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.