Op. Demon's Run, pt. 2

                                                        Op. Demon's Run, pt. 2


Where was I...

Right, ridiculous amounts of utter silliness.

Contrary to what I was expecting, over night we went from "WH Alliance hitting a WH corp" to "Something unexpected in an entertaining way". Whilst I had slept, getting ready for a day full of shooting things with my moros, SojournerRover had gone and posted this thread on the EVE Online forums.

Huh, I knew he liked to whine everywhere he could, but I hadn't been expecting that.

Turns out he's mad about the fact that he's being evicted/burnt/killed. I totally understand that; I would be too. Not sure why he'd bother to post and rage on the forum but hey, if he wants to engage us on the forums instead of on Tranquility, that's his deal. Me, I'm gonna take my moros over to a few of his towers and engage it.

Target one is a tasty looking True Sansha Medium tower. Oh yes, we're hitting that first. Mmmmm. We take our happy little gang of murder to the tower and unsurprisingly, a whole group of Insidious Design is waiting in the tower for us, ready to pos gun us down.

What? I never said they were actually gonna shoot at us.

So we land, siege up and smack the crap out of that tower. The whole time they're pos gunning me, but I barely have to run my repper to keep up with the damage and

OHSHITOHSHITOHSHITOHSHIT THEY'RE BOMBING US.

Oh wait, that was one guy bombing us. I think it scratched my paint? Maybe? Didn't really notice it. So we get the tower down to 24% annnnnnd...

8 hour reinforce timer? Seriously? That's like when they invaded us! So stupid. So so stupid. 

We continue our way around the system, hitting towers and pocos as we go, when the guys on hole control get a little antsy. It makes sense, they're bored, no worries. A few scouts are sent out to see what they can see, and lo and behold, they find a 10 man tech 3 gang running sites two holes down. Awesome.

We get some volunteers together while the dreads go refit and get ready to hit another tower. Things are looking great and they roll out of the stage 2 hole to go kill some people. About 50 people total jumped out I think? Good numbers. Now, as any group of competent wormholers can tell you, what happened next was to be expected, because it was a stage 2 hole. As we crammed the fleet throught the hole, it went stage 3 and then snapped shut.

Shit.

This left about 7-8 people actually in the hole to do hole control. If I'm not mistaken, and I might be because I was sitting in a pos when this went down, Insidious Design had some 15-20 people online in the hole at that time. It could have gone really bad, really fast. Anyone looking at d-scan would have noticed the complete lack of ships. But no, all that happened was Rover complaining on the forums that life is so unfair, and blah blah blah, blah blah blah, save my ass, blah blah blah.

It took about 2 hours, but we got the fleet back in. And then went right back to hitting some towers. Ah, good times. The tower hitting continued over night into somewhere around early saturday morning. Or late friday night. I don't remember, there was some other matters on my mind.

Like the self destruct party.

Oh man, that self destruct party. I've never had a bigger laugh in my entire EVE career. It really took the cake for "Stupidest Thing Ever". Hold on, let me get you some pictures. 

God, look at that. That's so friggin sad! I wish I could add actual tears to that phoenix, but oh well. Story of its' life. I think the grand total of self destructed ships was a lot. Wait, I've got a picture for that as well? WILL WONDERS NEVER CEASE?!

Of that massive spike of self destructed ships, I think 3 of them died to our fire. Among those numbers self destructed are capitals, freighters, and numerous other ships. It was just so sad to see if all blow up, and not by my hands.

Anyway, that wraps things up for this post. It's longer than the usual ones, and a little rambley, but you stuck with it. Good work! The final installment of this EPIC SAGA (hahahahahahahahhahaha oh man that still cracks me up) will go up later. Promise!

Blue Probes going out.

 

        

                                                                                           Op. Demon's Run

This past weekend, oh man, hahahahaha, this past weekend. 

So, as many of you might have gathered, this past weekend Talocan United and Transmission Lost were out and about, hitting Insidious Design. As most of you might remember, I'm an ex-director of their corp that was kicked out for extremely petty reasons. The fact that they invaded one of Talocan's systems and pissed off the alliance executor didn't help their case either. Crazy, right?

