Ambushed While Rolling the Static.

So I logged in the other evening and scanned down the home system, there was a C6 and the usual lowsec static. A quick reconnoiter of the C6 finds 7 active towers and about a dozen active pilots, so this is not a WH that I want to keep open. Looking at itit looks like it will take about 1bn in mass to close, so one pass with 3 battleships with the AB on and then a pass in the devoter has this hole closed and I have a sigh of relief.

Now since it was a K162 inbound I need to roll the static low to close myself back off to anyone from that system. The low 2 jumps away from New Eden so its in the middle of nowhere and there are no stations or people in the system.

First pass through the WH everything goes fine, waiting out the timer at the tower a rapier comes through the hole from lowsec, thinking he may have been from the C5 I land the fleet on the hole and he jumps back out and the second pass through the hole goes normally.  As I am sitting back in the safety of the tower a covert tengu decloaks on the static, again for some reason I think this must be someone from the C6 I just closed, even though I have combat scanners out I miss the new anomaly that is showing up on the scanners and I warp the 2 Geddons and the Abbadon to the WH. I get Geddon out, Geddon In Geddon Out Geddon In, Abaddon Out and 11 guys land on the two geddons on the inside of the WH… Shit Shit I try to warp off no dice and both geddons are polarized, I start locking targets and deploying sentry drones, Ill go down fighting, oh damn they have a Falcon…

http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/engagement.php?id=17126370#overview

They offer to ransom the pods, and ask me to make them an offer, I give them a GF and honestly at this point I’m not going to pay more than 50m for my pod of 2 +4s so I wake up in Jita. Such is life in a WH I think the most dangerous space in EVE.

I spend the evening getting everyone back to the WH, and log off for the night. The next 2 evenings there are 5 open WH’s into me so I get nothing accomplished except to head Zan over to join the Amarr FW. I might as well get some loyalty points to get some Navy Geddons and some Slicers.

The alts all now can fly Tengu’s so they can manage the day to day in the WH, I simply have to adjust my PI production and import a few more goods to keep that going.

So we are currently chilling in Amarr FW, using the WH as supplemental income. I have been joined by my son on a new toon, the plan is to earn enough isk at the cash out to get him a decent character through the character bazaar, so far we are working that plan, but that is another blog post to come later this week.

Fly it like you stole it

Zandramus

Faction War..., and Super Caps seeded on the test server

Faction War

I have decided to do the Faction War on the side of the Amarr Loayalists, frankly because they have the best ships IMO and I get to shoot some dirty Minmatar in the process, so it all works out. I will be forming my own corporation this evening, something on the lines of Imperial Slavers or some such… I just can’t see joining some fail corp full of scrubs and spies with my main toon, so we will have about 5 people I know in corp and do corp roams nightly.

We will work on improving our relationship with the current faction warfare corporations and try to get some joint roams going, but from what I saw the other night in the roam there was obviously several spies in the fleet as the Minmatar Militia seems to know where we were warping before we warped.

I must say that honestly spies are pretty fail, this fleet was a BC gang, of 20-25 guys, honestly is winning so important to you that you have to cheat to do it, that pretty much says it all about your character. I also experienced an awoxer yesterday, lol pretty much tells me how good a pvp’er you are that you have to resort to awoxing in frigate warfare lol.

Test Server…

So I was on the test server last night and they have seeded Supercaps and Titans, I made sure to grab the Titan skillbook for Zandramus and train it so that I can try out a Titan tonight on the server. I will have Amarr titan trained to 3 and doomsday trained to 3 by the time I get home today. I will probably never be able to afford a Titan on the main server, but this should provide some fun. There was some SuperCap warfare going on last night and I fitted me out a nice Aeon, and had some fun with it.

That’s all to report this week…

Zandramus

The Mate Wars... a giant troll...

I would like to share some behind the scenes on this topic as I have been listening to how it actually started versus how it is being perceived, which I might add is quite comical, especially those of you who actually think the Aussi was being serious.

