Reinforcements

I can't remember if I posted it on this blog (and I'm too lazy to check), but one of the things I most expected to happen post-Rubicon was an excess of reinforced depots outside the major trade hubs. Given I spend most of my game time in various flavours of "Unknown Space" it has taken a week before I eventually found myself in any trade hubs. The sight that awaited me in Amarr was exactly as I suspected, if maybe a little less concentrated than expected.

A different kind of Red Ring Of Death

Later on I had the misfortune to find myself in Jita where a similar picture was painted. I am confused though. I was 100% certain these depots would be anchored outside the trade hubs and 100% certain they would mostly be reinforced. I was right on both counts but I don't know why this is the case. What was the motivation behind launching these depots? Did the people who put them out there seriously think they wouldn't be shot at? Do they really want 3000m3 of extra storage so close to a station? What about the people who bothered to shoot them? Anyone taking a pot-shot would have been flagged as a suspect resulting in the rest of the ships outside the station shooting at them. What's the point?

Somewhere deep in my head I must understand why this happened because I knew it would be this way. I just can't unlock the rationale. So, dear reader, please enlighten me to this madness.

More Posterity

On the eve of EVE crossing the Rubicon I took more screenshots to record for posterity. As many of you know, the old certification system is going away to be replaced by ship mastery. For a lot of people this will be considered a good thing as many of the certificates are a bit outdated now. For me, as useful as I hope the new mastery system will be, I will be a little sad at them passing into history. Certificates didn't exist when I first played EVE in 2005. A lot of the problems I had back then was from overload at the vast array of skills I could train. I had no idea what would be a good idea and what wasn't. In the end I didn't make it past the two week trial back then. The same story happened in 2007 when I gave EVE a second chance. By 2009 the certificate system existed and what a major difference it made to me.

I trained many skills since then, some following the certificates and others ignore them completely. There are two categories of certificates I got to elite level which I am rather proud of - Elite Core skills and Elite Defence.

Elite Core Skills

Elite Defence Skills

I have no idea how my skills will shape up under the new mastery ratings so let the record show I once was Elite at something.

My Little Caravan

One of the new personal structures coming with Rubicon is the Mobile Depot. This little structure will allow a limited amount of storage along with a personal fitting service so you can swap out ship modules while in space. The recently announced in-space changes to T3 subsystems will also be possible making this little structure potentially awesome. My friend splatus has already written about the three depots, along with their attributes, so I won't cover any of that in detail. I have been interested since these were announced to see how they would pan out for use in w-space. The main questions in my head were: does it appear on d-scan, can it be probed down, and how easily can it be shot. It was time to go to Singularity and find out.

No Dougal the depot is small... the Loki is far away.

Deploying the depot is simplicity itself. For the full wormhole experience I started cloaked and aligned to a celestial. In one fluid movement I decloaked, dragged the depot from my cargo into space, then warped off. No hanging around messing with right-click menus or anything. Once I landed I immediately about-turned to see if the depot had anchored properly to find it had.

The next thing was to answer my two questions about d-scan and probing. Warping off again I first launched Sisters core scanner probes and tried to find the signature. As expected I found nothing so swapped for Sisters combat probes. This time I got a weak signature but it was easy enough to whittle down the probe ranges before finally getting a 100% lock at the 1 AU probe range. Testing d-scan initially showed nothing on any of my presets. Digging a little revealed a new checkbox in the overview settings. Once I ticked that option the depot clearly appeared on d-scan.

Little bubbles of ping

New box to tick

At this point I was happy with how easy these things will be to find in space so the last remaining question was how easy are they to kill. From the screenshot I took it apparently took seven volleys from my cloaky loki to put the depot into reinforced mode. Something designed with damage in mind would be much quicker but, to be honest, seven volleys isn't exactly an ice age. Once reinforced a bright red reticule appears which is only visible when you are on-grid with the depot. I initially mis-read the countdown as 48 minutes but it's actually 48 hours before the structure leaves reinforced mode. While it was reinforced I was able to add and remove items from the storage space. I didn't think to try the refit option although I have read that will not work during the reinforced timer.

48 Hours!! Is Nick Nolte in there?

Given the ease by which I scanned this down I went to look for the meta versions of the basic depot. Unfortunately these were not seeded in the market on singularity. Discussions with some corp mates suggested scanning these meta objects will range from somewhat harder for the meta 2 'Wetu' depot to almost impossible for the meta 3 'Yurt' depot due to it's 1:1 sig to sensor strength ratio. If the meta items get seeded I'll give it a go, otherwise I look forward to trying to scan them down in space and hopefully shooting them 'just because I can'.

Sisters are doing it for themselves

There's been a bit of excitement in my corp with people keen to get their hands on the new Sisters of EVE cruiser, the Stratios. There's less excitement about the frigate, the Astero, as we already have covops frigates and cloaky bombers. The Stratios, on the other hand, looks like a worthy replacement for some current scanning boats. It's better than a Covops frigate because it can fit guns. It should be better than my trusted cloaky Loki because it will hopefully be cheaper. Also, dying in one won't result in skill point loss. It does remain to be seen if I can tear myself away from my precious, rhyming cloaky loki...

When I was on SiSi the other night it was to check if the new anchorables were up yet for us to see. Sadly they weren't so I played around with getting the golden pod and then with the improved warp acceleration. I then set to finding the unskinned models of the SoE ships which I read were available. So you don't also have to dig around to see them, I present the screenshots I took for your perusal.

Astero Frigate

Stratios Cruiser

To be honest, the concept work showed skins which didn't look a million miles from the very white nekkid models above. Just add some red stripes here and there. I do look forward to seeing these fully skinned and live on TQ during November. I also look forward to the names and designs for the SoE Battlecruiser and Battleship which everyone should start clamouring for around November 20th..

The Goose laid a golden what?

I don't often wander on to SiSi to play with new features or practice. A lot of my alliance swear by going there to try new doctines and such like. I'm of the opinion that EVE is something I do to relax and any 'practice' can take place on the live server. Sometimes though, there can be something worth jumping over there just to have a sneak peek. Yes, I opened my Collector's Edition Christmas presents early - bad Orea.

 This is my pod. There are many like it, but this one is mine. It is my life. I must warp it away lest I lose my life. Without me my pod is useless. Without my pod, I am useless. I must align my pod true. I must align faster than the enemy who is trying to lock me. I must warp away before he shoots me. I will. My pod and I know that what counts in war is not the round we dodge, the noise of our structure alarm, or the fire we trail in a narrow escape. We know it is the good fights that count. We will live.

This is my future golden pod. There and not as many like it, and soon this one will be mine. It is the shizzle. I must lose many ships to dazzle the enemy with its brilliance. Without me my golden pod is still the shizzle. Without my golden pod I am merely a 'green-dweller'...

...I'll stop with the bad rehashing of the Rifleman's Creed now. If you want a golden pod implant you should probably get yourself over to the EVE store now and preorder the Collector's Edition box set.

Also note the engine trail has changed colour between the green, apparently Gallente-powered pod and the seemingly Caldari-engined golden pod. I wonder if that's intentional.