So, we planned this op very slowly, making sure that we could get things into Insidious Design's hole with minimal resistance. (Haha, that's gonna be funny later. Trust me) I fit up a Moros with all the trimmings and goodness, little meta 2 blaster here, little faction there, everything that makes it fun to fly. It's no phoenix, but it'll do for what we're expecting. As I move it into jump position, the TL insertion fleet lands on the low sec into Insid's hole, and ever so politely lights me a cyno. I happily jump to it and jump on in. The rest of TL's fleet comes along and we go to work assuming hole control.

It's right about then that Insidious Design goes and tries to get assistance. Realizing that they're slightly outnumbered, and the fact that fighting just isn't in their nature, they pos up without taking so much as a peek  outside the shields. They also proceed to call Exhale., Surely You're Joking, and just about anyone else that would listen. We'd left the low sec hole open since we were going to drag a few more ships slowly through it. That's when we hear from one of the stragglers that Exhale had a fleet coming to shoot us up a bit. As fun as that would be, we had different plans.

And by plans, I mean "We slapped the hole shut with a Revelation." Literally. They got 3 jumps out, we lit a cyno, and closed the hole into J151718 with it. Pretty funny if you ask me. After that happened, we started to roll the hole to get more people in, set up towers, all that goodness. We eventually get a Transmission Lost tower in and set up. While we waited for more people so we could smack the towers with our capital fleet, I did a bit of talking to other alliances, the usual fun diplo work. Oh, the mails it generated. I'll share them with you in a bit. Still setting up.

So anyway, we finally get around to going to hit the tower. We've learned from the past few times that hey, sub caps really don't need to be on the field. Ever. Unless there's a fight. Even then, you want to make sure that they're locked up by logi before the pos turns on them. Anyways, 3 moros, a revelation and an archon land on grid with Redrum, Insidious design's main tower. We sieged up and watched all the people inside in their ships just watch as we bashed their tower into reinforced. Oh sure, they tried to pos gun us down, but it's kinda hard to do that when the archon you're shooting is tanking with no problem, and the moros gives exactly 0 fucks when you shoot it. It took about 30 minutes at most to blap the tower.

I'll be breaking this story up into parts, as it's pretty long. Might be 3 parts actually. Next part goes up soonish.

Blue probes, going out.    

                My Little Frig Roam: Friendship is Hilarious


Ok, so, it's been awhile. Work has been kicking my ass. But it's cool, because I'm back now. Stories and stuff are back to normal.

But you're not reading this because you want my excuses. No, you want stories. So story time it is!

Every once in awhile, all the major wormhole groups get together and go on a null roam. Mostly because it's funny. Yesterday was once such event. We got everyone together, set lots of groups to blue standings, and then proceeded to frig up. Since I had originally volunteered a Talocan person to FC, I was waiting for him to show up.

He never did. Bastard.

I thought to myself, what sucker can I throw into a position of authority to take charge of a massive group of wormholers in a frig roam across the stars of null sec in an attempt to die gloriously or murder people trying?

So, I'm leading this group of 90+ frigs through low to get to delve so we can have a fun roam through there, maybe fight us some testies. We get to the first null, has about 10 in local, all neuts, and none of them save one guy want to fight us. Sad. So we start going system to system, looking for targets. WE continue until we find a tier 3 bc gang alphaing things on a gate. We give chase, but to no avail. Damn those idiots for running! Hate them so.... eh they probably made the smart decision here. 

So we continue on, me FC'ing without giving too much indication to where we were going for fear of running into RnK again (At least they gave me some good screentime when we got pipe bombed!) and I jump us right into a terrifying deadly gang of 6 THRASHERS AND A MERLIN. THE HORROR.

So, 6 dead thrashers and 1 dead merlin later, and our balls feeling a bit less blue, we count up the dead.

Wait, none of us died? Dreams do come true. Then again, 90 tech 2 frigs versus tech 7 tech 1 ships is a bit overkill. Good times. We get a few more jumps and I have fleet hold for a minute. 

Gate fire. Gate fire? I don't remember saying jump. "ENEMY LOKI JUMPED INTO YOU"

:D

Bubbles went up and it uncloaked. The fight was underwhelming, as it lasted all of 10 seconds, and its pod lasted even less.   Glorious combat! Kinda.

The rest of the roam was kinda a bust, all we managed to catch was a reaper and someone that d/c'd got popped and podded by the fleet. Poor Corbexx. I made sure that the offenders who had the crappy overview paid him back. It's not the money, it's the principal of the thing. After that though, we almost caught stuff but their intel channels told everyone to dock up. Lame. So we headed home with a decent number of kills and the promise of more glory later.