First, let me go over the players here the player who had all the convo’s with  Rvb I do not know him, I am hearing this second hand from the others that were kicked from RvB at the same time as he was. Lets just say that Kresh Vladir, has returned to the game with a new toon shortly before this all happened, he and the Aussi, and a particularly angry FC from NC. and some other NC. alts where having some fun in Red federation and happened to get kicked after refusing to re-imburse some losses. The Aussi, began trolling the Red Federation directors, about being kicked over reimbursement, and they took the bait with a forum thread as if it he was being serious about the whole mate thing. Thus the Mate war was started. Kresh's  friends created Yellow federation as a shallow troll of RvB taking all of the corp information right off the RvB forum, NC. declares war on RvB and Yellow Federation declares war on RvB, Comedy ensues. Kresh’s friend puts together a RR BS fleet and gets blobbed to hell 150+ to 18, losing a full slave set in the process…

Kresh’s friends puts some disco BS’s together in a HS system and gets the rvb frig fleet to warp in on him and comedy ensues as they manage to kill 22b isk in pods before he and his NC. Pal lose their disco BS’s.

Now I want to say with Kresh and his buddy there have been some funny content generated in this game. It was Kresh who using my alt back in the day that ate the head off the Sharks with Laserbeams can art with a giant Pac-Man. I can say I am happy my son has returned to the game, I wish him and Super69 the best and hope that you all have fun with the Mate wars…. Last I checked last night Kresh was can flipping somewhere in Hisec…..

Zandramus

Battles with Pandemic Legion… Nem3 gives PL a bloody nose

So as I stated in the previous posting, Sniggwaffe, Pandemic Region, and several other PL training corps have moved themselves into Delve. Friday evening when I logged in there was a tier 3 sniper gang camping the undock on the MO-GZ5 station. They had managed to somehow bug the grid so that when undocking you didn’t see them at first and they managed to one shot a couple of small ships undocking. I was sitting cloaked about 100k off the station when they warped in to 250k above, before I could get position on them they warped into the bugged grid which made them disappear off of my overview, but they were 60k above the undock.

Unable to do anything aginst this group in the rapier I was in, I docked up and got in the Archon to see what type of DPS this crew had with them. In a matter of minutes they were breaking my armor tank on the Archon so I docked up and repaired. They started to rape-cage the station with a cloaky hauler, at this we massive undocked several carriers and armor battleships, I was sitting on the undock when everyone undocked and I already had 5 of the tier 3 battlecruisers locked. They had a significant amount of scimitars with  them and had a pretty good rep, but I don’t think they were expecting me to unleash the 10 tech 2 sentry drones on them. I started calling primaries and the ships were going pop, pop, pop in a matter of seconds I had myself 5 nice killmails with the sentry drones and pulled them in and deployed fighters which chased them all over the system as they ran.   

Battle Report http://www.nem3sis.co.uk/killboard/index.php/kill_related/10077/

Saturday were getting ready for a CTA that was supposed to be a ROL invasion, which didn’t happen so we used that opportunity to reinforce the Snigwaffe POS in D-W7F0 after reinforcing this the timer was set to come out right after downtime Sunday morning, so I set my alarm clock and when I woke up I heard that we had kill a PL carrier that was repping the mods on the pos and it was pretty fail fit, also notice that shortly after this kill the pilot is no longer in PL https://www.pandemic-legion.com/killboard/view_kill.php?id=487661 So we come in right after down time in a Armor fleet and kill the POS, I actually was in a Hictor watching the gate as I don’t like shooting structures, and managed to get some good kills in the next system over.

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&kll_id=12563165

After this I take a break and come back just as a nano roam is going out and I get this juicy kill in ROL space.. http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=12564910 … This was a long roam and I needed a break so I watched a movie for the day and came back just as a major CTA was forming up.

Apparently PL had placed another POS in D-W and things were about to get fun. A shield BC fleet was formed up and we waited for a long time in T5Z on the D-W gate waiting to jump into about a 47 man sniper tier 3 gang. I was in my Artie-Cane we jumped into the fleet and began aligning and took 5-6 losses right of the bat, I killed a rifter tackle and we warped to the safe pos. The sniper gang arrived at the safe pos and was shooting it when we all formed up and MWD on we get into position on the gang and kill about 5 of them and they warp off. We warped onto their pos as it was not gunned yet and began putting dps onto it, they came out and got range on us so we warped off, we warped back in on them and they POS’d up, A cyno went up in the system as we were shooting the tower when In warps a Nomad that apparently entered the wrong password for the POS and he stops short, and is quickly tackled and melted with yours truly getting the final blow…a game first Jump-freighter kill for me.  The comments on the PL boards just make it all too sweet… https://www.pandemic-legion.com/killboard/view_kill.php?id=487897

