Low-key?

I think not! If you see this thing in orbit around you, know that you are already royally screwed sideways into next sunday. I humbly introduce to you my new toy...

You want this, don't you...

Fly sneaky

o7

Align Ottawa !!!

Freedom!

This is it. The moment I was waiting for has finally arrived. Tomorrow morning after dropping off my boys at my ex's place I get on my bike and head WSW towards the Canadian capital. Nothing to think about but me, my bike and the road/path. I will clear my head like I have never done before. Well, the weather forecast for the coming days is on the iffy side but at this point I simply don't care. Just get me out of fucking Montreal already! Needless to say my blogging activities will come to a complete stop until I get back, and you can expect a decently sized pictorial post as I will be photo-documenting the trip as much as I can (read as much as my phone's charge will allow).

Of course who says "I'm going away for a while" also has to say "Oh shit I gotta set a long skill to train!", and I've got the prefect skill in mind: Cloaking V. One of the ships I'm planning on buying is the ChaosStorm-approved Ganky-Cloaky-Proby-Unbubblable Loki. I already have 3 out of 5 subsystems, and a good collection of mods so when the time comes I'll fit this monstrosity. I'll practice doing some cloaky flying with my "cheaper" Rapier first, but then again more when I actually have time to fly, which means after October 20th.

There you have it, my last post before I go on the bike tour. You have no idea how excited I am right now!

Fly hardcore

o7

Fail-est Loki pilot evar !!!

You want more proof that carebearing dulls the brain? Here goes: last Friday night I was taking things easy in EVE after a big work week full of weird events (including an intern who got fired... good fucking riddance!), a big drum session after replacing my snare head, and a huge well-deserved supper accompanied by some of Quebec's finest beer. So feeling mellow and lazy I didn't feel like hunting so I said to myself "just to a few missions before doing the couch potato", so I did. I was also testing a new Loki setup which now had some newly-trained HAM IIs and a pretty big drone bay. Sure it wasn't a DPS machine the way my Sleipnir is, but flying circles around ships that can't hit you can be quite funny and now with the drones I could easily take care of those pesky frigate rats. Until the fail happened.

My agent gave me the "go get my cans of Quafe" mission. If you're not familiar with it, you have to loot a can sitting about 40 km from the warp-in point in the middle of a Blood Raider camp, and when you loot the can a whole bunch of cruiser and battleship Bloods spawn on top of you. So the tactic is go in, loot and GTFO. But in my misguided lazy comfort I had forgotten one little but important detail. Among the initial spawn are a few frigates that have to be dealt with, and in my almost-sleepy state I completely forgot that little fact and proceeded to warp in and fly straight to the can, loot it, and click warp. Now the can is in the middle of a whole bunch of structures and in my dazed state it took me a while to realise that my Loki was going nowhere and had to be re-aligned, so I cut the warp and did so. But when I clicked warp a second time take a wild guess what message Aura gave me. Yeah, that message. But even then my numb and slightly drunk brains were too slow in realising it. By the time I woke up to the fact that the Blood Raiders were going to kill me I had no cap left, therefore no tank left, and didn't have enough time to kill the scramming frigate. A few seconds later, Hellbringer II went bye-bye. And to prove yet again that my brains were too slow to play EVE I had completely forgotten about the "loss of SP" part of flying T3's. Yeah.... bravo champion (insert ovation here) !!!

Oh well, at least I'll look at the positive point of my loss: the Loki wasn't pinata-fit with a bunch of faction and complex modules. But still, it's an expensive loss. EVE is a harsh mistress and if you think you may be a bit tired to play it, better stay away and do something else! Now, I'm not as financially poor as I used to be and if I wanted to I could buy two replacements right away. But do I really need one? Not really. Just like with the one that was lost in W-space my Sleipnir will do just as good, if not better. Hell, I think I'll train Command Ship V before I re-train Minmatar Engineering Subsystem IV, the skill that was lost in the explosion. And of course if things go according to plan I will be doing a bit more The PvP in the near future and this will inevitably have me replacing interceptors, AFs, cruisers, BCs, and maybe even some HACs and Recons. Lokis are nice, but my luck with them so far has been nothing short of disastrous. One was lost in a well-staged gank by a Titan-skilled Hall&Oates fan, but the loss that's purely my own fault is the suckiest, even if financially it doesn't hurt as much. But it was nothing that a quick game of Quake couldn't fix :)

