Breaking the Cardinal Patch Day Rule

Well Last night in the WH I was dealing with some people in a class 4 system that k162 inbounded to me, scanning their system there was no anomalies present, so I certainly didn’t want them running mine. Though I was having issues closing the hole between the systems. Once they were aware of my presence, they logged in a nidhogger into the POS and also some players in various stealth bombers and some DPS battleships. Now like me some of the players were flashy red. I shot at one of their cov ops pilots jumping into my system so we had ourselves an old fashioned standoff… I couldn’t go into their system to close the hole, and they couldn’t come into mine to run my anomalies.

Not that I could run mine either as there were 2 additional k162’s last evening, so this went on for several hours, me watching their pos and everyone they had logged in and I am sure they were doing the same. About 9PM ET I see them start logging off, I get my brother to log in his toons and I log all mine in and we send 7 geddons and a devoter at the WH and cut its mass in half in the first pass. We warp back to the pos, wait out the session change and warp back to the hole and one at a time go through till it shrinks again, then it was just 2 passes with the devoter and the connection was closed. Time to go to bed and get ready for the patch tomorrow.

Though in logging out I broke the cardinal rule of patch day, 3 of my toons have less than 4 hours of skill training left in their queue. I have gotten in the habit of topping up the queue’s in the morning before work and was not able to to that today due to patch deployment. DOH

Zandramus

Sunday Logistics…

So I have been monitoring the WH and it is up to 27 anoms that need to be worked, and my alts are still a month away from effectively flying Drakes, so with the static WH only 2 jumps into NPC 0.0 I load my carrier with the required ships and set destination to egbinger in Moldon Heath which will be 2 carrier jumps from where my carrier is currently located.

I head my Cyno alt in his probe out to the midpoint system Ebodold, now damn DOTLAN Jump planner for not allowing you to filter out Kick Out Stations as undesirable stations to be using to jump to and from, as I was undocking from the single station in Ebodold, my cyno alt in his probe is killed and podded by a pirate in a Cynabal 3k off the station when the session change timer ended. So I make a different midpoint and the rest of the trip to Egbinger goes uneventful.

I back trace the route from the wormhole with a cov ops frigate and while there are 2 pilots in the system that the WH is in, I never see any scan probes out. I make tactical at the gates in B-VIP9 and 9SNK-O and begin moving ships. Since there are pilots in 9SNK-O with the WH there I decide to move the most expensive ships first, so in comes the Legion and the Zealot, then the Curse and the Devoter, then the Navy slicer and the Guardian. I know what you are thinking these are mostly PVP ships, well the Devoter is for closing the WH so it does double duty and the rest are for getting some pew when there are unwelcome visitors. There is already a complement of PVE ships in the WH for running the sites so the ships I bring are pretty much what stays in my carrier for distant PVP operations.

Once everyone is in the hole we mass collapse it and take a break for dinner. I will tell you why this is, as I have found when you mass collapse a wh there seems to be a chance roll that other WH’s will spawn. Now of course if you collapse a static another static will instantly spawn, but it has been my experience that you will get other WH connections spawn to you ie K162 inbounds after mass collapsing a hole. And this is exactly what happened as we came back from dinner there was a new K162 from Hisec as well as the new K346 to null. Now this means someone was in the hole and could have activated the K346 which makes the hole unsafe and both of these will need collapsed. It is getting late so I am going to leave this for the next evening when I am online so it is off to bed for me with no sleeper loot until tomorrow.

Zandramus

Ice Prices must be high... and the death of a few good clones...

Thursday for Thanksgiving, I logged in to see what was going on in the new home system I thought I would have a look around at what was in the system, imagine my suprise to find 3 offline moon goo towers that no one else had discovered previously.

After communicating my discovery we rallied the Yarr, and removed these derilicts from our system and took possesion of all of the modules attached for a nice profit for the day.

Yesterday, I decided to install a jump clone in the new system which jumped me out into a clone in blood raider space, now had I been thinking I could have just podded myself rather than taking the 30+ jump trip back to the home station but there was an intercepter available here and I decided to fly it home, only to be caught up in a bubble about 10 jumps away.