After this engagement, the next time we warp into the POS I am primaried and manage to get my Cain away with 47 pct structure, but I am out of the fight in the safe pos and on fire for about 45 min, while I get my alt in a pilgrim with armor maint drones through the jump-bridge and come in the back way right into a 60 man RVB assult frig blob on the gate coming into D-W. Shit, Shit this is going to take some skills. As I am AB Cyno Fit I pulse the AB and cloak zoom out and see a hole in their camp and slowly, slowly make my way out of the 6 tech2 large bubbles, RVB failure lol. I repair the armor on my Cane at a SS and get back in the fight.

At this point  RVB gets a warp into us shooting the pos and manage to get me scrammed, and webbed I kill 3 frigs before I go down and manage to get my pod out, but PL emerge from the POS and kill quite a bit of the shield BC fleet. We manage to break out of the system in short order and return to MO-GZ5 to re-ship, and take a 15-30 min break.

After the break shit starts to get real as 5 PL carriers are Cyno’d into the system, I reship into a Revelation and myself and the rest of the capitals jump into the system with the 5 PL carriers sitting in their POS, we siege green and quickly reinforce their POS as PL Jump out of system promising a fight on the timer, just after downtime.

Well some of us work for a living so I don’t know if anything happened this morning

Here is the battlereport of the battle with ship-types and kills / losses as I can gather them.

 http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_related&adjacent&kll_id=12568991

Good fights to all…

Zandramus

Unending Pew… and cautiousness with Caps

It has been a very busy month in Delve, the routine has been that I arrive home and there is a roam out which I catch up on and there seems to be no end of good pew to be had. So far this month I am at 104 kills and 1 loss, though it was a very expensive rapier…and I also missed a batch of 24 kills the other night as I got home too late to make it into the subcap fleet, so I flew the carrier to help remove a couple of Snigwaffe SBU’s that had been placed in D-W. So rather than participating in the goodfight that was happening on the gates I got to shoot at structures which frankly was like watching paint dry.

Zandramus Kills and Losses

Earlier this month SniggWaffe has moved into the area, they have set a pos in D-W which is in a strategic position to allow them to Blops the entirety of Delve. We have had several battles I would have to say one-sided battles with their bomber fleet, but one must always be cautious when dealing with Pandemic Leagion… and while Snigwaffe is mostly filled with PL wannabe’s, as someone who was in one of the founder corps of PL, I can see a strategy here where PL sends out Snigwaffe to irritate small alliances into using capital ships and then PL can pounce in with their Supers and GG us once they have killed off the capital fleet.

So for me I am being very cautious with my capitals, I am also enjoying the subcap fights that Sniggwaffe has been providing. After all EVE can be very much like a chessgame, if you play too greedily you can end up getting checkmated early.

Zandramus

   

CSM 7 Who not to vote for...

While Eve-Uni’s original goals were to take in new players to the game and teach them to become eve-citizens and survive in a hostile universe, I believe it has recently strayed far from these ideals.

"L'enfer est plein de bonnes volontés et désirs" (hell is full of good wishes and desires). Saint Bernard of Clairvaux… from which we get The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The recent engagement of the Dec-Shield by the Eve-Uni is what captured my attention that perhaps its candidate for the CSM may have more game changing ideas that I do not particularly want to have the Eve that I have come to love, changed into a completely different game.

If Kelduum can support using tactics that were until recently considered exploits by CCP to avoid war dec’s on  itself, while promoting Eve-Uni to be not just a corporation like any other corporation, but to try to have it designated as special by the development team and granted favors…

This to me is nothing different than the scandals of the Devs giving BOB tech II BPO’s

CCP intervention into the game should not give an advantage to any particular corporation or organization over any other. Game mechanics whether they be broken or bad for one side are at least fair in that they are bad or broken for the other side.

