Video: Armor logistics in action

This is PL's Armor Theory video, demonstrating armor logistics in a HAC and heavy dictor gang. This video goes with this post, in which we were batphoned by PL to help kill some russian supercarriers.

If you want to see A-team logistics in action, this is it. PL spent months developing their strategy and now their logi/HAC gangs are the envy of every alliance in new eden. While watching you might note that dictors cannot be remote repped while their bubble is active. To get around this PL alternates dictors, having one bubble for one cycle then get repped while another bubbles. Dictors get primaried as soon as they bubble and a few are lost, but it seems to work reasonably well. Another item of interest is that the pilot overheats his highs at one point to save a command ship, which was probably running armor links for the gang.

Also, this is the first eve video I appear in.

Eve files link
MKV, 166 MB, 8:10

I don't care how many WPM you typed

Today I am going to make an exception to my no-writing-about-things-outside-of-eve guideline. See, I read eve blogs for content, and this is something the majority of blog entries do not have. Banter blogs are bad enough, generating dozens of posts full of identical drivel, but this recent how-fast-can-you-type thing forces me to complain; it's not even eve related.

"Design your own mission"? Boring and pointless. "What are your plans for the next year"? Boring, but at least it's relevant. "Post your killboard statistics"? Meaningless, and only a couple lowsec pirates will even read it.

If you want me to read your posts instead of just skipping to the next item in the feed aggregator, post content. If you don't have anything interesting to say, don't say anything. Those of you with no posts other than banter blogs, stupid memes and copy-pasted eve news, I am talking to you.

It's not a popularity contest, pageviews are a terrible metric for success and if you want to write you should start by having something to write about.

That is all.

Another general war update

AAA went home. I don't know that they actually did anything in the war, but I suppose this is a good thing. ROL and possibly Initiative seem to be the only remnants of the invasion that are active in the north, and at least ROL was here for months before it invasion started. Red Alliance, former allies of ours, are working with White Noise against us in Venal, though the rumored russian invasion of the northernmost regions doesn't seem to have happened.

In the last few days we've been working on taking back some high-end moons in Pure Blind and have apparently taken some minor losses as hostiles hit targets of opportunity; our numbers have dropped as the actual danger of an invasion is gone, so the normal group of ~goodfights~ alliances (plus RA) have taken the opportunity to grab kills where they can. ROL killed another mothership of ours which had jumped to a cyno beacon unscouted (and they used 5 titans to do it, which is more than the entire SC had on the field during the capital fight we lost in h-w). They may just be turning into one of maybe three non-NC alliances that I have any respect for.

We have no wardecs on for the first time in months, so I'm going to take the opportunity to sell off some plexing loot and things in empire, and maybe take a trip out to geminate to firesale stuff that got left there.

Teamspeak Recordings: Killing IT caps

Yo, how is the doomsday on The Kapown going?

The module is laggy, waiting for it...

Okay, just drag another module over it like your cloaking
device or your Miner II and then it should unstick.

-NC using titans

With the war over or on hold or whatever, I can catch up on some non-battlereport posts I've had sitting around for a while. This is another in a series with teamspeak recordings and goes with this post, in which we killed a number of IT caps while taking minimal losses. Teamspeak recordings are, as always, NSFW.


Download/Listen
MP3, 33 minutes, 50 MB

EDIT: Added a title :fail:

IT vs NC: In which there is slight lag

There was a fight in o-y today. The hostiles titan bridged to a snipe spot just as we jumped in via gate. The lag started bad at around 3-5 minutes for modules and got worse, 20+ after we dropped our trademark titan blob and local hit 460.

After maybe five hours local started dropping and eventually we got to go home.

An exciting fleet fight

Aftermath: 1200 km of wrecks

Killboard.This will probably take a day to sync fully. I suspect we'll come out ahead; the FC reports that the enemy kept bringing in more ships thinking they were going to get titan kills and they blackscreened all to hell. We kept bringing in people too but, well, titans. People who came in after the fight started were supposedly taking 45 minutes to load.

