Holiday Break

Well it’s been a few days since I blogged last and I have had a pretty decent holiday I have bought and have been playing a bit of SWTOR. Though I have been wanting to PVP in EVE, every time I log in there is no one on in Corp that is doing anything, I am just going to figure that everyone is taking a small vacation and will be back soon. So my training plan is underway and I have 333 days till it is completed and that’s with +4’s as I jumped into my combat clone last night expecting some PVP for a scheduled op but no one showed up, so I will jump back into the training clone tonight.

I think the plan here is to get most of the folks back into a wormhole by the end of January. I am currently looking for an empty class 4 with a class 3 static. Once I find this I will drop an alt in there so that I can find my way back to this when we are ready to move into it. The class three we were in was a bit of a pain in the arse as far as logistics, I feel that if we are in a C4 with a C3 static and we need to get to empire we can just roll the static until I find a C3 with a HS or LS static. We became quite good at mass closing WH’s in the C3 so now I feel it is time to move up a bit.

I am looking forward to having the carriers and possibly a dread in the system, I think we can make more than the 1 billion a week we were making in the C3 and we can use the capitals to our advantage. I have to think in reality, anything I take into the hole I am planning on losing, so we will have everything we need to survive for several months set up and placed in a central location where we can just throw it into the freighter and jump freighter and get it to the system where our entrance will be.

Straight forward I learned quite a bit about setting up and taking down the POS, it is not quite near the pain it was before the winter patch when it took me all day to set it up. I like the idea of having a Dick-Star setup but also having 3-4 times the amount of guns needed for a Death-Star anchored and offline so that they can be on-lined if needed. Everyone in the alt corp. is a pos-gunner so that is a plus we have 9 pos gunners and 4 carrier pilots and 2 dread pilots. I think we will do ok in a class 4 even if we are attacked.

I will probably go with the multiple tower defence like we had denying anyone else a staging moon. Yes it will be easy to take down an offline tower, but it will give us plenty of warning about what is coming if we are going to be attacked, and force them to spend quite a bit of time removing us if they really want us out.

Vulnerability and I have been talking it over about getting our security status right again and I think that we may do this soon so that we can get back in HS. I really didn’t enjoy losing the Navy Gheddon to the game mechanics because I was a pirate, I think this was pretty lame just because I am flashy someone shouldn’t gcc because they rep me. I didn’t have gcc why would they get it as I was attacked first. Anyway bad game mechanic that needs fixed as far as I am concerned.

Just finished listening to the latest Fly Reckless, was impressed at the level that “The Mittani” has put into the game , so props Mittani, not a fanboi but interesting to hear your thoughts on the game.

Zandramus

2011, End the year reflection.

I wanted to sit down and reflect back on this year, it has been a very full year for me many things that happened, relationships started and ended, my thoughts on looking forward to 2012.

Several relationships started and ended this year, very disappointed with what I thought was a very serious six month relationship that ended in July, I haven’t really felt like going through the whole song and dance again this fall with anyone, haven’t met anyone that clicked well enough for more than a date or two since then. I am looking forward to putting this years events behind me and starting fresh next year. I need to seriously go through my contact list and remove some numbers…

The beginning of the year was fraught with getting my house back and I had worked out a property settlement with my ex-wife and I took possession of the house in June, I am getting used to living here again, there is a lot of house work to do. I had anticipated in getting back to setting up my studio in the basement and getting back into playing the guitar and looking for a band to play with while I was trying to get the house back, but I haven’t felt the urge to start practicing again. Putting a set list together for 3 hours of content involves knowing around 45-60 songs and is a lot of work to keep up on. My drummer friend wants me to do some guest appearances with their band at some local clubs so there is that, I may look into this and get a set list from him for the next year. I haven’t played seriously for 14 months so will need to rebuild up the strength of my fingers and add some calluses to them if I want to be serious about it.   

I have fully invested getting my characters going again in online gaming, this is usually a winter activity for me so I have laid out some plans on what to do while the weather outside sucks here in Ohio. Once the spring comes back around, I see that they have extended the bike trail to near the house, so no more driving to get to a good bike trail. I plan on getting my century ride in next year finally. This year with the surgery I had and then injuring my foot playing football I was not able to get in anything longer than some 30 mile rides.

This has been a bad year for my pets, I have lost 2 cats this year, and my ex-wife lost another of the cats that the kids had when they were growing up. It is sad as when you have and take care of pets they become like family members with very short life spans. I will cherish the memories that these pets have blessed me with and miss them very much in the coming year.

Other than that my son is turning 21 in January and he wants to go to Las Vegas for a party sometime around March, so there is a plan for everyone to meet up in Vegas for this event and I am definitely looking forward to that.

Who know what else the future holds, there are always suprises and unexpected turns and I am looking forward to experiencing something new in the coming year.