As such I would have to hope that anyone considering voting for Kelduum take a second look at what his motives are at getting into the CSM. After all power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely

Zandramus

Lack of kills due to lack effort…

While many of my alliance mates were able to get several capital kills this past week, on each of the ops I passed on traveling the 30+ jumps to go investigate neutral ratting systems as I was in a rather expensive clone and really didn’t feel like putting in the effort required. So this last week the pew was rather dismal, I spent a bit of time trying to make some isk, running a couple of havens, and salvaging. Bottom-line is I have about 700m in the wallet towards my Aeon fund, and a long way to go. I cannot seem to run more than a couple of havens before I get bored as hell or before some cloaky person pays a visit to my system only to sit there cloaked for ages, which forces me to go camp the outgate in the hope of getting some pew, only to see said person log or exit right after I take down the bubbles and go to bed for the night.

We have had some more sov grinding, which I am very happy to have the Revelation for now. My brother managed to get himself a Moros over the weekend and he popped its cherry on a CTA to shoot down a TCU. With our neighbors to the south deployed at the moment we have seen an uptick in roaming 3-5 man gangs, and I managed to get on the kill of a rupture yesterday afternoon, in some ways a great fight in eve is as elusive as that great golf shot, or the chance at a 300 game in bowling. It comes around every so often, just enough to keep you from quitting and keeps you yearning for the next great fight / chip in / 274. I must report that it has been a while since I holed out from 150+ yards, the 300 game is still elusive, but fun every time I string 6+ strikes in a row, and while I recently had a great fight, I can say I can wait for the next one, until then it’s back to the grind and building up the Aeon fund.

Zandramus

A well laid trap foiled by idiots…

So last night I decided I would set a trap for the nightly roam that winds through our space, I was specifically setting up for a frigate roam, anything larger and I would not have the setup to handle.

I picked a system with a regional gate, 3 jumps from our home system, I had bookmarks here for 3 bubbles that would drag anything coming from any direction into a focal point where I had 2 disco-Armageddon’s sitting cloaked about 7k apart. I was using explosive and thermal damage types. Basically anything drug into the kill zone would die fast and be podded.

After sitting around for 3 hours with no one coming up on the intel-channel there began to be word of a 10 man frig gang with 1 drake 5 jumps away. All I had to do is wait for them to arrive and head further down the pipe. Meanwhile in alliance chat I see they are forming up a home defense fleet to deal with the gang, I got into the fleet and let them know the plans I had and the trap that was set up, and to have them push the gang my direction.

So what does our elite pvp gang end up doing? Well they get about 30 guys in fleet and of course they are making sure they have logi support with them, and be sure to call for reps and form up on the titan while they have a dictor chase the gang in the wrong direction until he finally jumps into the gang and bubbles up and lights the cyno where 30 idiots pour out of and kill everything. And while I hear them patting themselves patting themselves on the back and saying, I hope those guys come back that was fun.

All I can say in fleet chat is fucking fail, you just titan bridged a fleet onto a frigate gang… If I were in the frigate gang I would certainly want to come back after that happened NOT… Its no wonder people hate super caps so much when people do this sort of shit, how hard would it have been to chase down this gang with some fast frigates, or chase them in the direction of a well laid trap.

I thank the fleet for wasting my time this evening just so they could kill-mail whore on a fleet of frigates, let me clue you in you elite pvp’ers, 2 vs 10 would have been an awesome fight, 30 vs 10 is fail.

Zandramus

Pew of The Week (POTW) with TEST Alliance

I haven’t had much to report lately, we have been grinding SOV and frankly that is like watching paint dry, but it is a necessary evil that has to be done for any fledgling alliance. We have had the typical roam here and there but have had astonishingly few kills in my timezone, we form up for a incoming fleet and then get blue balled by said fleet even when we have even numbers.  

That was until last night just before the big game was about to kick off, we were given short notice to be in shield bc’s and to form up on the titan. We managed a 30 man fleet with 3 scimi’s and we bridged to lowsec about 11 jumps from the target system of Huna. We were going to agress some TEST Alliance pilots that numbered in the 60’s with capital support. We were going to be assisting some neutrals that were outnumbered in the system, even with our numbers we were still going to be outnumbered by the TEST fleet.

