Screw you, Murphy

I should be doing physics II questions right now.

Anywho, back in WH space, I’ve had a bit of a snag. By which I mean several snags.

By which I mean if I didn’t know better I’d swear I was intentionally screwing up just to have something to post about.

Which I’m not. Pinky promise.

Anywho, to shoot the most NPCs in nullsec, I have two alts trained up to domis and not much else. They can use t2 RR, t2 energy xferr, some drones and that’s it. I’m not entirely sure if I bothered to pick up gun skills at any point. Oh, and they fly itty Vs and (in another week or three) will have perfect learning skills in preparation for “operation triple character carrier”.

If anyone can think of something to do with multiboxing three carriers please let me know as I honestly haven’t thought it out past “OMG 45 DRONES”.

Anyway, this is becoming a bit of an issue in a wormhole as anything bigger than a cruiser requires more reps than Eve’s public image after a typical dev post in the forums is met by a truckload of people who appreciate that they’re working on lag, they’d just rather they work on it a bit harder.

Coupled with the fact that the warp-in points SOMEHOW always spit you out 70km or more away from the actual sleepers who seem to be exploiting that AHARM C6 with reckless abandon.

So, you’ve got the equivalent of walking towards someone half a mile away at a brisk pace while he shoots at you with a handgun with perfect range the entire time and you can only hit about ten feet in front of you because you’re holding five or six riot shields and throwing duct tape at your friend to patch the holes the guy is shooting.

This is irritating as I somehow perfectly calculated my tank to be EXACTLY however much DPS sleepers tend to do, so I’m constantly sweating and cursing as my armor has made such a frequent habit of dropping into hull I’m not sure how much of the original armor remains as compared to whatever the hell RRs actually do to the ship they’re repairing.

So, to fix this whole brisk walk towards man with a sniper rifle issue, I’m using a zephyr to get myself warp-in points about 500m away from the BS, whaling the crap out of them, then warping away, zephyr, repeat, hooray.

In my latest use of this strategy, I was in a mostly cruiser wave. Not wanting to warp in and out and such, I dropped a cap recharger and fitted an AB to each battleship. Warp in, turn on the ABs and start approaching the sole remaining BS. It goes down, and these three annoying warp scramming frigs show up.

Fully prepared for the situation, I launched my hobgoblin IIs and made a humorous comment in WH colonists:

haav0c > “Hello, warp scrambling frigs. Meet tiny whirring balls of hobgoblin death”

God, I’m so witty. Unfortunately I was so busy thinking “crap, Murphy’s Law now states that I cannot possibly survive this wave as I have already predicted its successful outcome” to notice that my ships had drifted/ ABed away from each other at top speed and were now upwards of 10km from each other.

For those who don’t know, the range of an RR module is something like 6-8km. I don’t remember, but the important thing is it’s less than 10km by a good 2km or more. Now, I want you to imagine a scenario:

You are taking heavy fire in a battleship and are traveling at top speed (200m/s) in the x direction. If your tank will only hold for another 20 seconds without RR, will you survive if you are currently traveling towards your RR partner?

Will you survive if you are traveling at top speed in EXACTLY THE WRONG DIRECTION?

Will you survive if you are traveling at top speed in exactly the wrong direction and in your haste you forget to turn the afterburner off?

Will you survive if you are traveling at top speed in exactly the wrong direction, you forgot to turn off the AB AND you are currently in a Black Hole C4 wormhole? (+44% inertia)?

For those of you reaching for a book on Eve physics and a pencil, I can save you some time and reveal that the scenario in which everything has gone horribly wrong will result in one destroyed RR BS while three warp scrambling frigs, unamused by the hobgoblin tomfoolery, are still alive. Consequently, the other RR BS follows, followed by the DPS BS.

SO.

After half an hour of an entertaining movie and picking up my loot and the destroyed sleeper’s loot 10 m3 at a time in a zephyr, I check my fuel levels.

20 hours of coolant, enriched uranium and nitrogen isotopes left.

Ok, that’s manageable, I can scan a route in that time, I just need to force collapse some WHs with my Orca and BS.

*Inner Voice* what BS?

…that pile of metal over there.

*Inner Voice* surrounded by the angry sleepers?

Yup.

*Inner Voice* good luck with that.

I hate you.

So, after two hours of collapsing our static C4 which seems to only be heavily occupied and/or leading to C5s, C6s or more effing C5s, It’s the last pass of the Orca through a X-something-something-something WH to close it so I can scan another useless WH and then preferably find another, better one.

Again, up goes the witty comment, this time in the local chat I will soon be separated from and never see again, ever.

haav0c > DIE WH DIE!

Once again, just as I said that, I thought of Murphy’s Law. Then, once again, I jumped through with the AB on just to make sure that my eight passes (with a 250 mil mass ship) would collapse this hole (2 bil mass).

As you can probably guess, it didn’t effing close.

With corp mates complaining about the fuel alerts and 18 hours of fuel left, I make an executive decision. Since all I have left is some itty Vs, GSCs and destroyers/scan frigs, I stuff everything in the Orca, offline the tower and logoff.

It is an incredibly short term solution but is also viable for long term, assuming no-one bashes it. As to you people bashing it, why in all the hells would you bash a tower with nothing possible to be gained from it?

Anywho, I’ll keep looking for a BS capable route while studying for the Physics test Tuesday. Electric potential energy and all related constants and variables are jerks.