and no one advised me otherwise, that that was where I had to take my ships… gratefully the trolling stopped and was followed up by, “Well look, we can fix that this way…” While I was, and am, very grateful to our JF pilot for his offer of several very inconvenient for him possible solutions, I left those ships where they were and just contracted em to the Freighter pilot, I trust him and he had to come out this way anyway right? As for the rest of the ships I am taking to null, as you can imagine I spent a truly amazing amount of time moving them all over EvE the past several days. =]

Tur’s Fleet

Anyhoo, I get almost all of my ships out, and in the process realize I own wayyy too many ships so I put a few unrigged Rifters up for sale and a buncha rigged Rifters and rigged Thrashers and a Procurer up on contract. I move the ones Ima keep in Empire to our Hisec Offices and the one I want to bring with me to the last 0.5 sys from the lowsec staging system. So far so good, the losec holes we have been having are decent, and we had a hisec or two in the stat C2. I haven’t lost any ships (yet, repeatedly impact knuckles on xylem of dried cellulose) and I am ready to make some Indy runs. I make several with my Mastodon transport and get the bulk of the mods and assets in the Ship Assy arrays out of the hole staged in the closest station and then from there into storage at the HQ... so far, so good.

We go campin:

The next day we get back to workin on all of this and I am scanning the days holes when what do I find... the newest D382, our static C2, is unoccupado… there’s just an offline Gallente tower with 10 incapped guns and their public Corp records read like that happened moar than a month ago, hmm… I do a quick DScan…OH Damn! 30 combat sites! WooHoo! Oh yea, we gotta rape this hole before we go nulla. OK, so while we have a connecting hole I real quick throw up a Small Minnie Spike, a Ship Maint Bay and the Sm Ship Assy for storage. Bring in and online the minimum needed hardeners and a few guns so she can at least go down fighting…

Serenity Base Defenses

Yea I said ‘go down fighting”. You see small towers are really nothing moar than targets in W-space… I actually refer to it as “the ‘tent’ in the raid hole.” If anyone gets at all serious about taking it down, it won’t last long. But… for what we want to do it is an acceptable option. It gives us a minimum amount of protection and somewhere to store multiple ships, which you cannot do otherwise as your one lone clone can’t logoff in multiple ships.

By the end of the day I have the ‘tent’ all setup, many SS BMs (Safe Spot Book Marks) are made and I log off content we are on schedule in Phase One AND we have a nice chunk ‘o ISK to make to boot. Finding an empty hole with a high site count was sorta like a G’bye present from W-space… =]

Serenity Base… our tent in the raid C2

Then we get camped:

The next day my CEO and I are hopin to complete the move out AND our Friendly but Not-so Neighborhoodly Freighter pilot is bringing his Freighter, for free, to pick up ships etc. The for free is cause he was working with us on mining in our home hole and he has a LOT of stuff and a number of his own ships in our POS, so he would have been coming to get them anyway instead of moving them one by one. Well, to say it did not turn out as planned is a wee bit off the mark…

I had scanned down the A239, the stat lo and is was a suc hole… and Vik (Your Friendly Freighter pilot) had come out and run my ships to the staging system. He said he was gonna head on back to his home sys if we weren’t ready and the holes were not good, I said Okay but that I had not yet scanned the D382, which was listed as having a stat hi, and so he decided to wait… well, he shouldn’t have. Turns out his corp had a War Dec going live that very day. Anyhoo, I was still scanning when he said they had a dec coming on and I said well get the hell outta here man!

Well, he thought he could make it… you guessed it, he dint. Obelisk Freighter w/ 3 Hulks in the hold asploded inna horrible fire, Damn. And if that wasn’t bad enough… 2 days later, he does the shuttle fast-fast thing to get to our new stat lo so he can get his ships out and… we are camped by the Tuskers. My CEO is killed and podded, with the loss of an Itty V, thankfully carrying nothing irreplaceable or outstandingly expensive, and podding happens, it’s EVE.

So we do the waiting game thing and after almost 3 hours, we put a CovOps on both sides of the hole and wait some moar… all seems clear. Local looked OK, seemed the gang who attacked AI were no longer in system, course they could have just jumped a gate and were waiting for a cloaky scout to give em the signal to warp in… but it all “looks” clear and it has been 3 hours so we all decide to try for it and we give Vik the greenlight to make the run from the POS and out… and he gets jumped as soon as he warps thru the hole.

He is able to warp back thru but they are right on his heels. On landing inside they pop up a ‘dictor bubble and that’s that… They blow his Apoc and request a ransom for his pod. Little do they know, or care, that his recent losses have drained his wallet and he cannot afford any reasonable ransom… so they pod him. Crap… its EVE and its Wormholes… right?

Vik ends up back in null from when he was incorp down there, I cover the cost of upgrading his clone and the guys there help him bloodjump (slang: The act of purposefully jumping to the location of a medical clone by deliberately being podded) back to hisec. Them damn Tuskers… gotta give em the respect though. We had made a buncha runs in my Mastodon and AI’s Itty V before they jumped AI on an outbound leg. Then they did it right… they played the waiting game, and won another kill for their patience.

Needless to say that was that for the night. AI went and picked up his Hyp from wherever he had docked it and made his way to the raid C2 we had setup the ‘tent’ in and logged for the night… We heard from Strigon and he has the Duck I got as a prize from the C4 raid he is gonna use in the raid C2 and he is on his way back. I stayed up a bit writing up reports, this one among em.

POS Gun Fun:

On a side note, I finally got to use the POS guns… I had a really stoopid number of shuttles in the POS. Some from batches I had brought in for the usual reasons, shuttle are just damned handy and a lot from all the moving ships out part of the last week. You can’t repackage mods and ships in a POS and you can’t put unpackaged ships in a Transport or a Freighter… you can store/scoop them into a Capital like an Orca or a Carrier… but we sold our carrier earlier this week and lost our Orca some time ago in the hole.

We badly need another Orca, but “need in one hand and shite in the other and see which fills faster” as they say. So how did I solve this dilemma? Would you believe I risked multiple losec runs to save an effin fleet of 10K ISK each shuttles?? Uh UH!! I flew about half of em out to my 200Km from the POS Relay Point, ejected, podded back into the POS, took control of a Med Arty Battery and had me some fun.

After I popped all the shuttles that I had dropped at the Relay Point, I changed the POS aggression settings, flew another shuttle out, ejected, gave my pod a burst of thrusters and watched the POS herself turn the shuttle into a wreck inna cloud of smoke… Cool, rinse and repeat until there were no moar shuttles left… sigh. Later AI had come back to the POS and he played with the guns blasting the wrecks to clean up the sky as they were clutterin up his dscan… right, I heard him smilin as he said it. =]

So, we still have the last few mods, the spike and a ship or two left to move out, and now something like 35 or moar sites in the raid C2 still to run… I got out of our old C2 tonight made the 4 lows out to hisec and am now doing some last minute ship moving and finishing this report before I head to the tent in raid C2 for the night…

Man, I am looking forward to our null adventures,

But I am surely gonna miss living... on the other side of the sky.

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

Pater Nulla

2012-01-26T04:42:00.003-05:00

The EVEning Prayer

CCP, which art in The Land of Ice,

(Don’t let this go to your heads…)

To Thy New Eden we come,

Thy DPS to be done, in Hek,

As it is in Jita.

Give us this day our daily Adrenaline Rush,

And forgive them their piratical ways,

As we cloak and warp from harms ganking grasp.

Lead us not into Gate Camps,

But help us as we try our best,
to camp gates, against them.

And deliver our cargos from evil,

For thine is the Server, the Sandbox,

The DPS and the Tank,

For ever and ever…

(or at least until the wife gets home...)

This We beseech thee in Chribba's name,

Allow not the tears and whines

of the small and the weak,

the griefer and the bear,

to change the Rules of the 'Verse,

in which we live, and die, this our Virtual Life.

AhhhMen…

Si non potes comminues, derident eos ...

Blog Banter 32: “The Sandbox Argument”

2012-01-23T03:31:00.008-05:00

Topic:

"A quick view of the Eve Online forums can always find someone complaining about being suicide ganked, whining about some scam they fell for or other such tears. With the Goons' Ice Interdiction claiming a vast amount of mining ships there were calls for an "opt out of PvP" option.

Should this happen? Should people be able to opt-out of PvP in Eve Online? Should CONCORD prevent crime rather than just handing out justice after the event? Or do the hi-sec population already have too much protection from the scum and villainy that inhabits the game?"

Answer…

For me, this is a non-question... a semantically null discussion as regards MMO virtual realities. EVE already is far safer than RL ever can be... In EVE, everyone is IMMORTAL. You cannot DIE.

What people want, what they are crying about is not “safety”… it is the protection and permanence of their STUFF.

They dunt wanna LOSE any of the ISK, or THINGS they have gathered, made or bought with ISK in the game. Whether it is ships, ore, mods, POS(es), blingy faction mods, simple 10K ISK implants to a set of 1.5 Billion “Slave” implants… their very first Rifter all proudly T1 fitted or a Nyx they’ve had since ‘05.

What they want… is their STUFF safe from attack and theft and destruction… and I say your ASS is already Immortal, your STUFF isn’t… shutup.

Rational…

EVE is the first MMORPG to be a ‘true’ virtual REALITY in “most” respects. In RL, as In EVE, there is NO WHERE that you are perfectly safe from attack, theft, scams, griefing, being bullied and ripped off… but unlike RL, in EVE “you” CAN’T DIE.

Yes, your current clone can be shot, lazered, railgunned, blastered, asploded and burnt to a crackly crisp in a horrible fire, flash frozen in the depths of the black, scooped up and put on display or sold at auction… and YOU will wake up in a nice fresh clean clone... EVERYTIME. So you lost some STUFF… so what? YOU are still here and you will certainly still have (almost) all the skills you have already trained (unless you were flyin a T3). But the STUFF (and any skills) you lost CAN BE REPLACED. You just gotta have the guts and desire to get off yer pod gooey ass and get back out there. IT’S A GAME.

The problem is… it is the first game to have REAL RISK. Loss in EVE COSTS. And the cost can be very high… but you cannot die. So get some perspective people. The fact that there is real loss in EVE is the very thing that makes it so very special… and the main reason that universal and inescapable potential for loss MUST never be nerfed in ANY respect. If you do… even a little… then we are all just playing WoW.

