Fight us maybe?

The war in delve is all but over as evidenced by the influence map. Delve and Querious are taken and it was quite disappointing. In their defense, RA and nulli didn’t want those regions anyway.

The last bastion of defense is the station in 319-3D. It’s an NPC station and so the best we can do is camp it until they give up.

and so we bubble the undock, bubble towards the sun and other celestials and sit there with our carriers and dreads and anything else people want to bring and wait for them to try to escape en-mass

So here’s a commemerative youtube video from PL in case you haven’t already seen it:

Well. it was good while it lasted…

RIP SoCo.

Edit: I ended the night by dying honorably in a hail of heavy missiles: I failed to cycle my bubble down quick enough during a mass-hostile undock. only 5 mins before going to bed also. I guess they fought us maybe.

http://eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=13990661

Deployed to Delve

I’ve been busy this week but I have had one good night of eve-time.

Akura apologizes in advance for the wall of text

Our alliance has been asked to deploy to delve. Specifically, this means that it is mandatory for all our combat pilots to be on the front line. Now, we (the combat pilots) were told a bit over a week ago, but I have been reluctant to move. commencing the one and only time I’m going to rant about this.

So far joining ANZAC has been a bit of an exercise in frustration:

- jump clone to fountain, make gate bookmarks
- wait for combat ships to be jump freightered out to base
- spend almost a week worth of play time reading forums and signing up to alliance (and ally alliances) coms.
- Ships arrive yay! …. Get told to move base to cloud ring.
- one more week of moving and making new cloud ring bookmarks (luckily I had some in the critical systems from 2 years ago)
- Sign up for more voice comms
- I found the market lacking and so I bought nearly 1 bil worth of ships and modules to bring out to our base.
- Finally I go on one or two roams!
- get told to deploy to delve.
- As I couldn’t be on for the weekend deployment convoys I ended up leaving all my ships in cloud ring and death cloneing down to delve.
- Repurchase core combat ships and modules: Buzzard, Onyx, Drake, Falcon, Manticore x 2.
- Make more off-gate bookmarks
- find out that there are still more voice comms to sign up for.

So pretty much I have spent more time making off-gate bookmarks, reading forums and signing up for voice comms than I have actually spent playing the game….. This pisses me off somewhat, but it is no one’s fault. It was just bad timing. I’m not so much annoyed about the moving around, just that I have over 3 bill worth of assets sitting useless in cloud ring. (sure, not much compared to some people but I don’t operate with excessive amounts of isk reserves and I don’t fly capitals)

ok, end rant……

So, Delve huh?
This region has always had a mythical intimidationness about it. This is the home of the old BoB and goonswarm after it. I’ve heard stories of the ledgendary 24/7hr perma-lockdown of NOL-M9 after BoB disbanded. I’ve heard it called “fortress Delve” I’ve heard of the Dusk and Dawn alliance pos warfare, I’ve heard of the legendary richness of the moons (prior to some R64 reballancing). Frankly, I’m intimidated.

You know what intimidates me more? There are so many allied alliances here that our corporation was not able to find a player controlled station with an office. We (and a number of other alliances) have almost filled out the NPC-held stations!

The line up of alliances deployed here reads like a who’s who of northern nullsec:
Test alliance
Executive Outcomes
Pandemic Legion
Goons
Fatal Ascension
Razor
convicted

..And this is still early days in the deployment. apparently the plan is to pvp until Against All Authorities is a High-sec mining alliance. This is going to be known as the Third Great War. I missed the first two, the first was before my time and the second was when I was just barely able to sit in a battlecruiser for the first time. This time, I’m ready

The fact that we’re going up against -A-, red alliance and by extension Red Overlord makes me quite excited. Having been part of -A- before, I know that they will be very tough opponents. There will be more at play here than just game mechanics. There will be spies, there will be propoganda, who knows what else. unless -A- has changed significantly in the two years since I was part of it, they are very serious players with a very large capital fleet. at the time it was widely accepted that they had the largest number of Titans of any alliance.

One step at a time though. Earlier this week we were just in the “establishing a beach-head” phase. As the threat of spies is ever-present, any major targets are not announced until we get jumped in and told to lock it up.

I’m curious: once we get past Delve and Querious – if it was me, I’d stage out of Providence. Last time I was there CVA appeared fairly easy to kick out. I doubt that -A- could extend their reach to cover that region as well. Providence may very well burn again.

My first night in Delve:

After deathcloning I looked around for ships to buy. There were cheap, fitted perma-mwd Drakes supplied by my corporation, so I bought one of them. I don’t generally fly one of these but they’re good to have ready should a drakefleet op be called. My preferred ship, the Onyx is less useful if mobility and speed are required over holding down an enemy fleet or locking down a system. Light dictors are easier to replace, Drakes are almost free.