Total kills: 12
Total friendly losses: 1* (Friendly fire still counts)
Fun had: Plenty!

I'll have another story up later, for now, fly well!

Blue probes out.

                     The reason you don't piss blues off

So, it's been awhile. I'm sorry, just been busy. Also, not that many good stories. Us exploding in stupid ways never does. Luckily, we can fix that. 

What? We just did?

Oh, we totally just did.

How did we manage this, you ask? Well, let me tell you.

So, I'm sitting in pub channel, minding my own business, when someone pipes up, "Excuse me, is there a diplo available?".

Hmm.

Hmmmmmmm.

HMMMMMMMMMM.

"Yo!"

Don't look at me like that. I didn't know what to expect. And I wasn't feeling the subtle aspect of it. So the guy starts up a conversation with me, and right off the bat, he tells me he's got Jasminmatar's c2 pulsar that he's trying to move out of, but Jas was being a dick and was besieging his tower. Not cool. Then again, Jas has never been one to stick to his word. And then my new best friend told me what I wasn't expecting:

"He's siegeing it with a chimera"

Oh. Oh this is good.

So, I immediately put out a call to the alliance, and then, since I didn't feel like halfassing it, called it MORE friends. Transmission Lost and SRS. to the rescue/lulz! Turns out Jas also had some other shield ships hitting the tower, but eh, I want that Chimera and I want it dead.

So, we assemble the fleet one jump out and I start to scan down the hole, but my scout/new best friend was kind enough to give us a warp in. So awesome. Since I'm in a hound, and I wasn't feeling up to FC'ing this, I graciously hand off FC duties to Cipreh, who was kind enough to accept. I trust his judgement, since he's shot us up enough. 

We warp into the pos that's being shot up, and our advance scout goes for the hero tackle, but as soon as we land on the hole and jump in, we hear that the chimera is bubbled. 

Tha hell?

Turns out they bubbled their own chimera and fleet. We start getting points on things, but we can't get the chimera pointed because it's in triage. Silly Boxxykiller. We begin pointing everything that we can, but some stuff gets out. I go to point Jas since I know he's their FC, but he has long since fled the field of honor.

Because, you know, Jas. Kind of a coward when it comes to losing his ships. Even with a chimera on field.

We start engaging them and they start to drop. The enemy chimera can't keep up with the ships getting slaughtered, and since it's in triage, we just murder everything else off the field. Along the way we lose one of our sabres to the enemy, but that was about it. Not too shabby.

So, we've lay waste to everything but boxxy and her chimera. We literally just poor firepower into it and it starts to go down faster than a fat kid bungee jumping towards a sea of cake as far as the eye can see. At about 50% structure, Boxxy starts to jettison ships out. We see a loki, drake, and a shuttle pop out. Right at that point, the chimera explodes in a blaze of failure and bitterness. Boxxy was then kind enough to jump into the loki, and that poor loki. Just explodes so fast. I wanted to feel bad, but then Boxxy jumps into the drake.

Which then explodes in less than 3 seconds. Whoops.

Luckily for boxxy, she knows how to flee properly. So she gets out. Oh well. We then take our fleet back to their half mass high sec static and the rest of their fleet lands and starts to flee. So we help them out a bit and get close it for them. We catch the stragglers and I proceed to scan a way out for a fleet. We get an exit 5 from Jita and everyone piles out into high. Not bad for less than an hours work I'd say.

I'd like to thank Jasminmatar for up and leaving his fleet in disarray yet again, as he is known to do. Without your desertion of your fleet, we wouldn't have had such an easy time murdering your friends. So thank you, from the bottom of our magazines.

Because they're empty. From shooting you. To death.

Ok, time to head back to my home hole. More stories to create, you know?

 

Blue probes out.

Ratting in Null Sec

So, you shot someone in high sec. Don't worry, accidents hap...

Oh. oh you MEANT to shoot him. Ok, I can respect that. Murder is fun and all.

....they didn't attack you first?

...they were in a POD?!

Oh man. Ok, don't worry. Just relax. This sort of thing happens every day in EVE. I know, because I've done it before. We can totally fix this.

First, you're gonna need to find a way into null. Luckily, there's a good number of wormholes that lead there from w-space. Scan one down and get into deep null. Where there's no activity.

No, don't go to Delve stupid. You'll just get hot dropped by supers.

