The Attack On HED-GP

Yesterday we had an early form up to attack HED-GP along with WN. and friends. We put our standard Abaddon, T3, and Guardian fleet together with numbers just over 100. I managed to get some guns for an Abaddon (I can't use the T2 guns they were up on contract with yet) so that I could get in on some kill mails. Now I will preface this with the fact that I had been having a bad week thus far in deaths. I had lost 10 ships and I think 8 pods. I even was spoken to about the fact that I was leading the alliance in deaths for the month.

For this op I made certain that I would do everything in my power to be on as many kill mails as I could. As we were preparing to undock in GN7 the call was finally made to rush to the titan that lay in wait for us to jump bridge into HED. Well we didn't have to wait long as the fighting had already begun so off we jumped. When we landed on the other side of the cyno we were at a ping above the engagement that was happening below between WN./Red Alliance and -a-/friends. We immediately warped into the fray and began to go to work. 

Methodically, and almost perfectly, we started to take down 'geddon after 'geddon. Their logistics simple could not keep up with the additional pressure we were putting on them. Now I had learned a new trick about the overview which sped up my client tremendously and the locking times were almost normal even though there were 1000+ people in local and close to 500 on field by that time. I was keeping up with the primary and secondary targets and managed to get a couple of volleys off on each of them in succession. Soon the -a- gang decided they had enough and warped off field after popping some of our bubblers. But just then an AHAC gang warped in close to us and became our next prey on this eventful day. 

This gang had a fair number of logistics combined with many Zealots, Vagas, Muninns and Deimos. We began to ping pong targets between HACs and Guardians from the other gang. Nothing was withstanding the amount of damage we were putting out. Now because they warped in close and our bubblers happened to put up some phenomenal bubbles we ended up decimating the AHAC gang. They took heavy losses and most of the Guardians that were on field were wiped out. 

Soon they managed to escape with the heavy losses and we began to loot the field. We then were informed to set the starbase password on our ships. We warped to a ping and landed in the enemies POS. It seems we had a spy on the other side that informed us of the password. Upon landing we set out to trying to bumped out the wounded enemy fleet from the POS and succeeded in getting a few stragglers in bubbles as well. We followed them to another POS and attempted to try to bump them out again. 

After about 30 minutes of this it looked like they were going to be warping off to the station to dock up. We were told to align station and be ready to warp to 20km off. This was curious, but I did as told. When they warped we were told it was to a ping that was directly on top of the station, like literally on the top of it. Well it seems this was actually a trap and those that could not immediately dock up were bombed by more than 30 bombers. I have never seen so many BS explosions at once before. 

We then warped around catching stragglers for a while until we finally were ordered to land at a POS that was coming out of reinforcement. After landing we sat there for a bit and our Super caps were called to jumpin. Well it seemed that WN. already had this idea as they had Titans on field from the earlier engagement and also warped in a shit ton of mother ships. There must have been at least 60 super cap ships on field when the POS was obliterated. We then warped to a safe and began to prepare to leave. I took this screen shot at the time and think it is quite cool with the caps and Abaddons in the background.

Later in the day we went back to an uneventful POS bash where we took down 4 more POS's and a ton of modules. I later that evening went on a couple of roams with my Slicer. On these roams I was very cautious and actually managed to rack up a bunch more kills. All in all I turned the week around and broke 100+ kills for the month already. I look forward to some more epic engagements and more successful roams. I have also managed to buy a Devoter as well so I look forward to using that in the near future too.

Here is the battle report from the HEP-GP engagement: http://northern-coalition.co.uk/?a=kill_related&kll_id=76285

Once again thank you for reading.

On The Defensive

So recently I have been in a lot of different engagements. I will try to recap a few with detail but not so much that it is a pain in the ass to read. First I have been lucky enough to be part of a couple of the Abaddon/T3 gangs in my Guardian. The first engagement I joined we went to HED-GP and sat on the SV5 gate. When we jumped in WN. was already engaged in combat with -a- in HED when we jumped in.

We immediately began to orbit the gate and lock up the people that started to take immediate fire from the enemy. I dropped drones and assigned them to one of the Abaddons from my corp so that I could get some killmail whoring done. We started to see the enemy switch targets frequently and began to take a few losses, but all in all the Guardian crew did very well. There was one point our FC was primaried and we managed to keep him up even though he went into deep structure. Another pilot was broadcasting for armor and by the time I got him locked up he was in structure. I quickly overloaded my reppers and together the logi crew was able to keep him from dying at ~250 structure left. As the engagement wound down we had only taken 5 losses to the enemies ~50 some losses. Later on they went back for seconds and overall on the day there were only 35 losses to the 126 kills of the enemy. I even sumbitted a battle report to Eve News 24 which was published about this and the then two other engagements we had with RAZOR and CVA in which we took no losses. It was hella fun with the Guardian and I was lucky enough to be part of a successful op my first time out.

The next op I was in was Abaddons/T3/Guardians once again. This time we went to T-R in which the enemy brought a couple of hundred Armageddons, and the system had close to 900+ people which "desynced" everyone. The Guardian crew was keeping up with the damage for the most part and we were not losing a lot of ships, but then because of the "desync" and lag our anchor floated off into no where land about 300km off from the main fleet. We managed to drive off the invaders that day as well and had a good ratio of kills to losses.

After going on some regular roams I had a pretty bad week in which I suffered a lot of lost ships. Mostly smaller stuff but I lost a couple of Zealots as well. I decided to get an Abaddon down into GN7 so that I could participate in the kills on some of these larger fights. Luckily I did this as we come to the reason for the title of the blog, the defense of our home.

It seems we pissed off -a- and friends as they decided to go on the offensive and attack out POS in GN7. I logged on and had decided to put some nano ships together for the nano gangs that we fly up in high sec. I got them moved into the low sec station and the next time I logged in to see if people could move them we had like 200+ reds in the home system. So as the POS was going to be coming out of reinforced this weekend we had a CTA in which we all got in a massive Abaddon fleet and waited at the POS. We also happened to have our Titans logged in and waiting with us. We waited.... and waited ... and waited. We had intel of a large fleet that had jumped into a system about 4 away and then moved to HED-GP. We had reports of upwards of 260+ in that system with many battleships and support. So we waited some more and they finally arrived.

Our local exploded to almost 400 people and mostly were reds. They warped to our POS and before we could get our carriers inside the force field they took two down. We then warped off to a planet and then back to another POS we had in system. While our 5 Titans left the other POS's shield to engage the enemy fleet in which they took out a couple of battleships. We then warped to a ping from the new POS and aligned down to a cyno that we put up. The enemy warped to the cyno and we did as well. In jumped a good sized fleet of WN. and friends to help defend. The battle ensued and what a battle it was. Each side took heavy losses of battleships and it was by far the longest fight I have been in and was very fun. Even though we were fighting a larger force and defending our own space. At some point the opposing FC called my name as primary and I saw the enemy beginning to yellow box my ship. I immediately broadcast for armor but it literally was only two volleys and my 200k ehp ship was down. I managed to get my pod out and reshipped to my nano Zealot to go back out and assist on kills as the enemy began to make a break for it at that time because we had dropped another cyno and jumped in WN.'s super captials. So on field we had somewhere around 9 Titans and a handful of mother ships. Well as soon as I undocked two enemy 'Geddons landed on the station and someone put a bubble up. at this point I prob should have docked up but I wanted to assist my brothers in warding off the invaders. I engaged and managed to kill one 'Geddon while losing my ship just before the second one went down.

I am sure I will hear about losing two ships in the engagement but I was determined to assist in repelling the invasion. At that point I was down to just a Guardian left and decided to stay docked due to them attempting to catch stragglers a few jumps away. This was one hell of a fight and it was pretty epic in my opinion. Hopefully they think twice about attacking us again, which would allow me to get some more ships down to the system so that I can continue to help out on roams and defending our home system.

Anyway here is the battle report for the day. You can see that there were many losses on both sides.  http://www.northern-coalition.co.uk/?a=kill_related&kll_id=75496 but we did emerge victorious.

Again thanks for reading.

Industrial Dust

My industrialist has been coming along nicely. I have been doing some research on what makes me money and what does not make money and I have come to realize with a spreadsheet that I was losing money in one of the markets versus just plain selling off the refined ore. So I will be more efficient with my selling now. I have also been researching getting into trading and plan on doing some investment of the mass amounts of money I have been making with my other account that is in the wormhole. Now all of this is kinda a moot point, even though I have been still doing some trading and sneaking in mining in the early morning hours due to the war dec that has been going on.

Which by the way has not been going our corps way. We have lost quite a few ships to them, except when we can put good numbers of people together in which point they would play station games. Ohh by the way, station games suck! Either way I managed to get a solo kill on my indy toon for his first ever kill. What happened is I joined up into a corp fleet as I got on and they needed bodies to come fight the war dec'ers. One of my corpies was being camped in by a Malediction and a Merlin, two frigate size hulls one being an Interceptor.

So I warp to 100km from the station in my Omen to find them outside of station. They immediately start towards me and I warp off after letting them get within 50km, landing on a safe point I had created. They happen to have warped off from station towards the celestial that I had been pointed to, which was my plan all along. This allowed my corp mate to undock his Iskur and warp to my safe. We then figured we could take them so I warped back to station and landed at zero. There was no one there, so I began to burn away from station. Well soon the Malediction landed and began to come after me. I happen to be afterburner fit with a scram and web. I deployed my 3 drones and began to aggress the ceptor. He is going down slowly when the Merlin lands, now 50km from us. I don't think the pilot in the ceptor knew to break away from me or get at range and I ended up being able to kill him before a Hurricane landed near us. In which point I abandoned my drones and warped off.

