Friday, November 28, 2014

Oops

So things have been going well lately. We managed to get some mining in, not as much as we would have liked, but at least we brought some ore in. Last Jita run brought in about 2 bil. So I decided to pick up twp Legions again for PvE purposes. I think I've learned my lesson on that.

So our corpmate Gnicklas has joined us in the hole now, so one of the Legions are fitted with missiles, and he does a horrendous amount of damage at closer range. I picked up a pulse Legion for my own use to make the combat sites go faster. We've also moved our PI a bit, and now we are only producing Robotics and Coolant. All Mech Parts and Consumer Electronics go towards Robotics.

Which brings me to a kill I made yesterday, which I'm not very proud of. Normally I'd say people who die in wormhole space get what is coming to them. Everyone knows the risks, and when death claims us, the new clone is no surprise.

A number of ships were in our wormhole scanning, and one actually jumped to a Data site in an Astero with Nick's combat probes on scan. We were in the site with him, cloaked, but didn't attack because surely this was a trap. No one is this stupid.

We were wrong. At some point in the next 30 seconds, he must have finally seen the combat probes,.and off he went. I tried to beat him to the hole he jumped to with my Devoter, but just missed him. I tried to catch him on the other side with my Pilgrim, but he cloaked up and was gone.

And then a Rupture appeared on scan, threw out some Core Scanners and went at it. Still with Combat Probes on DSCAN from us. What the hell was going on?

The Rupture ended up at our Z647 to a C1, which we hadn't scanned down, so the gent had way too much time to get away, and he jumped through as I landed in the Pilgrim. Rats, missed another one. I sat 10km off the hole and had some sort of banter with Nick, and about five minutes later I decided to jump through to see what was in the C1.

And there was the Rupture, 20km from the wormhole. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. And he wasn't trying to warp. ???

I got him pointed, webbed and tracking disrupted and Infi 2s out and attacking. His ship went down pretty fast, and I was pretty sure he was going to make the hole before he popped, but sure enough, his ship exploded.

Again, I fully expected his pod to warp off, but there it sat, I almost didn't bother, but I obliged him on to his next pod. Which is when I noticed local blinking.

"Leave me alone!" Vishera Fett says. Ah geez, sounds like something a newbie would scream as a cold blooded killer approached with a gleaming knife. And sure enough, guy was less than a few weeks old. And his cargo was full of data and relic site loot.

I had just blapped a noob.

So that was the first "oops".

Tonight, we had a hole close to Jita open, so I headed over in the Impel with a load of sellables. Managed half a bil, bought some fuel and headed back. As I warped, I pulled up Agents of Shield on Netflix. I got home, opened up the fuel bay on the POS and thought I filled it up. I got into Shield for a bit, and then started hearing sounds, which  kind of sounded like POS sounds. Like something Onlining/Offlining.

So I checked around the screen. Hmmm, both Corp Arrays are offline. So is the Ship Maint Array. Wait, where's the shield?!?!

Ah shit.

Checking the fuel bay found it completely empty. Well, I'll just grab the fuel out of the wrong place I put it.....uh oh, I can't take stuff out of offlined Corp Arrays....and I don't have any other fuel just handy.

I quickly popped my Orca outside and found fuel four jumps away. I settled my Purifier I had jumped in before I accidentally offlined my whole station near the open wormhole and hoped no one with any serious firepower would float on by. I also put Nyslia in her Devoter next to the tower itself and turned on her bubble, maybe someone would think the bubble was the shield.....it was the only real play I had.

Ten minutes and eight jumps in an Orca later, I put the fuel I bought into the POS and started onlining it. Ah crap, I forgot it's 30 minutes to online the station! I had to run to get some chicken wings I had already ordered before the debacle, so off I went as fast as possible. I got backfour minutes before the shield came back up, no one in the system. Whew.

Now I'm  having to online each gun battery. Argh. Hopefully I'll learn from this snafu.


Forgotten Heathen out.




Wednesday, November 5, 2014

Phoebe and Me, Pop Goes Another Wormhole, Wartargets

The Phoebe patch released yesterday, and I was really interested to see these "null sec data/relic sites" they said would now appear in C1-3 wormholes. I don't usually mess with our data/relic sites, other than to kill all the NPCs. Years of crap loot for lots of wasted time have made me pretty jaded towards them. So what I found was pleasantly surprising.

