Holiday Break

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

2011, End the year reflection.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

Training Plan, What the future holds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

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

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

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

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

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

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

Its off to bed for me tonight

Zandramus

Evening of Gate Camping, finds a Hilariously fit Phoon.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus

Finally An Exit… and some Pew

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zandramus