How to kill 40 armor hacs and 12 guardians in 11 seconds

Smartbombs.

Random hotdrop

"Can you move to the left a bit? I'm looting."

-NC titan pilot

Today I was busy doing other things when jabber ping went out for capitals. I was two regions from my dread, but was able to catch up thanks to a friendly cyno carrier. We had a decent fleet for a rushed formup, about 70 caps with 5 titans

Jumping to l4x in geminate, where some NC entites are apparently making a push, we landed on a busy grid which included a small drone lands coalition capital fleet. Dreads went on carriers and titans were assigned to doomsday enemy dreads. Red and blue subcapital fleets were on the field, and after cleaning up the enemy caps we started taking down battleships. The fight didn't result in a huge number of kills (except for a successful bombing run by the enemy), but it was good fun.

After jumping in


Starting on the subcapitals

Killboard

Outnumbered, not outgunned

Having recently finished training heavy assault ships I got into an armor hac gang for the first time today, flying an ishtar because I don't have amarr or minmatar (for loki) cruiser 5 yet. In armor hac fleets the ishtar is a support ship, its' 5 mid slots allowing it to fit two points and two remote ECCM modules while offensive capabilities are limited to autocannons, light drones and sentries.

Ishtar fitting for my skills

Razor is traditionally weak in logistics but we seem to be improving that, pulling 12 guardians out of 80 in fleet. Everything in atlas space near our staging system had already fail cascaded so we headed south into providence, where some fighting is taking place in the aftermath of U'K's disbanding-or-whatever. :CCP: was in full effect, causing significant lag just jumping through gates, and we soon encountered a gate with 200 hostiles on the other side.

Jumping through we entered a running fight against the main enemy fleet, mostly primarying enemy battlecruisers. An Initiative drake gang entered the field soon after, bringing numbers to 240 against our 80. Things were a bit laggy, but the system was reinforced and modules cycled well manually.

After jumping in


Spreading modules and damage

Guardians were able to keep us alive without too much trouble and enemy ships which were in range died without a fuss. After over an hour of fighting hostiles left the gate and we started warping around and catching what we could. Eventually the enemy left the system and we headed back to our staging area.

Killboard

Exploration site guides: H-PA Crash Crew

This is the first of a series of guides to exploration sites. These will be published at wide intervals due to the number of times a site must be run to gather meaningful statistics. The wiki is a pretty good resource for this, but is out of date and does not provide statistics.

Normally LADAR sites are gas clouds, but some areas have LADAR hacking sites which provide booster use and manufacturing items such as booster BPC, booster reactions and skillbooks including neurotoxin recovery, nanite control and drug manufacturing. H-PA Crash Crew is one such site, containing 3 to 9 containers which must be accessed with the use of a codebreaker module.

Running the site:

Warping to zero puts you 35 km from the center of the site and the initial spawn, consisting of:

2 energy neutralizing sentries
4 cruise missile batteries
4 elite frigates, 1 of which may warp scramble
4 elite cruisers
5 battleships
Possibly a special spawn, Fusura (cruiser) and/or Isoryn (battleship)

Initial warpin with Fusura spawn

Killing one of the battleships, usually the last, will trigger a second wave consisting of:

3 elite frigates
3 elite cruisers
5 battleships

• NOTE: There are no gates in this site and it can be done with a carrier, though this would be overkill.
  
• NOTE: You do not need to kill any of the ships to hack and open the containers.
• NOTE: I have never seen the second wave contain a special spawn.
• NOTE: The energy neutralizing turrets have a maximum range of approximately 45 KM.
• NOTE: This site drops the nanite control skillbook fairly often, which is generally worth 200-270 million.
• NOTE: The Fusura special spawn can drop a gila BPC (VERY rarely), medium dread guristas loot such as smartbombs and railguns, and drug manufacturing items such as booster reactions and booster BPC. Isoryn can drop large dread guristas items and drug manufacturing items. Presumably it is possible for Isoryn to drop a rattlesnake BPC, though I have never seen this happen.
• NOTE: The contract market for booster BPC is extremely weak. Try the 'narcotics' channel or player Serenianus, who may be interested in buying them in bulk.
• Note: Only the three cans which always spawn can contain skillbooks. The rest only have booster BPC, and are also much harder to hack so you may want to ignore them.
  

Statistics:

Number of times run: 31

Average value of drops: 108 million

Number of containers:
3 containers: 4
4 containers: 7
5 containers: 7
6 containers: 7
7 containers: 2
8 containers: 2
9 containers: 2

Special spawn frequency:
No special spawn: 21
Fusura: 7
Isoryn: 3

EDIT 2010-8-2: It is possible to get a 'perfect' spawn: 9 containers, fusura and isoryn.