Ok, so you're in deep. Good.

Now warp to belts and find the shiniest battleship there is.

KILL IT AND TAKE IT'S BOUNTIES.

Because, well, sec equates to how high its' bounty is. For some reason. Don't look at me, I just shoot people usually.

But yeah, ratting. Every 15 minutes, you get both the bounty for the rat you killed and sec status from the highest value rat you killed. Weird, I know. Just remember that it gives you sec for each system you rat in as well. Hell you can go from -4.0 to -2.0 in less than a day.

Crazy how that works, huh?

Now go out and rat! Get some loot, chat with locals, shoot them, watch them shoot you, and have fun!

Blue Probes Out.

The Last Chancers, Transmission Lost & Talocan United defend a Class 2 w...

Right, so there was going to be a post about kicking about null sec earlier this week, but then germans decided to try and kick over a pos in a system we're playing around in. Pretty good sized fleet, but they had a small problem.

They're null seccers.

Null seccers as a whole are fairly unfamiliar with the concept of "hole control". They decided that closing/critting a hole one at a time makes more sense than sending a fleet over to do it. These particular null sec folks did exactly that, which cost them dearly. They had been wailing on the pos and got it to 64% percent when we got a large group of people together and got them to roll holes for us by being sneaky. Having scouts ready to get us a new hole when the old one closed, we got the new one and found it was only 4 from the old one. We got there as fast as possible, and, well, the video above is the end result. Was fun!

Blue Probes Out.

Hot Drop in a c6. Awww yeah.

Safety in a C6 Wormhole

So. Class 6 wormholes. At last count, there was.... 113 of them? Something around that. Not the point.

No no, what we're here to talk about today is the idea of "safety" in a class 6. As most people know, there's a few ways to be safe when running sites. The most popular option is d-scan, where you spam the crap out of it as so to catch anything popping up on it. Option 2 is having a scout cloaked on a hole, watching and listening for hole activation. Everything else is just extra security which is never a bad thing.

In addition to that, most c6 groups travel light. We're talking a lot of poses, but little defense so if they get sieged, they can pack up and move if they so desire. Given how often people can find a c6, not terribly hard to get in and smash some. I don't recommend trying it against the better wormhole groups, you'll just get them mad enough to follow you home and smash your house in retaliation. 

So, let's say that you're in some tengus running a c6 radar. That gives you an advantage when someone comes looking for you, mostly because it adds to the time it takes to scan you down. The only time it's not terribly effective is when the people looking for you know how to work d-scan properly. Especially if you go to run sites and they've already snuck a scout in. Which leads me to today's story.

Today, we ran across a c6, J160855, static c1. Current occupants are Red Army Recon. If I had one word to describe them, it'd be terrible. Earlier, we had one of our scouts sneak into their hole through a c1 we connected to and scout them out. Their towers were laughably defended; a strong breeze could have knocked them over. So we sat and let our scout watch them gather and we slowly moved a fleet up to the c1 to hit them when they ran things. a c1 being small, that meant Battlecruiser and smaller only.

Challenge accepted.

So our scout watches them all warp to a site after they had scanned a site down. It let us know that they were at a radar, and that they were halfway through wave 1 when we jumped in. This is where that scout came into play. Since they had scanned their system down earlier, they knew where the c1 we were in was since they had spawned it, and had a cloaky scout sitting there watching. So when our gang jumped in, they all aligned out as we warped in on our scout. One by one, they all warped out, except for one guy. He had the misfortune of being warp scrambled by the lone sleeper frigate they had remaining. It's about that point that we landed and just messed his day up. One dead Tengu later, we all head up, as they log off. Fairly sad when you think about it.

Wait, what's that? We have fraps of it? Well alright then! It'll be right above this post.

Look at that. Embedded video. Nifty!

With that, next post will be.... tomorrow. Awesome. With that...

Blue Probes Out.

How To: Sleeper Tank

So, today I'm going to teach you all a new tanking technique. It's called Sleeper Tanking.

Sleeper tanking is mostly a PvP-only way to tank, as the way it works is very different then your normal tank. I find a PvP fit drake works just fine for this, as it's the first ship I used for it and worked with to get the result I did. 