After looking at the kill mail I found that I should have shot the wreck and then warped off lol. It contained an 80m mwd, so it turns out my first and only kill was that of a 101m isk Interceptor! Not too shabby. Later on we had a decent gang and station camped them for a while. This went on for a time and we finally logged with the exception of 3 of our pilots which ended up losing 3 battleships.

Now as of today they have been quiet in highsec and that is because they managed to somehow find where our wormhole was. They have put up a POS inside and have been attacking our POS that is located within the wormhole. So I logged in last night to find one of our corpies sending me a convo as soon as I logged. He was desperately trying to get in touch with one of the leaders. It turns out that someone had been told by the bad guys that he was a spy. The other members believed them and they subsequently decided to fleet him without his knowing, have him warp to them and then they killed him. He was beside himself, or at least led me to believe that was the case. I did what I could to bring some doubt to the possibility that he was a spy, including checking his API for transactions of money. But they apparently didn't believe him and he was then kicked from the corp the next day.

And I find out late last night that the corp is going to be leaving the alliance to try to end the war. They then are going to create a completely new corp and alliance to try to start over. From what I gather the alliance we are part of seems to have been a griefer alliance and that is what caused the war. I personally think that the enemy merc corp will continue to find our players and end up war dec'ing any new corp we form, but we shall see. Only time will tell and in the mean time I plan on making some iskies through trading. Hopefully there is enough lull in wars that I can transport my goods to market and get more capital to be able to really go head first at trading.

In the next post which may be later today or tomorrow I will tell you of some epic engagements I had down in Providence this past weekend. They were a blast.

Thanks for reading.

Dram Addiction

I now get why Dramiels are so expensive. They are AWESOME!!! I have been recently using my Dram that survived the big VFK battle down in Providence for a ton of non-stop fleet ops. This has been anywhere from small random roaming about the area directly attached to our deployment space down on the southern tip of Provi, to frig roams (brings back a lot of memories) and Nano shield gangs. Where I have managed to get in on just about every kill that we have gotten thanks to its speed. And wow is it a blast going 8km/s in the thing!

It also has a hell of a tank for such a small ship and I have been dual prop / shield buffer tank in mine since I bought it.Just yesterday as a matter of fact I was given a couple of opportunities to test the dps and tank out. The first engagement was me jumping in a quick fleet once I came online due to a Sleipner being on gate along with a Vaga in our "home" system. Well burnt back to gate and we only managed to kill the Vaga on the other side, which I missed out on the kill due to aggression. Ohh well. One of my corp mates and another alliance mate decided to form a fleet up and perhaps do a small roam.

We had me in my Dramiel, a cloaky probing Falcon and a Cynabal. I started off by checking one of the systems two away from "home" and while the Falcon pilot was doing some probing. When I loaded on the other side there was a Keres lying in wait. Well I immediately tackled him as he did me and I began to burn away and let my drones start to eat away from him while I used my afterburner due to the mwd being shutdown by his scram. Just then a friend of his in a Zealot lands and begins to try to catch up to us. We had already made some good range and the Keres was starting to dip into armor so he broke off. At which point I grabbed my drones and turned on the speed of the mwd to burn to a safe 300km off gate. Well I alerted my friends to the targets and I warped to and jumped back through the gate and then warped to a safe.

They didn't follow and by this time I had the Falcon in system with me so we decided to go back and see what else might have landed. When we jumped in both the Zealot and Keres were still there. We decided to take them on and we broke cloak and I immediately went after the Zealot and attempted to get in under his guns with a 500 orbit. He managed to get a couple of pot shots off on me which took me to ~20% shield but once in under his tracking his dps fell considerably. I disrupted him and put my drones on the Keres while working on the Zealot with my guns and the help of the Falcon who had jammed him and was trying to get point on the Keres. Well the Zealot was going deep into armor and was almost to structure when he all of a sudden warped off. The Keres being out of scram ranged also bugged off. I was puzzled as to what had happened until I realized that I had gotten jammed myself and lost point without realizing it. Well holy fail! Ohh well it had proven to me some of the power of the Dram.

Later on we put a Nano shield gang together and went roaming down the bottom pipe of Provi. We managed to get a Drake along the way before a large CVA gang was found to be jumping in from Mishaba so we jumped to the next system and burnt up from the gate and then warped to a ping. Well apparently someone was on the phone and didn't hear the order so we lost a Rapier on the gate. We managed to avoid this gang for a little bit but then found word that it was between us and our home system. The orders from the FC were for one of the Dram's to jump into the next system and get eyes. So I jumped in and found them jumping into system with their scout on gate. I quickly burnt away from the gate and alerted our fleet to their intentions. They warped around in the previous system and the enemy fleet actually came back through the system I was in and warped to the next system towards "home".

The FC then needed eyes in the next system and I volunteered again. This time when I loaded the entire fleet was right on top of me. I held my cloak long enough for my session timer to be up and I quickly tried to get to gate, but it was not to be. I was quickly locked up and alpha'd down before I could even hit the jump button. Looking back on the killmail there was a Huggin that seems to have webbed the shit outta me. No biggy, I later went 44 jumps round trip to put another one together, this time with double nano's, as I had no other ships down in Provi to play with.

That night I was part of a couple more roaming gangs a couple of which allowed me to get a few more kills on the day. But the damage of my addiction had already been started and I don't know if I can ever go back to another type of interceptor again. Only time will tell but I foresee a lot of fun in my future with this ship!

Encounters Of A Laggy Kind

This weekend I got up early to participate in a large fleet of what is called the "Thunder Cat" fleet. Which consists of Tengu's, Logistics and some other support ships. I can't fly the shield ships Scimitar or Tengu so I put a Dramiel together to join up in this fleet. The gathering was pretty good for NC.Dot, with us having 40-50 in fleet.

Just after form up the FC called for all super cap alts to log in and get ready to jump. It turns out that PL was in the process of breaking out their supers from VFK and we were slated to assist. We began by titan bridging over to a mid system and then jumped into the adjacent system to VFK. We landed on gate and the call to jump in was made.

When in system it took forever for the grid to load. I was still able to move and immediately gave the fleet a ping. As the gate was heavily bubbled. Everyone was burning out when a decent sized Maelstrom fleet landed and a small skirmish began. Just then we found that the fight was taking place at a pos and a warp in was made. We all warped to that point and more laggy grid issues occurred. At this point in time there were about 600 people in system.

This particular pos had the cyno jammer located at it. We began to kill off some of the BS fleet that was located on the pos that was in the middle of fighting PL's Abaddon fleet. We all had to log out and back in at one point to get grids to load but we were finally able to target the cyno jammer and the fleet began to take it down. Meanwhile we had our supers ready to jump in once it was taken down. Also on the field were Goons supers with a couple actually being outside of the enemy pos. Since I was in a quick ship I began to work on some of the smaller ships and killed a bubbler (Sabre) solo as well as locked down an Ishtar for a bomber to kill.

As the cyno jammer went down we jumped in our supers and it was then called out by the FC to point an Avatar Titan that had bounced out of the PoS. We began to attack this as best we could as lag was terrible at this point with almost 800 people in system. The titan managed to get back inside the pos so the entire fleet changed to an Aeon that was also outside the pos. This ship didn't make it in and we managed to take him down within a few minutes. I was lucky enough to get in on the killmail for that one.

We burned down the rest of the bubbles around us as well as killed off any dictors. The entire fleet then warped out to a planet where we had a couple more enemies that quickly were killed off. It was at that time that what we had come to do was successful and we all warped to the out gate. Where our supers happened to have warped as well. Upon jumping I noticed that there were more than 1000+ people in local at that point and lag was rediculous. I pressed jump and waited there for a couple of minutes, which in the meantime an angry Maelstrom enemy fleet landed a short distance from the few of us that were left there.

I finally jumped into the next system but lag was still bad, so I did a log out and back in. This fixed most of it and I came back into a warp to the out gate. After that I was able to burn out and catch back up to the fleet. Now I have been looking forward to something like this for a while and it was interesting to contend against the lag as well as the sheer numbers of ships on grid. I really enjoyed it and I think I will see a lot more of these large engagements due to the next move by NC.Dot, which is to deploy to Providence to assist White Noise in their assault on Against All Authorities. I know providence pretty well from us roaming there a lot back when we were part of a null sec alliance in Catch so this should be a good time.

They already had an epic fight, which didn't go so well considering the huge numbers that the enemy brought to the field. I will try to keep you up to date with the different fleets that I join as well as some of the political stuff that seems to be happening down in Provi.

Meanwhile my Indy alt has gained a new title over in the corp he is part of, that is the Mining Leader. This means I plan ops and lead them. As well as pay the participants and take care of the logistics for the ore that is mined. I held our first op and it was very successful. We had 7 people show up and we depleted one roid field. In future ops I hope to get a lot more people and bring in a ton more ore. One thing that I love doing is coming up with fair ways to compensate people and my first act was to come up with a pay schedule for the members that was fair and also left some money for the corp afterwards. I think with my research into the market and calculation of approximate m3 ore mined per minute I was able to come up with something that works well. People seemed pleased with the outcome and I was too.

