Daftly Doings

Okay, folks, it's a new year and time to do some daft stuff. I realised over the past few years I've managed to spread a  lot of ships and random junk around most of New Eden. For sanity's sake, and for something random to do, I needed to collect it all in one place and sell the ships I don't fly anymore. This took the best part of three days and resulted in six billion ISK worth of unwanted ships.

This isn't even all of them!

Of course, there's always some random crap in a random location far away. In this case, there was a very Expired Cerebral Accelerator in a Blood Raiders station in Nullsec. To get there is 42 jumps from Jita. The item is worthless. The only sensible thing to do here is trash the item. But where's the fun of being sensible? It's much better to pour myself a whisky and fit myself up an uncatchable interceptor. Let's see what Nullsec has awake today.

More a Gatecamp than a gate camp

The first 20 jumps of Hisec were completely uneventful. Once I got away from the local scam-chatter of Jita there was absolutely nothing to distract my attention bar the profusion of anchored structures in almost all Hisec systems these days. Lowsec was entered at Vehan with a pilot called Vehan Gatecamp on the outside but no sign of an actual gate camp on the inside. In Hier, there was a small gate camp of four ships - nothing exciting - and this theme continued until the end of Lowsec and my entry to deepest, darkest Delve.

A gate camp was 'Hier'

I've never lived in Nullsec. I never fancied the ring-kissing, safe-ratting lifestyle. This means Nullsec still maintains an air of mystery for me, and with mystery comes the fear of the unknown. My first jump, Goon-inhabited 1-SMEB, had a Nereus and Machariel sitting on the gate. An interesting combination that smacks of confidence. Use your bait for looting the field! The rest of the gates in were clear, but every system had someone somewhere. Much more active the average deep Lowsec system.

I docked and collected my Expired Cerebral Accelerator then began the return journey. The route home was even less eventful. In A-ELE2 there was a Hurricane sitting at the entry gate. As I flew through the systems I kept track of the numbers in local. It was interesting to discover that Nullsec is more populated that Lowsec. For my small sample size, there were 1.5 pilots on average per Lowsec system compared to 4.5 per system for Nullsec. It's a really small sample and I'd love to know if this holds true for more areas of space. Has EVE truly become Hisec and Nullsec only?

Drunk Roam

Friday night led to a happy coincidence. A decent number of EU pilots all appeared online at the same time, each with a clear case of being a little drunk. Our constellation was well scanned and nothing interesting was presenting itself anywhere. Nobody appeared online in any of the plethora of holes that had been scanned. Our static had very few sites to run but even if it had nobody particularly wanted to shoot red crosses. Someone, possibly me, asked how lowsec looked. The reply came that it was dead with not a soul in local. Just then another EU pilot logged in, one who knew how to hunt in lowsec. He was appraised of the situation, thought for a moment, and then said "right, it's a crap lowsec but let's go see what we can find".

With everyone in a mix of Brutix, Vexors and the obligatory Drake we were ready to go. Then one pilot arrived in a Mammoth. "Well, that answers the question as to who will be bait". As we made the two short jumps to lowsec our FC read out the rules: "Every time we jump a gate, take a drink. Every time you dock, take a drink Everytime you...". We quickly got the picture and everyone started adding rules. I added a rule of "everytime you add a rule you take a drink". By the time we stopped adding rules I think the only thing you didn't take a drink for was breathing.

Waiting for a fight

Our quiet lowsec was indeed quiet so we headed off in some direction to see what our Mammoth could fish up. It only took two or three jumps before Rhianna in the Mammoth announced ships on a gate. Two of them warped off leaving only a Vigilant there when the Mammoth shed its session change cloak. The Vigilant pilot couldn't pass up the chance of an easy kill on the industrial ship and was probably a little surprised when he was tackled by it. The rest of us quickly jumped through, gained extra tackle, webs, and started shooting. The Vigilant went down rather fast under gate guns, three battlecruisers and my Vexor. It would have died a little faster if I'd remembered about my drones.

Unfortunately the FC didn't get on the kill due to some problem with docking at a station resulting in the people outside the station killing him. Unsurprisingly, we also lost the Mammoth. The two pilots reshipped but the rest of the evening was fairly quiet. We tried to get some locals to engage us at various places in one system. Rather than come fight they undocked an Archon for a bit then put it away again. Really? Obviously they were too scared of losing their ships to come fight us. Well oiled and satisfied with our single kill we went home.

Geo Fleets Up

The best part of writing about Geo on Saturday was I got it into my head that I should make an effort to get into a Brave Newbies Fleet. Around 21:00 a ping went out on jabber that a massive fight was going on in Sendaya. This was just the thing I needed so I logged into comms and jumped into EVE. Suddenly everything went slow as the time dilation dial read 11% TiDi. Oh my, over 1000 in local? Crikey! I jumped Geo into a cheap Atron and got into fleet.

From comms I could hear it was a tricky undock with snipers picking off people as they left station. Wanting to get in on the action quickly I thought "what the hell, it's only a million ISK" and hit undock. With the 11% TiDi effect it took forever to actually be spat out into space but once there I immediately warped to an insta undock bookmark. Warping takes forever in major TiDi and it gave me plenty of time to imagine fleets of snipers sitting waiting for me at the bookmark. Landing there none of my fears were founded and I realigned to the staging POS and warped off.