Gankers Are Bad People

I've been seeing this assertion a lot lately, people declaring that those who kill innocent miners or mission-runners are immoral, evil or even real-life sociopaths. And it pisses me off.

Part of the reason it annoys me is that although the accusation makes no sense in the context of eve, it's easy to see how people could buy into it: killing somebody's internet spaceship makes them sad, and making people sad on purpose means you are a bad person. Right?

Let's take that to an extreme then. Let us say that an alliance leader starts a war, destroying thousands of ships and seizing or destroying hundreds of billions of isk worth of assets. If we consider a player who ganks a hulk to be a bad person then this alliance leader, who has ruined the internet spaceship lives of hundreds of people, clearly has the morals of a genocidal maniac.

That sounds stupid so I'm going to make some assertons:

1. Spaceships being blown up is part of eve.
2. Generally, nobody likes having their spaceship being blown up.

If we accept those, then it's time to ask a question of the people who whine about gankers: What is so damn special about your particular spaceship that having it blown up gives you the right to pass moral judgment on people who are playing the game and having fun?

I don't see there being an answer to that which would change my mind, so the issue is resolved to my satisfaction. Thus, in order to ameliorate my annoyance, I resolved to gank a hulk in highsec for every time I was irritated by people whinging about griefers.

[17:43:48] Eifi > are you crazy??
[17:45:15] Eifi > stupid fuckkers
[17:45:44] Eifi > i need to kill hulk in highsec cause my dick is too small !!!
[17:45:49] Eifi > ttsss

And it was d-lishous.

Useful things: RF Freight

RF freight is a freighter-wielding highsec courier service with aggressively reasonable prices. I tried their service at the recommendation of corpmates and it does exactly what it says on the box, moving things from point a to point b safely and in a reasonable timeframe. They can be found in-game in the channel 'rf freight', the important part of the MOTD being as follows:

1. Read This FAQ
2. Use our Trip Calculator
3. Set up your contract

This contract was completed while RFI had a wardec active:

Living here is why we can have nice things

0.0 is where the money is.

Living there is hard, though. You need to fight to survive, and wars will interrupt your carebear activities for months on end. You will die repeatedly for no good reason.

But the isk. Even if you aren't at all interested in fighting, moving out here is worth it even with the wars. One hundred million per hour on a bad day, billion isk drops on a good one. This is why we get to fly capitals and supercapitals, why we can afford to bring machariels on roams. Put in the time and effort, and 0.0 will generate such an excess of isk that you too will be able to afford shiny things. I use the surplus to invest in making even more isk -- I want a titan someday.

That is all.

Roadtrip politics

Over the last few days I've gotten in on a few small roams, no interesting kills. Trying to get a handle on the political situation it looks as though PL, goons and several NC alliances are in the area, all running individual for-fun campaigns but keeping the batphones operational for supercap and CSAA kills. Most of the alliances are blue to us, the exception being PL who have a temp-nap system which we have made good use of in the past and I trust to work. A number of Morsus Mihi and sev3rance (MM guest) as well as razor pilots have appeared on killmails of supercaps that PL tackled.

Things thus far have not been going entirely well for atlas. Three or four of their renter alliances have fail cascaded, as have their allies Cult of War and Gentleman's Club. However, atlas isn't really a target we can kill; even if we were to take all their space, which we can't, they've survived that before. They also aren't the only enemy -- the SC seems to be back together, pulling 600 pilots today, including some IT, to defend an Initiative CSAA pos which had been reinforced. Command elected to blueball due to dominion lag even though our numbers were 250-400 -- not bad odds when that number includes PL.

Some ships just need to die

Some ships need to die. Not as in "it's carrying something expensive so it needs to die" or "it's shooting me so it needs to die," but ships which are almost literally begging the universe to be put out of their misery, ships so horrible that just knowing they exist will make you see the game in a whole new way.

This is one of them.

Roadtrip

Razor is taking a summer roadtrip to Curse. The situation down there is that atlas and their pets are under attack by PL and some goons, and possibly a few other NC alliances - sev3rance for sure, and I heard a rumor that some MM were in the area. So far this is an alliance operation, though I wouldn't be surprised if we end up cooperating with other forces in the area since of course NC are blobbing noobs and goons and PL are part of the NC (forums are always right). Several Atlas renters (HTA, primary. and one other) have already collapsed under the pressure, so I'm hopeful that we can do some good in the area. Looking forward to getting some revenge for geminate and max 2.

Hellpurge

(n) An operation in which all structures in an area are reinforced and killed as quickly as if there were no resistance.

(v) The act of conducting a hellpurge.

We're been running nearly-nonstop capital and subcapital ops for around five days. The Cry Havoc station has been taken by FCON, an ex-providence alliance, and all enemy structures in the target area destroyed -- about 60 towers, including those belonging to ROL, Ev0ke and CH pets, as well as 7 TCU. The enemy formed up a few times, apparently once with 8 supercarriers and 150 subcaps, but it never turned into a fight.

