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

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

Black Ops and choosing your target…

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

The Ice Interdiction...

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus