a slight attack of conscience

After almost going blind during my last encounter, I decided I needed to work on staying calm under pressure and so jumped into a Rifter and headed back to the systems I was tootling about in the other day.

It was getting late so I only had 45 mins or so, figured I'd have a quick scout around and if there weren't any obvious targets I'd call it a night.

First low-sec system had around 20 pilots in them, most of them Old Hands but there were 3 relatively new pilots, so I set about tracking them down.

In hardly anytime at all I managed to land on grid with one of them and he was in a Hurricane, though he warped off.

Now normally I'd not be keen on going up against a 'cane in my Rifter, but as this pilot was relatively young I knew there was no way he could have a good fit installed on the ship, so I tried tracking him down again.

I then noticed that there were 2 other 'canes and a Drake on scan - waaay too much for my lil ol rRifter.  A quick chat on Corp chat had offers of help, but as I was not going to be around for long I demurred.  However, a corpy was next door and had just recently been exploded by a guy in a 'Cane - the same guy I'd tangled with in his Thrasher in my last blog.  I was able to get his shipname (so I could avoid him), and I thought I'd see if I could find a single noob piloted 'cane.

A couple of minutes later my corpy had entered system, we fleeted up and the 3 noobs promptly disappeared.

Ho-hum.

I decided to stick my nose into a nearby dead-end low sec system in case they'd gone there - no sign of them, but there were a couple other young characters in local and I spotted a Cormorant on scan, next second he landed on grid, turned tail and warped out again.  I was able to see his direction, and a quick scan that way located him in a belt - I warped to 0.

As soon as I landed I started burning towards the Destroyer, locked him up, applied web, scram and guns and set orbit to 500m.

He returned fire and I set my guns to overheat, pretty soon his ship exploded, whereas I still had most of my shields left.

At this point my wife demanded my attention and I made the schoolboy error of warping to a gate - not wise when I'd just been flagged for an illegal act!, before I could warp off again the gate guns exploded my ship. bugger.

I docked up in a hi-sec island and hit the sack.

next morning I checked the fit of the Cormorant and it was pretty bad;

Dual Afocal Light Maser I,Microwave S

Dual Light Beam Laser I,Microwave S

Cu Vapor Particle Bore Stream I

250mm Light Carbine Howitzer I,Nuclear S

150mm Carbide Railgun I,Plutonium Charge S

Core Probe Launcher I,Core Scanner Probe I

Upgraded 'Malkuth' Light Missile Launcher,Inferno Light Missile

Salvager I

Small Shield Booster I

1MN Afterburner I

Analyzer I

Codebreaker I

[empty low slot]

Small Ancillary Current Router I

Small Egress Port Maximizer I

Small Energy Collision Accelerator I

Then my conscience kicked in "He was obviously a young character, it doesn't look like he's had any decent fitting advice, what if I just killed his EVE for him?"

So I stuck together a cheapish, decent fit he could use ratting and evemailed him along with some general fitting advice and wished him well.

Turns out he'd been doing some exploring, must have found a WH through to low-sec and jumped through to see what was what - then he met me.

He didn't sound disheartened, and at least he knows what to expect now :)

Bloody Hell, I've gone blind!

In my last post I mentioned that the Hound (and stealthiness in general was sexy).  Training time to get me into a Stealth Bomber, and pilot it semi competently, was about a year and would mess up my Rifter Plan so...

I have an old alt with a stupid name I made 4 years ago, who took some learning skills and some very basic, caldari frigate based training , then sat in Jita accepting my courier contracts to sell.

So now he has some unallocated skillpoints, but not enough or enough skills to sell for enough to cover the transfer fee. Rather than biomass him and start a new guy, or buy an existing SB pilot, I've dug this baldy Caldari out from retirement and set him a punishing training plan.

I allocated his spare SP which got him through some of the basics (no navigation skill, no mechanic, no engineering wtf was I on 4 years ago?), he then underwent some Neural Optimisation which will reduce his total skill training time by 30 days.

He's currently getting to grips with Cybernetics as I have a couple of +4 implants with his name on them which will further reduce his training time by another 33 days.  In the mean time he's been busy and now has 2 jumpclones installed, a shitload of skills injected waiting to be trained and a few skillbooks sat waiting in his hangar for his training to catch up.

All in all cost me about 200million isk, he'll be able to do covert scanning etc in a couple of months and will have the skills to be a decent Stealth Bomber pilot in 9 months.

For now he's keeping his head down and focusing on training, training, training - if I catch him having fun I'll force him to listen to local in Jita!

When he's done he will go down the pirate route, so once he isn't a total embarrassment in a fight, and if he's very nice to me, he may be let out to blow up some unsuspecting muppets, just to acclimate him to the stresses of combat.

Speaking of which, on to the main topic of today's blog :-

Last night I was out and about around looking for trouble in my Thrasher, I was bouncing around a couple of low-sec systems looking for someone suitable when I warped through a gate into a dead end system to find a flashy red Hurricane 17km away.  I was 12km from the gate, I held cloak as long as possible in case he was going to jump through, then burned to the gate with my MWD overheated and my DCII on.  He got lock, webbed me and opened fire.

Shields went straight away, I was halfway through my armour when I reached jumprange, I managed to resist opening fire on him and jumped through just as a Wolf landed on my new side of the gate!

I held cloak again, but knew that if these two were working together I was probably toast...but the Wolf jumped straight through!

I immediately warped out and headed to a station for repairs.  43k isk later my Thrasher was good as it gets and I headed back out.

This time the same low sec systems were quieter, though there was a Thrasher on my D-scan intermittently, I looked up the pilot and he was more experienced than me so I decided it'd be best to avoid him if possible.

I noticed a relative young character in a Coercer (destroyer) show up on D-scan along with some probes.

I tracked him down to a belt and warped in at 0 hoping to catch him unawares - bollocks, he was 99km away!  Burning 99km in my Thrasher would give him plenty of time to notice me and warp out so instead I warped straight out back the way I'd come, hoping he either wasn't paying attention or else thought I wasn't up for a fight.

I warped back to the belt at 100km and he was still there with his probes out - at 199Km!  I obviously hadn't checked where he was in the belt, just looked at his distance.  This time I warped to a celestial in the same direction I was already travelling all the while checking my d-scan and expecting him to warp off - he must have noticed me by now?

I warped back to the belt (now my third warp in to the same belt in about a minute) at 100km and landed right on top of him, locked him up and blew him away, he must have been /afk as he didn't react at all, just sat in his capsule.

All the while I'd been refreshing d-scan in case of company and I was just about to warp out when I saw the Thrasher I'd been avoiding earlier heading my way.

I waited and he landed 70km away.

~~~~~ Time for a brief Interlude ~~~~~

R1fta is a very relaxed corp.  R1fta as a corp do not care about killboard stats, lossmails, stoopid failfits, experimenting or whatever. All that matters is fun and explosions, preferably other peoples, but our own will do.

I'm all good with that, otherwise I'd probably have been kicked from most other pirate corps for general muppetry.

My kill:death ratio is about 10:26, though I am ahead in isk lost - helps that I fly cheaper ships.

I would like my kill:death ratio to be better - not because of Corp rules, but because I want to not lose quite so many fights.  (There are only two R1fta rules by the way i) always honour 1v1 fights, ii) always honour ransoms - violation of either of these will see you kicked without appeal, everything else is just fun).

So, the rational thing to do when the Thrasher landed 70km away was to GTFO and enjoy the +1 on my killboard.

~~~~~ Normal Service Resumed ~~~~~

I decided, "fuck it, if you don't try, you'll never know" and burned towards him with guns overheated, and my chest pounding.

Shortly afterwards I went Boom!, didn't do a huge amount of damage to him, warped off in my pod and gave a gf :) in local at about the same time he posted his own gf.

We had a bit of a chat about Thrashers, he advised me to stick with it, had nice things to say about R1fta and one of my corpies he used to fly with.

Quite an adrenaline rush, maybe too much, as I then started seeing flashing lines across my vision and my heart was still hammering away.

Much laughing in corpchat when I said what was happening, but a strawberry jam sandwich seemed to calm me down and a couple of minutes later my vision cleared.

A little later he emailed me his fit (I need to work on my shield skills to fit it though).

So now my kill:death ratio is 11:27, but I was killed by a helpful guy and I got a new fit to try.

I will have to try and pick my fights a bit more though and try and get my K:D ratio up so at least they are close to even.

And I may need to work on some calming techniques.

another failed gank

I was inspired by Kaeda's recent triple retriever gank and decided to attempt something similar. My alt had a bit of a hunt around in a cloaky Hound, and found a Hulk, Retriever and an Iteron all mining in a belt in Vylade (yep Iteron was mining too).

They had intermittent 'protection' from an Ishkur who sat in the belt 10km off them for a couple of minutes, would then warp off for a few minutes before returning and repeating.

I slid my Hound between the Iteron and the Retriever, and was about 4k from each of them. waited until the Ishkur did his warp off thing, then jumped into system in my Gank Thrasher, and warped to my alt. As soon as I entered warp I warped my alt out to a safe and I landed slap bang between the Iteron and Retriever. I locked up the Retriever, applied web, scram, guns and lolrocket.

All was going well, both were still mining, Retriever was going down, so I decided to lock up the Iteron to see if I could get them both.

I looked at the Iteron in my overview list and hit target. what I hadn't done was click on the Iteron in my overview list, so I untargetted the Retriever, my guns stopped, police turned up and jammed me. BAM.

 

Retriever & Iteron didn't even twitch.

I could hear a corpmate in my head shouting "Complexities! Complexities!" as I warped my pod out.

Lessons learned -

• I probably should have done this in a 0.5 system rather than 0.8, I may have been able to relock the Retriever.
• The speed the Police turned up probably wouldn't have given me enough time to take out both anyway.
• Setup was good, my alt was cloaked and undetected throughout.
• Hound is sexy, traveling around cloaked and getting into the perfect position without my targets being aware was great, a successful gank would have been the icing on the cake. I'll definitely be looking to get into a Hound myself at some point (but it'll not be anytime soon - too much other training to do first before I'll be able to fly one properly).

Ho-hum, onwards and upwards. 

Get some focus!

jeez, I seem to have the concentration span of a gnat, this coupled with my inherent laziness and general ineptitude means I tend to rush off and make a half arsed attempt at some new idea, mess it up and then look around for something else to try.

Hulkaggedon is a shiny distraction "Gank Miners! Buy Thrashers! Fit 'em cheap and go on a ganking spree!"  wait don't let you sec status drop too much or you can't get to your gank stash, rat up your sec status (hmm BS rats pay OK bounties, will help towards gank Thrashers etc)

So I popped a few retrievers, failed to pop some other miners (why do I double tap my guns button?! that just turns them on and off again, by the time they are ready to turn back on I'm jammed by the police, lose my Thrasher for nothing and get mocked in Russian - I think I got mocked in Russian, Google translate converted it from Russian to English but it still didn't make any sense).

Today I spent a couple of hours reading about solo stealth bombing in WH, researched fits etc then realised that to fly a SB effectively will take me the best part of a year to get the skills /sheesh.

Alternatively I could stick with the Rifter Plan, keep plugging away with cheap t1frigate  PvP (with the occasional sidetracks into Thrashers), and by the time I'm near the end of my Rifter Plan (305 days and counting) I'll be closer to being able to fly a SB semi-competently.

In the meantime my new PI setup is going well, my alt did her first ORCA run of materials at the weekend, and it looks like she may need to do another one before next weekend.  Her factory planet is operating 24 hours per day and she's aiming to ship 300 million isk worth of stuff to Jita during the next few days.  If this is sustainable (I so far it looks like it will be), she should be able to keep me in Rifters & Thrashers for a while.

I'm also planning on selling a spare ORCA pilot at the end of this week which should net me somewhere between 2-3 Billion isk which would free up a character slot for a new toon - hmm what to train for , ooh something shiny!

two posts in two days, what's going on!

"Criminals are not welcome here. Leave now or be destroyed".

/sigh you kill one or two ecological terrorists and are branded a criminal, EVE is so unfair!  Well, the ecological terrorists probably call themselves 'miners' and I destroyed 3 Retrievers and badly damaged a couple of Covetors, but still, criminal? me?

Luckily my sec status only dropped to -2.2 so I still have access to my stash of Destroyers in  0.9 space, looks like I'll need to sweettalk CONCORD and kill some belt rats to restore my sec status a tad, otherwise I'll end up getting myself barred from hi-sec before Hulkageddon is half-way through.

In case you weren't aware, the lower your security status, the less systems you can visit without the space police blowing your ship up on sight at gates, stations or anywhere you happen to stay still.

-2.0 not welcome in 1.0

-2.5 not welcome in 0.9

-3.0 not welcome in 0.8

-3.5 not welcome in 0.7

-4.0 not welcome in 0.6

-4.5 not welcome in 0.5 (and thus no hisec)

-5.0 flashy everybody can shoot you everywhere.

Whilst I'm not averse to having a low sec status, I'd really like to keep it above -2 for the duration of Hulkageddon to give me the widest range of possible targets.

After that, we'll see - I have alts to haul stuff from high-sec to wherever I am allowed to live, so shouldn't cause me too much hassle.

been awhile, stuff has happened.

Looks like it's been over a month since I last posted, I'm such a slacker!

I recently sold a Trader toon I'd set up on a trial account - whilst I'm not uber rich it has certainly helped, hopefully I'll have another character for sale (Orca pilot) at the end of this month, combined these two sales should see me setup account cost wise for the next 12 months at least.

I also finally knuckled down and got my PI toons sorted - 4 now have 5 planets each in lo-sec and the 5th has 4 planets in lo-sec plus a factory planet in high-sec. They all work together to produce one item which sells quite nicely indeed (no, I'm not going to tell you what it is, but it see's more income coming in than I can spend which is good).

One of my alts now also qualifies for Lvl 4 security missions from the Gallente Federation Navy (though doesn't yet have the skills rquired to fly his intended mission runner ship - a Maelstrom). He'll be ready to fly one competently by early June, at which point he'll also be able to do lvl 4s for Minmatar something or other too.

Finally, I've made progress with my intended life of piracy. I finally won a 1v1 rifter fight!, then not a couple of hours later I also exploded a solo catalyst :)

And now Hulkageddon has started - this will be ongoing throughout May and encourages suicide ganking in Hi-sec of miners in general and Hulks in particular.

I've never ganked before, though admittedly that catalyst pilot didn't want a fight - shouldn't have been in a lo-sec system in a combat ship then, but I decided to have a go last night, bought and fitted some cheap Thrashers (cost about 5 million each) and blew up 2 unsuspecting Retrievers (first one was worth around 32 million, the second around 16 million).

I'll have to work at getting a hauler nearby to pick up the dropped items, if I'd had one last night I could have netted loot worth 11 million which would have paid for the 2 lost Thrashers.

Ah well, plenty of May left :)