Zandramus

A costly weekend… and someone needs to fix neutral jamming.

So this weekend started out with a nice roam that I lost an Armageddon on that part of the weekend was all good, however it set me up for a costly loss as it was my last standard Armageddon in my hangar at the home system. I logged in the next morning and saw that several of our guys have been being harassed on the station by a Megathron, a Hurricane, and a Myrmadon. I ask everyone what we have available, we have a Tempest and a carrier for reps if needed, and in my hanger the only DPS tanky ship that is available to me is my Navy Armageddon.

So we play some station games we undock they aggress, we re-dock we are just probing what they have to bring to a fight here, after several checks I feel confident that this is what they are going to bring to the fight I undock and wait for them to aggress again and I engage the myrm, putting all damage on the myrm I am taking all damage from them as I hit 75pct armor, I call for the carrier to undock and start repping me. The carrier undocs and before he can lock me they warp in a neutral falcoln and jam the carrier. We continue to apply dps to the myrm but he isn’t going down, I suspect he is getting reps from the other 2 guys in his gang, as I get to about 25 pct armor I switch my damage to the falcoln to get him off of the field, He hits structure and warps away after 2 volleys but I am bleeding into structure at this point, the carrier gets a lock on me and another falcoln warps in and jams him.

The Navy Armageddon pops, I warp my pod out they pop our tempest, the carrier docks. Well, gg on them they really didn’t have anything to worry about with 2 neutral falcolns in system out of dscan range.

Well, I think its time to get my sec status back up, and grind up some more isk. I had just spent quite a bit of isk this weekend and that loss really hurt my wallet.

Btw did I mention how I hate neutral falcolns right now.

Zandramus

Training Plan, What the future holds.

Well it’s that time of the year to look at where I am and where I want to go, Many years ago before I left Eve I had the want to pilot a particular pirate ship, and while I can pilot that ship now very well, there are a number of ships that I cannot pilot perfectly.

During my absence, Zandramus was on a very long train to become a competent super capitol pilot, Zandramus can pilot an Aeon perfectly and has all of the capital and capitol support skills trained to 5 can pilot an Moros perfectly and can pilot an Archon perfectly,and in 12 days will be able to use the tech 2 triage modules, Zandramus was used by my son for the last several years to shoot structures and do large fleet engagements, and while that interest me in the long term, what interests me in the short term is to be able to pilot every Sub-Cap ship in the game… perfectly.

Which is going to lead me into a perception / willpower focused train for the next year. While Zandramus has perfect laser skills (small to extra large, pulse and beam) and perfect drone skills (16m sp in drones) , and has all battleships except Minmatar trained to 5, he has all cruisers trained to 5, he is lacking in his gunnery skills for projectile weapons and only has small hybrid specialization trained. He is sitting at the 92m skillpoint mark, and has a healthy pvp record.

Being a primary Armor tanker / Laser shooter, his shield and missile skills are sub-par, requiring him to use best named rather than being able to use tech 2 weapons and ammo. I use Dusk for my I-phone and currently it tells me this train will be 408 days. Now this is with my current implant set which is +3 and without remapping to optimize my training time.

I plan on selecting the character remap for the holiday gift, and I have an additional remap available in February. I plan on utilizing two +5 Implants in a Jump Clone when I am not pvp’ing and will probably use 2 +4’s in my pvp clone as I can afford them in any event. I am hoping to get the training time down to less than a year so that when this time next year comes around I can re-evaluate what I want to do next.

I have a jump-clone with a full slave set for if I ever get another Aeon, but tbh I won’t be risking over a billion in implants unless I am in a super-cap. I have just to plug in the titan book to be a titan pilot, but I really don’t have the isk at the moment for that.

So the next year looks to be some fun times, I am having a good time with my new low-sec friends that I have made in Quiet.Storm, I find it funny as I think I have come full circle from back in 2003 when I first met Zincol and became a member of The Rising Storm which later became SAS who then formed VOC in Geminate and went on to help form Pandemic Legion.

Those guys were really fun to fly with and I wish they were still in the game, Pandemic Legion today is full of guys that my kids grew up with and they not only played EVE together but they have taken the things we were doing in SAS as far as scouting and Intel with internet voice communications, and applied that to other games and have remained friends out of game.

Quiet.Storm who I am still getting to know are a group of people who have probably been in the game as long as my character has and they are very laid back and I enjoy pewing with them it reminds me of how things used to be, the small gang aspect really makes me feel good, though I have run into some annoying capitol blobs and blowhards cough Widiot cough ... I am looking forward to growing with this corporation in the future and getting in some good fights in the next year while I am training for my sub-cap extravaganza.

Zandramus

A bit of fun to be had by all...

