Sometimes you get back on the horse…

and sometimes the horse kills you twice and molests your wreck.

Most people can guess where this post goes from that title. SO!

As the earlier short burst of fiction suggested, I’ve moved into a C4. It’s technically a corp op. I say technically because I’m the only person actually IN the WH and it was technically funded by the corp.

I say technically because I took 300 mil out of the corp wallet and gave the reason “Misc. Expenses”. Thanks, director rights!

So, step one, get a tower. 187 mil (holy damn!)

Step two: various defences. 40 mil (dickstar)

Step three: Buy pos fuel for a week or five. 100 mil (damn you, PI! Or rather, damn everyone not doing PI[me included] and the people who stockpiles getting filthy rich)

Step four: Buy ships. 250 mil. (domi x3, geddon, 3 salvage catalysts, three backup scan ships, one SB, two covops)

Step five: Buy fits. 70 mil. (t2 RR, energy xferr, t2 drones. The two alts I’m moving in with can’t shoot…well…anything, so gonna go w/ RR domi and hope the drones work)

Step six: Buy misc items. (fitting mods, hull reppers, spare probes, more spare probes, probe LAUNCHERS, spare drones, shield reps. If you want to be nitpicky, I got three jumps from jita before remembering the probes and all the way to the WH before I remembered hull reps)

Step seven: Fit it all into the orca. (erm…)

Step seven and a half: Buy 27 giant secure containers

Step seven and three quarters: Ditch half the strontium.

Step eight: undock

Step nine: redock and buy something you forgot

Step ten: undock and get three jumps before remembering something else.

Step eleven: make it to the WH in the orca and jump through to the chosen WH (keeping in mind all WHs in the link are occupied and you’re essentially a meals on wheels to them.)

Step twelve: Anchor the tower.

Step thirteen: Realize you’ve forgotten nitrogen isotopes.

Step fourteen: DAMNIT!

Step fifteen: Realize you’ve forgotten an industrial or two.

Step sixteen: Kill two birds with one stone, go BACK to jita, buy ship, buy isotopes, go back in.

Step seventeen: Realize that it’s four in the morning.

Step Eighteen: anchor the corp hangar

Step nineteen: micronap.

Step twenty: wake up and being to hallucinate. Online corp hangar, anchor and online maint bay, store ships and items.

Step twenty one: The pos defenses agree to anchor themselves while I get the domis and other big ships in. They don’t, but when I get back the PoS promises to make sure they do by the time I wake up.

Step twenty two: bed.

So, defenses up, I fit the domis for RR and cap xferr and tank. The geddon gets four pulse lasers and three tachyons, because I’ve forgotten sleeper BS’s range and not because I’ve forgotten to buy fit rigs and more than four tachyons.

For those who haven’t gathered, I’m running three accounts. The relationship is like the food pyramid. Haav0c is the delicious dessert section and hardar and herleena are the grains, who have cap xferr between then and distributing RR and drones. In null, I was able to fit haav in a geddon for full on gank, which was stable with a med xferr coming from one of the domis. This was incredibly powerful as the domis were also fitted for sniping at 100km w/ sentrys, which made all the anomalies look like this when I was done:

Anyrate, using this setup put out hella lot of damage with ten sentry drones and tachyons hitting the silly BS null rats who slowboated straight towards me in a perfect reenactment of the charge of the light brigade, which resolved itself with superb historical accuracy when everything but me exploded.

So, warp into a site. The sleepers are 140km away. They start shooting, I start repping, everything’s froody. We start slowboating towards each other. Since I’m in one of those silly velocity increasing WHs with hits to targeting, I have to get within 70km to target. All the whole with two sleeper BSs hitting me.

The RR logistics works well, and I finally start hitting the BS who looked at me funny. It explodes eventually.

Unfortunately, the three sleeper BSs that spawned just after that sleeper exploding painfully reminded me of how painful sleepers are. Clearly, my perma-running two large RR wasn’t going to be enough. I managed to get all three accounts out, tho.

I pull the hole closing domi I brought with me out and refit it into a mirror of the other two domis, three energy Xferrs, three RR, full tank in lows and cap rechargers in the mids. I warp to a planet and practice swapping all four reppers to one target.

So, full of confidence that nothing can possibly go wrong, I warp in. Haav0c DCs.

I manage to warp the other two out, tho; so I try and do a dual-logoff thingy to get me 100000km away, despite not knowing how to do it.