The way I found this handy little trick was an engagement gone wrong. As in, no probes and we lost wrong. So we're warping around, trying to avoid dying for whatever reason, when it occurs to me. "I got in this ship. I have already come to terms with the fact that I will lose it. I'm finishing this my own way." So at a relative safe spot (relative in that two full flights of combat probes were scanning me down), I did a quick system scan. I pick up a Core Garrison. 

Perfect.

So I warp to it. We're doing this on my terms, damn it! The sleepers instantly lock me and do their thing while I get traversal and start moving, waiting for their combats to lock me down. A minute or so later, a massive fleet lands on it. Luckily for me, this is where the sleeper tank shines.

You see, sleepers love new targets. So when they get an entire selection of new friends to play with, they immediately switch targets. I remember seeing a hurricane pop before my own drake exploded. However, due to them being in PvP fit ships, they were extremely hesitant to throw a bubble up to catch my pod because that leaves them at the mercy of the sleepers. My drake explodes gloriously and my pod makes a quick getaway to a safe where I promptly High Sec express myself out so I could carry on my merry way.

So! To sleeper tank, you require them to both know where you are and to acknowledge that you will most likely die. Other than that, it's simple. You just warp into a sleeper site and wait for friends to show up. Then, fight as you normally would. Give it a try today!

Blue Probes Out. 

MEANWHILE, BACK IN...

When last we left off, spirits were high off that carrier kill. It felt good, man.

The part that I HADN'T mentioned though, was right as we began our operation, a joint fleet of Exhale. Surely You're Joking, Brotherhood of Starbridge, and, for some silly reason, Insidious Design, rolled up into one of Talocan United's home c5s, named Asgard.

Was only 70 people with a rev and like, 15 logi for the t3 brawler fleet they brought. Totally not overkill.

What? Sarcasm font isn't you know, a thing. Italics only do so much!

Anyways, so there's this fleet in Asgard. Big mucky fleet. Were they hired? Couldn't tell you. Were they looking to bring even more people in? Oh yeah. I know one of those Exhale pilots, and he loves his moros something fierce. He's also got it pimped out to a stupid good degree, and I bet it's become even more pimped since the last time I tangled with him.

But yeah. Bad situation. Good thing for my side that we have

BERNIE NATOR, TALUN DIPLO!


on our side. And yes, it HAS to be caps, and italicized. Loses meaning otherwise.

So, similar to how Transmission Lost had to deal with them last week, I dialed up the Batphone and started pulling favors from the various groups that we've done favors for before. And since I was the only leader really on, it feel to me to amass as much help as I could muster. Eventually we had this massive ball of people rage rolling holes to try and find our hole. It was literally maddening. [Editor's note: Rage rolling a hole means slamming mass through a hole so hard that the hole collapses. A c5 to c5 connection takes roughly 3 bil in raw tonnage to collapse. That's 3 battleships and a carrier, or two battleships and a Phoenix (IT HAS USES PEOPLE) and your hole will collapse. All normal mass restrictions apply, except in Alaska. Because Alaska.]


So, it's about 7 est. Exhale et all have put up two towers; one belongs to Exhale, the other to insidious design. No defenses though. It's also right at that time that a Transmission Lost fleet found a k162 into Asgard through a c5 they found in low sec. Which is good, because TL can bring huge numbers, and given that we had about not enough people on in Asgard at the time, we were immediately grateful for anything they could bring in.


So when Exhale and company up and left, we were kind of baffled. They literally just took their shinies and left. Not even a fight. Maybe they knew about the incoming shit storm and decided to leave while they still could? No idea, still can't get an answer out of Chitsa. Maybe at some point I will.


Funnily enough, they left the towers. So we went ahead and reinforced exhale's tower for them. Full stront bay. Makes sense. By this point TL had set a tower up as well. So we take that fleet over to the Insid tower, reinforce it, and...


2 hours of stront. I shit you not. We killed it 2 hours later just because it needed it.


Oh, wait, shit, forgot that exhale watched us reo the towers and then while we were asleep (well, while I was, since I'd been up for awhile at that point. Same day as previous post, remember?) they went and reo'd the TL tower THEN left. In their haste they left/abandoned some pilots in Asgard. 


Like this poor guy. Which is a shame, because I liked this guy. Really swell dude. Still, it's what happens when you invade someone.


There's more to this story, but this post is long enough as is. I'm going to come back in a bit and finish all the bits. Also, I'll have plenty more stories! Like how there's always a pressing need to observe your surroundings, and how a sleeper tank is viable for pvp!


Blue Probes Out.