So I log in last night to resolve a new signature in the wormhole that leads to a class 4 system I will call class 4-A. I jump into this system and it is empty, no towers, no ships, and It has a C3 Static, which I entered from. Someone had to open it… it just doesn’t open from the K162 side like that. So I blanket the system to find a bunch of rocks, gas, rocks, gas…. Ah there we go a k162 to class 2 wspace we will call this class 2-A.

Class 2-A is occupied, I spy several people at their POS where I narrowly avoid a bubble trap. Seems they had every approach to the POS bubbled and canned except the one from the planet, which somehow doesn’t make sense to me, but warping to the moon at 100 has me drop out of warp 2k from the POS shield, between 2 large bubbles and the shield.  This is a Russian corp, I add all of the members I observe to my contacts and since this C2 has a hisec static, I will be back to investigate more later on when the Russians are all nicely tucked in their bed.

I log into Zandramus and find out that we are knocking down a customs office ahead of what I am sure to be a WiDiot cap-athon to come and rep the office back up. These guys are off of their routine, they usually make it here just as the CO comes out of reinforced, we have the CO into half armor before the cyno goes up and WiDiot brings in oh yes 5 thantos… so they have superior numbers and ships again and the smak talk begins in local. We ship up and prepare to defend the POS as the last time they were here they attacked the POS but sadly they will not bite tonight and they leave system having only repped the Customs office into half shields . 15 minutes later the CO is reinforced again, maybe next time they will give us a fight, to me seems like they are wasting a shit ton of oxytopes moving those ships around every other night to defend a customs office that probably will never pay for itself.

I log back into the wormhole, and while the Russians have gone to sleep there are other people sitting on the entrance to the class 2 and it is reaching the end of its lifetime, so no exit tonight. I return home and blanket the system with probes to find 2 new signatures. A ladar sight which I activate, and whats this a k162 to Class 4 W Space… C4 – B is what I will  call this. A quick investigation finds their ships empty ion their tower, but belonging to the person I just added as a contact at C2-A. that’s interesting.. back to C4-A I go and there are 3 Tengu’s , a Sleipener, and a coercer on scan… me thinks they are running the sites, I do a quick probless scan of the system and warp to the first anomaly at 100 and there is no one there. I warp to the second anomaly at 100 and find the ships there killing the sleepers.

Very intrigued, I sit here cloaked and watch their work, when they are finished killing everything they warp off to another site out of scan range. I continue to hit D-Scan and am getting nothing on scan and the site de-spawns…. very interesting.  I decide to enact a toll for crossing my system and interrupting my routine tonight and I approach each and every large wreck in the site and loot the bloot, I make my way home with 60m isk of bloot in my cargo-hold of my anathema to pass a kestrel at the hole as I enter my home system.

Its off to bed for me tonight

Zandramus

Evening of Gate Camping, finds a Hilariously fit Phoon.

I log into the wormhole tonight and resolve the signatures present which total 3, there are no new signatures so I do some maintenance and un anchor the 17 small towers that were placeholders on the moons to deny any staging POS’s from being deployed. I bookmark each of them as I do this and return after they are un anchored and collect them in the hauler and deposit them in the corporate hangar. I am done with wormhole maintenance and I log in Zandramus, and Ref’Tal and plot their course back to Lonetrek for an evening gate interdiction.

I am joined by my brother Vulnerability when I arrive in Lonetrek and I decide that tonight I will provide heavy tackle in my Devoter. Vulnerability is also flying a Heavy Innterdictor an Onyx. So both of these ships have a giant tank on them and have no issues whatsoever tanking the gate guns and we have the scan resolution on both of them bonused to about 1200, so not a lot of stuff will get away from us.

I am interested in getting some expensive pod kills with this ship but basically we are killing anything unfortunate enough to jump into our low security system. We have other corporation members in system that are providing gang boosting, and dps. I am very comfortable with the fleet setup and would happily engage another small fleet of equal size with this one.

The evening progresses and we are getting nothing but noob ships and shuttles jumping in to us, I have missed several  destroyers tonight my computer has been a bit laggy and these ships are warping just as I get a positive lock which is strange as the targeted interdiction script is always pre-activated when I go to lock a target.

A phoon and a wolf warp to the gate on the other side of the gate and there is a tengu on scan, I feel things are about to get interesting, when the phoon and wolf jump into us. We ignore the wolf and concentrate on the phoon, knocking down his shields and just before he goes pop the pilot ejects, I miss the pod and the rest of the fleet is unable to stop dps fast enough to get us a free phoon. A look at the killmail and I am just baffled.  http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=14809353 Has there been a disturbance in the space time continuum, this phoon was fitted with miner II’s expanded cargoholds, had 2 drones in the drone bay, and heavy missile launchers in the launcher hardpoints. This fitting would have been normal minmatar fare for circa 2003-2004 before there was such things as mining barges which mine so much more efficiently.