EDIT EDIT EDIT: Related kills is giving wildly varying results for related kills, from 66b killed for 44 lost (with most losses showing on both sides) to 40 killed and 5 lost (clearly missing most of our losses). The current link (48 for 22) is the best I've found, with losses on the correct side, and it sounds about right; titans make a huge difference against battleships and one of ours got 94 killmails from this battle.

Well that was fun

I was plexing in tenal today when the call went out for supers > caps > BS. Logged into my dreadnaught in h-w and found them calling for 17k fuel, meaning the target was in our figurative backyard. Numbers were low, but fleets were forming at other staging points and FCs sounded excited. We were in a hurry, jumping bridge titans, support and dreadnaughts to the same cyno - risky because a good bump could leave us without a support fleet until the titan could be repositioned. We got lucky though and nobody so much as touched the bridge titan. FCs were pushing for more hictors and dictors.

We jumped in to x-70 where an enemy nyx was outside pos shields. We got an epic (~100 km) bump on it, went siege green, doomsdayed and tried bubble, neut and bump but it escaped. We sieged the pos while friendly supercaps jumped out but one of the titans wasn't capped and was left behind. It got tackled and the enemy started logging people in.

Bumped nyx in armor

Shooting dictors with a dread

For about two hours things were a mess trying to get dictors off the titan while we brought in reinforcements from staging systems. The enemy had a small number of capitals and even a few supers on the field but we took the caps down in short order. Eventually we got enough titans on grid to drive the enemy support off, at which point the fight was pretty well over. I had a little excitement near the end when a bunch of enemy support had me tackled far off the friendly capital blob (I had stayed mostly in the place where we cynoed) and got me down to 70% shield before they were driven off.

Aftermath

Killboard

Warbearing, or: The worst tengu fit ever

EDIT 2010-9-6: This fit has been superceded by one which is better at tanking but less good at scouting.

So let me tell you about this hilarious tengu fit. It has 22k EHP, afterburner and microwarpdrive and each rig is a different type. Oh, and I'm flying it.

What? Well, maybe we should start at the beginning.

At this point I've been at war for more than six months. If you read back through my posts you'll find two in which I talked about carebearing; since Atlas attacked geminate in December I've spent a total of 8 days earning isk.

A couple months ago I realized that there wasn't really an end in sight, so I decided to do some cross-training in order to have one character able to do both capital and subcapital combat.That way I could keep one on the front while carebearing at home. This has finally come to fruition (or it will in 3 days... funny story, my 45 million skill point capital pilot can't fit an RCU2). With the war at what appears to be a lull - sometimes going whole hours between fleets forming - I've had the opportunity to try plexing with two characters.

What I found was that the ishtar sort of sucks for killing things. It would be a lot better with perfect skills - and especially T2 drones - but the slow drones and anemic DPS just didn't cut it. Ships that do actual damage can't tank, and with two characters the only option was to have the scanning and scout ship also tank. This is where the T3 comes in.

This is a multi-role plexing utility ship. It does three things very well:

1. Scouting. It's immune to bubbles and warps in 3.6 seconds; almost no matter what you jump into, the only way you're going to be targeted by something is if you screw up.

2. Scanning. It can scan all signatures including ladar hacking sites, which are the hardest I've encountered. The sisters probe launcher and scan strength rig are necessary for this; with nearly perfect scanning skills the ladar hacking sites can be tricky.

3. Tanking guristas. It's cap stable (the CCC is necessary for this) and tanks nearly as well as an ishtar. Supplemented by a DPS ship it can tank pretty much anything as long as an effort is made to reduce incoming damage. It also has a significantly larger hit point buffer, and can tank the smartbomb in guristas military complex without going into armor.

Someday this is going to look horrible on my killboard, but you know what? I'm not really concerned about that. This setup does what I need and does it extremely well, in addition to being a joy to fly. It's worth every isk to me, and the fact that it's already paid for itself five times over is just icing on the cake.

Utility tengu (right) doing its' thing