Crusader Lost

I wake up in the clone station, at least I didnt have implants in... so I jump my archon near Jita and am working on ship fits and I put some implants in to work on some tight fits. I just deliver a Hookbill to my carrier and want to work on some rifter fits with the implants in so I head back to Jita 4-4 in an empty Rifter, I come out of warp and hit dock, only to find myself back in my clone station with my mail going blinky blinky.

Rifter Down

well the expensive part here was the POD as I had about 125m in implants that I use to fit tight ships and add some damage. Meh so these will be showing up on KM soon I am looking forward to it.

So I jump the archon home with some new implants and decide to go out looking for some PEW as im tired of getting blowed up with nothing to show for it. I take my trusty Pilgrim to Aununen and find some friends there and wait around for a few. We miss the militia peeps I had been scouting but I get a solo Bestower and Pod Kill with my drones on the Nonni gate.

Bestower , Pod

We then manage to kill a Brutix that I didnt get on the killmail as he landed 17k from me and was dead before I closed distance, then we killed this Badger Mk11 , then the prize of the night we get a Raven which elicits a response from the capsuleers corporation who instead of bringing 2x our numbers to kill us we get the following fight which kills only my Pilgrim as I got primaried, I feel so special, I GF them in local, I feel special that they were so afraid of us they brough 20 guys to kill 4 of us and only managed to kill my ship. 

Before turning In I reship to a Harbinger that I was changing the fitting on and managed to get in on this Hurricane kill before getting tired and heading to bed, It has been a very fun day.

Zandramus

Its a TARP!!! Oh Noes 111...

It’s a TARP!!! Oh Noes….

Well sadly the Redeemer met its end last night to a well executed trap set by Team Liquid on the Torrinos gate in EC-P8R. Apparently we were getting a bit too well known for Blop Dropping in the area and Team Liquid set a nice Juicy trap with a Tengue and a drake sitting on the Torrinos gate. We jump drive from our home system and land on the gate at range and they both burn out of range of the battleships, and then 10 rifters land on the gate and tackle everyone, and then 5 drakesand a Cain  land on the gate and start taking the battleships apart. Result is 3 Black Ops Battleships Down  (Summary) , 0 losses for the enemy fleet. I say GF well done and I am waking up in the station in Old Man Star…. Which reminds me I need to move my clone….

So on the way back to the home base, I pick up a Purifier in Aununen and am a few jumps away when I hear on coms they have a Thantos aggressed on the home station, I am to far away to get to the fight before the Thantos de-agros and docks up. I arrive in the home station and am sorting out some ships when word goes out that the Thantos has undocked and has aggressed. People in local are calling for reps and cap so I undock the Archon and start supplying cap and reps, I also make use of my 16m sp in drone skills and unleash my fighters on the carrier. Thantos is now into armor, we light a Cyno and drop a Nyx and a Wyvern into the mix.  Thanto's Down in 3 vollies, So now the night has not been a total loss.

While I am in the process of sorting out ships, there are some ships in Aununen that I need to pick up, I log my Cyno Alt in to Aununen and see there are 54 people in local. Hmm… the Toon who’s carrier we just sploded, undocks in another Thantos and agresses our corps BS’s sitting on the home station. I do a D-scan in Aununen and see that there are 2 Titans in local along with a slew of High end BS’s and Carriers. I smell another Tarp about to happen. We smack it up in local in the home system and making sure not to agress the new Thantos, thoroughly upsetting the carrier pilot and I am sure frustrating the fleet that thought they were going to bridge into us.  

It is getting late for me so I head to bed stopping to talk to my son and a friend of his who are on the phone talking to someone in NC.Dot who just lost a carrier and were trying to bait a hot drop with another one. I lols and tell them to ask her how did that turn out…..

Zandramus

Black Ops and choosing your target…

So last night we were running a black ops fleet which consisted of main fleet - 3 Redeemer’s, 2 Sin’s, a Widow, 2 Falcon’s, 2 Rapier’s, a Manticore and a scout fleet of aprox 4 recon’s. Our first engagement of the night was a huge success where we insta-popped a GoonWaffe Machariel in EC-P8R. I want to say that this was a good example of choosing the correct target getting him pointed and dropping the fleet on him.