We’re situated in and around some NPC stations. That means there are a bunch of annoying little non-sov holding alliances still left hanging around. I don’t imagine these guys will last very long, the shear number of major alliance members flying around will cause them to have a very unsatisfactory eve experience.

I saw an Onyx on contract for 300 mil isk a few systems away from our base so I bought it and waited for my corp to start up a roaming/gate-camping/bad-guy flushing fleet. Despite the fact I had to go 4 or 5 systems into unknown-npc-held space I encountered no issues getting in and transporting my Onyx back out again. Either the randoms that were in those systems were safe or docked, or they were just ignoring me. I have also felt much more comfortable in nullsec since re-mastering the microwarp drive/cloak trick that renders any ship all but unlockable so long as there are no bubbles.

Part of what I really love about my current corp is the excellent combination of seriousness combined with banter. We have a few ex-military members so the discipline is very good when it needs to be. people do what they are told, and they do it well. This is one of the reasons I joined in the first place. The banter is icing. At one point, our FC was practically yelling at some of the fleet for having not set up off-gate bookmarks. He called them “Perches” (apparently this is the correct military term). I’ve always just called them “off-gate bookmarks”. (for those that don’t know: to avoid getting trapped in bubbles, it is essential that every pilot have bookmarks at least 150km away from every gate so that you can warp to the bookmark and scout prior to warping to the gate. if there is a camp or sling bubble on the gate, this is a life-saver). Anyway, after long debate in-between warping around and killing people we all concluded that they should be called Drop-bears: “make drop-bears on all the gates!” , “warp to the drop bear in the corporate locations”. “anyone got a drop bear on the NOL gate?”

Bring everything

Later that evening Test Alliance announced a kitchen sink op. This is basically a non-reimbursable fleet where you bring whatever you want to fly and can afford to lose. The FC makes no guarantees that we will come out alive on the other end. As a result, most people came in battlecruisers, either hurricanes or drakes. These are very cheap to replace. Naturally, I came in my brand new Onyx, however the most expensive ship there was a redeemer Black ops battleship. Such was the confidence we had in the FC.

a ragtag bunch of ships

Now, despite the serious nature of the deployment to delve, ops like these have a purpose: to intimidate the local populous. As I mentioned, there are a number of small, annoying alliances hanging around. They inhibit our movements and need to be evicted. They need to know that they are never safe while this large-scale operation is in progress. And so we must constantly be keeping pressure on them until they leave. However seeing as this goal is secondary to the greater strategic goal and given the fact there is no actual set objective for these roams, there are no reimbursements.

Hot drop time:

Enter the surprise Hot-drop. A Hot drop is where a cyno is lit by a brave soul who flies right into the middle of a hostile fleet and hopes to live long enough for the rest of the fleet to bridge in via titan. In the past, if I have hot-dropped anywhere, it is to permanently take the system and usually has been with a fleet of capitals or large number of battleships into a similarly large group of battleships/capitals. If it works, it’s great. If the bad guys kill the cyno before the fleet can bridge in, it can go horribly wrong. (side note – if everything is perfect but your titan jumps in after you and explodes the fleet, then that’s bad also).

This time we were doing it with only 50 people, jumping in on small groups of 10 or so who had no chance if we did it correctly.

Kitchen sink forming up on our buddy titan

So we all formed up on the titan for the first jump I was the only Heavy Interdictor but towards the middle/end of the evening we had a few light dictors join us. Our FC was in a bait, armor tanked drake with a cyno and it wasn’t long before he got a bite. Up went the cyno, we all jumped in and I threw up a bubble. The hostile fleet didn’t stand a chance and I didn’t even get a chance to lock anything thanks to our “insta-canes” one-vollying them

Towards the end of the night the FC got me to put a cyno on my Onyx and we went together to find targets – nothing really eventuated unfortunately but it was still good.

I’ve found my situational awareness is a little bit down from when I was playing almost every night 2 years ago. I just have to get back into the habit of doing the fleet thing. Admittedly it was 1am, and by that time the best I could do was follow FC orders, not think for myself all that well, but hey, I was still slightly dissapointed. worst mistake I made was just a miss-placed bubble at one point because my mind wandered and I wasn’t centred on gate after our first drop, but still. There’s always next time

Comming up soon: I join a 200 man drake fleet – Very cool screenshots etc to compensate for this wall of text post here

In which I discover a new module

Due to the delay involved in my corporate logistics moving things out to our nullsec area, I was looking at buying a spare Onyx and having it ready and fitted in case I got exploded.