Fleet jumped into Huna and we got a warp into the field right at my optimal of 50k in my Artie-Cane. First wave of the battle, primaries were being called fast and the ships were popping just as fast as I could lock them and get one volley into them. After about 15-20 ships on their side were down they retreated into their pos shields while we went to work on the ECM batteries on the POS, the POS had no guns on it, lol fail. After we incapped 3 ECM batteries the TEST fleet warped to a ping about 300k off the pos and warped back to us in the 20-30k range. We quickly burned back out to our optimals and the target calling proceeded for the next 5 minutes or so. I was Jammed for much of this part of the battle, I think I managed to get in on only 3-4 kills in this wave as the pos gunners had singled me out for jamming. We lost 2 ships initially in this engagement until we got back out to our optimals, both ships were Drakes. Battle report straight from our killboard is here  http://nem3.com/killboard/index.php/kill_related/4091/ This shows we killed 30 whilst they managed to get 2 of us. If you take a look at their killboard for this battle, their losses are even more as they lost 49 ships Total and managed to kill 3 others totaling 5 for the engagement.

https://kb.pleaseignore.com/?a=kill_related&kll_id=360343

The fight was one of the best I have been in since I flew with SAS, this was about all I was going to talk about on this blog but while I was researching the battle, I see we engaged them again this morning, and I am amazed at how once sided these 2 battles are, take a look at the killboard for this battle in C3N-3S

http://nem3.com/killboard/index.php/kill_related/4155/

It shows that while being outnumbered by nearly 2-1 odds that we managed to kill 63 more ships with only 24 losses. I can imagine that TEST leadership is probably not too pleased with their current efficiency in battle, though I am upset I wasn’t able to participate in this second battle, I hope that there are more like this to come.

Zandramus

Tracking and Physics

I wanted to add my two cents to a post by Jester which can be found here...

http://jestertrek.blogspot.com/2012/01/proven-in-field.html

I will let you read it and come back to this post but Jester postulates that large ships guns should not be able to hit small ships that are being piloted correctly, and in a perfect world I would tend to agree with this but Eve is not a perfect world. It is a world of flawed physics where ships of 1m kg of mass can make ships of 100m kg of mass made to look like they are dancing on a string by bumping into them.

To further my point, most pilots in these large ships have loads of time invested in skilling up for those large ships, so do you think it is fair then that these vessels should be put at risk or lost to someone who has been in the game for a month and is flying a ship that cost 1/100 of the ship that the veteran is in?  To be realistic, frigate sized webbers should not work on anything larger than a frigate, a battleship should just drag the frigate along with it.  If you want to web down a battleship you better be using a battleship sized webber.

20m Isk dictors should not be able to pin down a 20-80b isk ship, if you want to do that then you should bring a capitol sized interdiction sphere deployed by a capital class vessel remember (risk/reward) iteration would be nice to see a supercap interdictor.  

Fast moving battleships (*Cough Machariel Cough) should not be able to bump capital sized ships, Freighters, Carriers or Dreadnaughts that have more than 100 times their mass... they should get smashed in and take damage FFS.

Until these issues are fixed / iterated correctly then yes I think that my ship that cost 100 times more than your small mass / low skill ship, should be able to PWN 1 shot those ships. Fix the physics model and I will be happy to support your position.

Zandramus

Long time since last post, sneaking an Obelisk into Delve like we were pro

Well real life has gotten very busy, I am working on several pieces of software for my company to support our scanning and imaging applications, and in the midst of that we found out that while deploying Windows 7 64bit environment and new machines that the current image viewer application could not support the video mode that the new video cards produced even at their lowest settings. This would not be an issue had our image viewer been written in a dot net language, but since it was written in the archaic Borland Delphi language (Pascal) and being it was written sometime in the dark ages, I cannot even compile it. Now I knew we were replacing this at some point and I have purchased an imaging control for .net but I planned on deploying these applications as an application suite, and not one at a time.

Because I had to deploy this application immediately, it means that it has to communicate with the other applications that were written in the dark ages, and it takes me several days to decipher the communication protocols that they are using. IE… Mailslots. Hell it took me a whole day to find a good example of their use coded in vb.net on the internet.

So I have not been in game much the last week, I go home log in and am exhausted, maybe do some NPC’ing before going to bed. Last evening we spent the whole evening sneaking in an obelisk into delve some 22 jumps from the nearest hisec point, we had several holy shits in local as they saw an obelisk go by scouted by 6 recons. We went through a hostile system of 20 guys like we were pro and they didn’t even notice what had happened. 5 jumps from our destination, we finally started to be chased by someone, though our obelisk pilot was being webbed and was warping so fast the person could not keep up with us. We had plenty of laughs as we delivered the cargo to the destination and I was off to bed after this.

