Friday, October 28, 2011

Moving On!

So when your comments start just reading like the eve online forums, it's time to end the discussion. We've moved on.

All losses have already been replaced. Apparently we had enough "hideous isk" from "being terrible at wormholes" lying around to take care of everything. Slight haha he he. Oh yeah, and we learned some stuff too.

I used both Orcas to start closing our high sec connection when a Buzzard jumped through and spewed probes out before cloaking. I happened to be sitting in a stealh bomber and noted he was too far away from the wormhole to jump back out, so I toodled on over and gave him a bump.

Then I shot him with torpedoes.

I managed to get him deep into armor before he made it back, but in all the burning for the hole, he left his russian named sisters probes sitting in space.

I hopped outside to check to see who was there, and found the pilot outside. He threw up a gf, and I saluted him. I got eyes on the inside wormhole and resumed my Orca jumps when a Tengu from his corp uncloaked inside our C2 as an Orca landed.

So the Orca jumped out and headed to the station to see what else would appear. Another corpmate of theirs jumping into the system with a Hurricane. After checking their killboard *INSERT LEARNED LESSON HERE* I found both large null sec roams and smaller wormhole roams with his corpmates. Since both had far too many ships for me to guard against, the aforementioned wormhole closing operation was over for the time being.

As has been mentioned before, some people have a serious ability to do nothing for hours on end for a stupid killmail, so a few hours later and no activity from our holes, I resumed closing the holes with my new warp stabbed orcas. To quote Mr Duncan, the warp stabs are permanently welded into the lows. Along with that, they contain some additional upgrades incorporating, yet again, lessons learned previously.

The corp has stepped up their PI production in the face of both these losses and the insane price inflation of POS fuels, which we are set up to produce in large quantities. Prepare the isk faucet, I'm gonna make it rain up in hea. Alright, seriously, why are the prices so high? I saw the Goonswarm attempt at controlling Gallente ice, and some sort of market manipulation attempt, but this is kind of ridiculous. But I'll profit from it, either way.

It's nice to be home.

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

So I Had A Funny Feeling

So our week got alot better. No, not really. We incurred the single largest lost ever seen by this corp yesterday. We lost two Orcas and two Tengus. Which was enough to get us kicked from our alliance, Talocan United. Here, let me make sure that's searchable.

Which was, of course, just an excuse. They had already been considering removing us. But on to what happened, since that's why you're really here.

We all got on that evening and decided we needed to head home and run the sites that had accumulated there, not having known that Tado and Dead Space had lost a Noctis and Drake earlier in the day, which of course, we were blamed for in my mail explaining why we were kicked. Talocan would like your corp to be on 24/7, have no life, no kids, no wives, and no job, apparently. But we didn't know about those losses, and we sure as heck weren't on to defend him. Guess that makes us at fault. It gets better because he had no fucking clue we WERE in that hole at the time. Nice job of assuming making you look like an ass, Nathan.

Anyhow, so the gravs were gone, Tado's crew handled the combats, so we headed home. And found out that our wormholes were TWO jumps from each other. That whole "same Region" thing was finally paying off. Or it was random chance, I don't know. So we packed up the Orcas with as much Arkonor as they could hold, and I made a fateful decision to "just take the warp stabs off this once".

Sometimes I hate it when I'm right.

So we made the two jumps and we popped in, and the faster ships started warping while a couple of us hung around to guard the Orcas at the hole, which was EoL, so most likely no one was coming through.

As a couple of the combat ships landed at the off grid space beneath the POS and were assigned fighters by the carrier above, combat probes appeared. Hmm. Checking DSCAN, no ships other than our own appeared, so I called for everyone to warp to the off grid bookmark.

To those that don't know, we use a bookmark immediately below the POS, immediately off grid from it, because our POS is surrounded by mobile warp disruptors as traps for both ships and cloakers. When scanning for ships, you can quickly see while probing and assume that ships at this bookmark are inside the POS.

Except in this case, here's what I surmise what happened. Prior to us entering the wormhole, our corpmate that was still inside had logged in his character while we were making our way home and ran his PI. These people that eventually jumped us were probably searching for him, and had ignored all the ships at our POS. This enabled them to quickly be able to scan down the ships as they waited for the Orcas to jump to them at the off grid bookmark.

