Wormhole Thanatos

Posted: 2010-01-02 | Author: | Filed under: ships | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments

This Thanatos setup is meant for fleet support when opening up Grav and Ladar sites.

Any advice?

Carrier Class

Posted: 2009-12-29 | Author: | Filed under: ships | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

I’ve done it before so why should I be nervous? I’ve crawled my way up from a frigate class ship into a Battleship and have commanded my Dominix in many successful Sleeper encounters. Going into Capital ships is just another logical step, right? Not to me.  The ships are big, the modules are expensive, and the entertainment value is high.

After 1.5 years of playing Eve, I am entering a time when I am stepping into an entirely new philosophy of ships – Capital ships – massive, slow to align, Oxygen Isotope consuming behemoths. Some have big guns, some repair things at great distances, some huge Cruiser sized drones, and some crush a hangars worth of ore down into an Iteron V.

I’m sure you have faced the “what am I going to do with my character now” point in your Eve career. Invention wasn’t calling out to me, I can already produce with Material and Production Efficiency V, I have good Dominix skills, so maybe now is the time where I should go play with the big boys in Capital ships.

After pulling up the current contracts, I found a Thanatos in a station with insurance. I read the contract twice, read it again, check the price, confirmed the item again, check the price again, ahhh OK, *click*

I picked up my Thanatos, the Agamemnon I, in the Lonetrek region on a contract for 700M. It is currently docked in station awaiting the completion of a few more skills before I bring it into WH space.

I’ve been doing a lot of reading on Carrier ships and here is what I have learned:

  1. First and foremost, a Carrier is a support ship. It is not a tackler or a DPS ship. Its main role is to repair your DPS, electronic attack, tacklers, or other capital ships.
  2. A Carrier is not a toy to be bounced off of large asteroids (!).
  3. You can be taken down by a single frigate. (There is a good killmail floating around somewhere where an AFK Carrier pilot was taken down by a frigate. (Help, anyone?))
  4. You can be prevented from jumping by a single warp scram.
  5. Items that you put in the corporate hangars can’t be scanned by a cargo scanner.

Now, what to do with a Carrier in WH space:

  1. Use it to kill Sleeper Battleships and support your mates at Gravimetric and Ladar sites. Note that warping a Capital ship to a Mag or other encounter site will trigger 5x additional Sleeper spawns (yikes).
  2. Keep it at the POS as a show of force. If you were not very aggressive and saw a few Battleships, a Carrier, a Rorqual and lots of POS modules, would you continue to scan or move on to the next WH system?
  3. Conversely, if you were an aggressor and saw such juicy targets as a few Battleships, a Carrier, a Rorqual and lots of POS modules, would you camp the system and hunt us down?
  4. Haul ships and modules when relocating to a new WH. A POS in WH space is like a campfire while out on a long nature adventure; you setup camp, do some activities, put the fire out and move on. After you anchor a POS in your system, the site respawn rate drops significantly. Moving ships one by one is a pain so putting a few ships in the Carrier will drastically lower relocation time.
  5. Close those pesky WHs as not all WHs are welcome. Sometimes you get a hot nullsec WH that everyone wants to come have a peek in your system. A jump with an Orca and Capital ship will close that right up.

Sounds like fun, aye? Hopefully you might run into me someday in WH space launching some Bouncer II’s or closing a WH.

Merry Skillmass

Posted: 2009-12-24 | Author: | Filed under: ships | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

I decided to treat myself and buy the necessary skills to get into a Thanatos (Gallente Carrier). Ignore Acceleration Control; it was a skill that I looked over for the past few months.

I see local spiking!

Posted: 2009-12-18 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Well, today has been a very, very laggy day. I have been told that there has been massive fighting in nullsec, and according to a brief message that flashed on my screen, gates have been shut down.

I’m kinda wondering if the fighters filled out CCPs new “hugeass bitchin fleet fight” form.

Anyway, since the nullsec before Dominion was like a bucket of squirrels fighting over a bunch of acorns, Dominion seems to have effectively covered the acorns in grease. Lots and lots of lovely fighting, and all the squirrels losing body parts which stimulates the squirrel body part market so the cyborg squirrel manufacturers can sell bionic arms to the squirrels…..

Tortured, yet funny extended metaphor aside, the freighter ganks were interesting, but the amount of sovereignty gain and loss over the last few days, now easily viewed from the yellow sovereignty button, is fairly unnerving:

Hurray for MS paint. Anyway, All this fighting has been expected for a while now, but one thing is for certain: these warring dudes are gonna run outta ships eventually, and then the power shall return to the place it belongs: the miners! muahaha!