I scanned for the day and found I had two of the new sites! I checked Eve Survival and found the NPCs looked quite hard, so I added a plate to my Zealot, and logged in Firt as Wing Commander for the small boost his skills gave my tank.I warped on over to the site and found......

Nothing. Just a floating bunch of boxes. Well that was a buzz kill. I found out through some more Googling that they had removed the NPCs a long time ago. Well, rats. I was looking forward to killing stuff. Honestly, though, it wouldn't have really gone with the lore of wormhole space....these sites being thrown in to appease the wormhole masses do feel a bit odd.

What I didn't realize is how hard these boxes are to crack. I failed quite a few of my first data ones, watching them explode in frustration. Okay, this isn't going to work, I don't know too much about this mini-game. So I read up on it, found that there are rigs for both relic and data to boost your virus, and fitted out two Anathemas, one for each.

Next site was 100% easier. I highly recommend you fit these rigs. My first site netted me about 15 mil in loot, from me exploding most of the containers and the fact that it was a Data site, which means mostly research crap. Not to put research down, but it's mostly worthless. Next site was a Relic site, and it netted me 37 mil in salvage! Now we're talking!

So, in the end, I'm "pleased" with the new sites in wormhole space. I just wish they fit in with the canon of the place instead of just some sites that spawn other places. But, in the end, I'll be happy with more content, but I hope they can mold it to better suit the eerieness that wormhole space deserves.

So after this I ran two of the actual wormhole Relic/Data sites, and actually got some melted nanoribbons, finally! I believe I ended up with 12, so I was pretty happy with that compared to the previous drought we had been having. Then I turned my attention to mining.

Which means I needed to close wormhole connections.

I got busy closing the few we had, and the last was a K162 to high sec with 2 bil mass. I decided to forego the afterburner, and just jumped the Orca back and forth a few times. Hole was at half mass when one more Orca pass popped it, with the Orca outside.

Well, at least it was high sec. I opened up the B274 and I was only 12 jumps away.

Straight through the Forge. Argh.

As many of you know, I was wardecced by an alliance that apparently just sits around on gates near Jita waiting for people who are unaware they are at war, or just have no clue about the mechanics. Last I saw, there were quite a few of them near Jita, and my only "safe" route was straight through those core worlds.

Alright, I figured I'd approach carefully, they should just be on the main gates into Jita. I was wrong. About three jumps out, I found a wartarget in local, but not on the gate I came in, so I quickly docked up.

My corpmate Gnicklas is back, so I had him use his special powers to find information. This gent had taken part in a kill only two hours ago, on a freighter, with five other wartargets. All of them in Proteuses and Phoboses.

Frack.

I decided I had better scout some and left the wormhole with Forgotten and headed over to Jita in my pod to put together a cheap PvP ship. If it was just this guy, he might be in something I could get the jump on, but probably not, who was I kidding? I was looking to give them a fight, I need some PvP experience anyhow.

So off I went and fitted out a Maller with a 30k buffer tank that I was pretty happy with and flew over towards where Firt was docked.

I got to one jump out and found the rest of the wartargets.

One Phobos and a Proteus were sitting on the gate immediately after Firt's location, and immediately attacked me. I actually managed to get the Phobos into 1/8th armor with my little Maller, and it lasted a couple minutes, my buffer actually held out pretty well. But it was only a matter of time, and I exploded and warped on over to dock, only to be told I could not dock due to an aggression timer.

Now this is what I'm talking about, needing PvP experience. I've never fought anywhere with docking, or stations, or any of this other nonsense. I have to say I panicked a little, waiting for my executioners to land and end my pod. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to warp off quickly, and return once my timer expired.

So this whole getting Firt home plan wasn't going to work right now. I checked the Star Map and found I could go around, but would have to traverse a single low sec system. Not a problem, I can scout. Bought a shuttle and headed towards that, with my Orca in tow as I scouted. A single wartarget chased us up the pipe, but lost us when we turned.

I jumped into the low sec system to find a Drake sitting on the gate my Orca would need to use. That wasn't going to work. Oh, there's a cyno in system, I bet it's in use and they're guarding it. So I docked up and waited an hour, and sure enough, everyone had left. I got the Orca moving, headed to the next gate, and met a jump freighter coming in my from cyno. Bet he's glad I'm not a problem.

So I got around Jita, circled it, and made it home. Closed the B274 and got mining!

We've decided to switch to Procurers to mine instead of Hulks after looking at the yeild, cycle duration when boosted vs price of the ship, and I've never been real happy with using Hulks, other than their yield. Now, with the major changes to mining ships, having a 54k EHP tank on the Procurer matters more than the extra yield.