Sadly we made some poor choices in our next two selections of targets, the word came down Cyno is up we jump to 0-N8XZ and kill the target on the gate, I believe it was a Myrmidon and a  Blackbird, but then we chase his gangmate to another gate and when we land we kill him, but instead of warping off and safeing up we lingered at the gate for a bit too long and a fleet of 15 warp on top of us that consist of 3 drakes a cynibal 2 cains 2 Hughins an Onyx an Arazu and several other ships. Most of us had warped off by this point or were cloaked and aligning. The fleet uncloaked a Sin and it went down very fast with no support. I myself was almost at the edge of the dictor bubble and was doing some very evasive maneuvering to keep from being decloaked by the 15 arseholes that just dropped out of warp on us when a cyno was lit and I decloaked and jumped away. But that was a very costly mistake to trade a Sin for a Myrmidon  and a Blackbird.

Sadly this didn’t make us choose our fights any better because the next fight we were involved in when the cyno was lit we jumped into P-33KR on top of 2 Drakes, a Rapier, Hurricaine and 6 rifters, now I know hindsight is 20/20 but I am thinking this over in my mind this morning and essentially we just dropped a 5+billion isk fleet onto a 200m isk fleet and I feel this was very poor choice of targets. And while we killed a Rapier, Hurricaine, Drake, and 4 of the Rifters, we lost our Manticore, Rapier, Arazu and a Falcon and this engagement and could have lost the entire fleet if the enemy Rapier had been able to light his cyno before he popped.  

I am hoping that we all have a polite discussion this evening we can make some sense of how to choose targets for the black ops fleets or that we change the fleet composition a bit on the next op that we have. If we had been using more support ships ie.. T3 cov ops boats and more bombers and less Black ops boats then I would have felt more comfortable dropping on the BC and frig-fleet. Being in mostly BS with a few recons I don’t think we had what was needed to eliminate the light tackle that was involved with this third fleet.

I think that one of the problems I am having here is I feel I let my corpmates down as I could not hit the drake that came in at range and popped our recon's, and I could not target the tiny rifters as my lock time on each was over 30 seconds. I had no remote rep fit, I was fitted with a neut, and that was useless in this fight, and I was stock full of garde II drones so while I was fit to handle large targets I could not hit a frigate realistically and hellp my recon friends who's ships were popping all around me.

Zandramus

A Second Job... or it seems like that sometimes

A weekends worth of work…

There are tasks in EVE that can be very time consuming, one of the ones that I dislike is moving things around. It is made even more difficult if one of your toons have a negative sec status, though I guess that is the price of being able to shoot at anyone no matter where you are located.

Yesterday I spent most of the day moving ships out of the wormhole and then getting them back to the new home system. Now the wormhole had both a hi-sec and a low-sec exit which meant I could move out all of the ships I needed to move out. Since only my low sec status toon can fly a guardian, and an amarr heavy interdictor meant those 2 ships had to be moved out of the low-sec entrance. The rest of the ships were moved out of the hi-sec entrance and then shuttled to a low-sec system that my main toon was able to jump his carrier into, pick up the ships and jump them back to the new home system.

Now the hard part was the low-sec entrance was completely on the other side of the map and required the archon to make 3 jumps to get there, which meant that the cyno toons had about 60 jumps each way to go and set up all of the cyno’s. So that took most of the day to complete. I did come across two very interesting looking fights in the flight to setting up the cyno characters, but no one in corp was anywhere near these locations to take advantage of the fights.

After everything was moved, I was able to join the corp camping the Aunenen gate to Nonni, however by the time I joined them there was no more traffic through the gate for the rest of the evening and I went to bed feeling like I had a second job.

Zandramus

New Directions… Yarr!

The new corp I had joined had a meeting last evening to decide what direction to pursue in the game, some things were thrown out and the gist of the discussion was about whether to join a null-sec alliance to manufacture some titans, or to purchase a titan and remain where we were currently located in low-sec. After listening to some very interesting position 1 thing was clear in that no one in corp really wanted to have to put up with the politics that go along with alliances, we wanted to be able to shoot whomever, whenever.

So after the vote we decided to Yarr it up and we all headed for aunenen. Now I know you will say Zan… you just spent all that time getting your security clearance back to a semi respectable place, well I will say to that I did and I was never so bored shooting little red + signs.