And so, on searching through the market I found this:

This is a new module, I’m not sure when it came out, but according to patch notes on the 24th of January, it was broken until then.

With maximum skills (HIC to V), the tech I bubble generator gives a radius of 20km (base of 16 x 5% per HIC level = 25%) whereas the tech II bubble generator gives 24km radius. an extra 4km doesn’t seem like much, but remember, this is an extra 4km in every direction.

The difference between the two is shown best when we look at the volume covered: (V=4/3piR2)
T1 = 33510 km3
T2 = 57905 km3

Meaning that the T2 bubble is a bit more than 42% bigger than the T1

The only problem:

I was training for interceptors and light dictors… but I’ll have to wait a month. I also discovered that my shield compensation skills are all sitting at III except for EM. That must have been from when I stopped doing them in favor of armor tanked battleships back in the day….. Well, at least I don’t have to wonder what I should train for.

I’ll also have to update my HIC guide to mention it. If you’re a HIC specialist, it is definitely worth training.

Roam through providence

And so as I mentioned I was going to do in my last post, I took my trusty Onyx and had a bit of a trip through Providence.

My Onyx Heavy Interdictor…. it doesn’t look good from any angle

This being the first time I have jumped into 0.0 space since I left the game two years ago, I was overly cautious. I had my alt scout and basically took my time to go through. My friend followed in his trusty rifter and we spent a bit of time going over the basics of nullsec survival. We made bookmarks near the gates, we had a bubble demonstration and eventually made our way to 9uy. Last time I was here I had the pleasure of bubbling the station for pew pew. This time I bubbled it for the lols

I was a bit disappointed however, there were only 5 in system, no hostiles. Still, it freaked me out a bit. In High sec you can be fairly safe assuming you’re not carrying anything of great value and there are no war decs against your corp. in nullsec with a proper alliance you can be certain of your safety if local contains only blues, but in Providence, despite the NRDS intention, you can’t tell who is going to kill you.

We met some nice proviholders from Sanctury Pact, and I remembered that seeing an onyx on screen is probably not the most peaceful ship you’d want to see. If it was me, I would assume that if I saw a lone HIC coming towards me, there would be a medium to large fleet of HAC’s or battle cruisers arriving shortly thereafter.

So I made my intentions clear in local (emiko is my alt):

[ 2012.05.16 12:08:13 ] EVE System > Channel changed to Local : XHQ-7V
[ 2012.05.16 12:08:37 ] Marites Camates > Konbanwa
[ 2012.05.16 12:08:56 ] Marites Camates > ogenki desu ka
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:10 ] Akura Kawanaka > nihongo o wakarimasen
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:23 ] Marites Camates > skosh
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:31 ] Akura Kawanaka > watashi mo
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:44 ] Marites Camates > Amirican living in Yokosuka
[ 2012.05.16 12:09:58 ] Akura Kawanaka > Australian pretending to be japanese living in australia
[ 2012.05.16 12:10:04 ] Marites Camates > haha
[ 2012.05.16 12:10:11 ] Marites Camates > Okage sama de
[ 2012.05.16 12:11:00 ] Emiko Kasono > we’re peaceful btw – just sight seeing, despit the fact Akura is in an onyx
[ 2012.05.16 12:11:26 ] Marites Camates > rgr, we are drinking, couldnt fight ..cant see
[ 2012.05.16 12:11:42 ] Significant other > dam coffee

These guys were sitting on one of the gates in a cane and a cruiser that I don’t remember. Unfortunately, when we were on the way out we noticed a 8-10 man gang from “Forceful Entry” alliance (never a good sign) and noticed a BC wreck on one of the gates – looks like our friend was smooshed.

On another note – on that killmail was a corporation called Centrelink Australia (this is sort of the Aussie equivalent of Social Security)
http://eve-kill.net/?a=corp_detail&crp_id=99309. I thought that was pretty funny.

So I also spoke to the recruiters at ANZAC Alliance. It turns out that my corporation name backfired and Rooman thought that I am an Alt. I’m certain I can convince them otherwise however.

I’m looking forward to a bit of alliance pew pew. According to The Ancient Gaming Noob I will be entering the north again (ANZAC is in Executive Outcomes alliance) just after a major conflict. which is probably good, it will give me a chance to settle in before the next round begins. I was never a fan of cloud ring though – as it connects with NPC held Syndicate, it was too easy to attack. the system is large and there are only a few bottleneck systems that we could defend easily. still, we had some of our

I’m writing fiction!

I’m Writing Fiction are you?