One problem with the mining ops currently though is that some random mercenary corp war dec'd our little Indy corp. This puts our mining ops on hold and gives me some potential pvp ops with the alt as well. I still am not sure where the dec came from, it could just be that they wanted to pick on the Indy's or that someone paid for their services. We shall find out hopefully, but if not ohh well. More on that to come I guess.

Finally the corp I am in down in null sec also has a couple of war dec's currently and we went out last night in battle cruisers to find some trouble in Jita. I took a Harbinger that I found on contract in our staging system. On the way we ran into some random neuts that wanted help in killing a Nightmare that was on station. We figured it was clearly a trap and took the bait. On the warp their we kicked the neuts and found the NM aggressed on the station with two carriers along side of him. Which seemed to have been repping him. Well we quickly gtfo and moved on to Jita. Where we used some neutral alts to get us warp ins on some WT's that were sitting outside the station. There was a Machariel, Megathron, Hurricane, and a Dramiel. We attempted to bait them off of the station with someone but they didn't bite, with the exception of the Dramiel. We landed on the bait and were not able to catch the little bastard unfortunately. We then saw an Apoc Navy and a reg Apoc undock instead of the Mega and Machariel. We decided to warp to zero on them and attack the Apoc to get one kill out of it potentially. We landed and it started to burn down, but not before both myself and one of our Hurricanes were killed. At which time the Apoc began to get reps from neuts and the attempts became futile.

So we gathered our pride and headed back to home base. Where I contracted my ships to be moved to Provi and now I have to figure out if I want to do the 44 jump trek or if I would rather pod myself down to maybe Amarr and then grab a ceptor or bomber maybe to make a run for the staging system in Provi. I dunno yet but I will let you know what I end up doing in the next post.

Thanks for reading.

Light The Titan Bridge! ... WTF Is Going On???

So there was an op scheduled yesterday that I planned on joining. This was a nano fleet that was going to be going through a wormhole to find some kills. So I decided to put a Curse together quickly before the roam. So I stopped my running of the Havens in our home system that I had been doing to make some iskies. Which it took me a few trips to a station 6 jumps away before I had the perfect combination of both tank and gank for them on the Sacrilege, but eventually had it.

Ok, back to the fleet. I quickly jump clone over to the staging system and began to put the Curse together. Well just then over comms it was made know that a hostile fleet was roaming through our space. they announced that they wanted to quickly put together the Hellcat (Abbadon, T3 and Guardian) fleet. So since I didn't have an Abbadon down there I grabbed a Guardian off of a contract for retarded money. Well we ended up going back to the nano shield fleet and all warped to a Titan! Well this was my first time seeing one and it was impressive. The plan was to have our scout that was following the fleet in a Rapier to drop a cyno on them and we were going to Titan bridge in. Sitting there, ready to spam right click on the Titan and the cyno is finally called to be lit and the bridge is called to be opened.

Nothing...
Nothing....
Nothing.....

"WTF IS GOING ON??" I hear over comms. The FC begins to ask if the Titan pilot is on comms and is wondering what the F is going on. No one knows, he did mention in fleet who is alt was earlier. But no responce. Well soon someone notices that the pilot is actually in another room within the team speak server! All I could do was shake my head and think "Wow ... FAIL!". Suffice it to say the Rapier died to them.

Shortly after that we found out they were one jump from one of our cyno beacon systems. We jump to that beacon and warp to the next systems gate to find that they are landing on the other side. We quickly see them starting to jump in and start to kite away from the gate. Well they decidedly jump back through the gate.

We jump in our bigger ships and then the rest of the fleet. Only to find that they have started to burn away from the gate. We begin the chase and primaries begin to be called for. Almost immediately a Hurricane gets primaried on our side and goes down. Well it seems I was closest because next was myself. I quickly hit the shield broadcast and saw my shields go from 50% and back to 100% over and over. But it seemed like I was ok, so I burnt back towards our Scimitars so all of them could reach me. Meanwhile we started taking down the closest targets and were able to melt a Drake and a Lachesis. The enemy fleet warped off while we had two more Drakes tackled and we quickly took them down. We chased the other fleet on the way back towards our staging system and had a HIC ready and waiting for them. But they ended up making a change in course and safed up. "GF's" were had in local and we decided to go on our regularly scheduled roam.

This was through a wormhole that lead over into Esoteria and right into a nest of carebear's that were doing Sanctums and Havens by the dozens. In the system that we popped out into we were able to get a Paladin kill, that unfortunately was meta-4 fail fit. We hit quite a few other systems and came out with a hand full of kills which included a faction fit Nightmare worth 2 billion iskies! It was a great kill and is currently the highest ship kill for the week. They planned on going out again but I had things to do before ending the night up. So I missed a few more kills.

Ohh well it was a fun night and I look forward to using the Curse some more and can't wait to get to use the Guardian in a fleet. In the next post I will let you know the cool news about my Indy toon and what has happened with him.

Thanks for reading.

It's Official

Well I have been given the opportunity to participate in some of the bigger engagements in the game now as I was accepted to the corp that I applied to. So far they are a great bunch of guys, very helpful and they definitely have a good grasp on the game, so I look forward to flying with them. Since yesterday I was able to get an Interceptor down in our staging area and was lucky enough to join two roams already.

The first roam I joined up with as they were on the roam and they went through a WH that landed us in Syndicate space. Well we roamed around for a good 45minutes to an hour with no luck of finding anything. So we took the more direct route back which took us through 2 jumps of Gallente hisec space. I am not liked by the Gallente NPC's, so I was lucky enough to be in a fast ship and made it through easily, as did the others that had security issues.

Well as we were making our way through low sec back into the safety of null sec we found that someone was following us. Well we waited for them at an "In" gate in which we left a rear scout to let us know what was coming. Well even though he saw the scout he jumped into us anyway. This poor Drake had no chance, although he did fire a couple of shots at me he melted pretty quickly. This turned out to be our only kill on the roam but at least we got one.

Later another roam popped up that needed people and once again I took the ceptor out. This time I was the forward scout for the main fleet. We had about 40 strong mixed with nano'd cruisers through battleships, which included a couple Machariels. The trip to our destination was fairly uneventful. We got into the system right before VFK where we found a dozen or so orange tags but no real numbers of Goons. So we sat on the gate and setup our strategy. Meanwhile we had a scout inside VFK on the gate and he was letting us know that massive amounts of people we landing. He counted approximately 40 Maelstroms and fair number of smaller support ships. At this time we found that there were more targets in YAO so we quickly got into that system. Warping off before the alpha fleet jumped in on us.

Once in YAO we quickly sat off of a gate with our strategy ready to go. Soon the Goons entered system and the population spiked to well over 150. Now completely outnumbered the ceptors were ordered to scout the gates. I went to the first one to find them warping off to another. I followed and landed 100km from the gate. Bubbles were being put up all over the gate and there were about 60-70 at zero on the gate. I immediately reported back and aligned to the star and started to MWD off. A host of smaller ships broke off from the main enemy fleet and began to burn out towards me. I was able to keep range on most of them and when one got to within 70km I decided I would change directions and keep eyes on the fleet as long as I could. This was my downfall, as just then a Dramiel warped to the Stilletto that was now 60K away and burnt to to me in a blink of an eye at 8km/s+ and tackled me. It wasn't long until a handful of people we on me and I went down. The rest of the fleet was beginning to get chased around and we suffered about 8-10 losses out of the engagement.

Ohh well I look forward to be able to fly the Malediction more often in more fleets. I have also brought down some Vengeances, Zealots and a Sacrilege that I will be using to do ratting in the area. The tank on the thing is insane and I really like what they have done with the model now, so I am looking forward to flying it and perhaps taking on some Havens and joining corp mates in Sanctums as well.

Meanwhile in the wormhole with my mim alt I was able to get into the wormhole this past weekend. And was able to run a site with my new corp mates. We had a whopping 15 ships in our fleet and melted the shit out of the sleepers. I look forward to some pvp and more sites with my new friends there as well in the near future. I am still on par to train for the Rapier and should be working on those skills by tomorrow.

My Indy toon has been doing well, joining missioning and mining fleets to make some iskies as well. Recently a division of our corp has found a wormhole and put up a PoS in it. I have not moved my toon in as he is not ready for wormholes and one toon in is enough for me at the moment. I will continue to do my manufacturing and mining in hisec thank you very much. Speaking of which the alliance I am in has a PoS in hisec for doing research and I plan to use this. They may be shutting it down as some of the people that upkeep it are in the wormhole but I have asked that I be able to keep it fueled in order to continue to run my BPO's through. We shall see what happens with that.

More fun to come, thanks for reading.

Changes, Changes and More Changes

A status update on my application is that the CEO of the corp that I have applied to in NC.Dot has been away so there has not been any movement on my app as this time. So I have been bored with my main and have recently taken to trolling low sec in a Vengeance looking for targets at the belts. I recently found nothing so I decided I would go somewhere that I know I would find a fight, top belt in Amamake.

Well as soon as I landed there was a Jaguar 400km off and a Thrasher about 2k off from me. Well I wanted a fight so I quickly locked up and tackled the Thrasher. I knew this would be a hard fight to win but decided to overheat and give it my best shot. One thing I did wrong was to get 7.5k away in my orbit, where instead I should have gotten under 500m from him to assist in keeping his tracking off and would have led to having been able to last longer. Basically while I ate away at his shield buffer he was able to break my tank and eventually I popped. Now I posted a "gf" in local and warped my pod away. Later on I found that I was on the killmail for the Thrasher as it looks like the Jaguar warped in and finished him off. So it was win-win for me, I got my pvp fix and got a kill out of it.