There was now a bit of waiting around while the FC got himself and everyone else organised. Everyone was told to be in Frigates or they'd be kicked from the fleet. This was to make sure we got the full 6 AU/s warp speed. Eventually we started out and I took a fleet warp to somewhere. It didn't matter where I was going, I just needed to be ready to start targeting, tackling and shooting flashy ships. I landed on grid and tackled the thing closest to me, someone else called point on comms so I switched to another ship which someone else also called. This grew old quickly so I concentrated on locking up primary, secondary and tertiary targets. The flood of broadcasts made this both easy and yet confusing. Easy because the names were in the fleet broadcast window, but confusing because sometimes I'd be trying to lock a new target and it wouldn't work. I quickly worked out that this was because the broadcasts were scrolling so fast I was clicking someone I already had locked. Okay, just need to pay more attention to that window then. More warping around the system, each time trying to lock the ships nearest to me. Quite often the target fleet would already be in warp as we landed so locking them was impossible. Our FC sounded a bit overwhelmed at times but did a decent job keeping it (and us) together as we bounced around trying to land on a fleet and pin them down before they fled us.

Eventually we regrouped at the POS. With the numbers we were facing the FC announced that people should ship up into cruisers if they had them.  I stuck with the Atron because I was still finding my feet and didn't want to waste any more ISK than I had to. There was a long flurry of messages and comms chatter on what ships people should take. Eventually everyone seemed to get themselves organised and we all formed up again on the FC.

Throughout the rest of the evening I maintained the same level of confusion as to where I was in space. Each time the FC warped us I kept the same routine of locking up what was nearest and shooting the primary. With the larger ships around now it was often hard to finish locking the enemy before it popped but I kept trying. All through the evening TiDi stayed in the 10% to 40% range. At one point someone uttered the classic line "local is down to 750" which raised a few laughs. The only time I've seen local like that is in Jita. Towards the end of the evening the RvB Ganked roam swung around to come fight us. I've been in a few RvB Ganked roams but never faced up against them. In my head I imagined I could hear Mangala Solaris calmly calling primaries and hoped my name didn't come up. To be fair, in an Atron it would be unlikely. After a short scuffle the Ganked roam fled the field leaving us victorious (or so I was told - I hadn't a clue what was going on).

With midnight coming up I needed to head off to bed but checking my personal killboard I was happy to see I had been blessed with 22 kills worth 2.5 billion ISK.  Somewhat amusingly, during the evening I dropped 0.3 in my sec status, which is more than I did during my failed attempt at being a pirate. This is definitely more what I had in mind for Geo, it's just a shame it took me so long to get to the right place with him.

Proud

I normally check the alliance killboard in the morning when I'm having breakfast. Today I was up earlier than normal for the Australian F1 race so my brain was more sleep-addled than normal. When I checked the killboard I was convinced that we had lost some capitals overnight. It took a little while for my brain to realise the capitals were on a green background.

3 Caps + 1 T3 + 1 Pod = 22 Bn ISK

The Moros was worth 6.7 Bil, the Naglfar was worth 6.8 Bil and the Thanatos was 7.2 Bil. The pod was pretty tasty too. I missed getting in on this action by an hour. Admittedly if I hadn't been getting up stupidly early to watch motorsport it would have been more like four hours, but still. Nice kills boys, I'm proud of you.

Update: An after action report has been written by someone actually there. It makes for a good read.

Alliance (and friends) December Roam

Our industrial division kindly donated 50 Drakes to the alliance with the insistence that they be whelped on some foolishness. I added a handful of Ospreys I had lying around and we had ourselves a theme roam. For reasons unknown to me CVA have us set as "Kill On Sight" making destination number one obvious - Providence. I took a bunch of screenshots over the course of the roam but one of our Interceptor pilots was filming the whole thing and spliced together the Providence incursion while I slept.



With various people having to head off we went back to hisec for refreshments before discussing where we would go next. Nobody had any bright ideas so instead we started looking for hotspots of activity in the in-game universe map. While that was being trawled we set off in the general direction of Barleguet, home of Brave Newbies Inc. They seem to be a fun bunch always up for a fight so if we were going to dispose of all these surviving Drakes somewhere it would be a certainty that they would help do just that. En route to Barleguet our scouts discovered a hive of activity in Aulbres. It appeared to be a massive frigate fight was happening so all we could do was fly right in and give them something bigger to shoot at. And shoot us they did.

Primary is, um, shoot things...

All in all it was a really fun night. The only problem we had of the evening was the form-up time of just after midnight. This confused a whole load of people who took "Just after Midnight on Sunday" to mean "Sunday night". This meant people were going to be 24 hours late. Oh well, next time we know better. Thanks to the scouts, logi and of course the FC for making this a fun night. I love it when my alliance gets together and does stuff. This is what makes us more than just a gaggle of corps who happen to fly under the same banner without actually knowing each other.

CZ FFA

On Saturday my fellow Scots over at the Crossing Zebras podcast hosted a community free for all in the infamous Asakai system. Given the first I knew about this event was the posts on my alliance forum suggesting ship fittings what else could I do but haul a bunch of ships there and prepare to die lots.