Life is a challenge, a constant fight to find safety and prosperity for yourself and your heirs. EVE mimics life in that very challenge and constant fight to safely go about one’s pursuit of wealth, power or peace in a world that IS NOT “SAFE”.

Does this mean there are players who wont play EVE? That there are players who will be driven away?

Yes it does... so? CCP knows this and accepts that EVE is unique and is not for everybody, they made it this way. It is for us... for those who are willing to fight for what we want and fight to keep what we have.

I am not good at PvP… my record is basically 50/50… so I dunt suc at it either, but I always get the shakes… I always get an adrenaline rush the likes of which is damn near incapacitating… and NO OTHER PvP in any other game does this to me… or ever has… why? Loss. Real, measurable, expensive, painful, costly, aggravating, effin LOSS.

I live in a wormhole... I have lost a lot in my time here... we lost a Noctis with 30 melted Nanoribbons in the hold last night to a Stealth Bomber attack inna C4 wormhole... 30 MNRs = 240Million ISK at current Jita prices... So what did we do? Cry, whine and moan? Rage log? Nope... we warped in to save what we could, the pilot got his POD out OK so we went back to running the rest of the sites, got a new Noctis and salvaged and looted the rest of the sites, with tighter security... what else? Its EVE dammit.

This is why some players get so upset… Carebears and Greifers, ALL of them dunt wanna loose the STUFF they have worked so long and hard to collect or create… Carebear or Geifer, it takes TIME, lots of precious time and effort to skill up, then to generate or collect or steal or destroy then loot and salvage the STUFF ingame need to sell outright or to make other STUFF ingame that they can then sell for other STUFF they want ingame… and because of this, that STUFF has real emotional meaning and value to all of them.

Neither side wants to lose they STUFF… the difference is one side, the carebears don’t want to have to fight for it. They want a safe place or a safe way to go about doing the things they do to get STUFF without any risk to the STUFF itself.

The Griefers also dunt wanna lose they STUFF, they just accept the risks and act accordingly and when they get griefed and lose they STUFF, well… they unnerstand and/or they try to get even… but either way they usually dunt run to the forums and rage and cry about it.

If CCP removes the element of real loss… of real risk. Eve will no longer be EVE. EVE is a game, but take away risk and It will become just a game… it will lose the very deep emotional connections it has for ALL of its players… because without risk… there is no VALUE.

You cannot VALUE that which you cannot LOSE.

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

Afterthoughts...

I probably should have added this in the original post but, all of the above is based on this:

My small corp lives in a wormhole. We have for many months now. We make our living primarily running Sleeper sites, both in our homehole and especially in the static C2s that pop up everyday...We have made some atrocious ISK upon occasion. We have lost a number of ships, maybe less, maybe moar, than we would have in Empire, I dunt know. I DO know that we are not at all PvP adverse But we are not a griefer corp... one of our members is definitely quite bloodthirsty, but... we consider ourselves moar a carebadger corp rather than carebear or greiferbear.

As stated we are not against PvP... you can't be an live in wormholes... try it, you'll soon see what I mean. But we also do not spend the majority of our time actively seeking PvP. We spend moar time on making ISK and planning for the future, IE what ships we are training for, building our next carrier, or Orca... and we let PvP take care of itself.

By that I mean we raid other WHs as they pop up... if there's people inside, and we feel the odds are in our favor... we setup an attack and try and take em. Why? Why not? It's a WORMHOLE. The deadliest space in EVE and we are wormholers. If we feel the odds are not in our favor, we mass close the hole and see what pops up next. If the hole is unoccupado, or has Towers but no one 'awake', then we scan the sites, if there are enough to make it worth the risk, we run em.

We have lost ships to raids we have done, we have lost ships to being raided, we have killed in raids and taken ships as prizes, we have killed some who have raided us... but we are not a PvP corp, or a greifer corp, or a pirate corp...

We are a corporation of like minded individuals who live a virtual life in New Eden, where we work, and fight, to make this virtual life for ourselves and our membership... life in New Eden is not safe and it can be very, very harsh at times... sometimes for us, and sometimes for those who cross us. but it is always WORTH it and it is NEVER boring. =]

Please... please don't ever make it boring by making it safe.

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

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After Action Report: WSCA-YC113.01.17-TE:HBHI

2012-01-18T05:01:00.006-05:00

After Action Report of W-Space Combat Activity
Captain TurAmarth ElRandir / Hiigaran Bounty Hunters Inc. [HBHI]

Waiting on The Word...

Time & Date: 07:00 to 08:15 EVE - YC 113.01.17
Location: 3 W-Space Systems; Home C2 of HBHI, D382 C2 & J113456-C4

Station: NA

Planet: NA

Constellation: NA

Region: Unknown Wormhole Space

Summary:
Took part in 4 Combat Actions

Solo Kills: none

Fleet Kills: 4

Losses: none

Captures: 2

Report:

During daily operations in the home C2 Capt. ElRandir had scanned down all signatures. There were four Wormholes present. The A239 (Static Losec) was the same, the D382 (Static C2) was new, there was a K162 that led to Hisec and a K162 that led to “Dangerous Unknown Space” (unexplored).

NC1M [HELPeR] reconned the D382 and reported several ships running sites. We decided to run a WH Denial OP. Sovereign Meari [HELPeR], Tsra [HELPeR], NC1M [HELPeR], Wyatt Franz [HELPeR] & TurAmarth ElRandir [HBHI] joined fleet.

Ships in Fleet:
TurAmarth ElRandir - Hurricane

Sovereign Meari - Mrymidon

Tsra - Hurricane

NC1M - Falcon

Wyatt Franz - various

A Magnate, "Avantia Jovakko [K=PRO](Magnate)" was scouting for the Enemy Fleet. About 15 minutes after NC1M warped in and began scouting, the Enemy Fleet broke off Sleeper Ops and retired from the field exiting thru an unknown WH, leaving wrecks behind. We waited hoping they would return as there were valuable Sleeper wrecks left behind. Finally as the timer was running down, Tsra attempted to L&S the wrecks but to no avail. The Magnate returned and scanned down the K162 back to our C2. All of us but NC1M holed up in our POSes and acted as if we weren’t there.

The Magnate transited into our C2 and began scouting. Tsra and I undocked and I took my Hurricane thru the D382 and Sovereign Meari and I setup a CAMP (Combat Ambush Maneuver Position) on the inside. Anchored a Med Warp Bubble and we took up CAMP stations at the hole. Tsra went back into our C2. The Magnate eventually returned to the D382 and did not immediately warp thru. Tsra was able to scram, web and kill the Magnate and sequentially kill the Magnate’s POD.

Kill Records:
http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=15036362
http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=15036362

We disengaged the CAMP and fleeted up inside the D382. NC1M scanned down the Enemy Fleets exit hole and scouted in his Falcon. Inside the D382 he engaged a Drake, "Drake [K-PRO](Drake)", and a Hurricane, "JA netta diamond [K-PRO](Hurricane)", he called for reinforcements. We warped in on him, the Hurricane jumped thru the hole and the Drake broke and warped to P1, I pursued. Tsra, NC1M and Sovereign Meari warped thru to the C4. The Drake immediately warped back to the WH as did I. He warped through but I had to wait down the "polarity" timer.

I finally warped in and engaged the Hurricane with scram but he went down to Tsra before I could engage my guns. I then engaged the Drake, the pilot decided at now three to one odds to eject. We disengaged all DPS keeping the Drake scrammed and webbed. I warped back thru to our C2, ejected in my POD and returned to claim the Drake. I took the Drake as prize back to our POS, reshipped back to my Hurricane and returned to fleet inside the C4.

Kill Record:
http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=15036456

Shortly after rejoining the fleet a Raven, "jonno aldeun [K-PRO](Raven)", an Augoror, "Gohan Katana [K-PRO](Augoror)", and "JA netta diamond” returned in another Hurricane, "JA netta diamond [K-PRO](Hurricane)". They landed on grid and attacked us. We primaried the Raven, once it was scrammed and webbed by both Tsra and I, I switched and scrammed, webbed and neuted the 2^nd Hurricane putting all my DPS and drones on the Raven until it was destroyed. Tsra & NC1M concentrated their attack with me on the Raven then they took down the Augoror. After the Raven I turned all DPS and drones on the Hurricane and was eventually joined by Tsra and NC1M. At that point the pilot ejected and we disengaged all DPS but kept the Hurricane scrammed and webbed incase an Enemy pilot tried to retake the ship. Wyatt Franz came out in his POD and claimed the Hurricane as prize.

Kill Records:
http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=15036639
http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=15036640

After Action… wrecks and the spoils

After this engagement the Enemy hailed us in local and we returned GF. They then hailed Sovereign Meari privately and he enjoined them in a discussion of the recent engagement. They requested safe passage and this was granted.

During this convo the members of K-PRO requested assistance in the form of advice and training in tactics and fits and came to an agreement with Sovereign Meari. K-PRO is now BLUE to Astraeaus Alliance and they have requested our assistance and we may join them in future Sleeper Combat Operations in K-PROs home C4 in the near future.

Summary:

Transited two Wormholes to fight and kill 4 ships & 1 POD and capture 2 ships w/ no losses.

Negotiated and accepted BLUE Treaty Status with the corp we fought.

Killed:
"Avantia Jovakko [K=PRO](Magnate)" - scout in J103352
Podded - Avantia Jovakko, Magnate pilot
"Gohan Katana [K-PRO](Augoror)" - in J113456
"jonno aldeun [K-PRO](Raven)" - in J113456
"JA netta diamond [K-PRO](Hurricane)" - in J113456

Captured:"Drake [K-PRO](Drake)" pilot ejected - in J113456
2nd "JA netta diamond [K-PRO](Hurricane)" pilot ejected - in J113456

Tactical Review:
HELPeR/HBHI Fleet-
We are all well experienced and highly skilled pilots flying well fit PVP Ships. We have a year of experience flying together in fleet and in many losec and W-space roams, raids and fights.

We had 3 well fit PVP DPS BCs and a very experienced EWar/CovOps scout/jammer.

Katana Productions [K-PRO]-
A very VERY new corp with very inexperienced pilots flying a mix of PVE fit BCs and a BS.

They had PVE fit BSs & BCs, one scout killed early on and no EWar support.

Summation:
We had the initiative, we were on the offensive, we used our CovOps scouting and EWar to full effect. We are experienced, work well together as a team and have a very good FC. We had strong PVP fit ships with multiple scram and web and Ewar available to us.

We had the upper hand from the outset.