Here's my Procurer fit:

{Heavy Shield Procurer}

High Slot: One Strip Miner 1

Med Slots: Em Ward Field 2, 2 Adaptive Invul 2s, Med Shield Extender 2

Low Slots:2 Mining Laser Upgrades 2

Rigs: Core Defense Field Extender 1, Anti-EM Screen, Anti-Thermal Screen

Unboosted with modules running, it's 49,470k EHP. 54k when boosted by the Mining Foreman. I'm actually looking forward to getting jumped by some stealth bombers.

I got to work mining with three Procurers, swapping out to the Miasmos when I hit four full cans. We had started this site the previous couple of nights, but didn't get very far before we were interrupted, so I mined the rest of the ABC, and took down the Spodumain and Dark Ochre before calling it quits for the night.

Glad I decided to mine, because logging on today, the site is gone. So are all my gas sites, so I'm assuming someone warped to all of them. Means I need to get to the remaining ore site, pronto.

Forgotten Heathen out o/

Monday, November 3, 2014

Luckiest Guy In Eve: Didn't I Learn This Lesson Already?

I got really lucky yesterday. I mean REALLY lucky. Like I just won the Eve Jackpot Lotto lucky.

If you've read my blog for a long time, you know this has happened before. It's happened to almost all wormhole dwellers. That dreaded message. The one, where when it pops up, and you even knew when it was coming, it strikes fear right into your heart.

"The wormhole has collapsed behind you, are you trapped?"

At this point, we all pull a double check. Am I in the correct system? Whew, sigh of relief.

At that point yesterday, my eyes popped open wide in horror. My Orca was now on the wrong side of a closed wormhole. But the terror subsided a bit, as I knew I had a Core Probe Launcher in it's cargo just for this instance.......wait......didn't I unload all my cargo in Jita the other day? I would have had to specifically make sure I put it back.....and I don't remember doing that......

And I was right. It wasn't in my cargo hold. My Fleet Hangar, no standby Magnate in the Ship Maintenance Array for real emergencies.

Well shit.

I was in a C2 with static low sec, and one onlined POS in system. I hadn't seen anyone on DSCAN yet, but someone had to have been here, a K162 had opened into my wormhole, hence the whole reason I was stuck here. So SOMEONE must have passed through here.

I began calling for help in local after I cloaked up off DSCAN from the POS. A nice juicy Orca kill was not what I wanted my possible saviors to see before I received said help. Few hours later, no help was found. I mentally calculated my possible ISK loss in ship and implants, and it was close to half a bil.

Wormholes really do bite you when you stop respecting them. And the stupid thing is, it was totally my fault. I did four back and forth jumps with my AB running on a 2 bil mass wormhole. At 300mil per jump of mass with the AB going, that's 2.4 bil. I'm surprised it didn't close on me sooner. I didn't pay attention enough, and wormhole space was going to teach me a lesson.....again.....

This isn't the first time I've been stuck in the black, alone with no hope of rescue. When I first began exploring wormholes in Apocrypha, I tried my hand at mining the new ores I had never seen before. I hadn't learned about mass limits, or even checking the info on the wormhole to see if it was unstable.

So one time too many I rolled the dice and finally came up snake eyes. I was flying my first Hulk, and the hole collapsed in front of my eyes. I spent a few days asking for help in local, but back then, wormhole space was fairly empty, and no one ever came to my aid. So I said a fond farewell to my Hulk and left it adrift for someone to come upon and find my corpse floating next to it.

I figured that was the fate that awaited my Orca and it's pilot. However, with the changes to wormhole space, there are so many transiting wormholes that there is almost always someone coming and going in every system in W-space.

So I kept calling for help.

About two hours into it the next day, I saw a Tengu on scan. Argh. Since there was no convo attempt or any respond, I figured he was looking for me. So I tried to speak to him directly.

All of a sudden I got a fleet invite. Hmmm, I thought, he might be just trying to get a warp to me, so I asked for a convo in local, and the pilot obliged. He told me he was not the Tengu pilot, and that he was in a Buzzard and from a null sec connection. He said he was on the low sec hole, and to warp to him at 10km.

It was too good to be true, and I just couldn't trust him. It is Eve, after all, but what did I have to lose?

As soon as I fleeted up with him, and uncloaked and warped to the gent at 100, just in case this was all a trap, which again, this is Eve. As soon as I had uncloaked, I caught the Tengu on scan again. Hmmm.