We've also been taking out a few Ev0ke towers in lowsec, and they actually showed up to try and defend a few times. We didn't catch their repping carriers and there wasn't a real fight, but I did volley an enemy battleship with my dreadnaught. It turned out to have no tank and a single shield EM resist rig....

Fortunately there are now reliable rumors we'll be going on a roadtrip soon, which should be interesting.

Gratuitous drone blob

An EVE wedding

Today in H-W I had the rare opportunity to attend a wedding (or wedding celebration), between Morsus Mihi members Mike Takumi and Tink Vader. The bride and groom were in a golem and a raven navy issue, and in attendance were four titans, four supercarriers and a number of others. The event was celebrated with an all-comers subcapital thunderdome. Several carriers tried to keep the bride and groom repped, but they were eventually taken down by the titans. I was in an interceptor and held on for some time, but attracted a doomsday that I had a bit of trouble tanking.

Celebrating EVE style

Strontium in the morning

Over the last few weeks we've been on low-intensity ops, slowly knocking out some towers in the Pure Blind area. A few days ago we turned up the heat and got back on the Cry Havoc eviction treadmill. We tried several times to kick them out before MAX 2 started and basically managed to lose some subcap fleets. This time we're bringing some numbers and capitals and have reinforced so many structures that the timer app is longer than my screen, so we're probably serious about it.

Cloud Ring and and southern Pure Blind (where CH lives) are basically part of NC territory, but are usually held by hostiles. We don't really need the space, it's hard to defend because of its' distance from tribute and anybody who moves in there would need to be really good in order to hold the stations against the local alliances.

Cry Havoc have skill and great fleet numbers for their size. They're an alliance I respect so it's sort of a shame we have to kill them, but they and Ev0ke allied with the SC during MAX 2 so they've got to go. Or at least suffer -- I doubt they'll leave the area even if we retake all the moons and stations.

Well, whatever. Hoping for some good fights over the next few days.

Reinforcement timers

Shooting the Cry Havoc station again.

Why I (should, should not) be on the eve blog pack

As you're all aware, Kinux is doing a revision to the blog pack, in which some of the inactive blogs will be dropped and replaced with active ones. As a blogger, obviously my self-worth is dependent on my hits per day so the idea of being in the pack has crossed my mind. Now it's time to decide whether or not to put my name forward.

Why I should be in the blog pack:

1. I post regularly about the internet spaceship game eve online.

You'd think that this would be the key metric, and indeed "Being part of the Pack comes with its responsibilities and obligations. The first and foremost is to blog regularly". I've got that covered, and even have some useful information and unique content.

If I was really pushing for inclusion I would have put that at the bottom of the post as a gotcha... but posting about internet spaceships isn't enough. The blog pack isn't just a list of blogs, it's a social media group: "for the Pack, I wanted to create this sense of belonging to an elite group of bloggers".

Why I should not be in the blog pack:

"Here's a list of To Dos that all members should strive to accomplish as part of their duties".

1. "Comment on Pack members blogs". I only comment when I have something to say, and usually something to contribute. This is very rare.
2. "When writing a post, try to link to each other posts, bringing the community even closer together". Sure, I'll do this... when somebody has recently written something which supplements my post. This has happened maybe one time in the last six months. Not that there aren't blogs I'd like to link; I've recently followed 12th's posts about his experience in the northern war with interest but no particular way to link them to what I was posting about at the time, see what I did there, and I'm definitely not going to make a post just linking somebody else's post.
3. I'm not very good at this. I use a facts-only style (my first titan kill warranting a whole four sentences) and the brevity and lack of adverbs surely makes me less engaging than somebody who can actually write, and if I have nothing to write about I just won't post.
4. I'm not a social media person. I don't participate in banter blogs (I would if there was one I wanted to respond to, but there haven't been), play stupid blog games or use any other form of social media. The blog pack and its guidelines are about community, whereas I only really care about the game.

Other issues:

1. Does the blog pack work? While the pack has succeeded in its' purpose of creating a close-knit group that gets lots of page views, for me the purpose of a blog pack is to aggragate posts. Out of approximately three blogs that I currently follow with real interest (see right, subtract two) none are in the blog pack. The exclusivity of the blog pack means that it misses content I actually care about.

Building a better blog pack - one which contains all the blogs, but does not have wow 'tards - would be simple. I've even figured out how to make it so subscribing works like the Kinux pack (single item) rather than the evebloggers bundle (hundreds of subscriptions inside a folder). It's an intriguing idea, though probably not worth the effort since the final product would just be the evebloggers bundle without the non-eve shit.

So, anyway. I decided not to link myself on kinux' post. Can't be a failure if you never try, right? \o/