Fly awake, especially in T3's!

o7

Some people just don't get it

I logged in tonite to an animated conversation in AMC's board room channel, and it wasn't long that I found the reason. Some of you may remember the story of a POS bash I wrote about a couple weeks ago, going on at the same time as one of our wars. Well, it seems that the owners of that POS did not quite understand the message. At first it was only one guy who had stayed in our wormhole system to harass some of our guys with his stealth bomber. But he and his corp apparently underestimated us, again. The conversation I logged on to was about ANOTHER small Amarr tower that had just gone online in our system, and the owners are the same guys. The tower is so freshly installed that there is only the tower and a ship maintenance array. Not even a single gun in sight. Within minutes the op is called and forces are gathered. The 1400's were going to sing again.

But guess what: they didn't have to sing for very long. With no Warp Disruptor or ECM module or gun to take out, putting a small tower into reinforced mode is quite fast. So we're dealing with a bunch of russian players who apparently enjoy wasting tower after tower just to get a few kills in W-space. Only in EVE....! I have to give props to all the AMC guys who showed up as fast as they could make the trip. A few arrived too late but this will mean only one thing: that tower will pop hella-fast once it comes out of reinforced :)

About freakin' time...

In other news, I've spent much of my weekend doing some much needed carebearism because I was close to flat broke. Enough that I could finally replace my long lost PvE Loki, turned one of my two Sleipnirs into a PvP ship (the fit still needs work I think) and got a new Vagabond. As much as I hate carebearing I have to drill myself to do it a bit more because I would like to get a spare Vaga or two, as well as spare Hurricanes. But in about a month I have a big purchase to make, that of my Orca. Oh well, at least I have plenty of T1 ships to throw into various little fires!

To the russian guys. Yeah you, DinatronniEffekt corp. Since you like blowing ISK so much maybe you should buy me my Orca... at least that would be something useful for a change! Oh and while you're at it, change your ticker from DIEF to DIAF !!!

Don't fly like these guys, it's too expensive >:)

o7

Caldari disappointment: Harpy

Yesterday I thought that maybe I should put my newly learned Caldari Frigate V skill to good use and get myself a new ship. I have enough good interceptors so I skipped those, and as the much awaited for Rocket Fix hasn't happened yet I decided to wait for the Hawk and instead got a Harpy. Big disappointment. I was thinking that with my good Hybrid skills this thing would be mean ship, but it looks like I was wrong. When I asked my buddy Unzer, who is an almost pure Caldari 80m skill point pilot if he had a good fit for the Harpy his answer was short and to the point: "Don't fly one. That's my only good fit.". Okaaaay... I turned on EFT to see what all that was about before I started buying guns and modules for my intended "Blarpy", and it didn't take long to see that Unzer was right. This ship is power grid challenged, has only 2 low slots, too many mids (unless you like to have a sig radius the size of a dump truck), and as all Caldari ships it's slow. A Jaguar has the same number of mid slots but at least it can boogie. And as a blaster platform, a Taranis will do everything better, faster and do more damage. I had paid only 11m ISK for the ship so I made someone happy and sold it directly on the market at 8.5m. I guess I'll wait to see the Rocket Fix and get better missile skills before I try another Caldari boat.

But I was still in a shopping frenzy mood... it shows I've done a few too many L4 missions! So I said "fuck it!" and bought my 5th Loki subsystem, and all the remaining modules for the ship. Some will come straight out of my current mission Sleipnir so I didn't have too much stuff to buy, but the 5th subsystem was also the most expensive one, the Adaptive Shielding. So now all I need is the actual hull and my Hellbringer will be brought back to life. Because I don't freak out over ninja salvagers* the way some other mission runners do (it's quite hilarious in Local sometimes!) I shouldn't be in a position to lose it as easily or fast as the first Loki, but although the ship has some faction goodies, it will not have anything crazy like Officer or meta 10 deadspace complex mods. It may sound weird to be anxious to get a PvE ship but I'm even more anxious to fit a PvP Sleipnir. I'm gonna have to do some EFT warfare as well as some Sisi testing before I have a finalized fit; I don't exactly have the ISK flow to lose multiple command ships in a short time :)