As the two Orcas entered warp to the bookmark, an Arazu uncloaked to the offgrid and started attacking one of the Tengus. The second Tengu arrived and they destroyed it. As both Orcas landed, more ships landed, a very identical fleet in composition to the one that jumped us a few days back. Machariel, Tengu, Hurricane, etc etc. So rather than lose it all, everyone that could get away warped up to the POS. I popped out the ECM drones and actually escaped a point on an Orca, but was quickly jammed and pointed by another ship.

In short, we ended up losing two Tengus that had been flying CAP, and both Orcas, fitted not with Warp Stabs, but with cargo expanders, because it was just two jumps.

Yep, in the end, I'm in charge, so the blame is mine alone. That's fine. I can live with that and I'll hope to change my decisions in the future to reflect my experiences. But it's wormhole space, and crazy shit happens. I can point at what I did wrong and learn from it.

However, the current leadership of Talocan United are hypocrites in the extreme. We've been kicked for our losses, but in reality, we had been on the chopping block for some time as examples of what and who they don't want in their "elite" alliance of wormhole corps. They are on the verge of making PvP ops mandatory. They whine and complain constantly about how not enough people show up for this op or that wormhole invasion.

Funny how their website paints a completely different picture than what Talocan United actually is. There have been major arguements over this on the Director forums. Zariah routinely throws major meltdown fits over it in chat and in Alliance public. He recently "quit the alliance" due to things not going his way, so he was going to take his ball and go home. The guy is a self described "twat" and a "cunt".

And most of the alliance is sick of his bullshit. So in that, our removal is really a relief from his childish rants and raves, and Nathan's inability to control him. I'm incredibly glad we're out. As of last Alliance dues, we were the third largest corp in the alliance. We showed up for numerous alliance ops since our joining, and nothing was ever enough for these people.

To a point, I can sympathize with them when not enough people show up for planned operations. I've run large alliances in other games before. I know how frustrating it is when people just don't care as much as you do. But the arguement of "people have lives, wives, and families" isn't good enough for these guys. You really should be on 24/7, have no life or job to speak of. You should be playing Eve! Well guess what? When you don't have anything meaningful in your life to take you away from Eve, I guess it's okay for you to invest yourself that much into a videogame.

But the majority of us living out here in real life land aren't willing to do that.

Talocan United as a general alliance is great. The people are willing to do extraordinary things to help you out and to socialize with you. I will miss a number of them very much. The "leadership", on the other hand, can DIAF for all I care. They show a complete lack of respect for people and their playstyles. Yes, their website says completely the opposite, but be warned, they want to make you one of them, one of the people who take "Internet Spaceships Seriously!". There's a limit to what most normal, well adjusted people will take in a video game, and they really expect too much.

And, to round that all out, Nathan and Zariah are giant hypocrites when it comes to ship losses. Until last week, my corp hadn't lost more than a single stealth bomber in over a year.

Here's Zariah losing an Orca. Nope, no warp stabs there. Guess you should kick him out for that, huh? Fucking hypocrites.


Here's a Mastadon that Zariah lost. Doing a run for POS fuel and mods alone, were we? For shame! Douchebaggery!


Got caught in your Buzzard and lost your POD did you? In a Cov ops??? That smacks of incompetence, right? Kind of hard to catch those cov ops.


Here's a nice CNR loss since we're busy making up excuses. WTG Nathan!


Another one!? Really? Kick him! OMG! Poor combat choice!


In the end, who cares. Behind each and every loss there's a story. And in Eve, most of the time it isn't the majority of the fault of the victim. I've never been one to shrug off the loss and say "Oh well, we'll replace it." I need to learn from every mistake I make. But it's a damn video game, and life comes first. In Talocan United, the alliance comes first. You get to have your say in your hole, but god help you if you disagree about something with either of the two aforementioned leaders. The alliance is going through a phase right now where it doesn't know what it wants to be. It contains people from all walks of Eve life, and a vocal minority, much akin to extreme politics, are driving the majority to a place they don't want to go. People don't want and can't maintain weekly alliance PvP ops. They can't and don't want to muster out at someone's beck and call while they are trying to maintain their own systems.