Although the suggested ship fits had been on our forums for ages it was still the night before when I finally bought all the ships, mods and (most of the) drones. I decided I wouldn't stage out of Asakai's single station as it would probably be camped to hell and I at least wanted to be able to fly around looking for fights as well as fleet up with my alliance. I looked around and decided to stage my ships in Rakapas as that was the closest, non-hisec system with cloning facilities. I was reminded by someone how hard it should be to get podded in lowsec and, combined with discovering I couldn't reach from Jita to Rakapas in one jump with my jump freighter, decided to stage out of Okkamon. This would conveniently be on my route back to Asakai from Rakapas should I be unlucky enough to get podded. In the more likely situation where I found myself without ship but pod intact I would only have one jump to reship.

With all the hulls and modules bought in Jita and jumped across to Okkamon I left Geo to the repetitive task of fitting the ships up to be combat ready. Thankfully there is now a 'Fit' button on the in-game loadout browser making this task easier. Please CCP, could you make that group and load the guns too? Oh, adding my tobacco, spirits, wine and janitor automatically would be nice too. Once the ships were all ready it was time for Orea to make his nervous sojourn into K-space. I think I've mentioned before that Orea has a real fear of systems  featuring 'local'. That fear (or possibly, "beer") didn't stop him flying his cloaky, scanny loki right into a lowsec system where lots of people were staging for a fight. It's only lowsec though so it all worked out fine.

Dare to fly a Noctis down there?

The clock rolled around to 19:50 on Saturday. I got myself on comms, logged in and fleeted up. Sending Geo in a Hound to scout Asakai I was in and rolling around the safe spots I had already prepared. Once the rest of the alliance was all shipped up we met up and started nosing around for some trouble. Already there was a massive wreck field at the sun and we kept pouncing down to brawl with some of the other fleets adding to the wreck field. We were doing so well until another of the alliance was coming in from hisec. We headed over to the Ikoskio gate and were landed on by an armour HAC fleet from BALKAN and friends. We died.

BALKAN and friends.

I quickly reshipped and got myself back into Asakai. The others were not so well prepared as me and I spent a while bouncing around safes again. I should have went back for one of the disposable frigates I took to Okkamon but by the time I thought of that it was too late. We had a another good run killing some famous names and having a blast. Fighting had largely switched to a small faction warfare complex. These only let frigates use the acceleration gate but the mass of cruisers at the gate were doing their best to stop that happening. After a good run we lost all our ships again to the combined might of, um, everyone. Having learnt my lesson from last time I decided to blow a couple of the Incursus I took with me. The first one landed at the small plex just in time for me to realise I hadn't reordered the modules into a sensible manner. I activated my cap booster instead of my dual reps and died without firing a shot. Reshipping into another Incursus I reorganised the modules en route. Landing again on the small plex gate I was intending to take on Xander Phoena. He turned out to be 45 km away so I picked the nearest target and at least managed to shoot him before dying and getting podded. I have no idea how I got podded, I never yet saw the pod, just went from ship to session change to white screen to floating corpse...

Not my best angle.

The rest of the crew were reshipped and ready as I swung past Okkamon to pick up another cruiser then onwards to join them. The event was in its dying throes and targets were few and far between. We went from plex to plex and down to the sun looking for looters. It really was all over though and just as we were about to call it quits ourself I spied a lone Hurricane sitting at the medium plex. I had barely called it when I found Orea in a fleet warp to pounce on the poor guy. Of course the 'poor guy' had friends who conveniently landed on us when he was half into armour. Try and we might to take the 'cane down with us his logi-bros got him repped up nicely and our fate was sealed.

The 'Scoreboard'

Looking at the 'scoreboard' we killed more than we lost but we spent more ISK doing it. Who cares? I didn't go to Asakai to win any awards (although I did score points most on my alliance killboard for the event), I went there to have fun and fun is exactly what I had. I kicked the crap out of my security status. I can't remember how long ago it was last below 4. It's still pretty healthy at a heady 2.9 now so I won't have to go ratting in nullsec any time soon. The other thing I got other than having fun was adding a raft of notable names to my short list of kills - Bagehi, Mangala Solaris (twice), Sindel Pellion, House2twist, and of course Xander Phoena who joins the vanishingly rare ranks of people I've had a beer with and also exploded in EVE. My thanks go out to Xander and the others at Crossing Zebras for arranging this and I cannot wait for the next bout of pointless violence.

The folks over at the Crossing Zebras podcast have organised a Community Free For All event. The idea is to get all us bloggers, the podcasters and the CSM members in one system at the same time to kill us repeatedly.

Where: Asakai
When: Saturday 5th October, 2000
Eve Ships: Frigates, Destroyers and Cruisers (T1, T2, T3 all allowed – no ship or module restrictions)
Length: I have no idea – until we exhaust all local supplies of frigs, dessies and cruisers I would guess!
Channel: CZ Community FFA

This should be awesomely destructive fun and I really hope to make it there. I've posted something about awarding prizes inside my alliance for members who get themselves over there too. I just need to work out what prizes and whether or not to make them all based around deaths rather than kills.

Sleepers and a lock out

It was Friday night and our home system had been filling up with anomalies all week, thirteen anomalies to be exact. It was decided that we would have a hole cleaning session and maybe make some ISK. We've been living in our C4 for long enough now that shooting sleepers is just a pretty light show backdrop to a random conversion over some drinks. That said, even burning through thirteen anomalies and a radar site does take an awful lot of time, drinking and conversation.

I don't think the Sleepers like me here

All told it took a few hours to clear out and loot everything with nary a tense moment as I was neither watching a wormhole nor acting as FC. I could just sit back and shoot what was indicated as the next target. There were a couple of pilot substitutions as the night wore on given the length of the Op but by 4 am it was declared mission success and the corp loot hanger was a lot fatter.