Meanwhile back on the industrial character I found a new corp that is a larger and more active corp. Within a few hours of joining them I was able to join both a missioning op (as the salvager) and a mining op. One thing that I am disappointed with is that there are less 5% and 10% asteroids in the system that we live at but I have a lot more people to chat with and do things with. Which is part of why I play the game so this should be a lot of fun at this point. I also happened to have dragged along one of the other corp mates from the first Indy corp into this new one as well. It kinda sucks for the guy that was trying to build his numbers but I needed something more active now, not later on. This corp is established and has dedicated goals which were things I was looking for.

I also have been toying with the idea of doing some hisec exploration with the Navy Omen on my Indy toon or I may put together a Sacrilege with my main to do them. I am still up in the air on what I will do and which toon to do it with. It really depends on if I get accepted to the null sec corp as to which I do I think at this point. I definitely want to play with exploration a little to try to add more money to the playing game fund.

Also my wife gave me permission to pay for an account recently. So I have decided to activate my third account, the Mimintar character. And have decided to add her to the wormhole corp that we merged the old corp with (which by the way provided more than 650m isk of dividends recently to its share holders). I have gotten the scanning skills taken care of on this toon thanks to the free skill points that we were awarded a while back. I also have a few support skills to train to be able to fit the Maelstrom shield buffer fit I plan to fly in the C6 wormhole. I also have fit out a scanning Probe ship and a rupture for pvp. Now this toon was wide open for skills and I have asked the CEO of the new wh corp about what would work best to fit into their needs. What I have come up with for a path is to train for a Rapier > Broadsword > Scimitar > Loki, in that order with full T2 gun skills mixed in as well. The Rapier looks like a very fun ship to fly and I hope it turns out to be as fun as the Pilgrim has been for me. We shall see.

So while I await possibly more changes to come I think I am getting myself setup to make some iskies in the C6 and with the Indy toon, which I have a pretty good base of sales already with the markets that I am in. I will continue to expand on those markets and I also have learned that the alliance for this new Indy corp has a hisec pos that I might be able to use for research on my blueprints. If so I have just been able to make even more money with research of ME and PE on the blueprint originals so that I can sell BPC's as well as keep my costs much lower on making the items themselves from the minerals that I mine. Although I am starting to think it may be better to just sell the raw materials to the corp and keep my industry foot print on a small scale of just salvaging as well as mining. As salvaging recently has raked in over 50m in just one days work and that was splitting the loot with someone.  Hell I may justt make salvaging into a small business in the game as well. This combined with the possible money from the wormhole could very well pay for my pvp fix on my main as well as pay for the account itself. That is the end hope that I have and I look forward to trying to make this a reality.

Either way I really hope my app is accepted as I am really looking forward to being in on some bigger gangs and engagements as Deklein is continually being sieged by NC.Dot and friends. The future is promising and I will let you know as I have more and more run ins with both my pvp stuff as well as the newer parts of Eve that I am exploring.

Thanks once again for reading.

While The Cats Away All Hell Breaks Loose

Well I have been on vacation for the last week and a half and wow has a lot of stuff has changed. To start my Indy character is now into a Retriever and man what a difference in the amount of Ore that I can mine. It also seems that the alliance that the Indy corp that I am part of seems to have gone off the deep end and has war dec'd another alliance for some real life reasons. What this all means is that I get to watch local and make sure I don't lose my Indy ships while trying to mine up some Ore.

Ohh well, soon I will have T2  strip miners and then I will be taking a break from skilling up this character. Which brings me to the next portion of this post and that is that my long time combat / wormhole corporation will be closing its doors very soon. The decision was made to pull everyone out of the wormhole due to lack of activity and the fact one of the more active players will be gone for a couple of months. And the leadership basically has decided to liquidate all of the assets in the corp and potentially split it up between the active members. The decision on what will be done with the end isk is still being decided upon and well I was recently provided a nice token of gratitude from the corp in the form of two skill books, Captial Ships and Caldari Carrier!! I was dumbfounded with the generosity of the directors that unanimously was to gift the books to me from the corps assets. I really have to say that I appreciate the gifts and couldn't say "Thank you" enough to them. Basically we are talking about 800+ million isk worth of gift here and I really appreciated these as it saves me a ton of time of saving up.

With that let's discuss some options. Basically they came up with two options for everyone. One they made a deal with one of the alts corps from their NC.Dot corp mates down in null sec that has a wormhole corp that will accept any members of us that applied. The other option was to be able to apply to that NC.Dot corp that requires that you have internal references which I am lucky enough to have my two corp mates that have alts in the corp. This is a huge opportunity for me in my opinion. For one this certainly would get me going on my carrier skills to be able to participate in their capital ops. This also would allow me to do something that I have been wanting to be part of which is large scale warfare. So I have decided that this is the route that I will be taking initially. I at least want to apply and see where it goes from there. This may prove to be a challenge given the fact that they have a 40m skill point minimum and I am at about half of that. But they do have a stipulation that this might be able to be overlooked given the internal references that are used. So we shall see how my app goes over once my friends have spoken with the CEO of the corp.

I am really excited about this chance and I hope to be able to get accepted so that I can have some mad PvP fun in the large fleets that NC.Dot has been known to field. This means I will also be training for a heavy interedictor as well so that I have a chance to get in on some of the cap fleets that require the HIC's, something I was on the fence about but really wanted to do as well.

So this means that my blog may get very busy very quickly. Now I still have the other wormhole corp to fall back on as well and I would expect more activity given the size of that corp too. I have some good things going for me they will just be in different spots within the game and I look forward to the future right now.

One final thing I have started to work on is the amount of Ore that I need to mine in order to have a Chimera built by the time I can actually fly one correctly, meaning Fighters, energy skills and shield skills. I actually was given the below link to calculate the needs:

http://eve.smith-net.org.uk/index.php?c=cap

I look forward to continuing to offset my costs by using my friends cap parts BPO's and buying their BPC's that they have left so that I can get one built. However I may just continue to use the ore to continue to build the items that I currently have a market for. Will have to crunch the numbers and see how things look. I will let you know what I figure out as I go.

Thanks again for reading and a lot more to come.

Selling Shiz And Making The Iskies

Ok so I made my first sales with some of the stuff I have been making from the mining I have been trying out. I made a good 6mil in sales out of not too much work. So this doesn't seem  like a lot but I am really excited at this because it proves I can make decent isk with the little work it will take once I have better mining, refining and manufacturing skills. Which by the way I have narrowed down to a 27 day plan that will make me fairly efficient at making some smaller stuff. If I want to really get into industry then I will have laid the ground work for later on to be able to invent off of BPO's and to make T2 equipment. I have realized that I miss training up my main for combat skills and want to get back into that within a reasonable amount of time and I think 1.5 months of training on the Indy character will get my feet wet enough that I can supplement some of my income.

Speaking of income, I did my first ever mining op with Orca support yesterday. It was a small op and I suggested it once we had 5 people logged in. I brought out my Arbi and the m3 that it produced was determined to be that of about 1/4 a T1 decently skills Retriever so I made a little bit of income off of the op. But it was cool to be able to chit chat with my corp mates and learn a little about them, which is part of the reason I play the game in the first place which is the people. I enjoy doing things as a team and we certainly put a dent in the asteroid belt and almost cleaned it out before finally calling it quits.

While doing this op I found that it gave me time to think about my manufacturing and where I wanted to be with the char. So I came up with the training plan that will take the 27 days to complete to get me back to training the main. This also gave me time to fiddle away my money on SOMER Blink. A neat little in game isk sink that is fun to kill time with. Basically you buy tickets against ships, modules and skill books that cost isk that you have in an account. Then a random winner is selected and then has the option of taking the ship, an isk buy out or putting it back into your account with a small % bonus. Well I started out with 10m in my account and was doing small blinks. I eventually got to over 105m isk and started larger blinks. At some point I accidentally chose a higher bid with low funds and tapped out my account. Ohh well all I really lost was the 10m and some winnings on top of that. I will play some more to pass the time I am sure.

If this Indy thing works out and I can supplement my income well enough I should be able to reactivate my third account and start doing lvl 4's with that character again. But that is probably not for another month or so to get myself established in a couple of markets around the universe.

Back in the wormhole we did a couple more CA's to make some iskies and unfortunately we have had holes that have been inactive recently. Ohh well I have plans to start doing some low sec and null sec roaming with Vengeances as I have read a blog that someone does well with them in and takes on bigger ships to boot. But that will be something in the future there as well. At this point we still have plans on staying in the wormhole for at least another month and then may pull out due to one of our main Basi pilots leaving the wormhole due to being offline for a month or more. We shall see how things work out there but until that time I will continue to hunt targets down and make the iskies in CA's with my friends and corp mates.

Until next time! Thanks for reading.

Ohh You Sneaky Bastards

Meanwhile back in the wormhole on my main we had a very productive weekend both isk wise and pvp. First we had a very active cave hole that I jumped in with one of my corp mates who was in an Arazu. I warped to the location of the other corps PoS and found quite a few of actives there, including multiple T3's and BC's. We decided it was best to leave the bees nest alone and went back to whome and watched the hole. Well soon a cloaky Tengu entered into our hole and cloaked up. Apparently they also had someone watching the other side of the hole because we started talking in local and they knew our ship types. Well we started seeing battleships jumping in and then out again. Figuring they were closing the hole we just trolled them in local and they finally confirmed that they were closing it due to them planning on running sites and us being cloaky. Soon an Orca jumped in and they gave "our scout" on the other side time to jump back through. Well we laughed at this and waited them out until they finally closed the hole. Too bad we didn't have numbers and combat ships to contend with them as that would have been a fun engagement. Maybe next time.