Don’t forget, there’s a Dramiel up for grabs and (because I take my writing instruments as seriously as I do my PvP) an extra 20 million for the first person to guess what pen I use.

Going for the heart of providence

If I didn’t know better, I’d think that title was some sort of romance novel. In fact this story is one of a love/hate relationship, which I am unfortunately not qualified to tell from the beginning, being in the North when it started. I only joined the fighting on the night that Against All Authorities took D-GTMI from Paxton federation, one of the Providence region holders.

Apparently the providence holders were offered a truce. Being the grunt I am, I was not party to the discussions, but from what I heard here are the events that brought us to the current situation:

Providence holders (CVA + pets) and Against all authorities (-A-) have had a Non Aggression Pact in terms of sovereignty changes but were enemies in terms of roaming fleets.

CVA got disbanded by a hacker and -A- marshalled to help protect their space from would-be invaders until they were reinstated by CCP

-A- Started a war with Goonswarm in 49-U.

CVA took the opportunity to launch an attack into -A- space, cutting us off from empire space.

-A- didn’t take this very well, especially after the recent show of solidarity and came back hard, taking an important station in providence (D-GTMI).

-A- after claiming the system in what is possibly the the largest fleet fight ever combined with possibly the largest single loss of capital ships ever with the greatest disparity between those on the winning side vs those on the loosing side ever proceeded to offer CVA a truce.

For reasons only their roleplaying god knows, CVA abandon common sense and reject said truce outright.

—-

This brings us to the subject of today’s blog:

-A- begin an offensive into the heart of Providence, their trade hub of 9uy, a system that has not been contested for three years.

—-
A vengeful battleship fleet prepares to jump into 9UY

I was at work, following twitter, when I read a post from my corp mate Wensley saying that the providence holders just got a nice surprise. I hastily tweeted back “What? What happened?!?!” knowing that the conflict had likely escalated. This was met with a “log on, get in fleet” and then a private “We’re taking 9UY”.

By this time it was 6:30pm anyway and after mouthing a big “O…..M…….G……” I decided I didn’t have to work late anyway and literally ran to get the next tube home.

9UY is a fair way from our home staging system, and so I was hoping that I hadn’t missed the titan bridge. it turned out that they had already started sieging the system, but CVA had counter attacked by dropping Sovereignty Blockade Units in our empire access system of HED and in the newly taken D-GTMI. Our fleet had returned to kill the attacking fleet and the SBU’s and I managed to catch the bridge back into 9UY in my Megathron.

Fleet jumping into 9UY

On a side note: the -A- fleet megathrons are a very tight fit. I have Advanced Weapons Upgrades to lvl 5 but I still needed to replace my 3% capacitor recharge hard-wiring implant with a 1% CPU implant in order to fit everything. Same goes for the recommended Eagle fit, I need a t2 power grid module, a power grid rig and energy grid upgrades to lvl 5 to even fit the damn thing…(yes, I have a new shiny… I can finally fly HAC’s after putting it off for so long. but that’s another blog post).

Unfortunately the battleship fleet at this stage didn’t see much action as the providence holders had exausted their resistance. Their jump bridge network was incapacitated and they didn’t seem to have any titans with which to bridge around from. whereas we were able go from HED, to D-G to 9UY at will with our titan pilots seemingly everywhere at once.

Shortly thereafter both the station and the infrastructure hub were reinforced and the timer was is a very favorable saturday night.

The order was given to return back to the home station and come back in roaming gang ships to lock down the system. I had my client set to have all the visual effects on for once and managed to get a shot of an open titan bridge:

Titan Bridge open. ooooh, shiny

I thought about taking my eagle out. This baby can hit at 165km, which for a cruiser is pretty damn good. my other option was a falcon which I haven’t flown for ages or my trusty onyx. after actually undocking and jumping into the system where the next titan bridge was going to be, I changed my mind and went back for what I know. My faithful Gothic Robo-Chicken has been through multiple wars in the north and has yet to let me down.

We bridged into 9UY again and proceeded to lock every gate down. At this point the FC explained why he chose this system to attack, fairly simple really: Rather than grind through all the station systems one-by-one, we’re going straight for the heart

9UY is a trade hub, and a number of CVA freighters were seen dropping off stuff at the station in recent days.
9UY is a crossroads. if you look at a map of Providence region you will see that it is a vital system, tying together the alliances CVA, -7-, STEEL and SLYPH who control a small portion of neighboring catch. in order to marshal their forces, the providence holders would need to pass through this system. Also, if, perhaps one were to look at their jump bridge map, not that I approve of metagaming, but perhaps I have been privy to information that suggests it is a fairly central point for the providence holder jump bridge network.