By this time someone had been off exploring in our new static which we had deliberately kept closed during the site sweeping activities. For whatever reason it was declared a terrible neighbour and the call came to close the hole and look for something better. I volunteered myself to jump into an Armageddon to speed things up just before heading to bed. First pass through the hole and back went fine. Second pass I forgot to turn on my MWD and this was going to be my undoing as upon the completion of our second pass the wormhole went critical where we would normally expect it to collapse.

At this point the method to finish the job is well documented and involved an Interdictor and its bubble. However, as noted above, there had been alcohol consumed and I decided that turning off all the plates on my geddon would drop my mass enough to allow a return trip. How wrong was I? After I jumped the wormhole lasted just long enough for me to think it was all good, and then it collapsed dashing my hopes on rocky shores. At least we had scanned from C4a to C4b so I headed that way hoping nobody was watching. I got into C4b with no problems and, deciding that scanning in a geddon at 5am whilst intoxicated was a bad idea, went to bed.

I wish we could occupy these lovely structures

Waking somewhat sleepily the next morning I resumed the hunt for K-space. It turned out that the owners of C4b were either on vacation or liked having lots of signatures to scan. In a moment of sheer luck I found their static C3 connection quite easily and took a break for lunch to hopefully throw anyone off the scent who had seen my probes. Post lunch, and with a scream of "banzai!!" I warped to the C3 hole and landed around six clicks from it. Stupid deadspace signature variances. Battleships move increasingly slowly the more you will them to speed up. Still, I jumped through safely and found the other side clear. Even better, this C3 wormhole had a static lowsec - sure a hisec would have been sweet but I was really expecting 'Bob' to be cruel and deal me a nullsec static.

Of course, the other thing this C3 had was twenty signatures to plough through. Rolling up my metaphorical sleeves I got to work. Twenty signatures in an Armageddon is never going to be fun though, and it wasn't. Eventually I found there was only the one other wormhole to my entry point and that took me to Naga in Aridia. Damn you Bob. Still, at least it had a station where I could dock up and go about my day. I was happy to leave my escape from Aridia to another time.

Death Race

I actually managed to take part in Rixx Javix and The Tuskers' Death Race today. I wasn't 100% certain I was going to be able to, but thanks to a forgiving wife I managed to make it happen. I even managed to record my whole event.

Over the last few days I set up a ship based on a Stabber hull I had lying around. I fitted an 100MN Afterburner expecting to have to burn out of bubbles in nullsec mid-race. I also fitted a large Ancillary Shield Booster expecting to take some damage en route. Sadly, neither of these fittings were particularly useful. To them I added a trio of Warp Core stabs, some shield resists and buffer and some pretty pointless guns. Yesterday I spent some time pouring over a map working out that the first ten systems were covered by only one route through lowsec. The only thing to do was to make tactical bookmarks on each gate so I could approach the inevitable smartbomb gate camps from an unexpected angle. This turned out to be a superfluous activity.

Come race day I was all set up in system. People were x-ing up in local from at least 15:00 even though the rules clearly stated 16:00 was the earliest time to join a race fleet. I hung around for a while and joined fleet around 16:30 - didn't want to be too early nor too late to this party. Thirty minutes later, and with my wife delivering food to my pod, I was ready to race.

I suffered a little confusion to begin with when the first destination was announced. EVE being EVE meant people were announcing in fleet that the notified destination wasn't real and that the fleet we were in was fake. I had planned on giving people a minute or so head start to avoid the initial gate camps somewhat so I used this time to figure out if my fleet was genuine. A Tusker was the Fleet Commander and was the one announcing the destination so I took it as read that this was genuine and set off. This led to another point of confusion. My autopilot showed a route via hisec. We were told the route would be through lowsec. Would taking the hisec route be cheating? I decided not to find out, adjusted the AP to stick to lowsec and headed off.

It turned out my first ten systems were spot on and I safely traversed them using the tactical bookmarks set up the night before. In retrospect this was probably not required as most of the gates were empty. I quickly fell behind. Being behind became a theme of the evening. When I was many jumps from each waypoint the interim games would be announced to allow stragglers to catch up. As I approached each waypoint the next destination was announced. This was my third point of confusion - should I continue to the current waypoint or switch routes to the new one? From what I read from Rixx there were going to be people taking screenshots to ensure everyone fully completed the course. To me this meant I should continue to the checkpoint before resetting my autopilot. I'm fairly sure this was not sensible as I continued to drop behind during the next two checkpoints. Sometimes I would have TiDi chasing me, sometimes there would even be ships on grid with me. In general I pretty much felt like I was roaming lowsec alone. Not really the Death Race I expected. A bit boring really.

The final system, Y9G-KS, was announced as being a paltry single jump into nullsec. I had expected a passage of nullsec somewhere in the middle, hence my AB fit, so this was a little disappointing. Nevermind, I was sort of having fun taking part in the community event, even if it wasn't that exciting. Laying in my course I found there were over 20 jumps between me and the goal... and I still had to visit P1@0 in New Eden. *sigh*

Again I subjected myself to a boring set of jumps which can be abbreviated as... suddenly I arrived in Y9G-KS. Oh look, bubbles on the gate. Almost like someone was expecting us or I'm crazily late to the party. I suspect the latter. I decided to burn directly upwards before heading away from the gate to get my bearings. Sadly, just as I get to the edge of the bubble Rote Kappele decided my Stabber had lived too long and made it die. Oh well, I'm in a pod and have had time to reconfigure my overview to show the finish line - a GSC. Not expecting a hope in hell of slowboating over to the finish line I started. On comms with some corpmates I counted down... 30... 25... 20... 10... 5... I'm here. Holy shit, I finished the course. To be honest that was more unexpected than making it through the first system.