This is a PVP game, and small gang tactics is what I enjoy so I am looking forward at Yarring it up, doing black ops and armor roams with my new friends. Oh and last night I went from -3.7 to -6.4 and had the best time in the game I have had in the last 2 months. I did find out I missed a really good fight just after I logged last night, but it was after midnight when I finally got to sleep.

And another thing, that stint in the militia showed me one thing, while the militia members were hesitant to fight those couple of days, I saw a lot of pirates enjoying the game and eager to fight anyone on their terms.

Zandramus

Blog Banter 30 Crucible Revised.

“With the winter expansion possibly being named ‘Crucible’, it certainly is a melting pot of refinements and tweaks aimed at making the EVE experience smoother and more wholesome. If the developers suddenly found themselves some spare resources and approached you for an additional feature to include before release, what single concept would you pitch them and how would you implement it.”

I am not even going to address the bonus question here, I will talk about my one thing that I think would bring more gameplay into the 0.0 nullsec and that is Delayed Local in nullsec. Make it like WH space is currently, right now there are not many people in nullsec, and the ones that are, are hiding behind alliances of hundreds if not thousands of players. It is very hard to sneak up on anyone when as soon as you jump through a gate you show up in the local channel.

Nullsec has become safer than HiSec, due to the fact that as soon as you see local change, you can warp to a safe, or dock up or go to your pos. Mining in an grav site? Running an Anomoly, or a complex, all you have to do is watch local and you are guaranteed to be safe. If you get caught unawares in 0.0 you were away from the keyboard or botting.

Speaking of botting, I have seen more botting going on in nullsec and these bots use the local channel to make themselves safe. How on earth is a CCP dev going to ever catch these bots when as soon as anyone enters the system 20 hulks with sequential character names warp to their pos. This is not like in Hisec where you can observe them, here in nullsec as soon as an unfamiliar name enters local they safe up at a pos. Meanwhile, empire miners are getting ganked by griefers using game mechanics, that they could never use in nullsec because as soon as they would enter a system in null everyone would vanish.

Lets put a little risk / reward back into the game, make nullsec more profitable, but make it scary like it should be. If the griefers could sneek up on someone in nullsec, maybe they would leave hisec alone and move back out to where you should be sneaking up on people rather than doing it in hisec.

Zandramus

Great Weekend

Well, I was enjoying my time with teh new corp on Friday night, I had just jumped my carrier into teh home system and took a break, when I logged back on they were going to run some level 5 missions with the carrier fleet, so I joined in, we ran 2 of them then saw combat probes in local we lined to teh station and warped out just before a tengue landed in the mission. Looks like we were the target of a hot drop, as the pilot was saying in local you boys think your so smart lol...

About 10 minutes later I logged into my scanning alt in the wormhole and found out it was only 7 jumps away, so I readied my fleet of stealth bombers and headed to teh wormhole with the two other combat pilots, we were ging to make some isk off of our sites.

Settleing down in teh wormhole I spent all day saturday closing incoming k162's and someone ran 6 of my sites while I was asleep. Sunday was a bit better we were able to run about 10 sites, but we closed 4 more incoming k162's before calling it a night.

I cant believe it has been over 9 days since my last connection to empire, I want to get the non essential stuff out of the hole until after the pos fuel changes take effect. Also it is a pain in the ass having to put teh starbase password in every time you leave the system. and I cant use the fitting service to reconfigure ships now.

well I dod manage to kill a noctise on the way to teh hoe of friday night, he just warped to teh gate and my brother missed him on the one side of the gate, I got him on the other as I was about half a system behind him on the way to the hole, he uncloaked just as I was coming out of warp, the stealth bomber got him warp disrupted and it only took a couple of vollies to pop the ship, I was hoping he was moving some sleeper loot but just a bunch of junk, I didnt even bother to pick it up.