Helping fellow alliance members out is one thing, but all the TU leadership want is serious e-peen so they can swing it around with the likes of Narwals and Aquila.

But it doesn't matter to me, my corpmates are standing by me like they always have, and I'll keep the friends I had. We'll be more at risk if they come across us, since the leadership harbors serious grudges and talks alot of shit about people that leave the alliance.

But it's Eve and we'll endure. It's just a game, remember? Pass me the cheetohs.

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Well That Was Unfortunate

This is going to be one of those "lesson learned" posts about wormhole space. There will be lots of second guessing and head banging. I'll get the nasty part of it out of the way to begin; we just lost a Tengu, a Legion, and a Noctis, plus all three pods.

So on to the why. We had poked around in our static C3 and found the inhabitants asleep, but with a Chimera on scan, and a few jumps 6 hours previous. I normally wouldn't mess with a wormhole with a semi-active DOTLAN and a carrier on scan, but I wanted to let our Tengu pilot try out his new fit on C3s, not to mention see how my better fit Legions could take them as well. So off we went!

We had a member in a Helios scan down the entire system, and only our connection and the high sec connection were found. We also scanned down our C2 system before we left, found nothing beyond what should have been there. So now we had the Helios sit on the high sec hole, while our cloaked Noctis would sit at our C2 connection while we were running sites. I thought that this was sufficient, and, in a normal case, it would have been on par with good security measures.

So we ran a few sites and were progressing on through a fourth when the C2 connection pulses. I called activation and warped the fleet over to a near moon. A Pilgrim uncloaked, I got the name and corp. Here's where I made a mistake. No one followed the Pilgrim through, so I assumed he was alone. It's a decent assumption to make. What I really should have done was immediately check his kills. If I had, as Fernando did later, I would have found that he had taken part in some kills an hour earlier as part of a fleet. That surely would have influenced my decisions to follow.

But since I didn't, I assumed this was a solo Pilgrim that had come out of a new K162 in our home. I was, at least, partly right. But, you know what, let's not assume he's alone. We sent the Helios pilot back through to our C2 and found.....nothing. Nothing on scan and nothing at the hole.

Alright, it's probably a solo Pilgrim then, we all concurred. It's getting late, we've got enough loot for now, we decided to head home. I fleet warped us to the hole, uncloaked the Noctis and burned it over to the hole, and we jumped. On the C2 side we found a Devoter.

Wut.

Where did that come from? The Helios pilot started yelling, more ships, more ships, a Sleipnir, Machariel, Loki.....

Final enemy fleet composition was:

Machariel; Tengu; Sleipnir; Loki; Nemesis; Devoter; Devoter; Pilgrim; Hurricane

I called for a jump back to the C3, knowing we would be stuck there, but we didn't have a prayer of answering all of this firepower. We jumped....to find yet another Devoter. When we jumped to the C2, they had uncloaked and jumped a Devoter. Now both sides of the wormhole were bubbled. Great.

At this point, I'll say this was a well executed gank. It was done with great precision and they were very patient, and it paid off for them.

So we were in a bubble, with an enemy fleet coming after us. "ALIGN AND BURN!" I yelled, turning on all my modules and aligning for the quickest planet I could just click on before the rest of the enemy fleet started applying DPS and webs.

We managed to get all four ships out of the bubble. The Tengu was pointed, and went down first, because it bore the brunt of the fleet's firepower. The Legion was also pointed and collapsed into a burning ball of plasma next. However, both my Legion and the Noctis managed to get clear and warp away from the trap. Both other pods also warped away.

Here's where my actual mistakes are made. I called for a logoff. Everyone logoff. I attempted logoffski.

I had other choices, I could have warped the fleet around planet to planet til they either caught us or grew bored, the catching us part being highly likely with their numbers. I should have warped the Noctis to a moon and cloaked him. He would have been safe. I should have gotten the static high sec bookmark from the Helios pilot and warped the fleet there. Hell, I could have warped us there to begin with and it all never would have went down, but honestly, I saw a Pilgrim.

Of course, they scanned down the pods and the Noctis and blew them away. Only my Legion escaped. I have tried to gain more experience in PvP in my time here in WH space, but obviously not enough of it. It came down to what choices do I have, and it was a very short list.