Kudos to The Tuskers for running the event. I would have liked it to be more eventful but my opinion is from only one single point of view. Whether this race was a success will require many others to put their views across. Regardless, I think this was great and maybe one day my alliance can assist The Tuskers in running a future death race.

Click to watch the video

Nashh Kadavr's Leaving Party

Nashh Kadavr of the many coloured Kadavr corporations decided to call it quits in New Eden and hang up his pod. To ensure no easy return from retirement Nashh decided to go out with a bang, inviting everyone to come shoot his Thanatos and even providing frigates to help if you wanted. I've been reading Nashh's blog for a while now so it would have been remiss of me to not help send off a fellow blogger in style. I also couldn't turn down the offer of shooting at a carrier.

I should have joined a fleet

Typically, I almost forgot about the whole thing and at 20:00 I only just remembered to move some ships. I figured I would need more than one ship, so moved five of my pre-fitter rifters across  to Assiettes. I remembered to change my medi-clone location and even insured the ships. Just after 21:00 I jumped into Goinard half expecting to die on the gate. To my surprise the gate was empty so I made some safe spots and started jumping around while watching local to see what was what.

After a while Nashh announced in local that we should get to the customs office at planet three, so I did and landed in mayhem. There were already Archons on the field repping Nashh. Oh well, I was only here for the fun so I burned the 20 km at Nashh, locked him up and started shooting long before I could actually hit. Much to my surprise I was within optimal range, orbitting Nashh, and taking teeny tiny pieces of armour off him before my first death. Time Dilation was around 10% at this point so I easily got my pod out and went back for another ship - TiDi meaning I could both grab a beer from the fridge and drink it during the warp out.

Strike Two

On warping back to the scene of the fight I finally remembered to start taking screenshots for this post. I got in range again and started shooting at Nashh. I didn't last long. Also, Nashh didn't seem to be taking much, if any, damage from the fight. Again I got my pod out, reshipped and came back. This time the field seemed to have split up, I started to approach Nashh but decided something odd was up and warped off to assess from local chatter.

Scary d-scan analysis looks scary

Local yielded nothing useful so I warped back to the fight. Trying to be clever I warped to 20 km thinking that would place me nearer the fight. I was wrong. As I burned toward the battle a former corp mate locked me up and put a disrupter on me. Not sure if he knows my alt but I'll be asking him later. It was taking forever to get to Nashh and I was taking incoming fire. To try and whore on another killmail I locked a nearby Ashimuu and started firing. That guaranteed a rapid death for ship number three with ship number four following suit rapidly afterward.

One, two, many, lots

For my last ship I had a slightly different tactic. I warped to 100 from the POCO in the hope their would be a wreck I could use to warp into the heart of the battle. This worked in so much as I was away from the snipers picking off ships burning between the POCO and the fight, but I was still 40 km away and had to burn back.

Rifter: Engage many cap ships

I've never seen a sight like the above screenshot. Something seemed inherently wrong with me burning a frigate into that mess of cap ships. But burn I did, just in time to see Nashh's Thanatos explode right in front of me. Where's the pod? There it is. Lock it!!! I managed to gain lock and squeeze off a few rounds in its direction before it exploded too. Yay, I got on both killmails. At this point I warped out figuring there was no point dying to the caps on field. I then remembered that I wasn't taking this ship home, warped to the top belt and died to a Thrasher.

Goodbye Nashh and congratulations on hosting such a memorable departure.

Nashh Kadavr - Farewell Party 2012
(he's in there somewhere)

A Weekend Deployment

I was all set for a relaxing weekend. I had prepared a couple of cruisers for the 40th RvB Ganked roam on the Saturday and I had no other fixed plans. For anyone who hasn't been on a Ganked roam, you should go on one. Just remember that you will not be taking your ship or clone back in one piece. Something has gone very, very wrong if you don't wake up in a new clone with a message from the insurers of your former ship. But I digress.

We had been aware for a while of a visitor in the class 2 wormhole system which houses our academy. He had been seen on d-scan and had been chatting in local. I'm not sure if he actually tried to blow anyone up. If he did try he definitely didn't succeed. At some point he decided to blow up a couple of warp bubbles my corp had left there when we handed the wormhole over the Corp that now runs the academy. Being a little bored I decided to have some fun. I sent the visitor a bill for 30 Million ISK and requested a written apology for the inconvenience.

Sadly his response was neither imaginative nor particularly polite. My reply pointed that out to him and I was delighted to receive a response he attributed to a corp mate:

In my travels through wormhole system J######, I found my ship battered and encumbered by multiple warp disruption bubbles belonging to your corporation. During that time, my travel was detrimentally effected. I lost valuable time (which is ISK). During my harrowing navigation, my ship suffered multiple scratches and dents, both when I ran into your warp disruption bubbles as well as when I was hit by pieces of debris when I disposed of them. I expect compensation for my time and damages to the tune of 30,000,000.01 ISK. Please remit payment ASAP to avoid further loss of your corporation assets and additional monetary damages of time and maintenance. Furthermore, I expect a written public apology on the EVE Gate forums for your negligence and oversight. Please also refrain from leaving your shit all over space for people to have to work around.