  

The Triage Module vs. The Cloak Module

So, this past weekend was a bit...

Intense.

I'm gonna time line it for you. Because it was nuts. I'll start with the first half of Friday in this post.

Before anyone says anything, the only thing that went down Friday was a chimera. That's the seat I'm taking. Deal with it.

So, a few months ago, we found a tasty tasty target in a c5. Very poorly defended, lots of shinnies, and possible capital ships. Aka, tasty tasty target.

So over the next few weeks, we draw up a very basic plan; slide some cap ships in when they aren't looking and let them sleep in the dark until we actually roll in to hit them, with only us being the wiser about it. W managed to sneak some 5 caps in. I'd tell you which ones they are, but that's poor intel right there.

Plus, 3 show up on the killmail. Spoilers!

So, we throw up our base of operations, which is really just a pos used as a temporary home. One of the locals notices, "Hey, holy shit, there is a large fleet on scan. With cap support. Maybe we should...PACK UP ALL THE THINGS AND GTFO".

So they do just that. They grab all their important loot into a chimera and proceed to warp straight to a safe spot with the intention of warping out.

At this point, our FC called for combats to be out, so we had that chimera probed down right as it landed. Since we also had an idea of where it was headed, I aligned my brick in the direction of where it was going so I could apply as much missley goodness to it as possible. That's when our prober landed on it and....

...couldn't tackle it because it hit triage.

Apparently, in the madness of trying to flee, he had forgotten to fit a cloaking device and mistook the triage module for a cloak. He didn't have much time to regret the decision, as I landed mere seconds later with two other dreads right behind me. I popped into siege, locked it up, and began to use my Phoenix for the very first time in PvHOLY CRAP IT DID HOW MUCH DAMAGE?!

Fun fact: Found a use for the Phoenix. And it's hitting structures and capital ships.

So, the "fight" lasted a little under 2 minutes.

Here's the resulting killmail:

Oboozie's Carrier

I'm not going to lie, it was satisfying. Podding him would have been even more so. The pod managed to slip away though. From there, we were going to go hit their pos, but they decided to strike a bargain with us. An undisclosed sum and a song later, we agreed to pull out.

Meanwhile, in a Talocan hole...

Part 2 later this week will focus on what happened to one of our c5s while we started the op.

Blue Probes Out.
This
 

Stealth Bombing and You

Ok, ok, I know, I'm running behind on updates. I've been busy, don't judge me.

Or do. Couldn't care less if you did, really.

Anyway! Originally this was going to be a post about cyno fields, but it has come to my attention recently that most people can't fly a stealth bomber worth a damn. It's a fairly easy concept but most people get themselves killed in a retarded way. So, without further ado, Here's Bernie's guide to Not Suck at Bombing.

Step 1: Get in a bomber.
Step 2: Equip a bomb launcher and cov ops cloak.
Step 3: Load a bomb that's situation specific.

Meaning, if you are going in a fleet, use a bomb that is agreed upon or watch a bomb take out the other bombs, wasting isk and ruining a perfectly good kill.

(Here's where we do the actual run btw)
Step 4: Warp to the target about 50 km off.
Step 5: Approach target until you are 35 km off.
Step 6: Align the front of your ship to the target or where the target is heading.
Step 7: Turn your engines on.
Step 8: At 32 km, uncloak. This is so you can actually launch your bomb with no delay.
Step 9: At 30 km, launch the bomb.
Step 10: Get the hell out. You should not be concerned with watching your bomb go off, or staying around to engage if it's a pure bomb fight. It's the fastest way to lose your bomber.

Step 11: The post fight. Here's where you decide to cut and run or go back for more bombing goodness.

Other than a few technical things here and there, this is all you need to know. Although I do have to remind people that bombs are explode on contact. If you're making a bomb run and there's say, a pos mod, between you and the target, if your bomb hits that pos mod, your bomb will explode prematurely, and you will probably lose your ship. Don't be an idiot.

Soooooo, go forth and bomb. Bombs are fun.

Blue Probes out.



 

I'm Running out of Windows

Phew. wow. I have just discovered that when you're in a position of leadership, you get to have a lot of chat windows open. Literally a lot. Your typical EVE player has somewhere in the realm of 4 to 5 chat windows open. I just hit a record high of 31. 