These two things have been the case for years and so this was a very obvious target for anyone wishing to shut down CVA and pets as fast as possible.

Onyx Heavy Interdictor on a gate

It was quite fun actually there wasn’t any more than about 150 in the system at any one time, but we had almost complete control over all the gates. Large mobile warp disruptors were anchored on most of the gates so I parked myself at one that didn’t and threw my bubble up. A friendly MomSupercarrier pilot sent me some fighters and although I managed to get two hostile battleships into armour, I didn’t get any kills before they burned to the gate as there were only 3-4 of us on that gate at that time. I mentioned on TS that they may want to come help kill the 15 man battleship gang that was attacking my poor little (albeit very heavily tanked with 115,000 hp) cruiser but for some reason the battleships decided to burn to the gate rather than face the might of the one heavy assault missile on my ship and they got away. good times

For some reason, throughout the night, there was a gang of about 50 hostiles that appeared in 9-F, two systems away and went back and forth, playing chicken with our support ships. as soon as we jumped in, they’d safe or dock up. this happened about 5 times.

Bubbling their station out of frustration. Wait…. that’s a minmatar station!

Eventually we left a cloaked interdictor there and Soundly Spanked them it looks like they were not all that prepared or just threw their fleet together at the last minute.. it looks like its trying to be a battlecruiser gang I guess. In any case, as you can see from that killboard link, the fight was reminiscent of the fight for D-G. we killed 34 ships and 11 pods for a loss of 5 frigates and two pods. lots of “gf”‘s in local afterwards, and at the time I thought we were fairly equal, but it seems not.

I think I need a good beating from a providence fleet to give me a reality check, because I’m starting to think they’re generally incompetent.

Another bit of fun we had that evening was when we killed a HAC gang that warped to the gate that I was at. The FC called primaries and we dutifully killed them one by one. Then at the last one, a guardian logistics ship, the FC told everyone to stop and get rid of their drones from him. Then he said to rep him up, “he’s our pet now” he said.

and so we did:

Bubbled and Scrambled and Neuted and Jammed and Target Disrupted

It’s those little moments in eve that make it such an enjoyable game to play. Even the guardian pilot seemed to appreciate the joke, saying “awww, AAA loves me” in local.

We thought it was only propper that we send him home the express rout and eventually killed him and his pod.

The -A- killboards for the operation in 9UY (not including our kills in 9-F) show the VERY favourable result of 222 ships killed for 16 ships lost. This was becoming a recurring theme in our engagements with providence:

To finish off. I was very nearly able to reproduce the screenshot that I showed on my fourth blog post ever. The angle of the Nyx wasn’t quite right to get the sun glinting off the top, but it was damn close. I still haven’t managed to get a clear view of a Hel. I got one the other day, but it had about three titans in the background, ruining the shot (I never thought I’d say that).

Nyx MotherSupercarrier by Starlight

Currently I’m logging in and out at a POS in 9UY, helping with the 23/7 lockdown of the system which will continue until it is in -A-’s hands in about 5 days or so.
The station comes out of its first reinforced cycle on saturday, I hope I can be there for that battle also.

First impressions of the South

So I have recently joined Against All Authorities. I originally applied to Ushra’Khan, but weighing up the options and pros and cons of each option, -A- suited me better. I’m used to being in a large space holding alliance while Ushra’Khan is more of a roaming-bases alliance. Every corporation generally has requirements to remain part of it and the Ushra’Khan corporation that I applied to required a payment of anywhere between 2 and 10 million per month per member to support the role-playing wardec against the providence members. The corporation that I have joined as part of -A- requires that every member get 20 killmails per month to remain in the corporation. This was more to my liking, and so I chose to join them. There were some other smaller reasons that also contributed. The 20 kills haven’t been hard to accomplish, having been on 26 ship kills in 4 days. some of those were of course as part of the large battle for D-G, but nevertheless I think it won’t be hard to maintain a good rate.

Before I go any further, I’d like to set the record straight about Goons and the Providence holders. I blame Podded Podcast for the source of this misinformation but I have since seen many people on both sides of the battle lines deny that the goons and providence holders are in any sort of non-hostile agreement, including seeing declarations to that end in Ushra’Khan pilots bio. I’d like to apologise for perpetuating this myth.

Against All Authorities Market system of G-E

First Impressions of the south:

Against All Authorities
This alliance seems extremely well organised. It seems like there is almost 50% russian pilots and so every fleet that I have been on except the small roaming gangs have had the fleet commands translated from english into russian either by the FC himself or a translator. Most of the important fleet commands are also transliterated into fleet chat in english, which most of the russians can apparently read better than they can understand spoken english. This is quite cool. I think though I will make an effort to at least learn how to count in russian so I can get an idea which gate they’re talking about before the translation comes along.