Now that was more like what I was hoping for. For his part I tried to sent the 0.01 ISK balance between what I requested and what he wanted for his ship. Sadly the EVE client will allow 0.10 ISK as the minimum so I chose 1.01 and a suitable reply. I also figured I might as well ask why he was hanging around the academy. If it was for easy kills he was going to be a bit disappointed as those guys are pretty savage against single targets. His reply was slightly unexpected as he told me his alliance was invading the C2. Ooo, change of weekend plans then.

After our success at forming a local defence against nothing it was good to now be testing how successful we were as an alliance at deploying from our local wormholes and meeting up in the academy. At least with a static lowsec wormhole it would be easy to get to the destination, but with the other corps living in class four systems there was going to be luck at play for good routes to K-space.

Plans and fleet compositions were drawn up by people with more knowledge than me. Money was deposited in a kitty in case anyone was short of ISK to buy what was asked of them. Come Thursday I scanned a very nice route out of our home system. Very nice apart from the 32 jumps to Jita. I then went shopping and bought the ships I was planning to take. I do like wilful shopping sprees that aren't just the result of a ship loss.

Come Friday I had the ships hauled up to a staging point near the appropriate lowsec system and flew my gaggle of ships into the C2. It was a bit like going home. That system is where I started my wormhole career over a year ago. It gave me a fuzzy feeling inside to go back. I even still had my 'safe' bookmarks. During this time we became aware that our visitor and one of his alts had left the C2. Watchlist triggered d-scans also meant we suspected the other alts had also left as we didn't see any ships appear when he logged off. Had our visitor gone? Sadly we received confirmation of this when we announced some other corp activity meant there would be no action for us. Not being particularly trusting we decided to maintain watch anyway just in case.

At some point after several beers and boredom I decided to wander off in a bomber to Tama with a slightly inebriated Emergent Patroller. This had the expected result of us losing both our ships to pirates. I'm fairly certain that would probably have happened if the beers hadn't been flowing given the expectation of tonight had been to lose ships or die trying. It just wasn't meant to be in the pirate bolt-hole of Tama.

For all the weekend didn't provide in combat activities, it did give us good practice at a defensive deployment to another wormhole system in our alliance. I found the planning and execution of this good fun as well. Rather than just logging in to hope there were people or sleepers to shoot we had a proper mission to execute. Great stuff.

Now if only CCP could find some way to make NPC missions involved and meaningful like that.

Scratch One Tengu

Ah well, it was almost inevitable what was going to happen this weekend. For the last few days I had been feeling a bloodlust not particularly common for me. Maybe it was a result of how quiet wormhole life has been, fake encounters notwithstanding, but I really just wanted to make someone explode.

Friday night I undocked in the hope of making said explosion happen. We had pilots out exploring and mapping our entire constellation of about six or seven wormhole systems. In our c2b there was a lowsec exit to Aridia and a Viator floating in the POS. I sat quite happily for over an hour watching the Viator, willing him to make a move to a POCO so I could send him on his merry way. A couple of other corp mates joined me so you would think one of us would have been on the ball to work out where he was going when he finally made a move. Unfortunately, the time sitting doing nothing dulled our reactions and we had to scatter to find him. "He's on the lowsec, I've got him pointed" someone called but he jumped through and away. Will he be stupid enough to come back? We sat waiting for half an hour until receiving a notification that the potential target had logged off. Damnit.

Someone now scanned a new K162 in our home system. Jumping through we had a C5a to go with our normal C4a static. A pilot floated in the POS in a Moa suggesting to me that he might be planning on sucking up some gas. He didn't warp off so I took the risk that he was otherwise distracted and scanned down two ladars in the system. Unfortunately he either saw me or decided to do something other than suck gas and logged off. Gah!

By now my corpmates were starting to bunk down for the night but I was still hopeful and jumped out into the lowsec of Aridia to see what was out there. Suffice to say I finished my evening jumping around a ring of five systems popping rats as I went. I was delighted to raise my sec rating from almost 4.1 to just over 4.1. Yeah, right...

Saturday had me looking for a route out of our home system to meet up with some folk and go shoot at people in nullsec. We had a K162 with a nullsec exit in our home system that wasn't particularly useful to me and our C4a led to another C4 and that led to a C5. I paused in C4b for some scanning practice. I'm still perfecting a technique involving four deep space probes and four core probes and the twenty signatures in C4b seemed perfect. It took about 45 minutes due to distractions before I had neatly catalogued all the sigs then I took a break.

Coming back I decided to peek into C5c. When I first connected to the corp and alliance channels there was some chatter about the Wormhole Engineers and I assumed they were in here. Being a fan of Tigerears' blog I decided taking a look was worth the risk of those elite wormhole PvPers. I jumped through the wormhole and "oh crap, grey boxes and a bubble". I held cloak for a short time while I formulated a plan of escape. I assumed I was dead but that wasn't going to stop me trying to get out in once piece. Jumping back to C4b I immediately broke the session cloak and activated my covops cloak while spamming the warp button to a random planet. The wormhole gods didn't smile at me as the attacking forces landed right on top of me forcing my cloak back off. I continued to align and spam warp while assessing what was there and what was preventing my escape. I first targeted a Hurricane before noticing the Ishkur and switching to it. Four separate points on me meant I was dead I just wanted to take someone with me.