Zandramus  

Nullsec Life, NEM3SIS, Delve, and Karma

I have been moved in now for about a week and I must report that I am having a fantastic time in Delve. I am getting plenty of Pew, however I find myself in some supporting roles that I normally would not have tried I have been in manyt fights as a Devoter Pilot where I wasn’t getting on the killmail, I tried out Logi pilot but didn’t enhjoy that at all I had trained logi 5 so that I could put my carrier into triage mode. I have typically been the DPS’er having trained Fighters 5, Fighter Bombers 5, I am a natural Carrier and Super Carrier Pilot. We have been doing some structure bashing to claim space and all that has been going well, but where I am clearly enjoying myself is that we seem to have regular visitors to our space and we seem to be able to quickly field a gang of people.

Last night was pretty typical we had visitors that had made their way into our pocket and we had begun forming up when we heard that they had killed 2 noctis’s of people who weren’t watching the Intel Channel, then word went out that they had one of our carriers tackled off the station. Immediately I started moving a cyno alt into the system and as I was already in my carrier a few systems away we got a cyno lit in the home system for people to get there and start forming up. The FC had several other carriers undock in that system and begin repping the carrier that was tackled. Once that was happening I managed to get a cyno Lit in that system and several of our PVP carrier pilots jumped to it and warped to the station at 0 and began deploying fighters on the invaders. Karma is a wonderful thing, as these were the Happy Endings corporation that had hot dropped my corp down in Stain in the 000-FS solar system when they blew up my brick Devoter on the station, I was now in the position to return the favor. They had 14 in system and we were now the defending force with the superior numbers and ships.

I immediately went to work on the most expensive ship on the field as it was called primary. I only managed to get on a couple of the killmails as fighters move so darned slow, but was happy to help remove a Loki, and Harbinger from the field.

Loki

http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=15035827

Harbinger

http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=15035826

So I am looking forward to many more fights, I have been in about 20 fleets now and have gotten some good kills, but these stood out to me this week as payback.

Zandramus

New Friends

Well this weekend was a whirlwind of moving assets, the bulk of the corp. still hasn’t finished moving, but we are showing up more and more in local of our new home. The corp. had a meeting about one week after we made the half assed deployment to Stain region, we had been offered a place in an alliance several times and this time it was decided that we would be joining the NEM3SIS alliance and moving to Querious.

So Thursday night I was packing all of my stuff and I spent the next 2 days moving from the ass end of Stain to Querious, which was fortunately only 2 jumps in the Anshar each way. Though it took three trips through a fairly busy hub where the cyno pilot kept getting shot so it was touch and go, I hate risking a 5b isk ship to move my stuff but really I would not have been able to move without it, maybe I need less stuff. It also took 2 trips with 2 carriers to move all of the ships. All told I used about 150k Oxytopes cost me a fortune, and 80k Helium Isotopes (Which are so much cheaper).

Just as I had moved in I was grinding some sec and lost a zealot to a cloaky goon trap
http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=14963235  lol but I am still ahead of the isk wars with them.  I made all this back later in the day when we found a class 3 nearby that we invaded for the day and liberated the loot from shooting all of their sites. It was kinda nice running sleeper sites again as I felt very comfortable back in a WH.

I participated in a couple of roams, it appears our fellow lonetrek dwellers and common targets Team Liquid has moved to the NPC stations around us and we were shooting at them on one of the roams, though their Kiting tactics can be quite frustrating, I will be looking forward to shooting at them some more.

That’s all for now TL:DR Moved stuff will have fun shooting peeps soon.

Zandramus

Blob Blob Blob…Life in Stain

Well we came down to Stain region to make some isk and hopefully get some GF but all we have seen so far is blob after blob. The first evening we were here we knew that the Happy Ending folks had about equal numbers online in W-Q233 so when they had a person in our station in OOO-FS I was camping them in with  heavy interdictor. The Happy Endings folks came over to OOO-FS and it looked like we were going to get a good fight, their person undocks and a fight ensues, then a Cyno is lit and a capitol fleet drops on us. Before I could get the bubble down and de-aggress my brick Devoter go boom. http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=14927911

My corp. starts undocking carriers in response while I am warping off to a celestial and getting back to the station so my pod didn’t go splat.. meanwhile one of the carriers gets bumped off the station and is taking heavy damage, calls go out to rep the wayward carrier and bump it back to the station. I dock up and undock in the Archon with the intent to only rep the carrier and I begin repping on the undock. The wayward carrier manages to get back in docking range as my archon just finishes up repairing its armor we are outnumbered about 14 – 7 so we dock up.