A quick look at the pilot reveals he is brand new, first seen on battleclinic on 11/27/2011… with 1 kill and 2 losses including the phoon. What the hell is such a new player flying a typhoon fitted this way and jumping into lowsec with a ship he clearly he cannot fly proficiently.  This game never ceases to amaze me. I assume I just blew up some 10 year old just starting into the game and getting his first taste of EVE.  But he had the conscience of mind to eject to save the pod…. Something here isn’t right …

Anyway the eveing digresses into a few more pod kills and I go to bed feeling unsatisfied with the quality of my kills for the day.

Zandramus

Finally An Exit… and some Pew

Well I log in to find 4 new signatures in the wormhole, there are scanner probes on dscan so this looks promising, there wouldn’t be someone in here scanning if there were no wormholes in the system. I set to scanning down the system and resolve a wormhole right off the bat, I warp to it at range cloaked and it is an exit to class 4 W-Space that is no help so I sit at range off the this wormhole while I continue to scan. There is a new Gravometric site, that I activate, then a new Ladar site that I activate, then at last another wormhole, I cross my fingers and warp to it at range…. It is alas a low security exit.

I log in Zandramus and Ref’Tal and begin moving them toward the low security system in Amarr space that the wormhole is in, this space actually looks familiar and it is as it is 1 jump away from the last low security exit some 3 weeks ago. There were some pirates around then so I must be careful. Arriving in the system, I set Zandramus up on the inside of the wormhole watching the exit in a stealth bomber. I set the scanning alt up on the outside of the wormhole in a covert ops ship, and Ref’Tal leaves his Pilgrim in the sole station is the system and enters the wormhole and boards the Iteron V and begins making trips out of the wormhole.

Everything is going well, there is seldom anyone in the low security system beside the scanning alt, so Ref’Tal makes 15 trips with the Iteron V emptying the corporate hanger and depositing it all into a new corporate office he has rented in the system. He continues to move ships out of the wormhole, leaving only ships he cannot fly left in the corporate hangar array. Vulnerability was origionally on his way to help out but while this was progressing WiDot decided to hit the corporate pos in the home system so he was moving all his characters there to help man the pos gunnery and then help repair pos modules. So this was going to be a Solo adventure for me tonight.

About this time there were scanner probes out in the low security system and as I was done at this point with the Iteron V I was concentrating on self destructing some of the tech 1 cruisers in the system that were used for gas mining, and Zandramus hears the wormhole flare. Zandramus waits for the person to uncloak and when he does he uncloaks, aligns to the wormhole and launches a concussion bomb. I was hoping it was just a covert ops frigate, but that turns out to be a cloaky Tengu. Well being in an anathema lets see if I can bluff him with the knowledge of the hole behind me and him not knowing the system. Zandramus gains a positive lock on the Tengu so he aint gonna be cloaking or warping off and launches a volley of torpedoes, activates his microwarp drive and begins a 17k orbit of the target. The first volley of the Tengu puts Zandramus into half armor, but now he is at full speed in a speed bonused system traveling about 5k meters a second in orbit and he has the Tengu positively locked and warp disrupted in a system that missiles only travel 60 percent of their distance and Zandramus has a 60 percent speed buff. I am hoping to outrun the Tengu’s missiles and force him to make a decision as my EM torps rip apart his shields. My bluff appears to work as the Tengu disengages and exits the WH. I don’t know if it was that Zandramus was Flashy Red, or that there were other ships on scan at the pos that the Tengu could see and thought the boldness of Zandramus ment that he had back up… but mission accomplished there will not be a cloaky Tengu in the system messing up my logistical plans for the evening.

So everything is out of the wormhole except for the hangar array, the ship maintenance array, a couple of battleships, and a heavy interdictor. All of the pos guns are still in place, I still have all of the fuel for at least a month. I need to begin removing all of the small towers that are anchored at all of the moons in the system so that when the next wormhole opens up I can finally move out of the wormhole for good.

Its late and its been a busy evening, I missed a corporation operation because I was tied up with logistics but hopefully tomorrow is another day.

Zandramus

Another frustrating day ends in bonus pew

Well I log in today into the wormhole to find only 3 signatures, finally all of those rock and gas sites have expired except for 1, then I get a new gas site which I activate and the static wormhole which opens to Providence. This is no help I feel dejected and log out and log in Zandramus, he is in Aunenen and it looks like TunDragon is still active here so I log in Ref’Tal  and purchase some stuff on the market and consolidate all of my shit in Nonni into one station.