Note:
K-PRO was in a C4 in W-space because they were avoiding the Corporate Wars incessantly waged against new corps in Empire which had taken a heavy toll on them very early in their corps history. W-space IS the deadliest space in EVE, but it is also very secluded and “apart” from Empire. Locator Agents cannot find you in W-space and I have yet to see any proof of anyone being able to actually search out a specific W-space System intentionally.

They were actually safer (IE from War Deccers and Empire gankers and pirates) in the C4, running sites in the Static C2 (they were NOT running sites in the C4, far above their capabilities ATM) and making the random Empire runs to sell off their L&S and buy ships ect. and returning to the C4.

However, this does leave them open to raids by people like us. As bad as it was, four ships lost and one corpmate pod killed. It was probably better than what they had gone through, and would continue to go through, if they had stayed in Empire.

A ‘course… then I wouldn’t have this nice new-to-me Drake… now would I? =]

Reppin th Spoils of War

Fly Safe (he he he) and lock you up in the Sky =/|)=

I Find Myself… Not Minding That I’m Mining…

2012-01-08T03:30:00.004-05:00

Me… mining… and liking it… whodathunkit?

Tur, mining... will wonders never cease?

It started like this, I recently lost my Sleeper Mael under… well, let’s just say, really unpleasant and unexpected circumstances, and I sorta came back to Hisec to get away from my troubles and think things over as ‘twere…

So as we have needed new Hisec offices for a while anyway I decided to go ahead and set em up as I had done the research and had decided on a system and station that fits our needs just a few hops from Dodi. We sorta base outta Dodi as it is very central to all the major hubs being closely equidistant… 14 from Rens, 15 from Jita and 16 from Amarr, and Dodixie is a minor hub in its own right. I rented the offices and took my time moving all my stuff from Dodi to the new station over the last few days.

Two very interesting things happened…

(1) As I needed some ISK so I decided to put up with the grind and run a few mishes. My best local agent in our new Empire HQ was an L3. As I dint have a BC or BS in Empire and was sorta left with few choices so I decided to run them in my Navy Issue Vexor. As a Minnie I have always relied on guns and outflyin my eminies… with the Vex I decided to try something new and use droans as my primary weapon and kite the NPCs. The fights were moar exciting as I was slightly moar challenged in a Navy Cruiser rather than waffle stompin everything in sight inna Battleship (which can be kinda fun too but can get old fast…).

This was more fun and I have really enjoyed missioning for the first time in a long time. It isn’t ‘new’ and I know too well just how to handle the NPCs… yer still fighting a limited AI after all, but add in the element of a little risk and it becomes fun again.

(2) I have been skilling up to get into the Prowler and Mastodon… the Indy Transport ships. The Prowler is the Minnie Blockade Runner (a cloaky covert hauler) and the Mastodon is the Minnie Deep Space Transport (strong defensive heavy hauler). I need these of course because the C2 WH we live in has a static Lowsec hole and most of the time we have to come in and out of the hole usually via 1 to 3 lowsec hops but we have seen as bad as 9 lows and we have upon occasion had a hole pop out where we have 1 or 2 lows then a few NULLS then moar lows to hisec…. Yuch.

So I was checking my skills… and found I had also at some point cleared the hurdle for the Procurer ORE mining barge… really? Hmmm, a very Spokian “Interesting” w/ one raised eyebrow feeling came over me.

I have been getting moar involved and interested in the Industry side of things ever since we hired a miner to the corp and built a carrier. Plus we have found ourselves short on POS fuels a few times and that simply should not happen with PI allowing you to make ALL but the ice products ‘in house’ as twere and we aren’t fully realizing the potential the PI and mining the hole offers.

PI Pickup at the Plasma Planet

All of the above lead to me finding myself in hisec with no immediate plans to return to the hole ASAP, and an unusual interest in all things related to mining… so I bought and fitted up a Procurer and went a mining we will go, a mining we will go… Hi, Hi, the derrio a mining we will go… just to see what all the fuss was about.

It was very weird and I now know I’ll never be a full time miner but still… It was not altogether unpleasant. I knew I was making ISK, though not as much nor as fast as I would like, however I was bring productive and while not AFK, I was able to devote moar time to the left screen, bloggin and such, than usual when ingame. Plus the whole “EVE is just a front end for Excel” thing kinda suits me. All the complex numbers one gets into when one delves into Ores and minerals and refining and cycle times et al… it IS all sorta interesting.

I can see mining as something I will skill up for and use in those times when I want to still be productive without having to devote all my attention to the gameplay. When I want to make ISK in Empire, or take advantage of the A, B, Cs in W-space or generate the minerals to make Ammo, droans and ships in the POS.

So far it has been interesting in figuring out where to mine… You can’t anchor Giant Secure cans in any system above 0.7 so I had to pick a .7 system, close to my main station, with at least one station to base out of, a good number of ABs (Asteroid Belts) to work in, then how best to anchor Giant cans (whatta joke… a ‘giant’ can that holds one seventh as much as a Jet Can), how best to ‘work’ a field, what kind of return I can expect with a Procurer, what ores are best to mine and is refining or selling as ores better, etc., etc. …

As for the hauling aspect, after you mine up the ores and fill all yer cans you gotta get it back to a station to refine or sell. I anchor 9 Giant Secure Cans at the belt I am working. That is how many fit in the hold of my Mammoth… and that pushes my total cargo m3 from 27,129.27 without the cans to 35,229.27 with, an additional 6,300m3 of ore per full can run… it’s not a ‘lot’ but every m3 counts in this game I am told. Now I don't unanchor my belt cans, I simply keep 9 in the hold and trans the ore from each belt can to a can in the hold.

So far, and I understand I am in the entry level ORE Mining Barge, I am not ‘displeased’ with my income… no it is nowhere near what I can make running Sleepers, but I have been told over and over again that if you really get into it the ISK you ‘can’ make mining is really up there. While I don’t wanna be a “miner” for a living… I do want to be able to take full advantage of the very lucrative ores available in the -1.0 space that is W-space.

We get Arkonor, Bistot and Crokite… the 3 most valuable ores in EVE and available ONLY in W-space and NULL. Gravimetric, or Grav sites are usually full of all three plus many other ores, but the Big Three are where the ISK is at for W-Space mining… thought ALL of it should be mined and used, either for manufacturing or for sale in Empire. It is an ISK faucet we have never really cracked open, hence my interest in it… if I’m gonna mine, I wanna do it competently.

As for the other side of mining, getting ganked and the mind numbing drone of the mining lazers turnin your brain to mush… I have “yet” to be attacked by other than the usual Rats… and my lone Warrior II can handle them nicely thank you… as for a real Pirate attack… I have had a few Orange fellows fly in and look me over… I can only assume I was not worth the loss of their ships as I am in a Procurer, not a really valuable ship and they warped away without incident...

And I just turn the sound down on the lazers. =P

I do one thing I have not seen other miners do, and it makes mining, for me, a far moar ‘active’ thing than it seems to be for all the others I have seen out there mining … I string my cans in a line on the inside curve of the belt… and I start at a can, align to a warpable that has something opposite it and go to just over three quarters speed… when I pass out of range of the can I turn 180, realign to the other warpable, go to speed… then cruise past the can to just out of range and repeat… mining the whole time. I drop the ore in the can when it is in range. This way I am (1) moar involved in mining than just sitting there watching and (b) I am, except for a short period at turnover, ALWAYS aligned and at speed ready to warp out if I feel the need.

When a can is full I setup the same routine on the next can and rinse and repeat. Until I do get attacked I won’t know if this is a viable tactic or if I am just wasting my time and will end up like everyone else and just sit there waiting for the gankers to come…I have been told, it WILL happen eventually, but it does not happen so often as to make mining a worthless occupation, otherwise why would so many do it? We’ll see…

Hey! It could happen...

So that’s about it for me… other than a night spent CO bashin so our Ally corp can put up another POCO, I have been mining and mishin in hisec solo… fun fun fun. =]

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

Saturnalia update…

2012-01-01T20:07:00.002-05:00

or ~ Why is there a Tree in the POS??

Just a note to let them as what read the stuff what as comes from my brain here… The holidays have been very good to me and mine, hope all of you have had happy and safe holidays and have had a chance to reconnect with kith & kin.

It’s nice to reacquaint once self with those people who always makin noise in the background and tryin to get you interested in things that you and I know are simply not as interesting, or important, as…

what one is skilling up for now, and what to skill for next,

what fuels are needed, and by when, for the POS (or POSes),

keeping “them” (no matter who they be) out of your system(s),

and all the other fascinating things we all “do” here in New Eden.

But that’s what these dead of winter days of gatherings & gift giving, family & frens and dining & drinking… (til you puke up multicolored fruit cake… which BTW, IS real) are for, right?

As for Flyin the Deadly skies of EVE… Well, we three, the Directors of HBHI, were once again able to come together in the Real and discuss matters of great import and other nonsense as we spent Boxer Day evening running a few sites in our homehole and knocking back a few shots (we put paid to a fifth of Tattoo).

I will fess up and state, for the record, that I in my turn became somewhat befuddled from the excess of small glasses of that smokey sweet Ruum. So much so that I lost track of time and warped my Noctis to the last 2 sites… too late. Yup… we, (read “I”) got to chattin a bit and the wrecks all went ‘pop’ afore I got there… oh well, so it goes huh?

So grab a Grolsh from the Beer Tree out on the ramp, sit down and let's talk spacehips... =]

Incarna to Crucible, 2011 was a very interesting year for EVE as I am sure most will agree…Let’s hope 2012 brings as much, fun, excitement and change as 2011 did… as the Chinese saying goes,

“May you live in Interesting Times.”

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

I Can Live with Dyin, I Just Can’t Mine for a Livin…

2011-12-09T04:08:00.023-05:00

or, The Mind Melting Drone of The Minin Lazers…

I have never been, nor shall I ever be, a miner. Tried it, got the T-shirt… balled the T-shirt up, stuffed it into an ore compression unit, jetcanned it and the ore is was compressed into, target locked it, sent 5 Warrior IIs to attack it… and fired 2 Heavy Caldari Navy Scourge missiles at it for good measure. Fuk that T-shirt…

Take that… stoopid T-shirt

OK, so you mebbe get the idea I am not into mining much… all I can say is that the complete inactivity one experiences once one has begun mining ops combined with the endless mind numbing sound of the mining lazers… just makes me wanna podlkill myself. I really feel that this HAS to be the absolute worst way to “enjoy” making ISK in all of EVE, and yet… there are those who do naught else, and while I dunt know the percentages, not all of them are BOT miners.