The next night we actually got a fair number of people online and had 11 CA's in whome! So after scouting the cave we found no actives so we decided to do the CA's and ended up doing them all. Overall from the day I probably made close to 130mil isk in a short period of time. So it was a good day for the corp and the members.

Later that night I was on my alt mining and one of my wh corp mates decided he wanted to find some targets and closed the cave hole. Well he found some actives so I switched over to the main and jumped in with him into the cave. At the time we had 3 people on, with a 4'th on comms. When I got to their PoS we found two Drakes and a Cynabal there. They were all active it looked like and we decided to wait it out as the Cynabal would be trouble for cloaky ships. We waited a fair amount of time and just then the Cynabal and his obvious alt in a Buzzard logged off. At which time a 3'rd toon landed in another Drake. Well we watched as two Drakes warped off to what looked to be a wormhole location. The third Drake pilot changed into a catalyst and also warped that direction. We took this as our chance to ambush them. So we probed the hole down quickly and got the cloaky ships in position with a Hyperion on the other side of the cave hole in whome. Soon the catalyst pilot came back through and logged off. Leaving just two Drakes alone in the adjacent wormhole.

We devised a plan to have the Arazu pilot decloak and tackle one, in hopes that it would draw the Drakes away from the wormhole with his sensor damps so that we could then hopefully ambush them both and get a couple of kills out of it. Well one Drake pilot came back and warped away. During which time the Arazu had decloaked but was not able to get tackle. We thought our plan had been foiled with the Arazu being seen but it turned out that the pilot had not noticed him. Instead he switched to a salvaging ship and went back in the wormhole in his Cormorant. So we waited while they were salvaging, but nothing happened and no new wrecks were being created. So our cloaky Tengu decided to use combat scanners to scare them into coming back to the wormhole. This also had no affect, so he just scanned them down instead. He warped in and landed on the Drake, at which time he took point. I jumped in second and warped to him as he may not have been able to tank the Drakes dps. I landed and took point as well and began to neut and web the prey. Meanwhile the other pilot had gotten away in the Cormorant.

We began our onslaught with just the two of us to start, while the other two made their way into the wormhole. The Drake quickly realized that I was neuting him and I am sure he figured I had less tank then the Tengu because he launched his two drones and began to attack me. Well knowing how well my Pilgrim tanked the last engagement with it I held steady and continued to bash him with my neuts and drones. We even killed off his drones. He managed to get me to about 80% armor by the time our friends arrived while he was into ~20% shield. It was not long after the Hyperion and Arazu landed that he started going down quickly. Well before the ship blew up the pilot ejected and warped off.  We finished the Drake quickly, the others went off in pursuit of the capsule. They got to the wormhole, jumped through and realized that he had not jumped through. Just then a Heron landed on the hole. They locked him up and he seemed to not know which direction to go at that point and tried turning back around. Well that spelled his demise and his ship was soon space dust. Now before it went down the Arazu pilot dropped point and was ready to tackle the pod. He got it so they were able to get another two kills.

Meanwhile I stayed back in the wormhole and gathered my corp mates drones that he had left. Soon the other pilot that was now in a pod and seemed to be stuck in the C3 wormhole with me logged off. Now this is where it becomes funny as he clearly didn't understand that your character stays logged in 15 minutes after getting aggression. So we got out the combat probes and scanned him down. We all got point on his pod and finished him off with the Hype. We sent him an evemail with the killboard kill as well as the explanation of the mechanics so he knows in the future.

So over all I made some good iskies, got to test the Pilgrim's tank out once again (ohh by the way I was top dmg over the Tengu) and had some good fun being sneaky in the wormhole. One thing I know is that you always have to be on the look out in wormholes and scanning constantly really is a priority as the second Drake pilot should have figured out.

Alright, until next time! Thanks again for reading.

The Beginnings Of A Carebear

So I have been doing a lot of stuff in the game recently. I will start off with my alt in this post and post the antics of my wormhole corp and main in another post later on. To start I have joined an Industrial corporation with which I plan on making some salary by participating in their ops. I have also started to do some mining. Right now because of my skill set I am using an Arbitrator and mining drones + meta mining drills. I am yielding about 250m3/min. I have discovered with some drone interfacing skills and miner II drones I will be able to yield 2-2.5 times that in the Arbi, so I am working towards that right now skills wise. I then will get into a Retriever to have a bigger cargo bay along with similar yield with strip miner I's and slightly better with T2 strip miners.

I have also decided on a market to start targetting which means I have a skill plan in place to get into inventing off of a T1 blueprint and create T2 blueprint copies so that I can make the items off of those. I also remembered that I had a bunch of T1 blueprint copies for T1 items that I have started making. Which speaking of which takes a lot of Tritanium. Which means I either need to buy it or I need to mine it. And since I had some cycles from not being in the wormhole due to low activity (will keep this for another post) I decided to do the mining.

Now because the Arbi only has 1.3km3 cargo hold with 4 expanders I have been using a jet can to keep the ore in. This has been working well and I wait until it is up to 10km3 and then I grab my hauler to move the ore to station. Well last night I was mining, and a Vigil landed on grid. Well he warped off again and soon he came back. Now I am fairly new to mining and cans and this is what ultimately got me into trouble.

What he did the next time was that he created his own can, then transferred my ore to his, taking ownership or what is called "can flipping". Now I put out combat drones and soon he flew away. So I figured I had a few seconds to grab some of my own ore and make it back to station. Well that was not true because his corpmate soon decloaked in a Loki and blew me up. This was a valuable lesson and I plan to never have this problem in the future. So in the meantime I went out and built me a new mining ship. I came back to system and saw that a couple of his corp members were still in system, but not the one that blew me up. By this time my timer had run out and I decided to grab some giant secure containers and take them out into space at a belt. Well when I got there I saw that the can was still there along with my wreck.

In the wreck was the ore I grabbed so I scooped this up. I also decided I would get the ore in the can back as well. So what I did was align to station, grab the loots and warp away right away. I then docked with my ore, so I was at least able to make up some of my time. So in the future I will be using the secure containers instead to mine into, even though that will be a pain I think it will be safer and avoid situations such as what happened.

I look forward to this new side to eve and plan on making at least a small income from the things I make in order to supplement my income from the worm hole. More to come later on.

Thanks for reading.

Old Friends And Wormholes

Well this great big world of Eve is not always so big it seems. I say this now after what happened last night. Once logged in I found out that we had a low sec route. Now keep in mind yesterday was a big patch that added walking in stations to the game. Now I had already seen this on the test realm so I was not that excited about it. Given that I decided to go hunting for some targets. So I began to do some warping around and scanning in the wormholes that lead up to the low sec.

I found nothing in the holes and proceeded to go out into the low sec. When I did my dscan there I found some scanner probes and a Ibis on scan. Soon there were other ships and I found that there were about 10 people in system over all. I decided to stalk around the belts looking for ratters. I even went a few systems over looking for people. I found a few mission runners along with some carriers but nothing that was killable or findable with just core scan probes. So back to the low sec that was our exit I went.

Well when I got to the low sec system that held the exit hole I found that there were a couple of Tengu's on scan (both with the owners name in the name of the ship, a classic nub move) and some combat scanners showing up on scan. Well I hung around the exit hole for a little while in hopes one of the Tengu's would find the hole and come to investigate. I did notice that there were some mission wrecks on scan as well but thought nothing of it at the time. I noticed some other ships and people coming in and out of the system, and now that I think of it I did happen to see a Purifier, a Cruor and a couple of carriers. Well the two Tengu's disappeared off scan but one went off scan while I was away from the hole. I decided to make a run back through the route on a whim just to see if a Tengu had ventured into the hole.

When I got in the hole I found 4 core scanner probes on scan. This perked my adrenaline and I immediately decided to keep a look out for anything. Well the probes didn't move for quite some time. So I decided I would take a run through the route back to our home hole. I jumped out of the C3 that the low sec attached to into the adjacent C4. Dscan showed a Purifier on scan, so I held my cloak. Well wouldn't you know it, the ship landed on the hole I was at. I quickly decloaked from the jump and tried to target him. "Target is invulnerable" was what I got. Well I assumed this meant he had jumped through the hole so I quickly jumped through, decloaked and deployed drones in an attempt to decloak him. I orbited for a few minutes and figured he had warped off or actually cloaked up on the other side of the hole. So I waited and waited some more. Nothing. I had missed my opportunity. I decided to head back to our home hole and look around.

I took a short break and was still hungry for a kill. So I went back out through the holes towards the low sec. Just as I was about to jump out into the low sec I received a conversation invite from someone. Curious and thinking it was the cloaked up Purifier pilot I accepted. Well it was him. We had a good chat about how I almost caught him and that he had left his probes in space in the other wormhole. He explained that he was now stuck and assumed I was lying in wait for him. Well I was, sort of. I actually wanted some bigger fish out in low sec but I decided the convo was fun as well at the time. We continued to chat and I was looking over his corp and his information. Well what do you know it was a corp that was part of Amarr Faction Warfare, something I used to be part of. So I brought this up and explained that some of my old corp mates had actually joined his corp at one point. I couldn't remember all that had joined but rattled off a name or two.