I am looking forward to getting out of the hole and getting some industry started in Lowsec  Lonetrek, I purchase up some planetary command centers and another Iteron v for Ref’Tal as I left the other one I had here in the wormhole on Sunday. With nothing left to do, I log into Zandramus and take his stealth bomber onward to Tamo where we are shooting a WiDot Customs Office, as we enjoy their company every couple of days, while there are three of them in local they do not ride to the occasion of me shooting the customs office and three of us are not making much progress against it in stealth bombers.

Wishing they had kept the Naga as a Torp spewing BC. Anyways I log in later to move my stuff through aunenen and just as I am scouting the other side of the gate a Tornado warps to 200k off the gate and alpha’s a hauler right in front of me… Interesting, I make a mental note of his warp in point and start closing the distance. Once I think I am close I warp Ref’Tal to the gate and the Tornado warps down 60k from me, so still not close enough I warp Ref’Tal back to the station in Nonni. I move closer and when I think I am about in position I warp Ref’Tal to the gate with all my goods in the hauler but a cloaky installed in the top slot and jump him into Aunenen. The tornado warps down 25k from me.  Hehe..

I align with Ref’Tal and hit the cloak and uncloak in the stealth bomber hit the Mwd orbiut at 16 disrupt his warp engines and proceed to violence his boat. A corpmate warps in in a command BC but I think I could have done this myself as I was top damage dealer on the kill, don’t think he even shot back at either of us. Those Tornado’s are paper thin.

I always gf in local and I get back there was no fight, I find that a curious response from someone who was just alpha ganking haulers but to each his own I guess.

Was a fun kill, I feel like I may be stalking some more of these if they are going to fly solo like this.

Zandramus

Still no Empire exit in sight, this calls for drastic measures…

After calculating that it will take me 40 Iteron 5 loads to get all of my stuff out of W space, and not having an empire connection for the last week I am a bit discouraged this Saturday morning. So I decide to do some chain collapsing until I get a favorable nullsec exit as close to empire space as possible, or in an NPC station system.

I collapse the current static, and scan down the new entrance, low and behold I am 2 jumps from Akora in the Forge, I go and scan that approach and see that EOA is heavily camped, I look at the map on DotLan and see that I am also 2 jumps from Eurgrana (sp?) and I look at that route and see no one camping any of those systems and there are no bubbles.

I make some tactical bookmarks 200k off all of the gates and set about getting ships and haulers into the wormhole. Zandramus arrives and removes all of the ships that he is the only one capable of flying, this makes me feel a little better as there is no longer a 2b isk Legion floating in the tower as an attraction for someone to come into the WH and shootie my tower.

Ref’Tal arrives with his iteron mk5 and he proceeds to make several runs out of the system while Zandramus and friend keep an eye on the gates while he is running equipment out of the hole. There is a tense moment when a Tengu and an interceptor warp to the other side of an outbound gate just as Ref’Tal warps to the gate. But they both jump at the same time and Ref’Tal jumps through without them ever knowing they almost snagged a billion in high end fittings being transported in an Iteron 5. That was a very close call.

Ref’Tal makes a few more trips and manages to move 5 loads out to Eurgrana until several people have now started to take notice that an Iteron 5 is jumping in and out of Nullsec from Lowsec and start a serious gatecamp.

I leave the Iteron floating in the shields of the POS and everyone warps back to the home system so that we can get in some pew pew that evening. The next day we purchase a Gallente Jump Freighter and jump it to Eurgrana and move our loot back to our home.

Sunday there is still no exit, though there is a new Class 4 WH which leads nowhere though there are several people running my sites.  Since I am too tired to bring Zandramus and Ref’Tal back the 30+ jumps through HS or 54 Jumps through LS to get to the hole, the people in local scurry back to their WH while I am scanning. I get a nice convo from their CEO who happens to be friends with my CEO. I set them blue after the convo. He was laughing that he told his guys they were lucky they didn’t get blown up as he knows exactly the type of corp that I am currently in… and when they told him they saw our corp ticker on the ships in the POS he told them to get out of the hole until he could contact me. I thank him and let him know that they are welcome to run the sites as they see fit and he thanks me.

The night ends with me trying a new setup on my heavy interdictor for a lowsec camp  which generates several podkills for me and I also catch several blockaid runner haulers with this setup. I am happy for this new fit and will be looking forward to flying it again soon.

Training wise, I am still training for the triage carrier, 17 more days to go.

Zandramus

Not working as intended… Logofski confirmed…

Last night we were preparing to drop a force recon black ops group onto a Russian gate camp in Aunenen, however we took too much time forming up and they left Aunenen before we could rally and get the cyno lit. So with the good fight gone the cyno alt gets some aggression out of a single target some ten minutes later and we dropped on him and dispatched him in short order. We all cloaked back up waiting for the cyno to reset so we could leave Aunenen, when we get word an Obalisk just warped to the Aunenen gate at 0 in Nonni.

