Cheap fun: the joys of Sisi

Recently my computer had the unfortunate mishap of having a hard drive catastrophic failure, and of course with the new hard drive everything got re-installed and updated, and of course I had a brand-spankin'-new, lemony-fresh EVE install. This was the perfect opportunity to copy my EVE folder and apply to it the patch to connect to Singularity, EVE's test server, also known as Sisi.

I had played a little on Sisi just prior to the Quantam Rise patch, mostly to see how the speed rebalance would affect the way I fly ships (FYI: not much!) and I didn't even go to the main testing system of FD-MLJ in Syndicate at the time. After QR somehow my Sisi folder refused to be updated, and even a new copy of my Tranquility install did not fix this. Since then I've had many things on my plate both in-game and out so only in this past week did I rejoin the Sisi mini-community. The fun part is that our alliance headquarters are close enough to Syndicate space that I didn't have to join the "moveme" channel, and it was actually fun to fly down to 0.0 in a brand new 100 ISK Hyperion (ok, maybe 15000 in modules)! And here lies the fun of testing stuff on Sisi: absolutely everything you can buy on the market is 100 ISK, and everything is available in quantities of 100 million units, or just slightly less. This causes something funny though: the most expensive part of any ship is now the ammo, and when you're a Minmatar/Gallente gun freak like me you eat ammo like pop corn. But let's just say that ISK isn't an issue on Sisi; if you're short on ISK for X-Y-Z reason just undock a battlecruiser or battleship (or dreadnought or carrier if you have the skills), self-destruct it, and the Secure Commerce Commission will keep you in replacement ships and modules for years to come!

So naturally, the first thing I did after docking and making some ships and items reserves was to go out and find action. This isn't exactly hard to do as there are about a dozen beacons out in space for various classes of ships' free-for-alls, and three beacons for consensual combat only. So off I go towards FFA1, where pretty much everything goes except capital ships, and land right on top of a Sleipnir command ship. He obviously had much better skills so he had a way better tank than I did, and the inevitable was going to happen even if he didn't receive help from an Absolution passing by:

Hyperion bleeding

Damn that was fun! But I hardly stopped there. With a little bit of training I just had to see what the hell those hi-falootin' Tech 3 ships were all about. I had gotten hold of the skillbooks even before making my way to Syndicate so about an hour after I got on Sisi I was able to fly a Loki, and an hour after that a Proteus:

Hellbringer (BattleTech players will get it :)

Ganky (picture a Deimos on both steroids and cocaine!)

I lost the Loki to a Legion, among other ships, but the fun part is the Legion blew up in unison with me in a symphony of T3 destruction. The Proteus did fare a tad better before its untimely demise: I went down to 2 Astartes, 1 Eos and an Absolution (did I mention these things are painful?), but not before I took down one of the Astartes with me:

Bye bye Astarte!

These days on Sisi we get to try the features of the up-coming summer patch known as Apocrypha 1.5, and the shining highlight of this patch will be the arrival of sized rigs. Up until now, putting rigs on something cheap like a Rifter or fragile like an interceptor was seen as either pure folly or a plain waste of ISK, but when the patch hits rigged assault frigates will become the norm in no time flat. Case in point, this Jaguar:

Mmmm... blood!

Yes this looks like a typical Jaguar, but I'm not releasing its little secrets yet. The player who pwnd my behind twice with it did though, and I thank him for it. Let's just say it can solo big things :) And along the same lines but quite differently fit, I built a solo-PvP Rifter that made mincemeat of a Cormorant, and right after had an epic battle with a Wolf.

And finally, getting on Singularity allowed me to view two ships I had never seen before, and probably never will again unless I join one of the big alliances, an Aeon mothership and an Erebus titan:

Huh..... BIG !!!

Look for a little dot just above the station's docking ring, it's my Loki! Yes, a screenshot just doesn't do a titan justice. The mothership itself is big, but nothing compared to the titan. And all the time the station is buzzing with activity, with all sorts of capital ships and faction ships you never usually see.

So if you've never been on Sisi before, do yourself a favor and join in the fun... er... testing!

Fly it like it's worth 100 ISK :))

o7