I log on haav, enter client and immediately clock the little “close” button in the upper right. I wait ten minutes, log back on, and I’m in a pod sitting in my domi wreck.

So, lacking another dominix or an exit, I bastardize my poor geddon into a RR droneboat. If the fit you’re thinking of makes you wince, you’re not far off.

Warp in, Start setting up the energy xferr chain. Haav starts taking armor damage. I set three RRs on him and go back to trying to set up the energy xferrs.

Hardar runs out of cap.

Haav runs out of reps.

Haav explodes.

Hardar and Herleena flee.

SO!

Welcome to WH space. Again.


Irony, my old jackass of a friend

Let me rephrase that:
Irony, you jackass son of a cross-eyed whore. And screw you too, Murphy.

Remember how I’ve been whining about losing a PoS in a C6 for the last few weeks? Last night, I get this:
.

I logon, and someone by the name of Henner Borgenson has apparently found the PoS and contracted the BMs to Blake, who contracts them to me. We get in our scan alts, burn a way out through four systems in under an hour, and I head back to the PoS to get my Viator, my ship of choice for hostile environments.

Unfortunately, my Viator, rigged as it was, holds 7.5k m3. A large pos, packaged, is 8k m3. So, I take the only available hauler that can hold 8k m3, a trusty Iteron V that someone fit low-friction nozzles to for some reason. I put two stabs, two nanos and an expanded cargohold in the lows and a protocloak in the high, rounding it off with as many shield extenders as I can fit in the midslots and an invul field to cover it. I head out to highsec, and fly to where the BMs are, pick em up, and fly through WH space to a C6, which, lo and behold, has the PoS. I start to unanchor, warp out, warp to 100km, and cloak, setting an orbit of 160km. 55 minutes later, my hauler has made it to warp-to range of the PoS and it’s about to unanchor. I warp to it, scoop it and burn like hell out through the C6 and connecting C2, making it to highsec. Exuberant, I log onto an alt and start clearing anomalies in my C1 while warping the hauler. Half an hour later, I tab into the hauler and notice someone firing at me with cruise missiles. Five seconds later, I’m warping in a pod to the nearest station, buying an itty V and a cargo expander, clinging to the brief hope that the gank was a solo one and the dude is docking to get his own hauler. Shit don’t happen, I arrive at the scene and find my wreck completely looted, along with three battlecruiser wrecks.
It could be the fact that it’s currently 2:30 in the morning, but I really didn’t feel too bothered by this. I guess that I’d already written the tower off as a loss and was treating it as a bonus.
Anyway, I am now, hypothetically, 360 mil poorer than I was a few hours ago, not including the under 5 mil hauler. I WAS going to give Henner Borgenson a letter praising the skies and all the heavens for this glorious day, but he’ll have to settle for a “thanks for thinking of me” note. And some iskies once I manage to get a third and fourth tower running >.>

If anyone asks, I made 20 mil off the sleeper sites as I was ganked for 360 mil.

So, the end result from this is moving “normal space” up to number three on my “list of things to loathe”, finally overtaking “Idiots in expensive ships” but still behind “well-organized gatecamps” and “Pomeranians”

Next time, I’m employing red frog industries for my hauling needs…Curse my impatient self!


Know your ship types

Sooooo…. goonies collapsed.

Anyway, not that I really don’t care about an extremely aggressive environment where everything can be going swimmingly up until the point that you lose everything to a force so overwhelming that you almost logoff out of fear, but I’ll stick with my extremely aggressive environment where everything can be going swimmingly up until the point where you lose ALMOST everything to a slightly overwhelming force that usually leaves within 24 hours. Moving on, knowing your ship types.

I’ve already whined about not realizing that an Onxy was a Heavy Interdictor, and back when we almost lost the Rorqual I thought that a Falcon was an interceptor and spent most of the fight wondering how the hell an interceptor was permajamming me. Anyway, my big reason/exciting event you guys come here to read about happened last night.

A corp mate was mining while I was managing PoS shenanigans when he called combat probes. He made it to the PoS and got into his Cheetah while I took my Buzzard to the static C5 to see if the probes had come in from there. In the static, it’s static C2 had closed so we were a bit perplexed as to how someone had come in through here, until we found an incoming C5. Since we still had the same number of sigs in system as we had a good hour or two before the gank, we assumed someone had poked their head through and gone back out.