Now this is when I decided I would just help him out and explained I could give him the exit hole if he wanted. Naturally he assumed I was after a kill mail and well I was. But I was actually planning on letting him go since he was in FW and I knew some people in his corp. Well as we are talking one of my old FW corps CEO's pipes up in their old public chat asking if I was hunting. I thought this was curious so I checked his corp, well holy shit he was part of the same corp as the mysterious Purifier pilot. Now how funny was this situation. It turns out that he was on his way to the wormhole in an Ishtar to scare off the mean old hunter (me). Hah! What a small world we fly in! Hell I even fleeted him and gave him the hole entrance.

Well come additional fun conversation continued on and eventually we decided to blue one another on a temp basis for the night given my history with the one pilot. So I asked that the alliance/corp blue their corp and it was granted. Luckily because one of my other corpmates that had been drinking and was quite drunk jumped on comms and logged in at that time. He decided it would be a good idea to come back to the wormhole and jumped into the C3. I hear over comms "OHH SHIT AN ISHTAR!!!", well the Ishtar was sitting on the hole. In his drunken stupor he would have been destroyed easily. Well the blue status had gone through and he was able to continue on about his merry drunken way. The rest of the night was fairly quiet at that point and soon I said my goodbyes and logged.

So yeah, what a small world Eve really is. In the next post I think I will speak more on my toon skill ADHD! I just can't keep with my skill path for some reason as there are so many fun things to fly in Eve. At least this time I am just going to add some stuff to the middle of my plan and keep the rest of it the same I think. But I will discuss that next time.

Thanks again for reading.

Missed Proteus Opportunities

I log in the other night and one of my corp mates had just finished scanning down a low sec route. So I decided to go out and camp the gates in the Pilgrim in case I had a chance to snag something easy and then warp off. I was only in system for about 20 minutes when an Iteron IV came through (an industrial hauler) and I missed it because I was busy chatting, lol. Ohh well.

I continued to move around and soon had a Harbinger on scan. It had to be at a PoS or one of the belts so I started looking around. Just then my corp mate who was sitting on the inside of the low sec worm hole blurted out on comms that he had a Buzzard and Proteus on scan with probes being dropped. There were two sets of probes, core and combat. The core probes were near the hole he was sitting on so we decided to set a trap. I warped to the low sec side of the worm hole and sat there uncloaked.

It wasn't long before the Proteus landed on the hole and was about to jump. Now this is where we made a big mistake in that we were going to engage him on the low sec side. So he jumped through and decloaked right away. He actually aggressed me and began to hammer at my shields and armor. My corp mate followed him through the hole and started locking him up. Meanwhile I began to neut, tracking disrupt, web and scram him all the while tanking his damage to the point that I was half in armor. Soon we started to widdle his shield down and I assume I must have capped him out because he stopped firing.

All of a sudden he jumped through the hole. I pulled drones and jumped through after him. I decloaked quickly and saw him. I began to approach him and then he cloaked back up!!! Well I used my Interceptor trick of hitting CTRL-ALT-Space to go to max speed in an attempt to decloak him but he was gone. Well damn we lost our chance at a Proteus kill. We continued to stalk the holes in that worm hole but we did not know what kind of backup he may have on the other side of the C5 hole that was open. So after another 30 minutes of frustrated waiting we decided to call it a night.

Now in hind sight I realized that what we should have done is that I should have aggressed him on the low sec side and then jumped through the hole. Then re-engage him on the inside of the hole. What this would have done is given him a 3 minute timer that would have prevented him from being able to jump through the hole again while we killed him. So lesson learned but it was still adrenaline filled and fun. Ohh well next time we will have the Proteus on our kill board!

In the meantime we have been running CA's as well as Ladars in our home hole and the cave to make some "OK" money. So what I have decided to do is to pause training on my main for a bit and started leveling up one of my other alts on the account in skills to run lvl 1-3's. I have also decided to continue skilling him up to be able to create capital parts in industrial skills.

The reason behind this is three fold. Firstly this gives me something to do outside of the C4 wormhole that I can do solo when people are not online and when I can't stand doing a gas site. Next it allows me to get into something new in the game to make a little money with the production. I also am toying with the idea of my own PoS for production or joining one of my corp mates alts corp that is all industrialists. This also gives me a cheaper way of getting the capital parts for my Chimera once I can fly it properly on my main. Which is a ways away so that is why I am not worried about taking the small break in training right now.

As I learn more about this I will keep you informed to the information that I find along the way. For instance there is a decent guide for science and industry found here. I am kinda excited to get into this other part of Eve as it will be a new experience.

Thanks for reading.

Orca's And My First 'Cry' Pilgrim Loss

So my corp seems to have a special place in their blood lust heart for Orca's. Two nights ago we are in the cave and there are quite a few active industrialists. We knew they were industrialists from their bios and the fact that they named their PoS's such that you could tell they were manufacturing. We also saw them out with retrievers and the likes. Well one of our corpies saw that they left the hole with an Orca. So once again we went on the hunt and camped the hole. For hours and hours we waited. Well we finally had one of our Tengu pilots that jumped in get contacted by one of the corps that was part of the alliance in the hole. They wanted us to leave with our combat ships or they would close the hole. Well that is just what we wanted them to try so that we could jump them. See my corpy decided to play dumb and explain that he was just a miner and didn't know what his friends were up to. Well they didn't bite and so ended a long night of camping for no Orca kill this time around.

The next day dawns. I log in to an empty corp and alliance chat all alone in the wormhole. Which I am pretty comfortable on my own now with. So I decide that I have some time and start to probe down the holes for a route. I find our static hole in my second signature, which is fairly quick considering the number of sites we have in whome. I jump into the Cave and find no one on scan. I start looking for the next static and find it on the first try. I am thinking this is awesome, will have a route in no time. So I jump into the next hole, which happens to be another C4. In here there is two ships on scan and 1 appears to be active. So I find a safe spot and start scanning. Now let me remind you that I am doing this in my combat ship, the Pilgrim, since I do not have a scanner ship in the hole yet. Well in this C4 I find the next static, a C5 in two or three sigs. I am thinking this is great as I never have this kind of scanning luck. So I jump into the next hole and find it has a C5 static. I can't find any ships on scan so I probe the hole down. Now I start to think to myself that this route is going to suck ass so I decide I will fly back to whome and wait for people to come online so that we can close the Cave hole and start again.

So I jump back into the C4 between the C5 and our Cave. Check scan and see nothing. I warp to the Cave hole and am oblivious to what is about to happen. As I am warping I scan again as I get closer and see a Phobos on scan! It doesn't dawn on me that this thing could be on the hole. Well "Son of a Bitch" it was with a bubble up. I land in the bubble cloaked about 20k from the Phobos. When I later thought about my next moves I want to kick myself as I make some mistakes that I will learn from in future instances. My next move is to immediately fly towards the closest point in the bubble to get out of it, which is straight away from the Phobos and the hole that now sits ~37km from me. In hind sight I should have went straight up, down, left or right and I will tell you why next. Because not 10 seconds later a Tengu lands 1700m from me and uncloaks both of us. Had I went in a different direction I would probably have been less likely to have been decloaked. 10 more seconds goes by and the Tengu and Phobos begin to lock me, another Tengu decloaks and starts towards me.

Now I needed to make a decision, either to try to make a run for it or make for the hole. Given what I was up against I decided to try to run for it. This was another mistake as I later thought about what else I could have done. What I did do was the following, I immediately hit my AB and tried to get out of the bubble. Well one of the Tengu's began to warp disrupt me, so I dropped EC-600 ECM drones and waited. At the same time I turned on my damage control and began to watch my shields slowly disappear. Now my Pilgrim is an active armor tank fit with a complex adaptive nano and good resists. So I was tanking the damage "OK", when I finally got a jam with my drones off on the Tengu that was scramming me. Just then the other Tengu began to warp disrupt me as well but he had come in close. So I began to neut him out which happened rather quickly. Now at this time there was a pivotal moment in the fight where I had neuted out the one Tengu, had jams on the other and had just gotten near the edge of the bubble. I began trying to warp off and just then the Phobos microwarp drived closer and rebubbled me. So I was stuck. Now at this point I looked at the distance to the hole and realized I would have been able to make it there since I was now almost 100km off. I decided then to try something different and brought out the dps hammerheads. I put them on the Phobos and continued to tank the dmg with my armor slowly getting lower and lower.

 I made the decision to try to run because I thought my odds at getting to the hole were low given the 3 on 1 terms of engagement. Had I realized that I could tank most of the damage and last almost 6+ minutes I would have done things differently. First I could have realized that these were cloaky Tengu's and they would have had lower dps than a normal combat Tengu. So I think what I should have done is to went on the offensive and approached one of the Tengus. I could have then webbed, scrammed and neuted him out as well as dropped dps drones to go on the attack. I know with the neuts I would have had a good chance at breaking his tank if he was either active or buffered. A passive tank would have been both unique and harder to kill and I don't think I would have run into the passive cloaky Tengu type. I also could have put my tracking disruptor on the Phobos to minimize some of his dmg, even though it was a 1/4 of that of the Tengus it still would have upped my ability to survive and even brought him in close enough to have been able split neuts onto him and possibly neut him out as well.

