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

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

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 bit of fun to be had by all...

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

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

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

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

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

Its off to bed for me tonight

Zandramus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

No Exit to Empir3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Talos

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

 Halo Set go Squish

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

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

Zandramus

An evening of scanning and exploring…

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

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

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

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

Time for bed hopefully I can find an exit tomorrow…

Zandramus

Time to leave this wormhole behind.

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

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

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

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

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

That’s all for now…

Zandramus

WH's The most dangerous space in eve.

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

Ganked

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

Breaking the Cardinal Patch Day Rule

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

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

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

Zandramus

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

A weekends worth of work…

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

A Fruitless Evening Roam

Logged in last night and resolved the signatures in our class 3... Gas, Rocks, 1 radar Yay.. and our static to 0.0 So no new wormholes in the last 2 days maybe things are slowing back down. We run a few Anom's while we are closed in and pick up the bloot, then we decide to go on a little roam out of the static.

We refit to a more pvp fit drake and the three of us that are online dip our toes into 0.0. The system that we are in tonight is a dead end system one way in and out, no stations and only 1 asteroid belt. In other words it is perfect to stage from tonight. We bookmark the hole and head out, we jump into the next system, it is empty as well. Now I want to say there are two goals any time we get into 0.0, Goal number 1 is to try and find some pew, Goal number 2, is to get my security status back to 0. I am currently at -8.4 so this is a long term goal.

So with those intentions we start lookig at the map to see where there are some pilots in space, each system we go through we go through the belts and kill a BS rat if there is no one in space. If there is someone in space and we can locate him on dscan we will attempt some pew.

So the first system we come across with 1 person in local, there is nothing on dscan and there is a station in system, so we move on. We jump into the next system and I see a noctis on scan, but also a thantos, we are not going to be able to take 3 drakes vs a thantos so we wave and move on.

The next system there is a person in local, though nothing on dscan we believe they must be in a cloaky, we kill a 3bs spawn here and move on. We go through 6 more systems and all of them are empty and it is beginning to get late. We are 7 jumps from our dead end system and we start to head back. We kill a BS rat in each of the empty systems on the way back, wave at teh thantos pilot who thinks we are there to get him and I actually have a good convo with as we are lol'ing that a dramiel tackled him last night, I told hime he wasnt interesting to us as we didnt have the dps to take down a carrier in drakes.

We get one jump from the hole and head out in a different direction to check the 2 ice belt systems nearby, both systems are empty but we get sucked into a large tech 2 bubble in the second system which has no one in it, upset we got pulled to the bubble we destroy it and head back to the wormhole. It is now almost midnight so we roll the hole and go to bed unsatisfied, but tucked back in and closed in tight with the new static unactivated.

Maybe some pew this weekend.....

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

The Return

So I have returned to Eve Online after a 6 year hiatus.
I must say that the game looks very similar to what I remember but there is a ton of new content to explore. I will say I have been back in game for about a month now I spent the first week burning through missions to get to a level 4 agent only to become quickly bored of the grind. I had to find something new and exciting or I was just going to end up unsubbing the account again.

The wormhole...
After doing some research into wormholes I decided to give this a try, I trained up my astrometrics and being an amarr character trained to fly the legion. I set out for a week exploring and looking for an empty class 3. Was running around Geminate (my old stomping grounds) in an anethema when I encountered my first heavy interdictor. Waking up fresh in my home station I decided to fit my legion up with the interdiction nullifier. Who are all these people in 0.0 who claim to own space anyways another new concept for me how can you own space?

Ok so now the new cloaky unbubbleable legion has taken shape and I find myself a nice wormhole that has a 0.0 static I jump in the hole and wait for a week for a high-sec exit. Meanwhile every day I get a new hole to 0.0 to go out and find me some carebears to play with.

A high-sec hole opens and I spend all day moving in a large pos and enough fuel for 2 months and set it up. My hole has some interesting characteristics that I love... No local this is a dream for me come true. One of the reasons I unsubbed was the whole local in 0.0 issue. So it it really easy to sneak up on someone in a wormhole.

Well look for more to come

The Lost Explorer