Bastards Over There Mining Corp…
BOT Miners are the ultimate “I dunt wanna mine” crowd… cause THEY dunt mine, their BOTS do, and they are, to me (and MANY others including CCP) not “players” in the game. They use software roBOTs and Macros to run their mining ships and fleets so they can make ISK while being permaAFK.

EVE is a Shared Virtual Reality…
Shared = we all do whatever we do together in real time in the same ‘verse;

Virtual = this ‘verse exists inside a computer matrix; (howdya like them mixed metaphors huh!?)

Reality = collective subjective experiences from moment to moment in real time.

BOT Miners break this Shared Virtual Reality in two ways by…
(1) NOT being there with all the rest of us in real time, in doing so they…
(b) opt out of the shared ‘reality’ we all experience.
When a BOT Miner has ships attacked and destroyed, he may not find out for hours or even days afterwards. He is not THERE on scene when things happen, WITH the rest of us sharing the experience that is EVE… and so you end up with things like Hulkageddon.

The Mittani & Helicity Boson – HAG V

Hulkageddon was started originally as a campaign against BOT Miners when Macro mining and BOT mining had started to become wide spread and there were those in the community who took great umbrage at this. Of course people, being the cussed and depraved things we can be, quickly spread this to attacking any miner and the justification was… they were there. Well that’s ‘nough bout automated mining, what I started talkin about was ME mining… or, er, well… not.

To mine, ORE not to refine?
Anyhoo… my whole corp, small as ‘tis, is basically of one mind on this. None of us really “like” mining as compared to PvP or PvE or even, say… hittin ones self in da face with a nail studded Louisville Slugger… OK, mebbe I am a bit moar averse to mining than the rest, but it aint their first (or second or thirtyseventh) pick on the list of Things To Do in EVE either.

But back when we setup Serenity Station we turned our shining faces to the sun with high hopes and aspirations of being Industrial Tycoons and having tha ability to expend massive amounts of ammo and missiles AND SHIPS at a fraction of the cost of others cause we made em ourselves!! Uh huh… but no matter how many ammo and droan and ship assembly arrays you have… you aint makin shit one till you got ores… and we dunt like to mine… Hmmm.

So here we have this very nice POS, all dethstarry with its massive Rings of Deth defensive arrays and all cluttered and hard to move around in inside due to the number of assembly arrays… and we dunt make shit. We spent months using it for almost nothing but ship and mod storage so we can run Sleepers and have our own home in the sky. The ONLY thing we did do, which I will say is no “small” thing, is our industry corpmate was able to do the required training and buy or mfg the required parts and our first Capitol Ship, a Nidhoggur Class carrier, rolled out the Lrg Ship Assembly Array several weeks ago.

They’re sooooo cute when they’re newborn!!

Understand I am very proud of our corpmate for his achievement and I am extremely proud to be part of a corp, as small as we are, that has joined the ranks of the corps and alliances in EVE who have fielded Capitol Class vessels. It is an achievement of note… but it is still the only thing of any real value we have built in the POS since we set it up. So, we finally decided we needed a someone who has whatever it takes to actually enjoy sitting for hours as his(her) brain liquefies to the drone of the mining lazers, we needed to hire us a miner, which means we need to get active about recruiting… Hmmmm.

NBDR = Not Blue Dunt Recruit…
I hate recruiting. Scares me worse than a Flashy RED Tengu poppin up on grid while I am in my Noctis all alone in the hole… You see, I read constantly. I read Sci-fi books, history (mainly war histories), and EVERYTHING I can find about EVE. I read “voraciously” to quote a friend when he realized that I read several books at the same time. I will have one by my bedside, one (or two) in my backpack, and usually one I carry around with me so I have something to read in those brief quiet moments waiting on whatever to start, finish, reboot, load, break, set or…

My reading as regards EVE has shown me that there is, in my mind, the distinct possibility that, moar ISK has been lost to spais and corporate intrigue than has ever been lost to PvP or any form of aggro. We are a small tight corp. We are RL friends and family. I TRUST these guys… and I have trusted them in RL with the life and safety of my children. I think I can trust them with everything I have in a game. But to trust a toon? Some char with I dunt care what stats? “Oh look, he’s a noob, only 4 weeks ingame…” Uh huh… the CHAR may be 4 weeks old… the GUY behind the keyboard may have been playing EVE since the second day it was online and can kill us ALL with a Rifter HULL.

But he does not WANT to kill us… Oh Noes!! He wants a Directorship or at least full “take” access to ALL of our stuff. So when we log on one fine EVEning we find the POS and everything in it is GONE or destroyed because while we were all sleeping or spending our workday secure in the knowledge that all would be as it should be ingame cause we have only TRUSTWORTHY guys in our corp… he brought in his REAL corp and they looted and destroyed everything… LOLing all the while. Oh and we all get a nice ingame mail with a link to a vid on Youtoob showing the whole effin WORLD the whole thing… starting with the last one of us online that night saying ‘o7’ and a good night to our trusted friend as we logged off while he stayed up late working on something “…for the corp”.

Grand Theft Tengu(s)...

And there we are, with just the ships we logged off in, the ISK in our personal wallets, and a smattering of personal stuff here and there throughout New Eden. Billions in ISK gone, and months, possibly years of TIME and effort… stolen from us. It has happened, (watch link above, read post here) It will happen again. I DO NOT want it to happen to us. Ever. The ONLY way to ensure that (as best you can) is…

(1) only have RL people you personally know and trust at the Director level;
(2) stay small and controllable;
(3) read: Corp Security.

We have a very good friend, a guy I have written about before (linky) who is a war griefer by trade. He is a Master of Spais and in the art of infiltrating noob corps. It is probably the primary reason he is successful. If he can get an alt in your corp, no matter at what level, he will learn about you… your real membership, primes & alts, the ships and fits you fly, how skilled you all are, both in game and in piloting skills, he will find out your locations your patterns, your playstyle… he will learn YOUR WEAKNESSES…and exploit them.

Personally I believe that Oz made a strategic error with us. He saw us as too new and too small and probably too easy a target to spend a lot of recon time on… so he started the war dec THEN had his alt request membership. While we did initially accept his alt I grew increasingly nervous about him and finally pushed for us to kick him JIC. And I was proved correct later. He did not take the time to really get to recon us well. If he had he may have then seen that though small and very new…
(1) some of us were on the right track with ship fitting and skills and that we,

(2) were RL friends who are very dedicated to each other and that we,

(3) would not ever give in to a protection racket and that we,

(4) would fight back no matter the cost...

because several of our members were (are) bloodthirsty to the point of recklessness (a sumtimes useful trait) and we also know, it’s just a game. As it turned out, the fact that we did undock and we did fight valiantly, with one of us (me) undocking TWICE and dying in a horrible fire… even though we lost, this earned us his respect and his friendship.

So you can see that recruiting from the pool of ALL EVE chars out “there”…. Freakin scares the shit outta me. I know, I know… not ALL of em are bad, heck MOST of em are exactly who they portray themselves as… it’s that unknown percentage that aren’t that spoils the whole basket of apples for me. I just CANNOT trust a toon. It is Soooo easy to lie here. Soooo easy to disinform… so easy to deceive, and the cost, in game time and effort, can be very, very real. OK, so just don’t make anyone else a Director right? Yes, there is that and we have agreed not to unless it is a RL person and it has to be a unanimous yea vote to get it in, one nay vote and it’s off the table. Plus there are ways to allow access and still provide corp security in a POS.

I Hear the Drone of Mining Lazers in the Distance…

So yes, we finally did ‘hire’ a miner… and one I, and we all, can live with. I’ll call him Vic. Vic is first off absolutely crazy… stark raving mad. The mining lazers liquefied his brain many many years ago and left, sloshing around inside his skull, a goo similar to moon goo, but a self-aware goo… we think. At least he acts self aware, most of the time… Oh, and one moar thing… Vic is a mining GOD. He has lost moar ISK and ships than my whole corp in our whole history… and still he makes moar ISK than my whole corp in our whole history. He is simply amazing. He is a guy we met many months ago while we were in DemSal Alliance. Everybody got along with Vic. We all liked him and loved chattin with him on TS… he is a real character not just a char. And I am proud to consider him a friend. =]

He had been outta the game for quite a spell but a week or so ago he logged back in and got back in touch with us and he got all caught up on current events etc. Turns out he was looking for something newish to do… he was still gonna mine, where ever he was, but he was looking for a new venue to do it in. My CEO and he got to talkin, Vic has prior WH experience and felt mebbe some time in th hole might be just th thing for ol Vic. Well HELL YES!!!! We started drooling at the wallet thinkin of the kind a rock rapin Vic could do in a WH resource site… Arkonor, Bistot, Crokite, Scordite, Veldspar… Vic knows moar about mining and refining ORE that ANY of us… and he LOVES it.

From my Early Days… A 3 Hulk mining Op w/ Orca Support

Getting Vic incorp would be like hiring 4 or 5 miners who have several months experience… it would be like hiring 10 mining noobs and focus training them. But Vic doesn’t want to change corps which we completely understand as our corp means far moar to us than just a convenience as it is for so many out there. So… Vic's corp joins the Alliance, and due to the fact that we heavily overbought Arrays for the POS we are able to basically give him Alliance access to a Ship Maint Bay (to store his ships in) and a Ship Assy Array (to store everything else of his in) and they are basically for his corps use only. We retain control and Director access. NOW we’re cooking with GAS baby!!!

Now Refining Arrays in POSes are not nearly as efficient as the ones in NPC Stations throughout EVE, they are capped at 75% efficiency for all but Ice products, all Ice Products refine at 100% efficiency in POS Refineries. Go figure as there are NO ice fields in W-Space… ever. The unwritten but commonly accepted reason being that CCP wants you to “want” to do your refining in a station badly enough for you to risk transporting your ore around, thereby increasing the chance for “Player Interaction” (PvP, ganking, etc.).

We dunt care… with Vic minin for us, we will have moar than enough ore to choke the Refineries we have… in detail a 25% loss for each batch is not “efficient”… who cares when you have moar ore than you can process? And we will finally start running batches of our own ammo, our own droanes and our own ships… that, I can’t wait for. So another chapter begins for HBHI as we finally get down to business and put our POS to work for us, not as just a home, but as a tool for generating income all on its own merit.

And as for me… I get to fly CAP, Combat Air Patrol… PvP security of the mining ops (YEA!), and switch off as hauler ever now an then now that I am finally flying the Mammoth… but that’s another story… =]

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

Out of the fire and into the Crusible…

2011-12-03T00:54:00.024-05:00

Well, we are in the Crusible now, and for me, getting there got me boiling… though once in, I kinda liked it… =]

OK, I am a PC Tech IRL, and my notebook, the one I use for EVE, is technically the best one I have… but a few months ago the HD failed SMART. Not a “gonna die in 5 mins” kinda fail, the far more bothersome “probably gonna fail sometime soonish” kinda fail… fukme.

So I took a bunch of spare (and lower capacity) NB drives cleaned em up, moved backup data around and picked the 2 best… The 2 best as my wife’s notebook had also started giving HD errors. I had ONE, just one drive with NO SMART errors at all and it was the larger drive too… and as you might guess, that one went in ‘her’ system. The slightly smaller drive with minor SMART issues went in mine. No prob, both more than large enough for XP SP3 and the std apps for hers… std apps plus EVE and the gigs of associated pix, vids, apps that I have for mine.

OK, so I get both systems reloaded, apps & settings configed and all ‘seems’ to be working OK. Until a few weeks ago… the minor SMART errors on the drive in my sys are creeping into the failzone… not there yet, but closer than I like. And then came Crusible…

Initially Everything was going ok then the system simply stopped. No errors, no BSOD, mouse still responded but the screen is wallpaper… no input, mouse or keyboard has any effect. I give it 30 mins and hold the power button for the required 10 seconds… crap.

To make a long, painful yet unpleasant story a bit shorter…

I first double clicked on the EVE icon to upgrade to Crucible at around 17:00 EVE… I ended up reinstalling the client, from scratch (THANK GOD I saved the Incarna install files!) then redownloading the Crusible update, rerunning the setup… it crapped AGAIN, but I was able to rekickoff the update without downloading again… and THIS time it completed… JEZUZ.

When I FINALLY logged into our POS in the C2 wormhole we call home (no new pretty paintings in the sky for those who dwell in holes… =[ ) it was 04:45 EVE… that’s 11 hours 45 mins to get Crucible up and running… sheesh.

Was it worth it? Well…

Keep in mind we live in W-space and the biggest impact on us so far is the corp bookmarks (Oh HELL YEA!!!), POS fueling changes, we wait to see, and we are talkin about the POCOs…

As ervybody is doing careful metareports, write ups, and comparisons of ALL of the new Crucible features I thought I do sumthin different. Here are my PERSONAL thoughts on the changes I have ‘seen’ or experienced and their impact on me personally… in no particular order they are:

Interface Text Changes/Scaling… Kudos. Period, ‘nuff said.

Correctly Oriented Gates… Kudos!! Nice and far better for immersion and game “feel”, the ‘science geek’ and ‘SF buff’ in me are both pleased, TY VM.

Ship Contrails… The contrails are effin NICE! One wonders why they went away in the 1^st place… you get so much moar a FEEL for your ships movement and flight with them… and they just look damn cool as shit! ~and~ Some Ships got the Love… The Hookbill was one of the ships that got a ‘make-over’… Grey Urban Digital Camo!!! SCHWEET!!!!

Urban Grey Digitoflage AND Contrails, oooooo… ahhhhhh… =]

“Loot All ™”… TY TY TY TY… As the corp Salvage Ops Director I thank you from the bottom of my skeevy licentious heart… but… can you now make the cans POP a wee bit faster after “Loot All ™” is used?? You see, now with the New and Improved “Loot All ™” there is this ungodly, several 10^th of a second, boring wait for the can to pop as looting is now SOOOOO easy…[we will NEVER be fully happy!!!]

Newbulea... I am of 2 minds and 1 dissenting opinion about the New Nebula…

(1) [RP & Lore] “Where in hell did they come from!??? It’s just fukkin SCARY to wake up one morning and the “eternal” sky is DIFFERENT!!!” “What in hell do these NEW stars portend???” and “OH fuk!! Now ALL the star charts will have to be COMPLETELY resurveyed AND every goddamn ship in New Eden is gonna need a Garminverse Update immediately!”

(B) [OOC] Incredibly VERY visually stunning and beautiful AND they do seem to maintain a cogent placement as you move through the EVE cluster… nice and accurate, the ‘science geek’ and ‘SF buff’ in me are again both pleased.. Also… they also make it far harder to ‘see’ a cloaked ship in… This is/may be both good and bad.

Good, I dunt know if others can ‘see’ my cloaky the same as I do on screen, if not then NP. But if they can and they’re close enough, well you know?? So the newbulea will help hide cloakies even better…

Bad, they make it harder for ME to see my cloaky and determine where I am oriented to etc. so hmmmm…

(2c) Nobulea… We in W-space woke up to the same ol same ol space… no love for us… =[

Corp Bookmarks… One of the single best changes CCP could have given WH dwellers… BMs are our life out here. Ervyday we have to scan down the ‘daily holes, sigs & anoms’… My corp had been using a standardized Daily Hole Report email in which whoever did the days scanning, wrote up data on everything scanned down… And we have long had a corp hangar bay where we also store BM copies in order to ‘share’ the BMs, all of which is probably SOP in all WH corps… the Corp Bookmarks will simply remove ALL of the above work… scan em down, BM ‘em for corp and ta da, yer done. Though in our case we share the W-space we live in with another corp in our alliance… and we will still have to use the old methods to share with them… ah well.

POCOs… [Privately Operated Customs Offices]… so far I have no idea if this is good or bad… ALL I know is (1) my CEO got ganked and lost a stoopidly large amount of ISK value transportin POCO stuff to th hole… <sadface> OH! he was ganked by the newest and baddest of the gankset… the Tornado!!, and (B) I have already started practicing my bombing runs on the local COs in our hole… Wayyy too much fun! LOL!

New T3 Battlecruisers… are, as far as I am concerned, Battlecrusier Class Dessies…think about it. I have a Tornado over on Sisi and as intimated above, I feel the ‘Nado will become the baddest Alpha Gank boat EVE has seen yet… the ultimate GlassCannon (see: Thrasher)… A Sebo(?) & 1400mm howitzer fit ‘Nado 2 shotted my CEO’s Indie… Hello!

My 'Nado the "HDF =Bukfutter=" w/ 1200mm Arty locked and tracking...

Two of my corpmates have brought in a Naga and a Talos… the Naga nommed the Talos without breaking a sweat. Neither are ANY good at Sleepers (surprise surprise) and the Naga has been refit as a MINER (which it seems to do well at… just like most dessies, go figger)… I’ll will prolly get a ‘Nado or several… as POS Defense and/or Lowsec Gankers.

We dunt do Amarrrgh so no tactical/strategic opinion on that one… its gold colored, funny lookin and flown by God Cursed Slavers…. meh.

POS fuel “bloks”… we are still on standard fuels as are most and we will be researching and seeing what needs to be done to implement this… will update as we learn moar.

So far that is really all the impact of note I have experienced. I do want to add though...

Damn Good Job CCP. PLEASE keep it UP! (…that’s what she said!)

One thought... If CCP wants to make a Vampire Avatar MMORPG I say Great! But do it AFTER you keep your dollar/euro/yen faucet in good working order! Then you could mebbe AFFORD to hire (back) staff just for that.

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

Huh, Sleeper Boredom, now THAT was unexpected…

2011-11-28T00:37:00.007-05:00

or, “How We Got Tired of Makin Loads of ISK”…

Our corp has a few goals we are working towards… and, as with all New Eden corps, the route to those goals is fueled by ISK. As a Wormhole Exploration and Restoration Corporation (say it out loud… its FUN!!) we primarily make ISK thru running Sleeper Sites, the sites that spawn in our homehole but especially sites in OTHER WHs, we call this raiding.

The Honey Hole…

A few weeks ago Strigon pulled the days Scan Op and was probing down the days holes. He got the Stat C2, warped in per S.O.P. to do the initial survey… he reported that, (1) it seemed to be empty (uninhabited) and…. (b) OH DAMN!!! There were too many sites to count (chat logs follow screenshot)! He later gave a rough count at 60+… that’s OVER 60 Sleeper sites on Dscan and he counted 28 sites on probe scan… that’s approximately 90 TOTAL SITES!! It was The GREEN Cloud… (FYI, in the screenshot below I count 68 sites…) =]

Oh My God…

Chat Log - 90 Site Raid Hole Discovery: Strigon warps through the D382 Stat C2:

[21:29:22 ] Strigon Leader > Jxxxxxx Solar System

[21:29:45 ] Strigon Leader > I have a Gallente control tower on dscan

[21:29:50 ] Strigon Leader > no force field?

[21:29:53 ] Strigon Leader > hmmmm

[21:30:08 ] TurAmarth ElRandir > EVEEYE report; C2 with a Hisec....

[21:30:21 ] TurAmarth ElRandir > no FF???? Yummmy..... =]

[21:30:32 ] TurAmarth ElRandir > make sure yer OV is set right....

[21:30:38 ] Strigon Leader > may be out of range of it

[21:30:42 ] Strigon Leader > no ships on scan so far

[21:30:46 ] Strigon Leader > but it’s a big system

[21:30:54 ] Strigon Leader > warping to the other side to check

[21:32:00 ] TurAmarth ElRandir > stat Hisec and a Stat C3, 10 AU, 7 P, 9 Ms....

[21:32:14 ] Strigon Leader > no hostiles

[21:32:27 ] TurAmarth ElRandir > really? tower but no FFs?

[21:32:30 ] Strigon Leader > no mods either besides two mobile medium warp disruptors

[21:32:41 ] Strigon Leader > it must be offline

[21:32:43 ] TurAmarth ElRandir > Hmmm.... It’s a TRAP! =]

[21:32:50 ] Strigon Leader > beginning a scan for a high sec

[21:34:03 ] TurAmarth ElRandir > JEZUZ.... NO NPC kills in as far as I can see.... do a dscan....

[21:34:42 ] Strigon Leader > holy fuck

[21:35:01 ] TurAmarth ElRandir > yuppers!!! the MUTHALOAD!!!! how many sites???

