It’s about time.

A month or two after the previous post’s adventure of the nullsec wormhole, my alt has finally finished her orca training. After some amusing juggling of a WH to our WH base about to pop and 30 jumps both ways, my main was in our WH pos, and my alt was in highsec with the orca, which was, as promised, fully rigged and fitted. Not bad for 250 mil.

First thought: hell yeah, orca! yeah! looks cool!

Second thought: Boy, this thing is slow as %#@&.

Third thought: So this is why people have designated webbers.

The thoughts kinda meander from there, but in idle speculation, if the purpose of the webbing thing is to reduce your max speed to improve align time, couldn’t you use an afterburner or MWD, start aligning, then once the cycle finished you’d be going the correct speed and warp quickly? I personally can’t check this, seeing as my alt is completley hauling related, no navigation skills at all (boy, hindsight), but if someone could let me know I’d appreciate it.

Anyway, 5 jumps (felt like eternity) later, in Amarr, I drooled briefly over capital tractors, mindlinks, faction shield boosters, ecetera before being reminded that A: i have no isk, B: i have no skills, and C: we already have an orca in the WH to handle all boosting-related issues.

So, to make the most of the orca, i’ve stripped out the foreman link bonuses and align time reducers and fitted it entirely for hauling 😛

Ironically, my alt got trapped in a JGN that closed earlier this week and I had to pod myself to escape. A good policy is apparently to fit a scan launcher to every ship besides hulks… really should have thought of that. So, if anyone finds an itty V in WH space called “Free itty V rigged”, enjoy it >.>

*queues astrometrics in his alt.

Anyway, once we get an entrance that won’t close at any second and isn’t literally 5 WHs between us and highsec, like the one this morning, then I’ll get my orca in and enjoy hauling 8 cans at once. Until then, I plan to sit around running l2 missions w/ orca support XD.

Also, new browser is totally effin sweet but can’t play flash… yet. The day I can watch this in the browser while mining is the day my jaw gets locked in a smile.(NSFW)

Fly risky, because if you wanted to fly safe you’re really playing the wrong game.

edit: I swear, I thought about the MWD on the way home from college at a red light, not after finding the battleclinic linkie in comments. Thanks a bundle!

second edit: alright, after staring at the loadout in comments and screwing around with a 100mn afterburner, I managed to get the orca to a 12 second align time IF I was facing in the general direction of the object I wanted to go to, and i disengaged the afterburner once I reached 50% of my AB-boosted max speed, which translated into more than 75% of my normal speed, which worked well as a slingshot manuver. So, in theory, if I somehow, god forbid, ran into a very inattentive gatecamp I could break gatecloak, prototype cloak, get aligned, toggle the afterburner for one cycle then disengage it once I reached 50%, I’d only be visable to the dudes for 12 seconds as opposed to 40. With a sig radius so big they could fire in the opposite direction and still manage to hit me. Well, at least the afterburner makes the warp time about 30 seconds as opposed to 46. So, I’ll queue high-speed manuvering and be slightly faster in warping. Hurray!