I made the choices, so we'll be paying the price. All in all it's probably near a 3 bil loss, including ships and implants. We hadn't had a loss like this for a long time, I guess it was time to pay the piper. It'll take us quite a while to recover from based on our pilot count and activity levels.

But if you can't take it, you can't live here.

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

Some Explosions and OH NO! But Not Really.

I logged on today and busied myself with some mundane Eve business and started some scanning during breakfast.

When an Imicus and a Merlin appeared on scan. What the hell do they think they're doing here? Another round of bait thoughts ran through my head as the Imicus dropped some probes.

Hmm. Well I can't let them just have at it. So I hopped in my Anathema and went looking for them. After some retardedness on my part, which a bit continued, I got a warpin and switched to the Purifier for some reason, and warped over with the Devoter and a Domi in tow. I landed, got the point on the Imicus and proceeded to blow it away. The Merlin thought about trading blows, but as soon as the bubble on the Devoter came up, he headed away as fast as he could, and I lost the long point I had with the Devoter. Oh well. The pod exploded as the Merlin headed out the high sec entrance.

Well crap, I didn't know the B274 was open.

So I got a couple guys in Orcas and went about closing it. After checking the high sec side to make sure no one was there, I sat cloaked on our side and proceeded to have the Orcas warp to the hole.

I jumped both Orcas outside when I noticed a ship uncloaking near the wormhole. A russian Loki appeared. Ah crap.

So now both Orcas were outside with a hostile Loki sitting here. I didn't have enough DPS ships that I cared to run solo to run him off, and our allies in the hole had a Pilgrim alongside me watching, so we pondered what to do. While we did that he warped away.

So he's a cloaky Loki, so slightly less DPS output, I could grab my PvP Legion, the Devoter, and the neut Domi....hmmm....

While I thought it over, my ally at the hole reported that the Loki had jumped back and went through the hole to high sec.

Interesting. I already had warped both Orcas to a near station. Four minutes and this hole could be closed. I decided to jump my Purifier out and see where he had gone. He was nowhere to be seen, and there was no Loki on scan. So maybe he's cloaked. Well let's test that.

So I decided that both Orcas jumping in should be enough to tempt him to either uncloak or jump back inside if he were here, and my Orcas would be able to jump right back out, leaving a final jump home for each of them to close the hole.

So the Orcas arrived and I jumped them inside. No Loki uncloaked or followed. Interesting. I jumped the Orcas back outside and cloaked them in high sec.

As the time ticked down til they could rejump, I noticed russian named scan probes...had the Loki forgotten to BM the hole? One minute remained on the polarization timers.

20 seconds.

8 seconds.

JUMP!

all three ships made it back through and the B274 collapsed behind us, trapping our russian Loki friend outside. Now to figure out where he came from.

As the Orcas returned home, I scanned the system, and sure enough, found a K162 leading to a Class 4. I jumped through and found a single POS with a Moros and a Chimera on scan. The wormhole was an N766, so a 2 bil mass limit. Hopefully I can get this closed before any of the russian's friends come to avenge his stranding in high sec.

After checking the wormhole's limitations on Unknown Eve's tool, I neglected to check the info on the wormhole itself. There were very few jumps on DOTLAN so surely no one had come through this hole, and I hadn't seen it when I was scanning earlier.....but I forgot I hadn't actually completed my scan.

So I stayed inside the C4 with my Purifier and warped both the Orcas over to begin closing the hole. Only one made it through the hole before it closed behind it, stranding us inside the C4.

!!!

Wow, this could be bad. But, seeing as I have always planned for this eventuality, I was in a Purifier with a scan probe launcher, and the Orca ship array contained a T1 scanning ship as well. So I cloaked the Orca up and went to scanning.

The C4 had a beautiful C2 static, so it was only a matter of time, at worst a couple days, before I would get out to somewhere in empire space. But, as luck had it, the first C2 had a low sec and C2 static, and the next C2 had a high sec entrance, which I slipped out of and found myself 31 jumps from my wormhole. Oh well, lesson hopefully learned.

Except I've done this before. Thankfully this time it didn't cost me anything except the time spent in scanning down the exits.