After I proclaimed on comms that no one in their right mind would jump an Obalisk into Aunenen un-scouted I was reminded of a saying of one of the other Eve Bloggers though I don’t remember his name but it went kind of like this.. “Always bet on dumb…”

Because that is exactly what he did. We see the Obalisk de-cloak and he is quickly pointed and we begin removing his shield and armor and just as we start into structure he disappears.

WTF… this isn’t supposed to happen you aren’t supposed to be able to log out and disappear in the middle of battle, a heated discussion on the tactic erupts on coms and as everyone is distracted about the discussion a stealth bomber is lost to gate gun fire. 

Everyone cloaks up but the argument is this,

1.    Did he log off right after he jumped into Aunenen before he appeared and does that mean that since he logged before aggressed he gets a free pass?

2.    Did he log off in warp to the Aunenen gate after he selected jump from distance in the other system? IE was the hurricane his scout and initiated warp and jump from a distant point? What would be the mechanics here if he logged in Nonni but jumped because he selected warp and jump button?

I think that if the issue is 1. Then he should not have been able to disappear, however the issue gets a bit murky if he logged in Nonni before the ship jumped to Aunenen. Several of us petitioned this as whatever he was carrying we would have loved to loot, but didn’t get to due what I feel was a glitch in game mechanics.

Zandramus

No Exit to Empir3

I log in tonight to see if there is an escape route to find 8 new signatures in the system, even though I activated the other 8 gas and rock sites previously they are still here so quite a bit of signatures to sort through. I set my probes up to .25 AU resolution in a 7 probe configuration and resolve the current 10 bookmarks one of which is the static that is reaching the end of its natural lifetime.

As I begin to resolve the remaining 8 signatures that are new, I am hopeful that one of these is an exit to low-sec or hi-sec space, but to my chagrin I have 5 new gas and rock sites 1 new radar sight and a K163 to W4 space. I warp to 30k off the W4 wormhole and spy a helios covert ops leaving my system. I wait for about 10 min and jump into the void to see what I can see. A quick d-scan of the system locates the tower which contains an Orca, and a CN Raven, and some haulers and a helios. The Orca is piloted which makes me think they are getting ready to collapse the connection betwixt our systems so I must act fast if I am to find anything useful without getting trapped. I warp to a nearby planet and launch probes.

The system has 12 signatures, and nothing that looks familiar as I am not familiar with the densities in a class 4 to be able to pick out probable WH’s so I feel like I don’t have time to investigate further, I collect probes and beat feet back to my WH and log off in the tower.

I log into Zandramus who was left 4 jumps from home after the last black ops mission. He didn’t have any contacts on that mission so I didn’t feel it necessary to write home about. I undock in my Arazu and head for the home system in Lonetrek. No contacts in local until I jump into the home system and Low and behold, It is full of reds. Tonight we are being hosted by UI. Dot they have come to rescue their customs offices that we put into reinforced the night before last. They have 25 people in local, we have 5… sigh my corpmates are west coasters so I begin to reconnoiter the UI Dot fleet and see what they have.

Their fleet consist of 2 separate elements. 1 BC fleet of what must be shield Harbingers and Hurricanes as they are accompanied by 5 scythes. The other element of their fleet consist of 10 carriers, 5 Thanatos, 5 chimara so I expect it will not take them long to rep the shields on the customs offices. I watch them intently wishing I had a fleet of supers to drop on them but this is not the case so I have ships to buy for a fleet op later tonight so I dock at the station so I can log on my market alt on the same account.

I log into my market alt in Jita 4-4 and proceed to buy some armor ships which Zandramus excels in. I buy a Devoter, a Pilgrim to replace the one I lost foolishly jumping into Nonni when I had GCC and was doing the drinking and flying thing. I buy a Zealot, and I but another Guardian. I purchase all of the fits for these ships and contract them over to the corp jump freighter toon to get them back to our home system for me.

Logging back into our home system I find that our guests have left and I put all of my ships together and get ready for the evening operation.

A few hours later when everyone is online we are about to head out for the evening operation but before we do, we want to thank UI Dot for visiting us we enjoyed their smack-talk so much in local that we put their 2 customs offices back into reinforced mode and change ships for the nights main operation.  

We head out to 0.0 in the armor gang and travel quite a bit looking for a fight. We don’t find any in the initial systems, A Tempest gets away from us in the first engagement as he neuted out our tackle before we could land on grid and warped away. We head back the way we came and engage a Talos 80k off the gate who we manage to get tackled and he dies quickly.