[21:35:21 ] Strigon Leader > too many to f*in count man

[21:35:26 ] Strigon Leader > we are gonna be RICH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Sleeper Loot & Salvage 101:

For them as what dunt know, Ima go into a little detail here, so class, come to order…

The Class 2 Sleeper “Cosmic Anomaly” (combat) sites ISK value is highly variable. But… if you get just 1 MNR (Melted Nanoribbon) dropped, it can be worth, currently, a low of ISK 6M to over 7M (at the time of writing the Jita Quick Buy price is: ISK 6,572,230.00 x1 MNR), and if you hit a fantastic drop rate, let’s say… 5 MNRs dropped in 1 site, plus a good load of the other loot & salvage, a single site “can” be worth upwards of ISK 35M. Yup, ISK 35,000,000.00 for one site… that high is rare, but I’ve seen it.

So, let us do some math… let’s say you run, ohhh… 15 C2 combat sites, which is only a few hours work for a small 2 or 3 BS fleet with Scan Frig & Noctis support. 15 sites with an average of 0 to 3 MNR’s recovered per site so let’s say you end up with 17 MNRs. With that and the other L&S yer lookin at an approx average of 130 Million ISK… that’s ISK 130,000,000.00 (here I am being conservative, keep reading and you’ll find out why). =]

DISCLAIMER: The above is a SWAG (Scientific Wild Assed Guess) based on my personal experience and also keep in mind…

(1) L&S drop rates from Sleeper sites is highly variable and
(2) the drop rate is strongly affected by the WH Class
And salvage rates…

(3) are affected by the ship, mods, rigs and

(4) the skills and implants of the salvager, as follows...

The amount of MNRs and other L&S recovered is also affected by the guy runnin the salvage ship, what ship he salvages with, and the mods, rigs and skills applied. I have maxed out skills, advanced mechanic skill Salvaging at L5. I use the ORE dedicated Salvager, the Noctis fully rigged with 3x Medium Salvage Tackle Is and, as I am an L5 salvager, I can fit and run 4x Salvager IIs, to speed things up I also run 4x Small Tractor Beams. All of this is done to increase the chance to pull salvage or to reduce the time to complete salvaging. Because with Sleepers, the ONLY way you can make ISK is from the Loot & Salvage, but MAN it can be REALLY GOOD ISK!!!!

With my skills, ship & fit I have an ‘on-paper’ 120% chance to pull good salvage. The only thing I am not doing is rigging Medium Salvage Tackle IIs, an additional 15% increase in chance of salvage recovery (5% over the T1 rigs but cost prohibitive), and using the Hardwiring Implants (slot 9 & 10), 'Prospector' PPY-1, a 5% increase in chance of salvage recovery and, ‘Prospector’ PPZ-1, a 5% reduction in cycle time of salvagers… both of which I am considering getting. If I upgrade to the T2 rigs and both ‘plants, I will have an ‘on-paper’ chance of recovery of the game max of 130%. So far I have been very happy with my recovery rates and I can tell a definite difference from the days when I was skillin up to L5.

There’s the bell, class concluded…. you will be severely tested if you ever get into Salvaging in W-space.

Back to our story…

So Strigon is sittin inna C2 hole with sumthin over 90 Sleeper Sites… between 60 and 70 combat sites and 28 cosmic signatures. The sigs are the Ladar, Gravimetric, Magnetometric & Radar sites that have minable resources with a minimal Sleeper defense presence that usually spawns after you start mining operations. And he scanned for ‘life’ and found one offline POS… LOL. It was an EMPTY hole!!! This is the dreamed of strike… a hole with no residents to worry about and a (low) estimate of 2 BILLION in ISK just waiting to be harvested… Oh Frabjous Day!!

One of the other things we do is after we ‘reclaim’ a W-space (IE clean up all the Sleeper sites) is, if the Planetary Interaction, from which one makes the majority of the POS fuels from, and Static holes are decent, we offer the hole for sale on the market. This one was a ‘decent’ hole sale wise, not ‘great’ but good, WHs sell on the market from ISK 100M to ISK 500M on average, we hoped to put this one up for around ISK 400M. Decent PI and a Stat Hi and a Stat C3…

Hmmmm (grin), a C3… I feel we need to up our game and start takin on C3 WHs as they are harder, (IE moar challenging and fun to run) AND substantially moar lucrative too, but to do so we need to have regular access to them. So I am pushin for my corp to find a hole with a Stat C3, or just move to a C3… so on the ‘Pro’ side this one did catch my eye. On the ‘con’ side of the sheet, it has a Stat Hi-sec hole…

Hmm (frown), Stat Hi-sec… We really prefer a hole with a Stat low as you dunt get nearly as many ‘visitors’ as you do with a Stat Hi. Experience has shown that there are simply a LOT moar people scanning for holes in Hi-sec than in low is all.

Anyhoo, we were, of course, VERY ready to get busy with the Reclamation Op and start separatin the Sleepers from their very lucrative L&S… I was in hisec and Strigon gave me our Stat low, we fleet up and I was OMW. I pop in, reship to my Mael and we jump in. Strigon had setup a Warp Bubble on the Raid hole’s Stat Hisec as a precaution then he started on the sites and had 3 done when I joined him and we knocked down 2 moar. As it was a raid hole, after 5 sites I usually reship to my Noctis and start salvaging behind the fleet.

“Tengu on SCAN!!!”...

There is always a risk of either the residents (not in this case) or outside raiders (always) poppin in on you and takin advantage of the fact that your ships are PvE fit AND that you probably have Sleeper L&S in your hold, ESPECIALLY if there is a Noctis in the sky… the Noctis is ALWAYS ‘Primary”… I am always nervous when salvaging Sleepers in my Noc, especially when in a strange hole…

And tonight was no exception… After Tsra fleeted up and joined us, they were workin the sites and I was salvaging when over the Neocom we hear, “Tengu on scan!!!” I order “Man Battle Stations!” and the Emergency Klaxons scream throughout the ship… I turn and burn for our homehole, pop through, warp back to the POS safe and reshipped to my ‘Cane. Strigon was in his Rokh and I can’t ‘member what Tsra was in…

The Tengu was campin out near the Hisec hole and hopin for some pew pew… we tried to oblige. Tsra went in, and once engaged called us in and we all started to dance… The Tengu turned his loving attentions on me and I eventually began to bleed deep armor… we weren’t breakin his tank but he was breakin mine, so I warped through the hole… and right into Amarrgh space!!

This was BEFORE I had fixed my Amarr standings so I was still tagged as “shoot-on-sight” to the Amarrgh Imperious Navy and all gate and stations guns… oh joy! Talk about bein caught ‘tween a rock and a hard place… I was caught ‘tween a Tengu and the Amarr Navy!! LOL

I warped to the closest station, was warned at the door as they tractored me in… Seems ISK talks though, they still did all the repairs I ordered, and paid for, and a first class job of it too. I undock, the station screams it’s dire warning again as the guns try to lock me. I warp back to the hole with the Amarrgh Navy in hot pursuit and call out on TS, “Do I jump in??”

I land and the Amarr Navy lands a few seconds later while I am waiting for a response… I ‘jump jump’ as they start in on my shields (sliver of red) and Tsra advises me to get back to our hole as we are not gonna kill him and he is not killin us… Strigon is tankin him in his Rokh he’s not breakin the Tengu’s tank either… finally the Teng pilot pops back through the hisec hole and eventually leaves. =]

Salvaging Magic...
We give it a bit and then go back to waffle stompin the ISK outta the Sleepers. A bit later on Sov and a few others joined in and we ended up running 15 sites total that 1^st night… I did all the salvaging and I was very, VERY pleased with the results.

In order to keep inventory and shares accurate, I store all L&S from each fleet in a Huge Secure Can and name it with the fleet member’s names. If the fleet changes members, I start a new can and so on. So you see below a screeshot with the 2 cans from the 1^st night’s raid. The 1^st is 10 sites: me, Strigon and Tsra, the 2^nd is 5 sites: after Sov and others joined us.

Now one thing I am when salvaging, is superstitious. I have several rules I try not to break…
(1) NEVER look into the hold until you are done. (“Done” being of a personally variable definition… sumtimes ‘done’ means done with a whole run of sites and sumtimes it means done with THAT site…)

(2) ALWAYS run 2 or moar salvagers on the BS wrecks… why? I dunno… =P

Now even with that all I can say is that the drop rates I got in this raid were, to me, simply amazing.
I ran through the 1^st 5 sites and got 4 MNRs… meh. Not what you want, but around what you expect. Then I ran 2 sites and checked the hold… DAMN!!! 15 MNRs for just 2 sites… I’ve never had a drop rate that high before. I picked up 5 moar in the last 3 sites, about what you hope for. So for 10 sites we got 24 MNRs… shiney. =] Then Sov and some frens joined us and we ran 5 moar sites… this time I dint check the hold till I was OMW back to the POS, 15 MNRs for 5 sites… YEA!!! That’s an even better drop rate than the 1^st 10 sites, wayyy above expectations.

For those of you not familiar with WHs or Sleepers, in the screencap above of the L&S from what I pulled that 1^st nights raid, I highlighted in yellow the top 4 ISK makers in Sleeper L&S… the value breakdown of the top 4 only is as follows:

Can #1 (Jita prices at time of writing):

ACD - ea 1,250,009.99 x4 = 5,000,039.96

MNR - ea 6,573,230.00 x24 = 157,757,520.00

NNA - ea 35,002.00 x210 = 7,350,420.00

SDL - ea 486,001.19 x259 = 125,874,308.21

ISK 295,982,288.17

Can #2:

ACD - ea 1,250,009.99 x 8 = 10,000,079.92

MNR - ea 6,573,230.00 x 15 = 98,598,450.00

NNA - ea 35,002.00 x 124 = 4,340,248.00

SDL - ea 486,001.19 x 160 = 77,760,190.40

ISK 190,698,968.32

Sooo… the gross take, for 15 sites, of just the 4 highest value salvage, was: ISK 486,681,256.49

Not too shabby for one evenings work huh? =]

After Strigon and I logged, Sov, Tsra & Co. kept at it and logged off in the Raid Hole. The next day the Raid Hole had, of course, closed in our C2, and while Sov & Tsra did have a scan frig and scanned down the new Hisec, Strigon and I dint make it back in as we got caught up in other stuff. He and I did run a few sites that had popped in the homehole, so not an unproductive day…

Sov & Tsra continued to run sites and they also sold the hole (ISK 400M and Strigon got the finder’s fee) to a corp we are Blue with, good good. It was funny though, I heard later that one of em, Tsra or Sov, got simply “tired” of bashin Sleepers… TIRED of making some of the best ISK to be made in EVE… LOL

Wrecks eye view of my Salvage Thrasher

The day after that though, our little corp did make it back into the Raid Hole… Strigon and I left our C2 and Sov & Tsra gave us the Raid Hole system, brought us in and then left to head back to the home C2. I dint wanna risk a Noctis with no connecting WH to ours so picked up a Salvage Thrasher I had in storage out in Autaris from back when I was in RvB and I refitted her to be a Cloaky Salvage Thrasher and brought her to the Raid hole. I also brought in my Mael and a Cheetah so I had a DPS ship and we had a scan frig inside. Strigon was in his Rokh and AI was in his Hyperion.