2011.11.11 14:27:00
Victim: Duncan McClain
Corp: Jolly Codgers
Alliance: Get Off My Lawn
Faction: Unknown
Destroyed: Noctis
System: XQ-PXU
Security: -0.1
Damage Taken: 4971
Involved parties:
Name: Zandramus (laid the final blow)
Security: -3.9
Corp: Quiet.Storm
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Purifier
Weapon: Caldari Navy Mjolnir Torpedo
Damage Done: 4971
Destroyed items:
Charred Micro Circuit, Qty: 3 (Cargo)
Small Graviton Smartbomb I (Cargo)
Medium Salvage Tackle I, Qty: 2
Small Armor Repairer I (Cargo)
Quad LiF Fueled I Booster Rockets (Cargo)
Salvager I, Qty: 3
Mark I Generator Refitting: Capacitor Flux (Cargo)
Conductive Polymer, Qty: 6 (Cargo)
Damaged Artificial Neural Network, Qty: 6 (Cargo)
Medium Ld-Acid Capacitor Battery I (Cargo)
Supplemental Scanning CPU I (Cargo)
Initiated Signal Distortion Amplifier I (Cargo)
Small Tractor Beam I, Qty: 3
Shield Recharger I (Cargo)
Type-D Power Core Modification: Capacitor Power Relay (Cargo)
Dropped items:
Heavy Assault Missile Launcher I (Cargo)
1MN Afterburner I (Cargo)
Warp Disruptor I (Cargo)
Malfunctioning Shield Emitter, Qty: 4 (Cargo)
Tripped Power Circuit, Qty: 14 (Cargo)
Rocket Launcher I (Cargo)
Metal Scraps, Qty: 2 (Cargo)
Tracking Computer I (Cargo)
10MN MicroWarpdrive I
Fried Interface Circuit, Qty: 19 (Cargo)
Tungsten Charge M, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Small Energy Neutralizer I (Cargo)
Salvager I, Qty: 2
Scorched Telemetry Processor, Qty: 6 (Cargo)
Large Azeotropic Ward Salubrity I (Cargo)
Survey Scanner I (Cargo)
Cap Booster 100, Qty: 10 (Cargo)
Burned Logic Circuit, Qty: 2 (Cargo)
Sensor Booster I (Cargo)
F-b10 Nominal Capacitor Regenerator (Cargo)
Ward Console, Qty: 8 (Cargo)
Piranha Light Missile, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Medium Capacitor Battery I (Cargo)
Omni Positional ECCM Sensor System I (Cargo)


Zandramus

A matter of logistics, not the skill or the ship

So yesterday was an odd day for me I was busy moving ships to my new home, I was in a hurry and decided to take the shorter route through ec-p8r to get to Torrinos rather than fly 5 extra jumps, I believe it was because I had become overconfident that a stealth bomber made avoiding gate camps pretty easy, well it seems nothing can change the fact that sometimes when you go to jump through a gate you get the message, Session change already in progress … so frustrating to sit helplessly spamming the jump button and nothing happening. So I end up in Old Man Star again, 17 jumps from Torrinos where I had just purchased a new black ops battleship and was on my way to pick it up.

I will say I was wondering how I was going to come back and get my stealth bomber, no need for that now. I fly to torrinos through empire in my minmatar shuttle and take possession of my new shiney… though I have to send my alt to Jita to buy my faction mods as they are not available in Torrinos. After fitting out my new toy, I have someone light a covert cyno in the new home system and I make my first black ops jump.

Tonight I need to pick up a new stealth bomber, I already have my Pilgrim in system, I need to purchase a Curse to round out my recon ships. I need to get my Legion out of the wormhole as soon as I can get back in there and while I’m at it I have a bunch of ships there I have to move. I have a carrier somewhere in low-sec that needs moved to the new home I will see about filling it up with mods before moving it so that I get a good bit of supplies back home.

Speaking of the wormhole, it was raided yesterday before I got home from work and by the time I could get logged in after voting last night they had managed to run about half of the anomalies before my alts could get combat probes launched and run them off.

With the upcoming pos changes I am worried about not being able to get the new fuel into the hole before the pos goes offline, I may just evacuate the hole for the time being and throw up a small tower in the spot so anyone coming in would have to kill a tower to take the hole. I will leave a offline scanning alt in the system if I do this so I can always get back to the hole. Though thinking about it level 4 missions are a pretty safe way to make money without all the hassles of having to have enough people there to run the sites and exploit the hole, I may just move the pos’s out for now and look for a better hole in the future with new friends.

Zandramus

Why the Caldari Militia fails.

My stint with the Caldari Militia lasted about 4 hours, I came home tonight and logged in and was trying to get a group in the militia channel where no one was interested in FC’ing for me or grouping with me, they were all too paranoid that I may be a spy.