That's 31 separate windows, and it's pretty much all diplomatic work. I can't even properly write a post in under an hour due to just the sheer number of people I'm talking to. Between this sentence and the previous one has just been ten minutes of talking to different contacts in game, and most of them are mad.

It kinda just goes to show that people can take video games a bit seriously at times. Don't get me wrong, most gamers can get a bit heated about the games they love. I feel the same way about puppies. I love them so much, and god help you if you do anything bad to one. It's just that some people get heated about different things. And that isn't even going into motivations for gaming. It can be real complicated sometimes.

But that's not what my post is about.

No, my post today is just a suggestion to any CCP devs that might run across this post. Instead of making the additional chat windows pop up in the same box and having additional windows pop up in an arrow going to the right in a drop down menu, can't we just extend the border to make it go up so we can easily get to any tabs that need our attention? It's really just a small thing that makes our lives a little easier. That's all I ask.

Blue probes out.

The Self-destruct Button and You

 Let's be honest here. When you buy a super large, expensive ship, you have to come to terms with the fact that since you have gotten into it, at some point you are going to lose it. I'm not trying to be mean or scare people, it's the truth. Getting into a ship in eve and taking it into space means that it will explode at some point. Doubly so if said ship can't be docked at a station.

Let's say you build a carrier in a class 1 wormhole, for example. Accept the fact that that carrier is going to explode violently. It can't leave that wormhole, it can't dock anywhere, that ship is as good as gone the instant it is created.

This leaves us with two options. You can lose the ship gloriously in combat, or you can take the pathetic way out. Or as anyone in null/low sec also calls it, self destructing like a little bitch.

You see, ships of capital size and larger can take a long time to grind down if you don't have sufficient forces to bear against it. However, that doesn't mean you can't be annoying as all hell if you manage to capture one of the beasties doing something stupid, like repping up a POCO with only two carriers and sparse (Read: Not with the carriers) support. So let's say you engage and remove all the carrier's offense abilities while the rest of your fleet is coming in. You get it all the way through shields and then you get the dreaded message, "Target has initiated self-destruct. Ship will self-destruct in 120 seconds".

Shit.

Bar them turning the process off, there's a good chance you won't be able to kill it before it kills itself. Not only does it annoy the fleet trying to kill it, it pays you the default insurance on that bad boy. Although you do have to live with the fact that you had to self destruct a large ship because there was a tiny fleet pestering your large ship.

But really, there's no reason to press the self destruct button unless you're doing it to piss people off. Or trolling them. That's about it. If you're going to lose your large, shiny ship, take it like a man. Let them get that killing blow on you. People are going to be insulting you anyways. Just don't friggin' do it.

Blue probes out.

I accidentally your PI ship

As every good industrialist knows, to make something good, you need the basic materials. And no matter where you are in EVE, if you do Planetary Interaction, at some point you actually have to go to the planet's custom office and pick up the materials to transfer them to a destination of your choosing, be it a station to sell the raw materials, or another planet to continue refining it into better selling items. This leads to one small problem, especially if you live in security 0.0 and lower. That problem being, of course, the dreaded cloaked hunter.

In the movie Predator, you all remember the scene where the Predator just drops in on the Marines, all cloaked and stealthy, and then quickly killing them and cloaking back up. Well, in EVE, that's something you can do to other players. It works best if you do it in null security space and wormholes, mostly to avoid losing security status. You can do it in low security space and high security space, but you'll lose security status in low and your ship in high. But I'm explaining things that are obvious to most. Way to go, Captain Exposition.

Anyway, cloaky ships. They drop on a target like the Predator, and just shred them. It's not even polite. It's mean. It's a dick thing to do. But you know what?

It's easy.

It's easier than stealing a chubby kid's ice cream. Which is easy to do; they can't run after you and you know it. Although the idea of dropping on a industrial and letting them run is counter-productive.

So, today's story. I was doing my usual thing, bombing across space looking for something to entertain me, when I landed on my old corporation's tower in a wormhole. I still know some, but others I do not. I'm ok with this. Not my corp any more, so I'm not gonna feel guilty about anything that goes down. I'm sitting and staring, trying to size up the pos, and it's a mess. 4 online defensive modules, lots of anchored defenses, and a reaction silo going. Easy pickings if I were to drop my dread on top of it. But I'm not in my dread, I'm in my cov ops. So I'm still sitting and staring, when all of a sudden I see a Badger mk. II pick up speed and warp off to a planet. That's just something I can't allow. So, time to be reckless.