It is hard to compare it to my previous alliance Mostly Harmless because there has also been some changes in the sovereignty mechanics since I last participated in large fleet fights. It seems that Capital ships are deployed with an almost reckless abandon compared to what I’m used to and Battleships are relegated to an almost support role. This is good in a way as it increases the incentive for pilots to train for capital ships. I’m certainly inspired in any case. on Saturday night we had a CTA to go and destroy some goon POS’s in Querious and the battleship fleet wasn’t used for anything except destroying cyno jammers so that the capital fleet could warp in and do its thing.

General fighting
The highlight of the evening was coming back from querious to Catch via empire, where the fleet of 50+ battleships stumbled upon a 5 man war target camp in a 0.9 security system. our scout mentioned they were there and one of the alliance undocked a freighter at the station and warped it to the gate. The wartargets must have been so busy wetting themselves that a freighter had been stupid enough to warp to the middle of their little camp that they didn’t notice the battleship fleet jump in. We killed Two Loki’s. Very cool.

Also of course, we had the huge fight in D-G the other night, the same day I joined.

Fleet Salvation Initiative
My first thoughts when joining the alliance and reading alliance mails about CTA’s was that everything was fairly similar to what I’ve been used to for so long. Get the Teamspeak details, get the jump bridge map, bookmark all gates along the main routes etc. but then they kept on referencing “FSI” as in: “CTA 18:00 Dreads > Carriers > BS > FSI > support” which usually tells you what to bring in order of priority. After asking around I found that FSI stood for “Fleet Salvation Initiative”. this is simply the most organised bunch of logistics ships that I’ve heard of in a nullsec alliance. if you can fly a logistics ship but can’t afford, or don’t want to afford one. just grab an alliance logi ship before the op and hand it back afterwards. Pilots are encouraged to rotate out from damage dealing ships into the FSI every now and then.

Casual Roaming
My prior experience to frigate/cruiser roams have been mixed. In the north, unless we stumbled on a gang of empire guys wanting a bit of pew, or some pirates that ventured into nullsec for a change, most of the fights were close things. We would go roaming down through cloud ring and syndicate where Evoke was at the time and during these roams we all knew it was only a matter of time before an equal or more powerful fleet of evoke or Sons of Tangra was formed to take us down and it would be an intense fight on a gate somewhere, after which only one side would emerge victorious.

My first roam through providence however was completely different.

I dusted off my Onyx, which hasn’t seen action for a couple of months and joined up with a mixed cruiser/frigate gang that was going for a little roam through southern Providence. Ga’len a fellow blogger from Ushra’Khan joined up in his vagabond and about 20 of us roamed free, back and forth through a few dozen systems owned by CVA and Paxton Federation. No one stopped us, no one seemed to care. We hit a little bit of a gate camp at one point but they were quickly dispatched. We went to one station system and bubbled the station, staying there for a few minutes while unsuspecting proviholder members undocked and died. Now, when I first joined eve, I spent a little bit of time down in severence’s space and I had access to their intel channels. When a red was reported nearby you safe’d up and waited until they went away or got destroyed. I find it hard to believe that providence’s intel channels have degenerated so far that people were so willing to die to our fleet.

Bubbling a station

Perhaps it is just a lack of morale after losing D-G to -A- or perhaps it’s just a general incompetance. I don’t want to jump to conclusions, but my initial impressions are not good.

What was good however, was getting back into my Hictor. they seem to be appreciated a little bit more in this alliance. I did stuff up at one stage – that station in the screenshot above is an amarr refinery. I’d never seen one of these before and moved to the other end and bubbled, not realising that the undock point is the flat end, not the pointy one. “Fail bubble” on teamspeak and a sorry from me in fleet chat and I changed to the position you see above. I won’t make that mistake again.

Other thoughts
I am in the same corporation as Wensley of rifter drifter fame. he is also a new recruit. it will be interesting comparing our blogs. I think we have different blogging styles and we come from different backgrounds in the game so there shouldn’t be too much overlap. hopefully he’ll pick me up when I exaggerate too much about -A- victories

HICS need redesigning

As I collect all my stuff, preparing to move back out into nullsec, I look at Gothic Robo-chicken, my trusty Onyx-class heavy interdictor. Sitting there, collecting dust ever since I could fit a t2 galente battleship and started flying them instead.

It occurs to me, that the Heavy interdictor is no longer fulfilling the role it is designed for. This, quite frankly, sucks.