Now this is all hypothetical but I think I could have at least taken one of the Tengu's out with me and possibly even survived long enough to have gotten to the hole, killed or come close to killing a Tengu and maybe even gotten away. The latter part I am pretty sure would not have happened but at least I would have given a good fight. Which I think I proved a lot harder to take down then they bargained for but what can you do. Except learn from the experience. I definitely plan on testing my 1 on 1 theory with my corp mates cloaky Tengu to see if I would be able to take it out and still tank the dmg to survive long enough.

So as much as it sucked losing a 200mil ship, ohh and getting podded losing 50mil in implants, I learned a lot about how strong the Pilgrim is and have a good idea of what to do in any future instances like that. Next time I hope to have more even odds and be ready to go on the attack but will definitely have more confidence in what is becoming one of my favorite ships for both looks and ability.

Later that night my corp crushed the Cave hole due to my loss and found a new route, which they were able to camp and kill a Raven that was trying to crush a C3 hole in the Cave. The dirty bastards didn't scan the last hole out so that I could get there lol. While they were doing that I decided to scan for wormholes in Amarr of all places. Hell I found one and jumped in and sitting right on the hole was a Buzzard. I uncloaked and locked him up, was even able to launch drones and send them after him before he realized what was happening but alas he jumped out. I camped the hole for a bit, even saw a Tengu log in on scan and thought I would get my 1 v 1 since he disappeared off scan and clearly was a cloaky coming to the hole to check if I was still there. Just then my corp found the low sec hole so I decided to jump out get back into whome. Which is where I am now in a shiny new Pilgrim.

Thank you all for reading and more tales to come!

Death Of An Orca

So if I were to ask you how long you would wait for an Orca kill, what would be your answer? 20 minutes? 30? an hour? Well my corp and I seem to be willing to wait hours lol. I will start with some other information before getting into the Orca kill. Ohh hell why not just get into it.

So while working on a route we ran into some active players that were trying to close one of the holes. So we decided to go back and close the cave hole in our home system with our own Orca. Well it just so happens that we were able to close the hole out. While starting to scan for a new route we decided to check the K C5 hole that had also spawned in our home hole.  One of my corp mates went into the C5 in his cloaky Arazu. He happened to find an Orca and a Obelisk on scan at a POS. The Obelisk pilot jumped in a Buzzard and shortly after both of the ships warped away and disappeared.

This gave us an opportunity to get my Pilgrim in the hole and a couple other ships (a Hyperion and a Tengu) on our side of the C5 hole ready to jump in. Soon the Buzzard came back in and it gave the Arazu pilot, who had combat scanner probes out, time to find a location on the K hole within their C5. So the Arazu and myself sat cloaked off the hole for about an hour waiting. Just then the entire game cluster went offline. We both started warping to a far away planet before the drop to see if we could be out of scan range of the Buzzard pilot when we came back online. Well it seems to have worked because he simply sat in his POS after the 25 minutes of downtime going about his onlining of modules business. We even had one time where I became uncloaked because I got close to the signature of the hole but not the hole itself. This is an invisible area in space that I was not aware of until now. So I won't be orbiting the hole at 7.5k anytime soon again.

So we sat in waiting, and waited and waited another 30 or so minutes, with no signs of the Orca. So at that time I had to walk my dog. I took the pup for a decent walk around the neighborhood that took about 20 minutes. When I got back I found that my friends had tackled the Orca pilot on the hole and he jumped back through, locking him from jumping through another hole for 3 minutes. His shields were going down quickly and I was warping my ass off to get in on the kill. Well I managed to get there just as they had him at ~10% structure and got a scram on him to get in on the kill. I also was able to get in on the pod death as well. It seems he was offering in local a ransom of 100mil isk. Turns out the ship was worth 800mil since he had about 200m in isotopes in it. This brought our kill board positive for the week so it was a good kill for us.

I noticed on the kill board that a couple more industrials were taken down by one of my other corp mates a little later on. All in all this was a good pvp day for us and goes to show that it pays to wait when hunting, lol.

As for the other information this weekend was our first op for sites. It seems that the C4 sites are a lot easier than we anticipated and we killed them quite quickly. Well I have found that even though the Legion has a bonus to optimal range the pulse lasers were not cutting it in the site due to the range at which most of the BS's and BC's stayed. So I have started training for T2 beams which will take a day for me to complete. What really sucks is that this cuts about 130+ dps off my ship making it "OK" for running sites. Either way I will still be contributing and it is the best option I have right now for a C4, unless I want to go back to a Raven or CNR. Which we are trying to stick with all T3's to keep the hole from being disturbed during our farming runs. I will have level V offensive systems in the next 4 days and will work on surgical strike as well to boost my dps on the ship. I should be able to make up another 75 dps or more with some skill boosts. I will let you know how things look as I progress my skills but I at least bring some pain when dps'ing and I have a decent tank. Not too mention the ship is pretty cool looking and I still have the pulses in case of a pvp need.

Ohh well as I have more ops and pvp opportunities this week I will let you all know of the antics of the corp. All in all I am reenergized with being back in the wormhole and I think I am definitely done with null sec in the small scale for the foreseeable future due to there being not enough OOMPH behind having half carebears and small turn outs for Sov wars. If we ever do go back I fully expect to look for a large Alliance so that there is more to do, more pvp ops and better chances at achieving the alliances goals. Not to mention actually having goals and not just flying from the hip every other day like the last alliance.

More to come and thanks again for reading.

Back To Our Roots

So after many weeks of null sec, sov wars and ultimately getting camped in due to lack of planning by the alliance we have made our way back into a C4 wormhole. We decided to go with a C4 that has a static C4. This allows us the ability to have a smaller presence in the wormhole as compared to what was needed in the C6 last time. We have a smaller tower and a lot less assets.

We are still going to be using Basilisks for logistics so we are shield tanking. We have decided to try to get as many T3's in this time as possible due to the smaller hole sizes so that we can farm the static C4. Since I am all Amarr I plugged in all of the skills to fly a Legion. A very cool looking ship with a lot of good pvp abilities due to its bonuses to armor tanking. The only problem is we are shield tanking. So I went to work bastardizing the poor thing to come up with a fit that works. Well it is not the way the ship was meant to work but I was able to get the best dps from it while having a 63,000+ effective hp tank and very nice resists. As much flak as I am sure I would take from the Eve community for using it with shields I look forward to flying it.

I am quite excited as this is a cool ship and is my first T3. And I love doing wormhole ops as they are more dynamic and hold your attention because of the aggro switching, neuting and repping that the sleeper drones do. Tomorrow we should be back into the wormhole with our T3's and salvagers so that we can start doing ops.

I just remembered some other interesting stuff that happened last night. While putting up the tower in the wormhole and setting up the rest of the mods we decided to check the adjacent C4 static hole that we will call the "Cave" from now on for life to potentially have some pvp with. Well when we got in a couple of ships were on scan. Our prober probed them down and well what do you know it was an abandoned bunch of arrays and a ton of small scanning ships. Well I immediately blew up all of the t1 ships as I needed to take my aggression out on something after all!! LOL. But what we did find was some guns, and some arrays including an XLarge Ship Assembly array. This was a nice find and on our first night in the wormhole we have already started looting other peoples crap.

Either way the wormhole has brought new life into my Eve experiences. I learned a lot in my time in null and I found that Sov wars in a smaller alliance is just not fun. It is like trying to stop a mack truck with your bare hands and a rope, soooooo not going to happen. I did get more confidence in my FC'ing skills and will be taking fleets out of the wormhole and into null and low sec for more pvp fun. I plan on running my frigate fleet, maybe as soon as this weekend. We shall see how things play out and how our route looks.

More to come. Thanks for reading.

So Much Stuff

So once again I post about the failure of our new alliance that we have joined. Currently they have once again made a mistake about trying to take Sov, only to piss off the same big alliance and get kicked out of the one station they were holding Sov in. This means they are going back to their "roots" in NPC null sec space.

Well in the meantime they also were selected for the Alliance Tournament that CCP is holding. I was lucky enough to have been able to participate in the training of our pilots by practicing on the test server. What was nice was that we could field many different looks against the fleet that was going to be used in the tournament. What's nice is everything costs 100 isk on the test server and is seeded so that we could fit just about anything. While practicing I had a chance to do some 1v1's with a corp mate and alliance mates. I was able to test my Armageddon fits, my curse and Nightmare fits that I had been wanted to play around with. The curse fit worked out really well 1v1 against another curse. I also learned some valuable lessons in positioning and kiting. I look forward to playing the Curse and Pilgrim more so on the real server.

Now on to what our personal corp has decided to do now that the dust has settled a little bit. It seems a lot of us miss the money of WH life and we have now decided to move back into a WH at this point. It looks like we will be moving into a C4 wormhole that is on the edge of hard for wormholes in difficulty. This means that we will need to at least do remote rep gangs or have a logistics to really burn through them. I have already decided that I will be selling my PVE Nightmare and be purchasing the ship I will be using in the C4 sites. I plan on taking in my Pilgrim, a SB, a scanning ship and the PVE ship that I will be doing sites with. Perhaps also a Noctis for cleaning up wrecks within the sites after we clear them, which is where the real money is.

Either way I look forward to being back in the wormhole but I do plan on running PVP ops that take us out into null sec space in the future as well. I would like to run Armor HAC/Recon gangs, shield / logi gangs and the ever popular frigate gang that I had ran so many times before. Hopefully the other corp that has been along side us for a while will also venture into the WH so that we can put together good sized gangs for both PVE and PVP in the very near future. Time will only tell but hopefully I am able to start doing more in the game now and will be able to write more about it as well for all of my followers.

