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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a TARP!!! Oh Noes….

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

The Ice Interdiction...

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

Fun evening ending with pew pew and ship goes boom

We last left with my alt R.. out of the hole having been stuck on the other side of a closed wormhole and waking up fresh in a new clone station. Last night I logged in and scanned down the system with my scanning alt. 8 sigs in system 4 wormholes... After misguessing which was my static the night before I have figured out how to determine which is the k346 so I check the other 3 holes and we have 2 k162's that resolve at 1 au. A wh to a class 3 that resolves to .5au and the static which resolves at .25au . The k162's one is to 0.0 and one is to high-sec but the high-sec hole is reaching the end of it's lifetime. Acting quickly I start my alt on his way to the high sec system from minmatar space. He has 20 jumps to go in his purifier.

I jump my main Z.. through the hole in his pod and check the market and get the obligatory warning from concord that criminals are not welcome in empire space. There are drakes available in system so I buy a stack of drake hulls and launchers. Someone will need to run 12 jumps to Amarr to get the rest of the fit, I also buy a gheddon one jump over and jump back in the hole. I get a corpmate to log in and start moving the drake hulls into the hole while I watch the inside in the pilgrim with Z.. R arrives in his purifier and ships up to the legion to make the loot run into empire. He arrives at Amarr and sells the loot for 1.2 billion and buys the fit for the drakes and heads back to the hole. Once in he unships and goes and picks up the gheddon. About this time another corp member is logging in and just as I am telling him what's going on the hisec hole collapses.

We fit out the drakes for pve and look to grind some sec status. We hop out the k162 to 0.0 and end up in cache 5 jumps from HED-GP lots of traffic so we jump back in and go out through the static into an empty system with a cosmos agent. Hmm haven't done that before so I take the mission and we warp into the complex. We are almost done killing the spawn with the 3 drakes I am double boxing Z and R the site respawns... Ok this happened 4 times before we figure we don't have enough guys to clear the site and someone shows up in local.

We are down all our drones and almost out of ammo so we decide to head back to the hole and reship. Upon contact with the hole there is a Loki there who jumps into the hole. We jump through and engage the Loki. V..  cannot get him locked and this is where communication breaks Down when we are engaged by 2 more ships hurricaines... I am still shooting the Loki with Z and R, V switches to one of the hurricaines doesnt tell me on coms he is doing so. I try to gang warp us to the pos to reship.... Z warps the V & R get warp scrambled. So now it is a 2 vs 3 but we are holding our own until V goes down and gets his pod away R goes down and gets his pod away, I reship them in the pos Z into a pilgrim and warp cloaked to the hole to see whats going on and Z gets sucked into a bubble... He dies quickly to the 3 v 1 but gets his pod out... We give props in local gf all around they give props back.

After action analysis...

I am clearly rusty at pvp being out of the game so long, I should have called one of the hurricanes primary we should have at least popped one or two of them. Granted we were not in pvp setup no one had a point but we had an advantage in our hole we didn't use which was to negate the hurricanes falloff.

Secondly we should have jumped back through the hole when we started to go down we were passive fit and could have used the 30 seconds cloaked to regen some shields before jumping back through and regenning some more. Also the Loki who was set up as neuting tank would not have been able to come back through because as I suspected they came from Cache through the hole and when he jumped back in his timer started. We could have separated them and dealt with the hurricanes.

Third.. Z could have reshipped to a gankgheddon in the pos and made short work of the hurricanes or at least force them to jump out reducing the hostile ship count and turning the odds in our favor.

All in all it was fun, losing the drakes was not bad. Losing the pilgrim was a fluke, I think that we will do better the next time.

The Lost Pod Trader