The new owners were settin up their POS, and we hung out there while we were gettin ready. Once all systems had been checked and dubble checked, we ran all the sites we could until we were wore out… and tired of killin Sleepers… now where have I heard that afore? LOL

The next day we basically call it quits, we and our sister corp have nommed something like 40 to 50 Sleeper sites, there are STILL almost 30 left considering that sites were still spawning while we were workin on em, and of course, we needed to leave “some” for the new owners… =] So we pack it in and head for our homehole… tired, beat but quite a bit the richer… to put it mildly. I would give figures on how much in total was taken from this hole, but I dunt have, nor will I ask for, the totals for our sister corp and my corps finances are, well, none yo business… =]

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

Ch, ch, ch, Changes…

2011-11-24T19:46:00.012-05:00

or, “The Thing We’re Doing That We’ve Decided We Can’t Do.”

and, “What Else Is Tur Up To?”

Part the First:

“Nullsec here we co…” “Wha? We’re not going?” “…Oh crap.” It’s a mess..

Our old Alliance, DemSal, imploded with massive loss of ISK (on its part) and respect (on my part). OK, shit happens, it’s EVE, let’s move on… and most did, some to other Alliances some to other corps. A few stayed together and formed a new Alliance out of the ashes of the old and HBHI has joined this new Alliance. And we are goin thru some changes man… but, not really.

Now, as we live in a wormhole we are not as connected to Empire space (hi, lo & null sec) goings on as the majority of EVE denizens.

Case in point:

I knew nothing of the “MT Riots” in Jita, Amarr and other locations until I flew to Jita on a store run one fine EVEning… imagine my surprise when I discovered a real for-god riot under way that had Empire space stirred up like a grenade dropped inna fish bowl. Until I jumped the Perimeter gate I, and my corp, had no idea there was ANYTHING unusual going on.

‘nother Case in point:

One of our guys popped outta the hole a few days ago, docked up and exclaimed “Heyyy! They brought back ship spinning!” We collectively groaned and have gotten some real good LOLs outta that one as ervybody knows ship spinnin came back weeks ago.

But these, and many other instances highlight (1) how little the dramas of Empire space affects those of as really ‘live’ in holes and (2) how little my corp keeps up with events in Empire in the B-logs, D-logs and newsfeeds on the Neocom…. Sad, sad, sad.

At this point I must to digress briefly and make a side note... We who live in POSes never lost ship spinnin. In a POS, you are either logged off or you are in a ship inside the forcefield, or OYW sumwhar else... From the release of Incarna right through all the insanity and hoopla that followed, right up to today, when POS dwellers are on but just hangin out, we could and can still be found happily spinnin our ships in the POS... and with a far, FAR better view than any old CQ or stoopid 'door', lemme tell you!

We now return to our regularly scheduled post…

So, we are back in an Alliance. This one is a bit moar reserved but also bit moar… ‘involved’ is how I guess I would put it. All in all it comes across as a moar mature and stable Alliance on the whole. One of the exciting things going on… the negotiations for a move to null… (yipes!)

Yup, I said it…. The dreaded NULLSEC. You see, I may live in a wormhole, which by definition IS nullsec as its security rating is -1.0, yet I myself have never done any business or work below 0.2… oh, I did once run through a 0.1 system, but I dint stop off and have a beer, so I dunt count that (anyway I had my eyes closed the whole time…). So you see, I can honestly state that I have never been in null even though I live there. LOL A conundrum I have always greatly enjoyed… =]

While I do live in the aforesaid -1.0 W-space, I am moar skittish of going to or being IN null than WHs for the main reason that (1) in WHs you have 'no-local', and (b) W-space is off-the-beaten-path, not-on-the-map. Not a part of Empire. No public use gates, no “Spike in local!”, no jump bridges, no NPC stations, IE: SECLUDED = NO PEOPLE. Just a few of us, and the occasional target or three. Nice, quiet, private.

I HATE Jita… that many people I dunt know, all flyin heavily armed ships, all in one place… just makes my skin crawl.

Anyhoo…. The people heading up the Alliance are a group who’s last corp was a null sec corp which had come up to Empire to take an R&R break. They broke up after DemSal imploded and a core of them plus a few from other corps that were in DemSal formed a new corp and they established the new Alliance. And our new Alliance is now in negotiations to rent us a place in null. It’s still early in the negotiations so no details yet. There have been a few bumps in the road as is normal in these situations, hence the first subtitle of this post… =]

If they ever do get ervybody happy with the details then my corp will, for the first time, have an opportunity to ‘safely’ venture into nullsec. Safely you say huh? Well we’ll not be “neutral”, which as I understand in it is null equivalent to being Flashy RED to EFFIN ERVYBODY. We’ll be Blue to the Alliance overlords and the other tenants etc. As I understand it that means we will be as safe there as, if not actually safer than, in Hisec… this is what I have heard from some. If the negotiations pan out then we shall see what we shall see.

Part the Second:

“What Else Is Tur Up To?”

As for me personally, while all the above is playing out I have been working on getting into Incursioning.

You see a number of months back a few frens and I were sittin outside Dodi station watchin the Fools Parade and shooting the shit as there was nothing else worth shootin ATM… and the convo swayed into the Dream Ships Category of Standard EVE Chat Subjects. I opined as I dint really have any dream ships, I was still just workin my way up the std power ladder at the time and had recently gotten into a Phoon and was happy with that… then a Macharial undocked and passed by us… “Now, if I had a dream ship that would be it.” Said I, “But no… Look at it, it is an Amarrian ship and you know me, I dunt fly Amarrgh.”

The not flyin Amarrgh thing is partially a small bit of RP I do, as a Minmatar (a race the God cursed Amarr have enslaved for generations) I dunt fly Amarr on principle… and partially as a Minnie, I feel we have the best ships overall in EVE anyway so uther than the Drake (for WHs), the Noctis (ORE salvager) and a few uther frigs I am concentrating my skills on Minmatar ships exclusively…

Anyhoo, one of the guys pointed out it was not an Amarrian design, but an Angel Cartel creation based on a Jovian design and built with Minmatar and Gallente tech… “Huh!?!” “Really?...” I looked it up and said how “Well then, it seems I do have a dream ship, go figger…” One of my frens, not a corpmate (at the time) or Ally who is (was then) a bit of a Hisec richbich… bought me one. Right then and there. As a gift… uh wha?.

I was floored as you might imagine. ISK 800+M hull… as an impulse buy gift. Nice to have frens. Anyhoo… I couldn’t fly it at the time, so it sat in the dock for a while, and when I did skill up to fly it, I T2 fitted it for PvE and flew it to the hole. Where it has gone out on exactly one run in a sleeper site, which proved I could not fit a Mach as well as I thought I could… so it went back into the POS where it has sat.

It has come out only once since and that was to commemorate and swap DPS with our Carrier, a Nidhoggur, the day it was commissioned and sea trialed. Other than that, she’s been an ornament and a m3 hog in the Ship Maint Array. If yer wonderin why… I dint wanna lose it to a gankin or stoopidity, It was a GIFT from a fren fer crists sake…

So, our shiney new Alliance gets involved in running Incursions… the Mach is a defacto staple ‘cursion boat….and I have a Mach I am letting go to waste… Hmmm. I spend my usual excessive amount of time reading up on ervything I can find on Machs, Incursions and how the two go together like Quafe and Ruum. I finally go to my Alliance FCs and request their advice on fits and shit…. I get some MOAR links to moar very good info on the above topic… mmmK.

I refit my Mach specifically for Incursions (for now, T2 w/ best ‘named’ 800mm guns and one Meta 4 named mod I dunt have T2 skills for) and get aholt of one of our FCs…. Post my fit feelin I confident I am in the money and…. I get pretty much fatally trolled. I have 7x800mm Autocannons and I had 2x Ballistic Control Systems in my lows… “BCSs are for MISSILES you NOOB!!!” was about the nicest thing I hard for a while there… Anyhoo… swapped out the BCSs for the Gryostabilizer IIs I was supposed to have and the trolling slacked off… dint stop, just got less aggressive. And I got the sign off on my boat & fit from 3 of our FCs… I was in.

Now all I had to do was (1) get the Mach out of the hole and actually buy and fit the rigs/mods as spec’ed… and yea the fit I sent em was a PYFA fit transmitted to SARA (the Semi-Autonomous Rational Array that is the Master Admin Program over all of my computing needs both in POS and onboard all my ships) and sent to chat from there… (b) find a way to pull the free time on one of the set ‘cursioning dates the Alliance has on the calendar… and lemme tell you, the first was far easier than the second.

Oh and one I fergot… (1A) fix my Standings re the Amarrgh Empire so I can actually GO ‘acursioning… HUH? Yes, you see a very high percentage of Hisec ‘cursions happen to break out in Amarrgh space… and I was at a -6.29 standing. You see, at -5.0 as it says here, "NPC factions will begin shooting you on sight in their space. (-5.0 Modified Personal Standing)". I couldn’t fly in Amarr space. Well, I could, but I’d get shot at… a lot… by ALL of the gate and station guns AND the Imperial Amarr Navy would chase my ass around to boot… remember the Whoredur loss of many mil of ISK? Yea, that crap… crap.

So the OTHER thing I have been doin is fixing my standing re Amarrgh… and that dunt make Tur a happy boy, at all. You see, that means Ima hafta run mishins FOR the god cursed Amarr!! Crap. I hate mishin runnin in general and running them FOR the Amarrgh Empire… well, as a Minmatar that is as distasteful to me as… as… as… well, mining.   lol

So began my desperate search to find out how to raise my standings to the Amarrgh without selling out on my principles… and without boring me to the point of seppuku. One of the things I found was the Social skill, “Diplomacy”. Now back when I was still runnin mishins for a livin, we all trained up all the Social skills cause they affect the agent you can access and the mish payout amounts… I assumed I had skilled up all of them including Diplomacy. Ahhhh… wrong Batman, I dint. So I find out that the Diplomacy skill directly affects your Faction Standings and I hadn’t learned it as it does not ‘directly’ affect mishin agent accessability or reward, bounty, bonus & LP amounts unless your standings are for shit, which my weren’t at the time.