Later in the evening the corp. loses some expensive battleships coming back from running a 10/10 complex, and shortly after that the corp. loses an expensive solo ratting battleship. The chum is in the water.

Last night the happy endings folks pay our system a visit, there is a single Vagabond that engages a Stealth bomber on the gate and pop’s him, when we arrive at the gate Zandramus is in a Arazu fitted with faction scram and long point to deal with the Vagabond, and Vulnerability is in a Protius. The Vagabond is 300k off the gate and there is a Falcoln that just entered system and decloaks on the gate Vulnerability engages the falcoln forcing him to jump to l-A9FS. Ref’tal is in a stealth bomber on the other side of the gate watching the approach to our system, and the stealth bomber pilot switches to a Curse. Local in L-A9FS fills up with 7 Happy endings folks to come deal with 3 of us. We warp off the gate before they arrive.

15 min later they send an obvious bait Cyclone to the system, somehow Ref’Tal gets disoriented and is watching the wrong gate allowing them to blob us again 7-3 and we lose the Curse. At this point Zandramus switches up to a stealth bomber as it appears we are never going to get a fair fight with these guys and he begins to camp the gate waiting on the Falcoln spy they leave in the system, when he appears on the gate Zandramus engages him forcing him back into L-A9FS, Ref’Tal has not realized yet he is on the wrong gate and is waiting for the Falcoln to de-cloak again to bomb him of course he never does and the Falcoln again enters OOO-FS and Zandramus engages him again, this time though the blob jumps in and everyone engages Zandramus’s Stealth Bomber. 7V1… Zandramus pulls some slick piloting and gets back out of warp disrupter range and warps off with 20 pct armor.

Happy endings leave and go home and don’t return for the rest of the evening and I end up going to bed frustrated.

Zandramus   

Exploring a WH in home system..First Capital kill of 2012

So I logged in last night with some exploring in mind and I find two wormholes in the home system. Wormhole 1a leads to class 1 w-space and it is reaching the end of its life. Wormhole 3a leads to class 3 w-space and this is an outbound wormhole X702 so there is chance to surprise someone here. I do a quick d-scan and see there is a tower here with a forcefield and parked inside the forcefield is an unpiloted Orca, and Velator. I don’t see anything else on d-scan from this location so I warp to the sun and d-scan and I see Hurricane, Maelstrom, Tengu, Armageddon, Noctis, Drake, medium sleeper wreck, medium sleeper wreck, medium sleeper wreck…. Someone is running sites!!! I scan the system without probes so to pick up all of the anomalies and once I have those I sit at the sun and change d-scan to a 15 degree beam and line the sun up with each site on the map and quickly locate them in an anomaly.

Well they are located, now what… no one is on yet in my corp. fail fail. I watch them for the next hour and a half run all of the sites in the system they always hang around for the noctis to finish salvaging before they go on to the next site. Several times the hurricane lingers in the site after everyone else has left, but I am in a cov ops ship and no one else is on to help me so I am left as some pathetic onlooker unable to do anything with this group.

After they have finished the sites they warp back to their own wormhole as they were not the locals, and I drop scan probes and locate their hole and the lowsec static in Aridia region. One of our blue corps has informed us that they are going to kill some capital ships that are shooting their customs offices tonight and invites us along for the fun. We all make use of the wh connection to Aridia as then we are only 14 jumps from our low-sec base in lonetrek. I arrive in lonetrek just in time to half arse fit up a Armageddon before cyno’s go up and everyone drops on the 2 seiged dreds 3 jumps away. I race to the Saranemi solar system in time to help kill the first dread, and as we get the second one into structure it self destructs before we can kill it.

http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=14933405

We make it back home in Stain about a half hour later and its time to go to bed

Zandramus

2012 The move to Stain..

The move to Stain…

So we have been tasked to move our stuff from the Lonetrek region to the Stain region for some NPC nullsec fun. So I look at the jump plan that has been laid out for us and decide that I will truck most of my goods through empire via freighter to the hi-sec staging point in the Paye solersystem. From there I will load the jump freighter and jump the freighter 3 times to our destiniation in Stain. ‘