31 jumps later and my ships were home. So, the lesson for the blog today is?

ALWAYS SHOW INFO ON EVERY WORMHOLE BEFORE YOU GO THROUGH!!!

Friday, October 14, 2011

Two Posts In One Day!?

It's Christmas, right?

I found a little bit of time to login and check what was going on it Eve, and hitting DSCAN...sleeper wrecks? Drakes named after their pilots? What the.....

Re-checking DSCAN, not only were a bunch of our battleships floating in the POS shield, an afk alliance Loki pilot was sitting inside as well. I double checked, no, none of other corp we shared the wormhole was on. I hopped the Anathema and logged in both the Devoter and Dominix, which was, in hindsight, probably a bad idea for two more ships to appear on their scan, but this didn't seem to matter to them at all!

Hmm, a couple more geniuses, or maybe bait ships. I seem to be assuming everything stupid I see lately as bait, which is still probably a good idea. It was easy to quickly check these guys and find out they were in a 5 man corp, unless, of course, their ships were named after some newbie corp. Alas, my mind overshot what they truly were by leaps and bounds.

I jumped on Teamspeak and told the alliance there were people running sites in the hole, and I had an immediate fleet both in-system and pilots on the way to assist. Still these, quality individuals, continued to run the site they were at.

I soon figured out why, as I tooled through all the combat anoms, they must be in a mag or radar site. About that time an Anathema named after it's pilot dropped some probes, then both an Imicus and a Manticore both named X dropped more probes. It appeared they had other people searching for them as well, and they had also figured out they may be in a site they needed to scan down. Still no real reaction from the site runners.

As the fleet grew in number, one of the Drakes dropped off scan, while the other was found circling the B274 high sec connection. Both me and a pilot flying our Purifier watched as he lazily circled about. Then the Imicus uncloaked, and was not fired on.

Hmmm.

The second Drake then appeared at the hole, he may have been Proto cloaked, I wasn't sure, and then both Drakes warped off, the Imicus jumping into high sec, right into arriving alliance pilots who jumped in system. If the Imicus was warning the Drakes, we couldn't tell. They went about their business, with four Core Scanner probes from someone not in the alliance attempting to find their site.....which would take forever to find a radar or mag with four probes.

So the entire fleet settled on top of the B274, Devoter threw up the bubble and we waited. And sure enough, the Drakes warped straight to the hole, actually one at a time. They were annihilated in turn. Both pods turned to goo. Their Anathema snuck out, as well as two stealth bombers belonging to Red vs Blue, who were probably stalking them as well.

With hopes that a RvB fleet was on it's way, the FC said the hole owner, me, could have the loot. Upon opening one of the wrecks, I found four Caldari Navy Heavy Missile Launchers. Sweet, that'll pay for the four Large Mobile Warp Disruptor IIs the Small POS owners managed to down.

Who runs sites like that, in a ship fitted like that? Chalk up another lesson in Eve basic common sense for the day.

Seriously? Who Does This?

Well yesterday was an interesting occurance in the wormhole we share with another alliance corp. A small POS appeared at the outer planet in the time span between both our playtimes.

I started the day out by logging in and restarting my PI, having a good chat with the guys who share our second C2 home with us. We mentioned we were scheduled to come back to the hole from our main C2 this weekend, and everyone was looking forward to trying to run joint C3 ops and hanging out. After I ran my PI, I headed out to get my day started.

In the afternoon, I logged back in to do some more Planetville jostling. I decided we really needed some better POS Bash fit battleships, and started inquiring on our alliance boards for the best ship and fits, to which I received some good responses. From those and after talking to a couple of my corpmates who logged in, it was decided to get some more characters cross trained into Ravens for serious POS bash fun. Until then, I sorted through our available battleships, no less than seven Armageddons are sitting in this hole due to me using them for hole closing. I checked out two Armageddons, an Apoc, and an Abaddon, and made sure all were properly fit for maximum DPS output or as PvP gank BSes.

I logged in later and happened to check DOTLAN for both wormholes and noticed a large numbers of shipkills in the second C2, 6, and 4 podkills. Ouch. Someone just had a bad day. I logged in the scanning alt, who wonderfully is in an Anathema now, lessons learned. Scanning around, there was a hostile Legion on DSCAN.