Talos

Back through lowsec we go and into 0.0 again. We miss a Eagle 120k off the gate as he kills our scout we had on him and warps off, we jump into EC-P8R and engage a Hurricane and a Drake camping the Torrinos gate but they jump back through into Torrinos. We kill some of their bubbles off of the gate and warp back towards home, Our other scout has reshipped into a crow interceptor and tells us he has the Eagle tackled on the other side of the gate 100k off. We jump through and start burning towards the Eagle we are making ground slowly , or at least I am in my Zealot, when one of our faction cruisers calls point and web, I close the distance by overheating now and get a few shots in before he goes boom. But the kill of the night is to come, point called on pod just as I lock it and get the final blow the squishy pod melts to my overheated lasers and the following killmail is delivered to me.

 Halo Set go Squish

He had in a Halo set minus the Halo Omega, 500m isk lost to that pilot that has to hurt financially.

I feel very good as we reach home and I get logged off, I knew sooner or later I would get a good podkill with expensive implants and tonight was a very good night.

Zandramus

An evening of scanning and exploring…

Well the evening starts out with a full scan of the WH to hopefully find an exit to start evacuation. I scan down the static to Null which opens deep in the drone regions so that is no help at all. I also scan down a K162 coming in from class 4 w-space. I jump into the class 4 and quickly locate the tower and there are several ships in the tower all unpiloted. I drop scanner probes and blanket the system to see if there are any exits to K-Space, only to find gas, gas,rocks and 2 radar sights… This is a dead end, I collect my probes and warp back to my system and log off in the tower.

I log in Zandramus in Lonetrek, and fit up a covert ops boat with scan probes, now that he has trained astrometrics to 5 for jump portal generation, I might as well make use of his scanning skills and see what I can find here. Home system has gas and a radar sight, I jump next door and find a C1 w-space but the WH is critical and I don’t want to be hanging around in an empty C1. I jump back out to Lonetrek and jump into the next system that always has a wormhole in it and am not disappointed as I find a fresh C3. Scanning the C3 I find it has a static LS wormhole which isn’t the one I came in on, otherwise it is empty except for a few gas and rock sites. I jump out the static and low and behold I am in Akkio in the Forge region, my old stomping grounds heading out to the Geminate region Armpit of Eve. Anyways a quick scan shows I have some assets here I can move back to my home system in the anathema. I find 70 Apocalypse BPC’s 10 runs each, some ammo and rig BPO’s and about thirty skill-books, and some assorted hauler ships. And what appears to be some sort of body farm of frozen corpses from a by gone era…  All this within 5 jumps in 5 different stations.

I quickly reprocess all of the ammo and ships I find here and sell the minerals as the market here sucks, pick up all of the blueprints and skillbooks, pick up my body farm and remove 5 stations from my asset list now it only has a hundred or so stations on it. I make the 5 jumps back to the WH just as it has gone critical on time jump through do a quick d-scan to find it still empty WH, Jump back into Lonetrek and deposit my assets into the hanger in the home station.

I log my Alt toon into the home wormhole, to see a frozen corpse on the scanner I do a quick scan and see that one of the WH’s are now missing, I warp to the spot that the WH to the class 4 WSpace used to be to see the wreck of a Gallente battleship and a frozen corpse floating in space. Well I have been there done that before he must have got caught on the wrong side of the WH when it closed and self destructed. I loot the BS wreck and scoop the corpse for my collection.

Time for bed hopefully I can find an exit tomorrow…

Zandramus

Time to leave this wormhole behind.

The Crucible expansion has made it way too expensive to maintain the WH at the current time, If I am only to get in there once a month or so and grind through the sites, I am making about 2 billion isk, however it is costing me now over 500m isk a month for fuel for the large Amarr tower thanks to the recent change in PI it is no longer efficient to produce from the WH without killing off all the customs offices and installing my own, which I would do if there was an easy logistic chain to the WH.

Since I have a 0.0 static and only get a HS or LS hole on average once every couple of weeks I have decided to part ways with this particular class 3 and look for something with a LS static, that will make logistics so much easier. So as soon as I get a favorable WH I will start moving the ships and equipment out of the hole as fast as I can. I doubt that I will be able to do this all in one go as there are enough BS’s in the hole to colaps a Hisec hole only leaving the hole. Additionally there are several ships there that only Zandramus can fly and he is now at -8.2 sec status so those ships are stuck where they are until a LS hole opens up.

Once out of the hole, I will have my marketing toon’s start working the market and working on low sec PI to get together about a 1 year buffer of Amarr Fuel blocks. I will begin carefully looking for a new WH to exploit whether that be a class 3 with a low sec static or a class 4 with a class 3 static, I don’t  know yet which way I am going to go.

As far as marketing goes, there are several low sec systems that are FW and Pirate infested that I plan on giving some market love so that ships are easily replaced to losses making me a small profit in the process. I believe there is a Jump Freighter in the future for the hauler toon as well as an Amarr Dreadnaught for Zandramus. I would like to get another Aeon sometime next year, but this will require some significant investment into an Aeon sitting toon as I am enjoying small gang PVP with Zandramus way too much at the moment, but I would love to get into hot dropping some Supers and getting some Super Cap Kills as well.