The first Jump is just next door to the Low-Sec Staging point that allows my jump freighter to reach the next system in Stain, I have a Cyno character logged in in all three systems with extra ships and cyno’s as most cyno ships get killed in the 10 minutes the cyno is active. Moving the carriers from Lonetrek, I utilize a Pilgrim and then the carriers rep him for the remainder of the cyno cycle so I don’t  lose the cyno characters ship in this section of the route. Once everyone is at the low sec staging point I put the Pilgrim on the carrier and jump the the Archon, Thantos, and Anshar to the first cyno point in Stain. They dock and then jump to our new home in Stain. Quickly I unload everyone and jump them back to the midpoint dock and jump back to the lowsec staging point all on one cyno cycle. The anshar has to pick up more stuff in Paye so we wait for her to pick up the load of supplies for the day and she jups back to the lowsec system. The Anshar is using 40k Isotopes per round trip so this is quite expensive. We make the second trip there and leave the carriers this time only bringing the Anshar back for one more trip which is uneventful and all of our stuff is now in Stain.

Later in the evening I am asked to light several cyno’s for corm members and I do so , though I am starting to lose cyno ships. Once during this evening there was a concerted effort from some Machariels in the low sec system to bump some of our carriers off the undock before they could jump out to Stain. While this is all happening the locals have been stirred up in Stain and they have taken notice to us and decide to drop a Capitol fleet on our sub-caps sitting on our undock and I lose my Heavy Interdictor to them, and have to replace it from stocks in empire, so I make one last jump freighter run and take care of that and bring out a load of unassembled ships from the alt corp hanger in Nonni.

It appears the locals here are going to be hostile to us, though that just makes more targets for us, though it appears that our corp has given them a few expensive kills and now we have covert watchers in our system 24/7. They have smelled the chum in the water and it will only change when we begin costing them some of their expensive ships. So I am looking forward to some pew and getting my security status cleaned back up.

Zandramus

Grinding Sec Again... and nice solo pew

Well Vulnerability and I have decided to grind our way to good empire graces again and this new-years weekend we set off for the outer ring, as we have jump clones and ships located there for just this purpose.

Upon arriving in our clone stations though we come to realize that we do not have very many torpedo’s for our stealth bombers so we find the nearest supplies on the market and buy them and set our destination to D5IW-F. Upon jumping into the system we find the system camped, I manage to escape the interdictor bubble with Zandramus and Ref’Tal, however Vulnerability seems to have issues with hitting mwd and cloak as I instructed him and my dear brother informs me that he is getting shot by the gate campers. Ref’Tal is already docked up but all Zandramus can do is watch as Vulnerability becomes shipless, though he manages to get away in his pod and docks and purchases another ship.

http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=14913869

And thus the locals are no longer content at killing my brother, now they are smack talking in local and asking for ransom to let him leave the station, I watch intently as they warp back and forth from the station to the gate setting up bubbles and camping, but wait a second, there is a lone Oracle sniper that appears to warp to the same spot on the gate camp and is lazily sitting there all by himself. “Zandramus smells chum in the water”, I maneuver to within 40 of the oracle and wait, just as all of his buddies warp back to the station I click approach and bomb the target, click orbit and microwarpdrive, as I get to 19k he is starting to move and I disrupt his warp engines as the first volley of torpedoes slams into his hull. He is going down fast but not fast enough for me as I suspect he is crying for his gang support right about now. Just as his help arrives my torpedoes reduce his shiny sniper boat to scrap-metal and I cloak up grinning.

http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=14913755

Local was something like this…

>2skulls - you are no longer blue

>Zandramus - You were not blue the instant you shot my corpie.

>2skulls – you guys are dead

>Zandramus – Moar Tearz Please

I can’t remember the rest of the conversation but I was enjoying it, we played SWTOR for about 5 hours while they camped us in the station then I undocked everyone and insta-warped them to a safespot and logged out. oh so much time wasted for them. Apparently their corp and my corp were supposed to be blue, but checking the killmails he was on Vulnerabilities killmail so I don’t feel bad for killing him and I got 80 points on battleclinic for the solo kill with my stealth bomber. We did get to grind some Sec I am down to -5.0 and we get the word the corp is moving to Stain so we pack up and are headed back to Tamo to start packing for Stain.

Zandramus

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

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