Cool, I bought the book, stopped all training on the Loki (my new dream boat) and kicked off Diplomacy to L5. Ah HA!! Quickly skilled up to L3 and BAM! Im ‘in like Flint’ (google it) Amarrgh standings up to -4.99, WOOHOO!!! I can fly in Amarrgh space and not get all killed by the stooped NPCs!! Yea! LOL So to bump em up a bit moar to be on the safe side, I decide to run some of the Data Center mishes which give a direct Faction Standings bump.

They’re L1 mishes and on the whole wayyy too easy as I went out to run em in my L4 Mish fit Phoon and I actually hadda really good time cause I was epically waffle stompin ERVYTHING in sight!! LOL Warp in to 7 frigs w/ rookie pilots @ 50km, no agro, send in the drones, 2 Hvy Webbers and 3 Warrior 2s… they tackle the frigs and, of course, do enough damage to kill em, but I like to wait for their transversal to drop under 50km/s and one shot em with the 1200’s for the lulz…    =]

Anyhoo… I work just one of the Data Centers mish inna mish and up my Amarrgh Standings to -3.44… yea me! So I can now safely go ‘acursioning in Amarrgh. The Imperial Amarrgh Navy will allow me to pass unmolested, I have a Machurson boat & fit which have been given the stamp of approval by my Alliance FCs… now all I need is a few wifeaggro free hours one afternoon or evening…   uh huh…

Well…. With a pre-req like that, and wifeaggro like I get... looks like I will never go ‘acursioning. =\

PS
For them as might be curious, when I finished skilling Diplomacy to L5 and with several Data Center mishes under my belt my Amarrgh standings raised to a comfortable -2.49. Gotta watch that from now on… =]

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

New Shoes…

2011-11-19T06:21:00.006-05:00

Just wanted to jot off a note here to the masses of my readership... (yo dude)

Several of my recent posts tell a few tales of, well, no proud moments to be sure... however...

It seems to me women have an insight men often miss. I have, as you may have followed, recently lost a Hoarder to stoopidity and a Drake to a wormhole raid (the which of included a podding [with a full set of 'plants AND 'wires... sheesh] as is normal in W-space)... sigh. One might imagine this could lead to a wee bit 'O depression and yes, I will say it... some tears.

But the lady folk have a way of dealin with such feelins that, for the most part, the male of the species finds perplexin and even a might irritatin. You see, when a (not all, but many) woman gets depressed... she oft goes shoppin, and very often for... of all things, shoes. Huh...

Well I am here to tell ya they just my be onto sumthin here... you see after I lost the Whoredur... I went and bought me a Jag.. =]

Man OH Man... Nuthin felt better and picked me up moar than undockin in my bran new Jag. I flew it back to the hole and spent moar than a few hours just sittin an lookin at it in the Hangar bay, sittin in the cockpit, luxuriatin in that 'new cockpit' smell... Ahhhhhhhhhhh.... =]

Shortly after that came the WH Raid that put paid to the SleeperSpecial, my WH Duck [and POD] and THAT put me back in Autaris, spittin up clone goo and goin thru the whole bodyloss experience all over again.

I HATE gettin use to a new body.... even if it is cloned from my very own DNA, still always "feels" weird... like... like walkin around and every step you take has that "5th step up a 4 step staircase" feel to it. You know, when you go for a step what aint there... and for just a split second your world is all "wrong" feelin... sigh. But, it does go away after a while.

Anyhoo... I woke in Autaris and felt even worse than I did after the Whore loss a few days afore... so... I bought me a bran new Wolf!!! LOL

and once again, "Nuthin felt better and picked me up moar than undockin in my deadly new Wolf."

Now two things to unnerstan... I have wanted a Jag and/or a Wolf for months now, I was just holding myself firm to the training schedule I had setup, which was to hammer down a number of L5 skills I have been puttin off due to the time investment... keep in mind also some of them unlocked Assault Frigs, which the Jag and Wolf are. Now Jag is, well it's a JAG man!! Sleek, dark, FAST and a graceful, hard hittin beauty, As for the Wolf... well, the Wolf is a no holds barred barroom brawler... and looks it.

I spent several hours on my way from Jita to Dodi stoppin off in likly 0.5 systems and doin a little rattin, just for fun and to 'safely' try out her legs and fists. Needless to say she makes vurra short work of every Rat I came across. I was hard put to keep up with target changes... LOL Was FUN!!! and JUST what I needed after the week I have had.

Now I am sure there are them out there as what feel killin NPCs is NOT what you 'need' after losin at PvP, you need to GO AND KILL SUMONE!!!!... but you needa 'member in both cases I was in a Pv"E" fitted ship. I was not seekin and actually was hopin to avoid, PvP in both cases. I accept that I got killed.... I mean, it's EVE fer Krist's sake.You know what they say...

"When sumthin bad happens to you in EVE, always 'member to bow deep and say... 'Thank you CCP! May I have another?'" =]

We PAY real money for this... if it makes ya cry 'real' tears, cancel the card man.

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

Doth We Profit, From Their Bloodless Deths…?

2011-11-11T20:13:00.010-05:00

(I take a different tack here… this one wrote itself)

[The scene: A man sits alone in a large luxurious darkened room, the spacious private quarters of a powerful corporate executive, a Capsuleer Starship Captain, in the uppermost levels of a Planetary Orbital Station. The semicircular windowwall of neucleonic reinforced armorglass he faces encompasses a sweeping view which includes many of the assembly and refining arrays for the ships, drones, ammunition & fuels that support this station. In an arc across the sky, outside of the shimmering forcefield that protects them, the Red Giant sun shines through a double row of large warp disruption bubbles covering all primary approaches to this station… he seems intent on what lies, beyond…]

It is late and the somber sky forebodes an ill EVE one might say... I sit, alone in my study. The lights are off and in the gloom the deep grain of the rich Kallewood paneling glows a dark blood red, reflecting the ruddy light of the Red Giant sun that is the lifegiver here, in the wormhole space we call home.

I savor a snifter of 100 year old Ruum, thinking of the future, and of the long distant past. I know they are out there... deep in the hidden places in that eternal night. Sleepers. Drones and spacefaring ships of immense power and strong defensive armor. Inimical to all life. They attack without warning or provocation. Their programming allows for no quarter, no truce, no end to conflict. Warp in, intentionally or unknowingly, to their location and unless you are prepared and ready for a serious fight, you will die… as so many have.

My thoughts churn over all I have learned about The Sleepers since I first ventured into my first wormhole… since I first fought them.

Accepted doctrine is that Sleeper drones and ships are merely programmed machines, AI, Artificial Intelligences at best… but still, just machines. Artificial constructs, “things”… but, in my studies I have recently come across a radical concept. New and… disturbing. Is it possible that they are one of the original races that crawled up out of the ashes after the EVE Gate collapse? No one has ever found a living, or dead, Sleeper 'body' but this new theory proposes that they are most likely cybernetic beings, evolved from Terran, from human, yes, from ‘us’, into the black, deadly and unholy living drones and ships that leave us no choice but to fight.

The basis for this new theory is in the incredible technology we harvest, and sell, that is being studied in research centers in all of the Empires and Republics of New Eden and is used in the creation of more powerful starships. In all of this technology, there is a cybernetic or cyberlike basis or component. So far this was thought to simply be an advanced application of what Terrans have long attempted, to meld machine/computer speed and power with the flexibility and creativity inherent in biological/chemical systems… the prime example, the human brain which created the computer. What if they could be joined?

But what if the race that became the Sleepers had taken this to the end product, the final realization… A melding of artifact and life? What if they had become cybernetic living beings? Living machines… How would we recognize them as a lifeform? What changes in them would this ensue? Would they still be, ‘human’ or even ‘alive’ as we define it? Since I have learned of this theory I cannot help but wonder if we are fighting, and killing, living beings of metal and electricity… or are they just the automated lifeless drones we have for so long believed them to be?

Sleeper salvaging is one of the most lucrative trades in New Eden. But… as long as we were simply destroying drones… machines, the left over relics of some long forgotten wormhole war… I was at peace as we were ridding ourselves of a blasphemy, machines programmed to kill living beings. Morally we had the high ground. But… if we are ’killing’ living entities and profiting thereby… that puts our life here in a whole different light. One I am not as comfortable with.

I remember how it was before we came here... I had my fill of the faction bickering, political backstabbing, vandettas and feuds that no one could even remember the cause of… and worst of all, the sheer greed that was the driving force behind the piracy and so much of the conflict that freely spends the lives of so many as fuel to fill the coffers of corporations and alliances in the empires of New Eden… I had become sick of it, and sick of myself for being a part of it.

Therefore I left Empire Space and the endless, senseless killing. Oh yes, I was assured of my personal survival… I am a Capsuleer Starship Captain, and therefore, immortal. But my crew… and the crews of other Captains are not… and even with excellent lifesaving equipment, with the best ISK can buy in escape pods…. many are lost… many die in the fire and ice of combat in the black, so many… too many… I swore to my crews I would not risk their lives for the greed of others… that we would find a life where we could be proud to do our duty and unashamed of our service.

And so, we came here… to a Class 2 wormhole where we would fight the Sleeper Drones and harvest the lucrative loot and salvage without committing murder. We came out here to stop Killing for a Living and do what we were trained for, what we do best, and yes, what we love… so we can all afford a better, safer life…

Yes, it is dangerous and deadly work… and yes, we have killed here, and some of us have died in that defense. We have had to fight to protect our home from those who would scan down the random entrances to this W-space… But it is the Good Fight. We are defending our home and loved ones… not killing for profit or much worse, for the profit of others.

It has been a good life here. We have built a Station and a life worthy of living and enjoying… and now I find myself disturbed and ill at ease at the thought that we are still killing for profit. Killing in the name of Greed...

And I... I am going back out there, into that deadly sky... I, my ship and my crew, to find, and to fight them once again. No longer sure of my purpose and whether I am doing ‘good’ or not… I sip the warm aromatic Ruum and stare into the black… Yes, we will go back out. Yes we will destroy, or kill, the Sleepers… This is what I do. This is what we do. It is all we have…