I follow the guy to a poco and let him do his thing, and then check his alignment. He seems aligned to planet 1. I know they have a pos at P1M1, but they look more aligned to the planet. In my infinite wisdom, I let it warp off to planet 1, and then warp at 10 km to the Customs Office. I land, and....

Jackpot.

He's sitting about 12 km off me. I knew a lot of the people in the corp, but that guy didn't ring a bell. Not guilty at all. I drop cloak and burn at him, locking him while he starts aligning out to a distant planet. He didn't quite get there though. He was scrammed, and I had a feeling he had no warp stabilizers on. So I open fire with...

My single, lowly, tiny 150mm Light Autocannon II.

What? I couldn't fit a missile launcher on. Leave me alone.

So I begin my vicious assault, bearing the full dread and terror of my cherry tapper upon his ship. 30 seconds go past. He's at 25% shield. I'm getting the combat shakes. A full minute has gone by now. 50% armor. Note to self, put better weapons on next time. A minute 30. He hits structure. I'm spanning d-scan, asking myself, "Am I really getting away with this? They have other pilots on..." Two minutes in...

He pops. He goes down harder than a sack of concrete dropped off a skyscraper. I'm amazed that no one showed up. Out of about 30 people on, they just let him drop. I start locking his pod, but it manages to get out. I start to go for the wreck of the badger, but it's right about then that one of the people from the corp I actually knew showed up. I was not having any of that. I cloak up and warp off, not even allowing him to try and lock me. I bounce around a bit until my aggression timer went down. Upon reflection, had he had a shield tank or any tank at all, he would have lived. But he had nary a module in his highs or mids. Guess he felt safe.

From there, I logged off and celebrated with drinks at a friends house. I'm surprised I haven't gotten any angry mails yet. You'd think they'd be mad I killed one of their guys. Oh well.

So that's today's story. Tomorrow looks to be shaping up to be even more gank filled, with bigger targets that might shoot back. I suppose I'll leave you with a quick lesson.

If you decide to pick up your PI, no matter what part of space you're in, put a tank on. It could literally mean the difference between your ship living and your ship get embarrassingly killed by a buzzard with an autocannon.

Blue probes out.

Meanwhile, in Deep Space

Wow. So here we are. Deep in space. Talking about internet spaceships.


I know, I know, it's not what I was expecting out of me either. No one said to me "Hey Bernie, you should totally write a blog about what you do in EVE". I just came to a realization that everything in this game has a story, whether it be just how someone almost got into a fight but then everyone chickened out after an hour standoff with guns pointing everywhere, how a miner was sitting by their lonesome and then all of a sudden WAM! A sabre drops right on top of them and drops an interdiction probe, causing the miner to lose their ship and get a free ride to high sec to reship into whatever fancies them. A battle report on a killboard only tells so much, but it can't convey the setting, the drama, the feelings of joy as one fleet crushes another, or the sorrow of having to retreat after losing all their best fighters to FC error.

I want to bring to people the stories in EVE that they just can't find elsewhere. Sure, you can play other games, like WoW, or WoT, and pull off some pretty cool stuff, but their game mechanics aren't the best choice for doing stuff like you can do in EVE. In WoW, you can run up to somebody and gank them, but they just get right back up with no real cost to them. In EVE, you can get ganked by someone, lose a ship that had some actual value to you, and then proceed to join the group that ganked them, making their way to leadership positions, and robbing them blind. Not many other games I know of that let you do that.

So yeah! Seeing as this is an obligatory first post with no one knowing who I am, let me introduce myself.

I am Bernie Nator. I'm a pilot in a large alliance based in Wormhole space. There's a pretty good chance you've seen me before if you're a pilot living in a wormhole, and there's also a good chance we've chatted and/or shot at me before. I'm ok with both. I'm not here to focus on my alliance, although I will be spending a good amount of time talking about them and the things they do. As I said before, I'm going to be talking about the stories in wormhole space instead of just babbling statistics off at people. Mostly because I hate having to do math, I do enough of that at my day job.

With that said, I'll probably be updating every other day, mostly so I don't run out of stuff to talk about.

Oh, and as for the name of my blog, I'm gonna have to do a bit of scanning and traveling to find good stories to bring you. So if you see me in local with probes, don't hesitate to share a story. Or not pos up. Because there's always a good story to be had from that.

Blue probes, going out.