FFS people  it’s a game, so say I was a spy and grouped with you and you got ganked, so you lost a ship why would a 85m sp toon do that, I would never get to play after that…, I told them all where to go after acusing me of being a spy and retired from the Caldari Militia. It is no wonder FW sucks, it’s not the format of it it’s that its full of retards that cant or wont undock in anything other than a frigate, they all want to do solo pvp in the militia and that is not what I was looking for, I was looking for small gang warfare so I moved on.

So back to the forums looking for a corp I talked with several people last night and I think I found myself a new home, I joined Quiet.Storm I went on an op with them last night and they are doing exactly the type of small gang warfare I have been looking for. We had quite a few kills last night and I really like this group. It’s a group of high sp characters doing black ops, hac, strategic cruiser ops. So tonight I will be moving all of my ships to my new low-sec home and buying some more ships to go out on roams with.

Also last night I logged my scanning alt into the WH and found a K162 to of all places Outer Ring, right where I was sec grinding and could have moved the other 2 guys back into the wormhole if I had not flown them 21 jumps back into empire the night before lol.

Zandramus

A very busy weekend ... Your in the Militia now...

This weekend culminated with Zandramus having a security clearance of -3.97, and now he will be joining the Caldari Militia, the goal was to be so he could travel through hisec, which he now can without much trouble in frigate class ships. I will need to get him set up in the militia system over the next couple of days, I have already done some recon with him in his stealth bomber and have taken a few pot shots at some enemy faction cruisers to no avail. I wasn’t able to get him into the militia until late Sunday evening and by then not too many people were on to do anything with.

Saturday and Sunday were spent running around Cloud Ring and Outer Ring, grinding security status, I was tri-boxing three accounts in stealth bombers and was able to move from system to system pretty quickly and thus was able to get his security clearance from -6.7 Saturday morning, to where he is now by Sunday night. I will say I took plenty of time away from the computer Saturday, because hour after hour of shooting red + signs is extremely boring.

Sunday I ran into several 20 – 30 man gangs jumping in to two on Sunday that I was able to evade on all three accounts even after they bubbled up an interdictor on the gate. I was quite surprised how easily the stealth bomber can mwd/cloak to evade a gate camp. I did have one account become unresponsive on me after warping into a 15 man camp of pirates in 0.0 but even though it DC’d they did not get a positive lock on the toon and I was able to log him back in after the gate camp moved on.

The wormhole has not had any sites ran in it since last weekend, and there are about 2 bil worth of sites to be run. However the wormhole’s static exit has been spawning roughly 50 jumps from wherever Zandramus is located at so I am going to do the militia stuff until I get a favorable exit that I can jump in and close then run all my sites and jump back out. I plan on keeping the wormhole and using it as passive income to fund my militia endeavors.

Monitarily I have about 2 billion isk to purchase ships for pvp at the moment, I will start picking up a lot of frigates / cruisers / BC / Geddons in the next few days, and then pick up some specialty ships recon’s / HAC’s / Logistics. I think I may move some marketable ships to the militia HQ also and see if marking them up 30 pct leads to some sales of ships and modules, I will have to put together a list of ships and modules and set some buy orders to pick them up on the cheap.

That’s all for now hopefully by the weekend I will have some pew pew to talk about

Zandramus

The Ice Interdiction...

Things were going well for me grinding my security status when I happened upon a system in outer ring full of what I believe to be Botter’s mining blue ice. They are fully taking advantage of the higher prices of Gallente racial isotopes, they have fairly decent intel on their surroundings due to the layout of the system. And their first interaction with me just encouraged me to stick around since they warned me to leave and told me they were a NBSI group.

A2V6-6 is at the end of a long chain of systems and is a dead end, only one way in or out. The couple of times I have logged in to see quite a few Makinaw’s in system with sequentially name characters. The entry gate is bubbled which gives them enough time to run to their pos as soon as someone begins to come down the pipe towards them.

The only solution I see is that I am currently gathering intel on their timezone’s and monitoring their activity being logged off in their system. I will be adding all the characters to an alt account that can be logged in while I am not logged in to their system to see when they log in and what time zones they operate in.

Why all the hassle you ask??? Well because something is fundamentally wrong with players being able to operate with impunity and no risk in 0.0 With all the grief going on in empire over Blue Ice, these characters are taking advantage of the market and without any risk whatsoever.