Here’s why:

TL;DNR: Because of Titan

The long story: Cast your mind back to pre-dominion times

Titans had an area of effect weapon, that pretty much blasted any sub-capital that wasn’t a heavily tanked battleship. Your battleship fleet set up for gank and not tank? Boom, one doomsday and you’re sitting in a pod, Dual doomsdays and local drops by the exact amount of pilots that were in your fleet. Most alliances in the Northern Coalition therefore mandated that their battleship fleets should be able to survive at least one doomsday device.

a poor defenceless support fleet gets blasted into space dust, their battleship fleet barely hanging onto their ships by the skin of their structure while a Malicious titan laughs at the effects of his Doomsday Device

Both Titans and Motherships are immune to electronic warfare. This includes warp scramblers and so interceptors are useless against them. The potential for area of effect doomsdaying renders standard interdictors, destroyable, err, destroyer-class vessels less than survivable should a second titan come to assist the first supercapital.

Enter the Heavy Interdictor: A cruiser class vessel with the Effective Hit points of a heavily tanked battleship, able to project Warp bubbles if need, sacrificing manoeuvrability and speed, but also able to pin supercapitals with a focused warp disruption script, maintaining manoeuvrability and speed, making it hard to hit. Double doomsdays from titans of different races? Pah! A mere inconvenience. Doomsday destroy your fleet? Hold the supercapital in place, light a cyno when you’re fleet is ready to jump back in. Supercapital ships lived in fear of the cyno-HIC.

Small gang cruiser warfare? Oh, I’ll just take my cruiser class vessel with the hit points of a battleship and a bubble generator and infinite warp scrambling power along and see if we can’t trap a HAC or three at a gate.

They were Gods in nullsec.

Now: Post dominion:

So, what are Heavy interdictors good for now?

Tackling supercaps?
Titans now only hit one target at a time. Battleships no longer need to be tanked against Doomsday devices. You can tackle a titan and it can have ten doomsdays go off without reducing the effectiveness of your 100 man battleship fleet, despite the fact they are all glass cannons.

Sure, the supercapitals are still immune to ewarfare but I can buy and equip five standard interdictors for the price of one Heavy interdictor. And if a titan doomsdays, none of the interdictors die. And they have the manoeuvrability and speed almost equalling frigates.

Small gang warfare? Ok, they may be still good for gate camps, but if given a choice between a 30 million ship and a 160 million ship just to have a bubble up on a gate, heck – if you’re camping a gate why not deploy a large static bubble? That’s only 5-10 million.

Tackling tech III ships: ok – I admit, this is the one specialist role remaining. Only a focused warp disruption script can tackle a interdiction nullifier equipped strategic crulser. How the hell am I supposed to catch one though.

Tackling supercapitals in lowsec: ok, the HIC remains the only thing that can tackle super capitals in lowsec. I know I don’t fly in lowsec very much, but I’ve only had that happen once, and it was a fluke.

Wormholes? Please… you can’t fit a supercapital in a wormhole. Use an interdictor, although perhaps it would be nice to pin down a carrier… hmmm.

Gate camping in empire: Ok, a remote sensor boosted Onyx or Broadsword is still king of gate camps in lowsec, but why not have I don’t know… five interceptors for the same price.

My point remains: The Heavy Interdictor’s unique ability to pin down supercapitals while surviving multiple doomsday devices, is obsolete. And sitting on gates in lowsec is not what the ship was designed for.

What should happen:

In My Humble Opinion, the following changes should happen to HIC’s:

1) Hit points reduced
2) Warp disruption field generator range extended to at least give it a bit of advantage over a standard interdictor
3) The addition of scripts to change the properties of the bubble for example (and these are just ideas, some perhaps overpowered):

a) Make the bubble area of effect tracking disruption.
b) make the bubble area of effect webbing.
c) make the bubble area of effect sensor boosting (for friendly fleets)
d) make the bubble area of effect hit point boosting (portable shield for fleets)
) My personal favourite: Make the bubble Area of effect cloaking. Remember that protoss ship in starcraft that could conceal troops, revealing only itself..

Warp cloaked? Able to use black ops bridges? Perhaps too overpowered…

I’m not asking for a buff, I am just asking that it be looked at again in the light of the dominion changes.

HIC, Whisky and Haiku: For Death and Glory!

“I am slightly drunk,
the Onyx I fly rocks hard,
Death to the bad guys!”

BANZAAAAIIIIIII!!!!! – Akura Kawanka

Onyx-class Heavy interdictor at a POS with a glass of 12 year old Yamazaki single-malt in hand, by starlight.