Hmmm. Better go check the outer planet.....that's not our small POS. I headed in and found a small Minmatar POS, two small arty batteries, one medium arty battery, three ECM, two warp scramblers, and an online explosive hardener. The Corp had been created only days earlier, and the pilot appeared on numerous low and high sec killmails of various, mostly T1, ships.

Hmmm, either these guys aren't the smartest, or this is a bait POS. Either way, I got the alliance warned, and a fleet gathered up immediately.

I logged in Forgotten in one of the max DPS Armageddons, Nyslia in the Devoter, and Firtilis in one of our Dominixes fit for remote armor rep and Sentry 2s and rolled out of our home towards the growing alliance fleet. I also managed to get my mic working, so was overjoyed to be able to effectively communicate with the fleet on Teamspeak. Nothing replaces the ability to effectively communicate immediately with those you are PvPing with.

After an interesting look through the C3 where a Rorqual and Orca, plus two Mining Drone 1s wer on scan, it was concluded after I took a look at the POS that it was some bait for their guns and we got back to bringing down the wrath.

We staged out of our POS, and managed to make myself useful dealing out some serious damage in the first assault as we took out both Warp Scramblers first. Forgotten and Firtilis dished out some hefty DPS numbers that I was really happy with, while Nyslia tagged along with an alliance Loki as it watched the C3 connection.

As we banged down the few modules the invading corp had erected, the Loki went into the C3 connection to look around. After a few minutes, a warning was raised from the Loki; a hostile fleet was inbound on him inside the C3 consisting of numerous T3s and supporting Guardians. As well, an Arazu had been watching him at the hole, and he barely jumped through ahead of him with time to escape. Nyslia also headed into warp and both got back to our POS safely ahead of the hostile fleet.

The alliance restaged into our POS and we gathered intel, learning that this was a group the alliance had run into before, and had dealt with handedly, although most of our ships were not fitted for PvP at the time. I dug through our Corp array and handed out numerous Disruptors and Webbers for our plethora of battleships. I then hopped back into the Anathema and watched the C3 entrance, finding both an Arazu and an Anathema that dropped combat probes. Most likely finding our fleet waiting, they gathered their probes and headed back to whence they came. After that, I stayed in the Anathema and banged on DSCAN inside the C3 to give us plenty of warning if they decided to come back. They never did.

I re-shipped Nyslia into a Zealot and the fleet returned to flinging ordnance at the hostile POS. More alliance members showed up and the shield quickly fell to 25% and it went into reinforced, which actually greatly surprised me. If you ignore the two Large POSes from a well established wormhole alliance, why bother stronting up?

After incapping all the guns, most of the alliance logged inside our friendly POS, waiting for the POS to come out of reinforced.

Today, the owner of the POS attempted to contact the alliance, and wanted the chance to move everything out, to which his response was "Not a chance." This is another clear example of people not treating wormhole space with the proper thinking. He didn't try to contact either of our corps, nor our alliance, before moving in. Because he "assumed" our POS was for shipbuilding, due to the Advanced Medium Array, no doubt, and that no one was active because there were no NPC kills for 24 hours. There were some within 48, however, so I'm not sure how that translates to "inactivity".

This is the third time this has happened to us, a Small POS appearing in our system without any warning or contact, and the people who put it up are "surprised" by the reaction it garners. The last time this happened, our carrier showed up as they were onlining the tower, and their response was "We wanted to see what would happen". What?! Really?

This guy was extremely surprised we were so hostile. I'm completely baffled by this, as how can putting up a POS in a system without contacting the people living there be construed as anything but hostile?

The Small POS comes out of reinforced in a matter of time, and the alliance will be there to blow it to smithereens. Another example of poor planning, no common eve sense, no attempt at previous intel, and an obvious attempt by too few to do too much. In the end it's costing them alot of isk, so there's a lesson there in itself, as many of you reading this will either already know, or will learn from this example entirely.

Of course, the real lesson to draw from this is don't expect a Talocan United wormhole to allow you to do stupid things, like this.

Seriously? Who does this?

Thanks to all those who came out to defend, I hope I can repay when the call goes out to defend your home.