Overheating everything and trying to burn away was futile but I tried anyway. With four people preventing my warp engines from engaging this was going to be very messy, plus there was a Onyx in the field so I didn't expect to get my pod out neither. I was slowly eating through the Ishkur's armour but HAMs aren't designed for frigates. It was simply a matter of spamming the warp button while waiting to die. For some reason I was allowed to leave with my pod. I left a 'ta' as thanks in local because my brain couldn't compute 'gf' and then I started to wonder why I didn't eject to save some skill points. D'oh!

At least I got my wish to shoot at someone. Me exploding wasn't exactly the plan though.

Podded by Concord

I figured it would be fun to go down a controversial route today. Looking forward to your comments of rage.

Concord should be punishing people who commit crimes in hisec by podding them and issuing a fine.

No, this is not an anti-goon rant against Hulkageddon type activities, or the recent trend to gank freighters en route between Amarr and Jita. While that is not my chosen thing to do I am happy with there being people out there who do that. I'm even happy that those people are able to do it. Let's face it, the main difference between hisec and lowsec is only a perceived feeling of safety. So far in 2012 there has been almost the same number of ships killed in hisec as in lowsec, nullsec and wormhole space combined. That's not particularly safe, is it? Yet people feel safe autopiloting around willy-nilly in untanked haulers and Orcas. Something they would never do in 0.4 but are happy to do in 0.5.

If I don't have a problem with the crime why, then, do I have an issue with the current punishment? On TV there is a vast number of Police car chase programs. While the sequence of events that leads up to each chase will vary, the general recipe is the same: police detect criminal in a vehicle; police try to stop criminal; criminal flees; police chase; criminal crashes.

In my mind the above sequence of events isn't too dissimilar to EVE. In New Eden what we find is: Crime happens which Concord instantly know about; Concord arrive at the scene of the crime; Concord blow up criminal. It's at this point things fall down. Once Concord blows up your ship you are free to go. Sure, players can take pot-shots at your pod but the police are happy for you to do whatever you want. Unless you get another ship too soon, that is.

Consider a scenario where the police are chasing a murderer and in order to stop the criminal they ram his car off the road. The car gets written off due to the resulting damage. Imagine the public outrage if the police then let they guy go provided he doesn't get into another car too soon. Said fellow waits out this period of time, gets a new car and goes off to kill someone else. Make sense?

Here's what I think should happen. Once Concord blow up the criminal they should try to catch his pod and explode that too. This is the equivalent to the police not only stopping a criminal but arresting him as well. Finally, that criminal should be fined in the station for criminal activities. From a gankers point of view all this does is increase the 'operating costs' for their illegal activities. Now, as well as replacing ships they need to replace clones and pay fines.

It is worth making life a little more fun for these hisec pirates though. They should have the ability to warp their pod free from the exploding ship if they are quick enough. The understanding here being that ship destruction is a guaranteed punishment but it may be possible to escape with your pod and without being fined. Simply docking or jumping out of system isn't a route to safety, however. Stations will be aware you are a criminal and won't let you dock. Gates will let you leave but if the next system is also hisec then Concord will start chasing you there too. In fact, the only way to avoid being podded and fined is to get to lowsec or nullsec (or jump through a wormhole).

What gains does this give us in game? Well, carebears get the satisfaction of a more robust penalty against the 'bad guys'. Hisec griefing becomes slightly less interesting due to higher costs. The 'professionals' will still do it as they can work the costs into making sure they only gank the best targets. Finally these criminals can choose the excitement of a 'car chase' across the skies seeking safe haven. Seems like a genius idea to me. What say you?

Roaming Thoughts

So with my first proper lowsec roam taken care of, and four kills under my belt. What are my thoughts? Well, for one I had a fun time even if it was quieter than I had hoped. I have spent enough time flying through lowsec in the last year to realise that it is pretty empty and not the scary wasteland I once thought it was. When looking for a fight this isn't really what you want though. It was also fun to be in a fleet actively hunting for targets in an organised manner.

I had one realisation for the minute or two we would have sitting on each gate while our scout was a system over checking for targets. Anyone jumping through would think we were camping the gate which was definitely not the case. We would already be aware of the security status of someone jumping through and whether we wanted to try and catch them or not. On more than one occasion someone with positive sec status would see us and burn back to the gate rapidly. As we were all in Frigates or Destroyers there would be no way we'd survive the gate guns for long so had no intention of engaging those ships. It was amusing to watch through as I'm more used to being on the wrong side of such surprises.

Finally, do I want to go on another roam? Hell yes, it was lots of fun and I've already been out with the same guys for a second roam with two more kills, and my first loss. It'll be even more fun when I've got more of the essential skills - I can't even use a MWD yet. Pretty soon I'll need to find a suitable corp for Geo as well. Any suggestions? I've nearly one million skill points now!

On The Roam

With the ships all set up and our fleet all ready we undocked and headed into lowsec. We spent the first few jumps doing a mini circuit of Derelik but pickings were slim to none. As I mentioned on Monday the real destination was a big loop of Molden Heath so we headed there next.