In all seriousness, I’m a bit worried that this will only make t2 prices rise, as pvpers are gonna want ships NOW, immediately, before the dreads finish cynoing into their home base. Where Eve goes from here, no-one knows, but following chaos theory I predict AAA and goonswarm wiping each other out, being beaten to pieces by xxdeathxx, who form an alliance with atlas, while a relative unknown manages to establish a nullsec trading post and manages to keep it going by the policy of setting all station campers to red so they can’t use the station and letting everyone else come and sell/buy. And maybe, just maybe, they call the station…Milliways.

Predictions/dreams aside, we had a very, very nice day in the WH and made quite a bit, top of the head calculations gives 230 mil apiece between 6 people(or however much 3.1 mil m3 of bistot goes for nowadays). One of these people is a new member in the corp, new to the WH op, so as is our custom he can’t take from the hangars and has to end and begin every sentence with the word “sir”.

From a personal standpoint, I’m suspicious of every new person regardless of background, and now that I have an orca I’ve moved everything that I consider mine into a GSC, given it an eight-digit password, put it in the secure box of the orca and log off with it at a safespot, with my blockade runner and hulk inside.

I give it… 3-4 weeks before I trust anyone new to the corp, because after 3-4 weeks, the wait has reduced their profit-time ratio to below mining veldspar in an osprey :). This is countered, unfortunately, by making about 100 mil per day in the WH./facepalm

Trust is a very, very good thing to have. I can count the number of people I truly trust in eve on one hand, mainly because I’ve known them for over a year now. It’s my philosophy that if you can’t physically punch someone in the face, then they have no reason to not cheat you in a game about internet spaceships.

P.S. hulks at 175 in Jita, what the hell? Also, I really wish I could write less time-sensitive blogs so that I could stagger them better than three in a day after 5 days of nothing, but life’s an isk spammer. I’ve got 2 more slightly less time sensative posts in drafts, and should be able to get back to a one every 2 day schedule, assuming goonswarm doesn’t dissolve in the next week or two or something amazing like that.

This post written while WH mining, apparently I have a death wish >.<

See how the other side lives

Posted: 2009-12-17 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , | 4 Comments

WH mining is, in itself, risky, stupid, and profitable. Haul a pos in, get a refining array/rorqual up n running, clear the sleepers out of a belt n sit there for a few days with one finger on the drag ore to can button, one finger on the directional scanner, one finger on the coffee maker and one hand on a clean pair of shorts for when someone shows up with murdering miners on the mind.

Recently, our Rorqual/carrier pilot left us for greener less miney pastures. I didn’t ask directly, but he said something about lowsec pvping. Best regards to him, let’s hope he doesn’t get roflpwned by a DD, but knowing him he’d probably blow up his carrier before the DD could fire.

Five minutes of MS paint.

Anyway, thankfully the rorq pilot didn’t take the rorq with him, but the only other person currently in the WH can only compress ABC and is working on his leadership skills ATM. So, once we finish the ABC in the belts we have to either open up another grav site or mine lowsec ores at a 75% reduction in refine profit.

In light of this, I’ve started training a mission alt on my alt account and a salvage alt on my main account. This is mainly because:

A: I figured that a salvage boat would take much less time than a BS missioner to train,and I wanted to detract as little time as possible from my glorious main account.

B: My alt account just finished training for the Orca, so I don’t know what to do next w/ her.

C: IMO, l4 mission running is much more profitable than 75% refine of lowsec ores.

D: I’ve always wanted to explore the flip side of Eve to mining, i.e. shooting stuff.

E: Inevidably, the ABC runs out when I’m alone online, and since I lost my Domi recently, I cant unlock a new site.

Anyway, the training is going well, my main account is in a rigged catalyst with all skills moderatley trained, and my alt account already had a character w/ caldari cruiser IV trained.

Funnily enough, I accidentally left the alt in the last WH we were in, months ago. Renamed the drake “Free drake” and podded her back to empire. Yes, several of my corp mates have told me that I should have self-destructed for the insurance, but I didn’t know insurance worked that way.

Anyway, training is going well, once we run out of grav sites I’ll start running some missions and work my way slowly up to level 4 missions and possible large piles of isk. Anyway, I’ve run into a dilemma.

My main flies Gallente, and my drone skills are improved to the point that my drones are like little whirling balls of death. This is great for missioning, and since unlike sleepers, redular mission fodders never change the target or start shooting drones or some annoying thing like that, it seems great.

On the flip side, the Caldari have… well… tiny drones and missiles. I made the alt origionally because I was sick of three button combat (Drones Engage, Drones Orbit, Drones return to drone bay) and wanted to try missile combat (Target dude, F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7, target new dude). So far, flying a caracal is proving fun.

So what I’m saying here is, I’m torn between simple drone fighting while I soley operate the salvager, or Raven Hot-damn-missiles-are-awesome boom boom boom.

So, talking to all you mission runners, if I’m running a salvage account at the same time, should I stop training caldari and go gallente, or stick w/ caldari?

← Older Entries
Newer Entries →