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Consistancy and I'm a Bad Bomber Pilot

After watching another week of terrible combat spawns, we're up to four, and after both talking with other alliance corp members as well as someone else actually posting on our alliance boards, we can safely say something is not quite right with combat anomaly spawns.

I spent today sitting in my Purifier after seeing jumps on DOTLAN. I scanned it down, headed on through and found two Helioses jumping back and forth. That stopped when my Devoter arrived on our wormhole side. I tried numerous times to catch both of them, but to no avail. I find I have much to learn about cloaky ship combat.

So, deciding I wasn't going to catch the cov ops ships, I called in both Orcas and started closing the hole, with my Purifier sitting on the hostile side of our exit. I was speaking with a member of the corp we share our other C2 with, and managed to close the hole before I hopped the Purifier back through! Whoops!

Thankfully my SB fit comes standard with a Core Probe Launcher. I watched DSCAN for a bit, seeing both Helioses had their probes out and were looking again, so I figured they had better scanning equipment, I bet where-ever they cluster is where the new D382, C2 static is, since this WH was a low sec static. Lo and behold I scanned it down and was sitting off of it before one of the Helios ever found it.

While I was sitting cloaked about 10km off of it, I heard it activate, and a Helios appeared. I excitedly clicked my Warp Disruptor and MWD as I hit approach, but strangely, targetting did not work. Hmm I said as it warped off. Guess it would help had I actually decloaked. Rats.

After heading through to the next hole, I found yet another C2 with static low sec, so again scanned down the next WH and after another narrow miss at a Helios again, finally found a C2 with high sec static.

And it contained SEVEN grav sites.

Argh!

I know there aren't a ton of people who move into WHs to mine, but do everyone a favor and despawn your gravs if you're not using them! It'll help you from scanning them down, and it'll help those in your constellation who actually do mine.

So after a few hours of screwing around, I made it back home and closed all my doors. Not an entirely exciting set of events, but hopefully I learned a number of things from them that I didn't have to pay for.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

Combat Site Strangeness

Over the past couple of days, I noticed we had very few combat sites. Then none. And now, a day later, still none. I asked in alliance chat and some responded that they had the same issue along with lowered nano drop amounts.

No combat sites in almost two days is bizarre wormhole behavior. This hole has consistantly spawned 2-4 sites a day, on average. So what's going on?

Anyone else out there notice this?

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

War!

Well after helping defeat a large Starbridge force in an allied wormhole, Talocan United has been wardecced by Cosa Nostra, what I hear is the high sec griefing arm of Starbridge. So I took the early warning, fueled up both wormholes with a month of fuel, and prepared to weather the assault in our home wormhole.

Being a wormhole based corp, I expect the war to pass us by without much to get excited about. We've mined out the majority of our existing grav sites, and have a large stock of ore to compress soon. We also took the time to analyze our profit potential for our PI planets, and have been banging away on keeping the planets churning out materials. We're still focusing on Cryoprotectant and Biotech Reports, Biocells, and the full run of POS fuels. We were also looking to start trying to produce Nanite Repair Paste, but our system doesn't contain the Biomass needed, so we may have to truck those in. We'll start experimenting, and I expect I'll see what I can do with it soon.

Otherwise, it's been pretty quiet. We had some Rooks and Kings in here the other day, snooping about. We've kept on top of all our combat related sites, so they had nothing to bait us out with, so they resorted to uncloaked at the POS to try to coax those online outside the shield. Since only two of us were on at the time, and I was not one of them, everyone stayed safe and no one exploded. And other than a C6 connection, we've had little traffic to either kill or close. I did find our B274 had moved today, so that was a little odd......

And is there really anything worth any actual isk inside radar and mag sites, other than Caldari Decryptors? I still haven't seen a Talocan Derelict in over a year now, so all the money appears to be in the form of nanos from the wrecks. I've had very limited success with the respawn at downtime trick, so I've been leaving mag sites to try to spawn new waves, and hacking radars to try to get caldari decryptors. I ean, seriously, are they ever going to fix the other T3 ships so any other race's T3 salvage will be worth anything???

We've had a ton of ladars spawning, so maybe I'll have to actually try to react them again....argh what a PITA.