So I am determined to recruit as many players as possible to come in and deny access to the ice fields to this alliance, I will play the patient pirate until they decide to come out and fight for their system. They have been very vocal in the local, smacking it up so that just encourages me more to deny them access to their revenue stream.

Zandramus

My Journey back to HiSec

Last night I decided to leave the wormhole for the time being in order to address my security status -7.8 at the start of the evening. I am determined to not only have my security status back to 0.0 but to do a bit of expolring and see if I can find some pew pew. So I started in Outer Ring Region, we ran down the pipe towards A2V6-6 within a few jumps from there I ran in to some very talkative people in local they wanted to know what I was doing, and I explained to them I was exploring, which I was. They pointed out to me that they were a NBSI group and I was ok, game on.... they move into A2V6-6 and I followed to find some warp disruption bubbles and a welcoming committee on the other side of the gate.

Now I wasn’t born yesterday and I know how to handle myself in 0.0 I double clicked in space and pulsed the MWD and cloak at the same time denying them the opportunity to get a solid lock on me. So I find myself in a system with 45 other folks I see in dscan a bunch of Hulk’s and Makinaw’s some Drakes, and a boatload of T1 Frigates. I spend a few minutes reconnoitering the system and find most of the inhabitants sitting inside three Pos’s in the system.

I make my way back to the gate and make some tactical bookmarks, and watch as 2 drakes are playing pong with a set of drones in an attempt to uncloak me some 150k below. I guess they think I would be hanging about near the gate or something. I do some more searching and come across 10 – 15 unmanned tech 1 frigates sitting at a moon nowhere near a POS as if they have been discarded. Well a bombing run or 2 reduces the frigate fleet scap metal, strangely they were all fitted with improved cloaking devices…

Back to the gate and I see the drakes have given up and being in a stealth bomber I wasn’t too keen about fighting a drake fleet anyways or the hurricane that has now shown up dragged into their own bubble.  I leave out through the way I came, and set destination to a station where I can purchase some more racial torps and a few more bombs. I am killing a BS rat in each system as I go, NM-OEA is 20 jumps away, there are several people in the systems in between I pass some more drakes, and a group of other pirates headed to A2V6-6, (I guess its not the carebears evening to get some ice mining in) I arrive in NM-OEA and dock up at the top station.

Strangely enough I have ships and modules here, I have a catalyst here with tech1 rails on it, this may be one of the first catalyst in the game as I remember buying this a few days after destroyers were introduced, I remember flying out here and buying BPO’s for the corp to manufacture barges the first day barges were in the game. Ah the trip down memory lane…. I scope out the route I probably travelled and Yes there it is Orvole… that is where I would have entered through PF-346. It appears I have come a long ways in this game, I exit here and contemplate going to PF-346 for a look and make it to JKJ-VJ where I get some armor damage from a frigate whilst killing a battleship. I head back to NM-OEA and repair I almost kill a POD on the gate but he jumps through as the first volley takes him into structure. I repair and decide to head down through Fountain to the bottom of the map and then head back over into my old stomping grounds Geminate.  That is the plan and I log for the evening as its getting late, My sec status is now -6.7

Zandramus

The end of a very long and stress filled year

Yesterday morning around 8 AM my son landed in Atlanta returning from Afghanistan, safe and sound he was a member of the ISAF serving through the US Army, he was posted to the Kabul ISAF Airbase. He joined the Army Reserves right out of High School, as a parent I am very proud of him. He will be returning to college at the University of Toledo where he is studying to become a teacher.

It has been a very stress filled year for me, I dont think there has been a day gone by where I havent worried for his safety. Those of you who have children know that raising them becomes your job, the feelings I had seeing him get on the plane for Afghanistan where I could no longer protect him was very powerfull and very frightning. Each day for the last year has been a struggle to think positively and try to push all of the what ifs from my mind, but I can tell you that I had some very bad dreams throughout the last year.

I am very looking forward to him arriving home and maybe getting to play some EVE with him before he heads out to school again. I think I may have to buy him a new character as he was using mine and I think he sold his old character when I stopped playing. In any event I will be very happy to help him get settled back into the normal day to day away from the war.

Zandramus