Since I had to train Astrometrics to 5 on Zandramus to get Jump Portal Generation, I will be putting that skill to work hunting down target WH’s for the corporation to exploit / hunt in. So looking forward to finding a LS -> NS WH that puts me in range of killing capital ships deep in 0.0 and looking forward to hunting down some prey in WH’s all together now that jump statistics are no longer being broadcast.

That’s all for now…

Zandramus

WH's The most dangerous space in eve.

So last evening we were finishing up 2 days of clearing out our anomalies in the wormhole, we started with 27 and were down to 5-6 when we were ambushed by a group coming in from a class 5, who waited just long enough for us to have the noctis in the anomaly cleaning it up so they could pop and pod everyone out of the hole. The battle report can be found here …

Ganked

So about this fight, 1 thing that can be certain, anytime a PVP fitted group of ships engage PVE fitted ships, generally the PVE ships die. SO without a point on any of these ships unless the attacking force was completely inept the results are pretty much inevitable. You simply cannot PVP without a point fitted, and our aggressors had no intention of letting us go get our PVP ships from the POS, or even letting our PODz get away so that we could reship.

At the beginning of the fight I called the Arazu primary as they tend to be a bit squishy and I thought what the hell maybe we will get lucky and pop him before he can warp off. One of the unique things about a black hole system is though they say you have a plus to agility, it is incorrect you actually have a minus to agility and aligning and warping out takes forever. Fortunately for the Arazu pilot he was outside of the Heavy Interdictor bubbles they had us trapped in, and he warped away in half structure.

It was then I made the first mistake of the fight and called the Typhoon primary and the Scorpion secondary because up to this point we weren’t getting jammed we were getting neuted, and we frankly had monster tanks with high resists and high shield regens.I wanted to get their dps off the field, I wasn’t concerned with their interdictors I would target them last as they have high tank and low dps.  As the typhoon went into armor we started to get perma-jammed from the scorpion pilot, maybe he just woke up or something I called the Scorp primary but we lost our first drake at this point and our dps started to waver with only 3 ships left on the field and 2 of them jammed we could only watch the ships go down in flames whilst trying to lock any of the enemy vessels, once the next drake went down the fight was over as the remaining 2 were perma jammed until they popped.

So all told we lost 4 drakes at about 60m isk each and a noctis. Remember in the past that we were running these in a Legion, Kronos, and Astarte if we had still been doing that we would have lost over 4bil in ships, fittings and implants. As it was we lost roughly 300m last evening which I would call just a minor setback as we have an extra set of drakes and noctis’s in the hole already and all we have to do is travel back and continue harvesting the sleeper loot at our leisure. However they did us a favor and shortened our travel time to our home system so that we can PVP this weekend and get back to the industry stuff some other time. All in all I was able to GF them in local before I was podded out on Ref’Tal, I couldn’t tell if they replied or not as I was waking up with a bad headache in Minmatari space.

Zandramus

Almost CATastrophy

Well I missed the first night of Crucible, I was downloading the patch and had just gotten on teamspeak and in the game when it was time to feed my two cats dinner, now I have a diabetic cat that requires insulin at each meal, and this has been a normal routine for about six months now, so I was placing out the canned catfood on to the dishes when my other cat jumped up on the counter where I usually give the diabetic cat his shot and before I knew what was happening I had given the wrong cat the shot of insulin.

Panic ensued, and I called the emergency veterinary hospital and they told me all I could do is watch the cat over the next 12 hours to make sure if it starts to get groggy or nonresponsive to take it to an emergency veterinary hospital.

Now I have a bit of experience with diabetes, my daughter has been a type 1 diabetic since she was 5 years old so giving shots and paying attention to someones mood and reacting to high and low bloodsugar situations is something that I have had to do for the last 15 years of my life. But I was concerned over the cat as I had just lost another cat 6 months ago when she got into this cats medication mixed with food before he went on shots and I really didn’t want to be responsible for losing another cat.

I sent my son to go get some dry cat food at the grocery store and some sugar. We first force fed the cat some warm milk and sugar to get it a boost of sugar in its system and then we let it eat some dry cat food soaked in the sugary milk mix. And then I checked on her every 15 minutes over the next 12 hours. I missed a day of work, but everything turned out well and she is no worse for wear, and I am a bit more detail oriented when feeding the pets from now on.

I will be getting into the new expansion tonight and seeing how it plays and feels while I can enjoy the game. The last 2 nights I was not in the mood to enjoy myself while my pet was not feeling well due to my actions.

Zandramus