I landed on grid, and sure enough, there was the A239 wormhole exit. A Buzzard  uncloaked and the guy said that was the prudent move, he didn't blame me, and GL, careful it's a low sec hole.

I was amazed, to say the least. I'm certainly nowhere near the bloodthirstiest person in Eve, but even I give very little quarter anymore after a long life in holes.

So I warped off and cloaked again, since the Tengu was still looking for me. About fifteen minutes later, I decided to go for it. Landed on the hole and cringed, figuring I had company waiting outside.

I arrived in low sec, no ships anywhere near, two jumps from Hek.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

I could not believe my luck as I docked up in system, but after checking local I realized the Orca might not be making it out of low sec. Local was full of flashies, as a gang of criminals warped in and out of system. Oh well, at least I am certain to get my pod out.

I decided to chill out for awhile, already having pushed my luck way way too far. I got onto my main and scanned our my B274 and found I was only 13 jumps from Hek, so jumped in my new stealth bomber to go outfit it and scout my way out.

About half an hour later, I jumped Firt and the Orca clear to high sec! All I had to worry about now was wartargets...oh yeah, I was at war.

But, none showed themselves, and my Orca is bathing in the wonderful black seas of home space. Hopefully I'll be a little more careful, at least, for a little while, I'm sure.


Forgotten Heathen out.







Saturday, November 1, 2014

Damnation Fight That Results In A Wardec?

Not too much has been going on lately, just PI and some mining. Managed a Jita run that should net almost 1 bil in returns. That included our first use of our Compression Array, which is stupidly easy to use. Why the hell did they make me go through building a Rorqual and all that compression time? Oh well, it's easy now.

I've mostly been trying to keep our wormhole connections as closed as possible, and in doing that, I invariably run into those who are looking for fights. And when said fight should result in little risk for me, I'll take part in it. But why would anyone be annoyed with their opponents using a wormhole to jump to safety as I assume is the reason for the wardec? That was his plan anyhow, and the whole reason he was running a buffer fit Damnation in the first place. Oh, and had two, TWO, Onerioses on standby.

So I'm sitting on our B274 to High Sec, and I'm running stuff out. My Devoter is on zero at the hole, and I'm in a Purifier, cloaked, at some range, which ended up obviously being too close. I also had an Onerios cloaked at 50km.

A couple Magnates and an Anathema jumped in, I hit both Magnates as they jumped out, and the Anathema flew off. Then the Damnation jumped in. He opened fire on my Devoter, so I decided to see what he had to bring.

I had never actually fought a Damnation before, and I have to say I was impressed. My Devoter is fit for tanking everything, with a passive over 100k EHP fit. It is also fit for closing wormholes, not for combat, other than the aforementioned tanking. It only has two medium lasers on it. I opened fire with these. My tank was fine. Then he must have bumped my Purifier sometime in the fight, and as it happens when you multibox, I didn't know it. I was far into armor before I realized it was under fire and unable to get away. It popped and I got my pod to safety. And then he started neuting the Devoter.

It's also fit with CCC rigs, so it wasn't in immediate danger, but I could see the tank would eventually fail. I had him about half armor with my two little lasers, so I decided to neut him back and jumped in my Pilgrim. This is when I found out my Pilgrim fit sucks.

I've never bothered with fits that use Cap Boosters, but my Pilgrim was never cap stable.Two Medium Neuts and a Heavy Nos, two Tracking Disruptors, and a MWD. In hindsight, these didn't all work together very well, and he popped out some Hammerhead 2s, which I didn't know Damnations had drones, and he really went to work on my Pilgrim. Oh well, it's obvious he wants a fight and he's going to jump to safety when I get him lower, so I uncloaked my Onerios and repped my Pilgrim back up. Then he sent his Hammerheads at my Onerious and jumped in his own.

Since it was obvious where this was going, I said good fight in local and jumped out, to find a second Onerios waiting to jump in. Hmmmm. Alright, well it's bedtime for me anyhow, so I docked up and headed to bed.

That morning, I logged in and found a notification that the alliance this gent belonged to had wardecced me. Stranger still, another corp wanted to ally with me for the war. What's up with that?

So the war started and I almost forgot about it, and I kind of assume that's the point, as I found some of the wartargets near Jita sitting on gates. Probably pretty easy to get corps who play casually to not notice they're at war with an alliance and get transport and easy kills.

So I guess we'll be staying in the hole for awhile.

Forgotten Heathen out.