Great, now I’ve gotta beat myself over the head with a cloaking device.

Anyway, we decided that the best course of action would be to pick up the two or three cans of crokite and hole up for a few hours at which point we would try and close the C5. So, not stupid/crazy enough to take the Orca out for pickup, we moved an impel and itty V into the belt only to have a Sabre drop in on us, drop a bubble and fly out.

Now, my first impulse when stuck in an industrial (top speed is about 100m/s) in a warp bubble(usually 10km radius) is to take my hands off the keyboard and make a nice sandwich. You know, something with gouda and salami, mayo and some mustard, then come back and see if anyone else survived that could scan an entrance. But, after a few seconds of contemplating of which meat to use for the snack, I noticed that
A. The sabre had warped 40km away, meaning that this warp bubble was the stationary type and
B. I was pretty close to one of the bubble edges.

Slamming on the 1mn AB that seemed like a stupid joke at the time, my thought process of which cheese to use was completely shoved aside by the thought
“BURN TO THE EDGE! BURN!”
“AND DON’T FORGET THE CROKITE!”
Dutifully puttering towards the edge of the bubble, I looked back and noticed the impel trying to pull a logoffski, which apparently doesn’t work while in the middle of a sphere designed to inhibit warping off. A mid-sized fleet warped in, and started pounding on the impel while my scrawny t1 self continued puttering away. The impel popped about the same time I cleared the edge, and I attempted to warp away only to be oneshotted by a stiff breese from the nighthawk present.
The only difference between this annoying gank and the many, many, many other ganks I’ve been through is that there was a warp bubble present and I still managed to get my pod out, so I’ll take whatever win I can get. I scanned a new entrance, we got the impel pilot back in, and plan to start mining again once the unnoticed K162 in our system we hadn’t noticed vanishes.

Anyway, knowing that the Sabre was a regular interdictor instead of a heavy interdictor probably would have helped me maybe get the rigged itty V out as well as an empty pod…

This has been mentioned before, but ‘m gonna throw it up anyway. Handy little quiz on knowing ships.
http://phase.org/Eve/ShipQuiz

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to make a sandwich.


Orgres and Wardens and Gardes, oh my

As my skillbook would tell you, I fly gallente frigates, gallente cruisers, battlecruisers and gallente BS. Also caldari frigates, but that doesn’t really relate at the moment. Regardless, I have hull upgrades V and armor compensation at III across the board. The problem I have, tho, is offensive capability. As a Miner, I’m getting my ABC skills to IV but after that, I’m going over to improve my drone skills.

Bty, this has nothing to do with me getting completely outdpsed by the new guy with his shiny Ogre IIs last sleeper site.

I’ve got drone interfacing at IV, combat drone interfacing at IV, scout drone operation at IV, Sentry drone operation at II(facepalm) and Heavy drone operation at II(double facepalm). I’ve been told by various older players to train drone interfacing to V first, and the 20% damage bonus makes me agree. But what after that?

In the WH, sleepers target drones first, so having sentries seems better over ogres since you can recall them instantly as opposed to pressing recall and watching it explode 6km away from you, reducing your dps by a fifth.

But are sentries better in other applications? WHs are fun, but if CCP, I dunno, starts enforcing their “no WH long habitation” and make PoSes run out of fuel four times faster or make WHs show up on the overview or something, I’d like to have a fallback plan.

Anyway, which is better for missions, fleet fights and gang PvPing, sentries or heavys?


Sleeper and PvP Dominix Setup

I’ve always been a active armor tanker so I wanted to experiment with a buffer armor tanking Dominix for Sleeper and PvP combat. Please note that I do not have Tech 2 Large Rail skills yet. What should go in the mid slots? I don’t have any experience with ECM so I am looking for advice.

[Dominix, WH-PVP]

Damage Control II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
Armor Explosive Hardener II

Cap Recharger II
Sensor Booster II
Target Painter II
Omnidirectional Tracking Link I
Stasis Webifier II

350mm Railgun I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge L
350mm Railgun I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge L
350mm Railgun I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge L
350mm Railgun I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge L
350mm Railgun I, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge L
Drone Link Augmentor I

Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I
Large Trimark Armor Pump I

Medium Armor Maintenance Bot I x5
Ogre II x5
Hammerhead II x5

Dominix - WH2 Trimark