I do have more now actually as I think about it. I have to decide what type of ship to run for the sites. I am very enticed by the Legion which is only 4 days away from being trained to level 4. But what this ship does not have is that of a good shield tank which is what we will be running again. I have been playing around in EFT some and with some updates in my missile skills I could have a psuedo Tengu wanna be Legion with 60k ehp and 500 dps. Which should be enough for a C4 with a RR gang and especially with Logi support. It makes me sad to think that I could have my own Logi support had I not had to sell my alt. But I plan on having some good PVP fights in the WHs now that I have an array of better skills.

This also brings up a conundrum of whether or not to continue down the path of a carrier at this point. Being in a C4 there will be no need for the Capitals that I know of, unless we can still do escalations. If that is the case then I can certainly continue down that path. If not then I may want to look to cross train into a Tengu and more Caldari ships to broaden my boat skills some. I may even want to cross train into Minmatar at this point to be able to get the cross-skill ships. I could also build up my support skills for both gunnery, missiles and tanking skills too instead. I really need to sit down and build out a path for both. I know in my current set of skill plan I have Marauders and Black Ops ships queued after the carrier and I may want to move those up a notch as well.

So once again I have some major decisions to make that may delay the carrier once again but may turn out to be better in the short term for my over all skills. I will keep you in the know as I make more decisions on this.

Thanks once again for reading.

More Changes in Null Sec

So my corp, as well as two others have left our current alliance and joined up with what was our previous blue friends alliance. The reason was to be blue to their blues in an assault on a region of space that in the end we will have our own system as a corp with a station and the alliance will hold half of the entire region.

Now this is all well and good, but one of the major issues is logistics and where this region is located. It is one of the farthest systems that I have been to in the depths of  the Eve universe. Currently a much larger set of alliances are purging the russians systems that are in this region and in the end we supposedly get the region. What we have been tasked with is killing off stragglers as well as fleet warfare in the area.

Last night I went on a roam with about 7 other people in various ships. All that I had that was close (30 jumps including jump bridges) was a stealth bomber. Well we roamed the areas and saw virtually no one except for a few ratters who would safe up or pos up immediately. So the roam was quite a bit on the boring side. While down there I noticed that it is Angel rats that occupy the space and I am not all that excited about that considering I am mainly an Amarr pilot. Although I do have Caldari skills and will probably end up ratting in a Drake or Raven perhaps depending on how active things down there are. Which I don't expect it to be very active given the distance the region is from everywhere.

Right now I am up in the air on this move but I am determined to stick with my friends and corpmates and make due. Perhaps the money will be a lot better than the last couple of null sec systems and will lead to being able to field more Curses and Zealots as well as fund my year+ training schedule of gearing towards a carrier.  I would like to find a way to make decent isk that is fun and hopefully this turns some fruits of that labor as well as provides some pvp. The way it looks is that we will be making isk down in that area and will need to go out into the Russian's space for pvp roams. Which I am more than happy to do and I plan on doing a weekly roam again sometime shortly. Right now my Friday's are taken up and I cannot put one together then like I was before. I would really like to get my Anathema down in the area so that I could probe mission runners down.

I am also thinking about putting a Legion together for possible pvp ops but need to establish some steady isk flow for that to be feasible since I would need to possibly replace it. Right now I think I will be happy flying Vengeance and Maledictions for tacklers and Zealot / Curses for dps / fleet support. I have also added into my skill plan the Logistics skill and will be a Guardian pilot in ~12 days. This will all but round out where I want to be for flying sub-cap sub-battleship ships. I have a couple other ships in mind along with the carrier as well. That is the Widow, a Black Ops ship, due to the fact that it requires the same jump drive operation that I plan on having for the carrier anyway.

The second ship is the Golem. This is a great pve ship and would really help with missions or ratting in my opinion. It is really only 35 days for either ship at this point so I need to decide which way to go first. Either continue on the carrier path first, which would lead to the Widow along the way or to side track to the Golem in the interim to be able to fly it for pve.

Either way as I decide and go on more roams I will keep my blog up to date as much as possible.

Thanks again for reading.

Holy Sov Wars Batman

So just as my HAC and Recon skills are finishing their relative training our alliance has now formed a coalition with the alliance that we were friendly with previously. And we are using this coalition to invade the adjacent space that has some very lucrative systems and stations. So far we have attacked one system and started on some others. The first has been relatively easy to get to the 2'nd reinforcement and should be ours shortly. With the next systems being a fair amount harder as the owners seem to want to protect that space with mother ships.

So we have our work cut out for us. But in the meantime there is plenty of pew pew to be had in our roams. I have even gotten to take a Zealot out and enjoy this beast of a ship for the first time. I was on top with damage and was a kill mail whore for the first time in my carrier on our gate camp. That was until we landed on a gate and our scout let us know a counter fleet was up and had landed on the other side of the gate. Well it was a Drake / BC fleet slightly larger than our own fleet which consisted of 3 heavy assaults (one of course was me), multiple BC's and 3 battleships. So we waited for them to come in and that they did. Unfortunately they had logistics with them. Well we engaged and started attacking their logistics. One went down and that is when they started to lock me up. Now the fleet commander had order the HAC's to wait until they were attacked and then jump into the next system. Well since I had an aggression timer I decided to warp away to another gate. And this is where I made my mistake by coming back right away. As I landed and reaggressed the primary target the previous logistics pilot came back in another ship and it all went downhill from there.

The FC called for us to split and I was pointed up at that time, so in the same day I got my first kills and lost my first Zealot.

 I have to say that I really enjoy this ship and look forward to flying it more often. While this ship has me excited I am so very glad to say that the Recon skill is about to finish up level IV. With this ship I look forward to some fun neuting times of logistics and other ships. I have been looking forward to this ship for quite some time. However once I have the support skills for this and the Zealot trained up I am going to start my long training towards the carrier once again. I even found a kind of recommended training path for a carrier that I may take.

See it here.

Anyway more pew pew to write about next time. Thanks for reading.

Long Lost Alt

So a lot has happened since the last time I posted and I am sorry for not being more on top of this. Basically I have been really busy outside of Eve and been only getting online for our Friday roams. Because of this I have limited my isk intake and finally broke down and sold my alt for some money to continue to play. Alas I will miss the little guy but it was time.

Now my main has since then finished Amarr Cruiser V and I can now fly HAC's as well as have T2 medium weapons. So I am starting to look into getting at least one Zealot as something to roam with. Next on the list of priorities is that of the Curse. I really am looking forward to this ship as I feel it is not only a great looking ship but also one of great respect amongst others out there.

At some point I would like to put together a Recon gang involving all combat recon ships and possibly logistics. I have decided that I am going to bulk up my support skills for both the Zealot and the Curse before moving on to heavy interdictors or the guardian at this point. And then I can continue to look into training for a Carrier at some point there after.

For now though I have been leading battlecruiser sized gangs around the area. Our last one had 20+ attendees and was well rounded. The only thing we lacked were logistic ships. Which would have come in handy considering we landed on top of a similar sized gang with two logi's and we ended up doing well against them but lost in the end. We had maybe 3 or 4 get out with there ships while we took down 5-6 of theirs. It was still fun and happened at the start of the night rather than late into the night like what has been typical of our roams as of late.

Hopefully tonights roam will work out well and maybe we can even get some logistical support tonight. As for the alliance we are in the middle of a possible move from our current location due to Havens and Sanctums no longer being available where our blues live. Only time will tell on this one and there are a lot of suggestions as to what we should be doing floating around right now. Mostly political and at this time I don't think I want anything to do with them, but only to pewpew other ships and maybe make some money in missions.

Which I have thought about potentially buying one of my dream ships for missioning, the Nightmare. I am still up in the air on this and will probably make a decision on what I am going to use to mission soon.

Anyway thanks for reading.

To Hac, To Hic or To Con - That Is The Question

So now that I am less than one day away from having Amarr Cruiser V, I need to decide which type of advanced cruiser I plan to fly. I really like the Curse (Combat Recon ship) as a ship and I feel I have the most support skills to fly it already. But the Zealot (Heavy assault ship) packs a heck of a punch and seems to be a pretty popular ship out in null sec space. It has the advantage of becoming a sniper and joining those types of fleets. Finally a very well tanked and useful ship is that of the Devoter (Heavy Interdictor).

All three I can see getting great use out of. With the Curse more than likely being the one I would solo in the most. Which is something I really want to get into more often once I have more disposable income than I do currently.

As of now I have been joining and leading small fleets of people from my alliance. We have been having good nights where we will kill off a couple of battleships to nights where a giant blob lands on my fellow fleet members as we try to meet up like the other night. I am still running my dedicated roams on Friday nights and it has been picking up more and more members. With 20+ joining in the last one that I ran. Unfortunately on that night we had some bad luck and roamed for hours not finding anything. We even entered a system that is well known for having large engagements and we ended up camping the high sec gate in the system with no resistance for a good period of time, until we grew too tired to continue to wait for something to be put together and called it a night. So I was not able to get a chance to use the Basilisk that I was flying on my alt that night in combat, which really stank. But what can one do. Hopefully this weeks Frigate roam boasts similar numbers and has better success at finding victims of the swarm.

In the meantime I am still working on those videos and should have something to show soon. Once I have some free time from playing and normal real life things that are going on.

Thanks for reading.