So this being Wednesday it's time to start the weekend plans. In order to be closer to any potential The PvP I will clone-jump out of the mission hub and use any spare time doing exploration. Another corpmate told me yesterday that a couple of good sites could net me the ISK needed to get my Loki hull, but I must admit that my luck in exploration isn't exactly stellar. I think it might be time to up the danger levels a bit and explore that crazy place called Low-sec. According to my corpmate Havegun it's been much too quiet for PvP lately so who knows, I may get lucky for once. I need to put some mileage on my Rapier anyway :)

So that's about it for now. I hope the weekend is a good one filled with interesting stories to tell. Things have been very quiet so some kick-starting may be required. I'll make sure I have my steel-toe shoes on >:)

Fly deadly

o7

*: Hey don't get me wrong, I actually love ninja salvagers! I usually have a PvP ship on hand so if they wanna play, I'll play. My best 1v1 came about because someone had stolen my stuff, so please, steal my stuff some more !!! >:)

Hellbringer

Go back to sleep !!!

Here she is, finally baptised in fire. As I was pointing out to alliance mate Havegun Willtravel, this ship is as if a Vagabond and a Hurricane had some juicy sex somewhere in wild space and after a short gestation period this thing came out. And it's hungry, and it shits bullets !!!!

Soon™

Well, I may have missed the boat during my first tour of duty at AMC, but It's looking very much like I'll be able to redeem myself a bit, soon™ as the title implies. Back in spring 2009 Apocrypha came out and the industrial heads were going head-first into T3 production, at a time when the market was so nuts over wormhole products that strategic cruisers were more expensive than the average dreadnought. Being on the poor side because of full-time PvP and not being very interested in much of anything else at the time, I put off T3 ships to a much farther future and was content with killing pirates and colony intruders. It wasn't until late 2009 that I hit a big enough PvP burn-out to feel like doing stuff in EVE other than killing other players' ships and pods. Getting into industry is not something that appealed to me, even slightly, but doing a few missions, exploration, and travelling just for the hell of it, all mixed in with a bit of PvP of course, that called to me and I even enjoyed it! So all this mix of activities prepared me better for a second stint in wormhole space better than all the PvP in the world.

And here we are now, a few weeks after settling into Chaos Central and even after what could be considered a huge loss, I'm barely feeling the hit. Instead of buying and fitting a new Sleipnir I just took the one I was using to run missions (which had gotten to be once in a blue moon anyway), took out the myriad of faction modules and replaced then with T2, and voila, Sinister Footwear left Balginia for W-space. That way I can use a ship that was starting to collect dust, spend a minimal amount of ISK to refit it, and still be able to keep the Sleeper salvage that will go into... drum roll please... my first Loki!

Yes I could have gotten one much earlier if I had participated more in W-space ops last year but my legendary lack of patience caused me to want to do something else in order to not get bored, and I got bored anyway. I could also blame other activities like post-separation parenting, flight and race simluation, and lately Mechwarrior4, but I'll just blame myself for being too lazy to make myself a better plan in EVE. I don't usually build or have ships built for me, especially since I've been flying T2 ships almost exclusively; I remember my shock when I first joined AMC and someone lost a ship (don't remember who or which... getting too old!) and said "oh well, I guess I have to build another one". I was like "Huh.... dude... Rens... Amarr... JITA ?!?!". And another part of me was also saying "Huh... spare?!". I guess it's one of the little things that make the difference between an industrialist and a fighter jock :)

So of course, like all my big/expensive ships I get for the first time, this baby will get the Turtle Wax treatment every other day, and will be flown very carefully in relative safety, but yes I'll be keeping the Sleipnir handy just in case I get tired/stupid and lose it to another tourney team! The thing that I find a bummer in EVE though is that those ships make awesome PvP ships, but if you do a lot of PvP you can't make enough ISK to buy 'em, much less lose 'em; rich fucks buying GTCs are rich fucks, and crazies with 5+ accounts need a life. I guess I have to get used to making more ISK than I lose ships; It's easy to say "just use T1 ships for PvP" but when you know how much more fun it is to go faster, tackle easier, hit harder, and all that fun stuff it's even easier to say "screw it, I'll use the Vaga!". I still need a spare or two of those... I guess some Sleepers need to die for a good cause :))


Cheap or expensive, fly the crap out of it

o7