Just into Molden Heath we ran into a Jaguar taunting us around the system. We engaged him on the sun but he just burned away and warped off. The merry dance continued on a couple of sites as he jumped around trying to split us into multiple groups. This tactic worked to a certain extent and on a jump gate into a complex he landed on grid with a group of four of us. One of our number was pretty close to him so tackled him while the rest of us tried to get in range. This was about 70 km from where the rest of us were. Now 70 km is about the worst distance to cover as burning towards the destination is just as bad as burning away to 150 km and warping back. Needless to say the tackle died before we could get in range. With this unfortunate start behind us we regrouped and headed deeper leaving the Jaguar to his own devices.

It wasn't long before we had another target twitching under our noses. Our FC had found a Stabber worthy of our attention. Tackle was called in and got a successful hold on the ship. The rest of us jumped in and warped to the FC. With eight in our gang the Stabber didn't have much chance. First blood for Geo and third highest damage. - not bad for a thirteen day old character.

Two systems later and we had a Drake seeking our attentions. Exactly the same setup as before with the FC scouting the location and then calling tackle in. Tackle calls point and we all warp in. Strike two. It appeared this kill wasn't well received as we all had to scatter pretty quick when the Drake's friends arrived on grid advertising a fight we couldn't win. Thankfully we all got away and kept on the move for a few systems until they got bored.

It took another half hour before we got word of a Rupture on d-scan. By this time my beers were in full effect and the details of the kill are a bit fuzzy. It was just after this that two members of The Bastards met up with us. Thankfully they were on our side and arrived to a touch of awe from a couple of folk in fleet. The highlight comment on comms was "Oh, you're in The Bastards. I love your work".

With two Bastards in tow we went hunting for more kills, but they were elusive. It took the best part of an hour, and a few missed opportunities, before we acquired our final target of the evening. This target was the weirdest of the night. We were all parked on a gate when the Drake jumped into us. We all got lock but I was expecting him to burn back to the gate and jump through. I held off on aggression and got ready to follow him through while the rest of the fleet tore through his shields. About half into armour I decided not to miss the killmail and started shooting as well. He died seconds later.

It wasn't until afterwards I realised I wasn't showing drones on my overview and the Drake had actually aggressed us. Oh well, I could've hit him harded but at least I got on my fourth killmail of the evening. And with that we decided to call it a night. There were no further targets as we headed back to Derelik and off to sleep.

More Pew Please

Recently I've become increasingly interested in getting involved with some lowsec roams or general small scale PvP. I'm not particularly interested in 'honourable' one on one duelling as I believe in the whole "don't fight unless you've already won" philosophy. That's not so say I'm adverse to fighting in uncertain circumstances, but I would rather be in a group of people than relying solely on my own skills and the honour of my opponent.

I've become a little protective of my existing characters' security status, and over-protective of my low number of ship losses. This means I don't want to take either Orea or Dhal out on such roams. Plus, getting Orea out of his wormhole can be a pain without prior planning. Anyway, Orea gets to do his own solo hunting for soft targets and I'm happy with that. The solution to this problem is obviously to create a character exclusively for roaming around to find some pew pew, thus Geo was born.

During the week an invite went out for an Alliance roam. Even though Geo was only thirteen days old how could I pass up the opportunity? It takes very little skill to fit a half-decent Rifter and not much more for a half-decent Thrasher. I rearranged the skill queue accordingly and flew two Rifters and two Thrashers to the form-up system. With my ships in place all I had left to do was wait for the fleet advert.

[Rifter, Geo's Rifter]¹
Small Inefficient Armor Repair Unit
Damage Control I
200mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

X5 Prototype Engine Enervator
Initiated Harmonic Warp Scrambler I
Limited 1MN Afterburner I

150mm Light 'Scout' Autocannon I, Republic Fleet EMP S
150mm Light 'Scout' Autocannon I, Republic Fleet EMP S
150mm Light 'Scout' Autocannon I, Republic Fleet EMP S
[empty high slot]

Small Trimark Armor Pump I
Small Trimark Armor Pump I
Small Projectile Collision Accelerator I

[Thrasher, Geo's Thrasher]²
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
Damage Control I

Limited 1MN Afterburner I
Medium Subordinate Screen Stabilizer I
Fleeting Warp Disruptor I

250mm Light 'Scout' Artillery I, Republic Fleet EMP S
250mm Light 'Scout' Artillery I, Republic Fleet EMP S
250mm Light 'Scout' Artillery I, Republic Fleet EMP S
250mm Light 'Scout' Artillery I, Republic Fleet EMP S
250mm Light 'Scout' Artillery I, Republic Fleet EMP S
250mm Light 'Scout' Artillery I, Republic Fleet EMP S
250mm Light 'Scout' Artillery I, Republic Fleet EMP S
[empty high slot]

Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Core Defense Field Extender I
Small Ancillary Current Router I

I joined fleet and we spent the next hour forming up in Derelik. We were informed the route would be taking us around Molden Heath. This isn't a region of New Eden I've spent any time in so none of the system names were familiar. With my copy of Eve Tactical Maps open in front of me I could see a nice little cluster of interconnected lowsec systems in Derelik. This lead to a very convenient loop of lowsec systems which, I correctly guessed, would define the roam.

Finally we were all set in our fleet of nine and off we went.
¹ Heavily influenced by Kirith Kodachi's recently published fit for his Rifter.².
² Suggestions for improvements are welcome, just remember this is a character with only 600,000 SP.