Massive fight tonight in 00TY-J – NC managed to save a much contested r64 moon pos – the above was one of my celebratory drinks. my favorite part was local going from just under 300 to just under 700 in less than 10 seconds when MM, MH, TCF and Razor all jumped in simultaneously. PL had 6 titans floating around in their staging system but didn’t jump them in. I was sure hoping they would so I could finally tackle one of them but meh – still have my HIC ready for next time. full battle report comming soon (TM)

Near fatal mistake

Sunday night I made a mistake. A mistake that nearly cost me my beloved Gothic-Robochicken, the Onyx that has been with me for a good 2 months.

My first one at least died honourably in a swarm of 47 Sons of Tangra Heavy Assault Cruisers, but this time….. I was preparing to commit seppuku due to how fail I was to get into a situation like I did.

The lead up

It had been a long day. Once-again the northern coalition was fighting in the cloud-ring station system of 9-4 against Evoke. It was one of those fights where I would normally post awesome screenshots of massive fleets of battleships and carriers all pounding away at a hostile pos. I would normally tell tales of last minute covert-ops warp-ins and heroic sacrifices of interdictors. But this time, it was Evoke and friends that were doing all this and Mostly Harmless and allies were sitting in a friendly pos spinning our ships for four hours….

It was a little bit fun getting into the system, with Evoke camping the incoming jump bridge with cloaked interdictors. But we only lost 2 battleships in the process of getting 150+ ships into the system, which is not too shabby. Our FC got the testosterone flowing in us all when he rallied the troops in his Scottish accent: “make no mistake about it, We’re crossing the street with a sniper aiming out the window on the other side… we’re going to loose people. We will fight them in the trenches, we will fight them on the beaches…” well, perhaps he left out the Churchill part.

At one point I was sent out to a few hundred km off the friendly pos in the direction of the hostile pos. I assume since they had a habit of warping their battleship fleet in at about 175km I was to bubble if we ever saw them aligning and ensure they dropped out of warp outside their firing range. Nothing eventuated however and so I sat there, not even able to take good screenshots of the capital fleet jumping in…

my attempt at snapping a shot of the caps from a distance

Anyway – after a stupidly long amount of time, during which I got a good portion of my fan fiction short story for this month done I had to log off for dinner and a movie with my wife.

Complacency kills

Logging back on later that night, the hostilities had died down and I took the jump bridge network back to our home region. At one point however, I had to slow boat it through two star gates to get to the next jump bridge. I lacked patience due to the late night and unsatisfying day we had, so despite the fact there were two pandemic legion in local, I headed for the gate anyway. Hitting the directional scan button as an afterthought when in warp I saw a mass of mobile warp disruption bubbles. Having resigned myself to the fact I was going to die, I was quite relieved to find these bubbles were not on the gate (no idea where they were) and jumped through.

On the other side, however there was a recon, stealth bomber and an interdictor. I knew I was screwed. I had killed my poor ship by bad judgement and lack of use of the intel channels.

They only had three ships however, all of them fairly soft targets, so I locked up the manticore and started pounding away with my one missile launcher I had equipped. In hind sight I should have chosen the interdictor, but no matter. I mentioned in local that this fight would probably take a very long time, but got no reply.  In hind sight I should have offered to spare their ships for a ransom, or suggested a good book to read while they killed me, but wit in hindsight (hind-wit?) is 20:20.

Despite the fact I expected to die, I asked in our intel channel to see if anyone had any spare pew they could send my way. By this time, the hostile numbers had risen to about 6 and the dps was starting to make a dent in my shields they brought in an arazu and another ship which my combat log says was firing 250mm Railgun II’s. It turned out though, that there was a small bunch of friendlies in the next system over. I held out for what seemed like ages, I had moved to 40km away from the gate in the direction of where my buddies would be coming from and I didn’t use my mwd (to reduce my signature radius and therefore the damage that the stealth bomber was doing to me).

Saved!

Then local filled up with blues – I was saved. The best part is that the interdictor had a bubble on me so when my buddies warped to my gate, they were pulled into the bubble, directly on top of the hostiles, rather than continuing 40km away to the gate.

I was saved and my shield barely went below 50%. The combat log said the first hit on my shields was at 20:59:22 and the last at 21:05:05 so I think that’s pretty damn good. Apart from my ship not exploding, a couple of good things came out of this: I learned my lesson, the hostiles learned that you can’t take out a shield-tanking Heavy interdictor with a stealth bomber, 2 combat recon and light interdictor (and something else) in under 5 minutes. And my buddies got some pew and the satisfaction of saving an alliance mate.

Did some calculations on my onyx – I’d only really ever looked at the Effective Hit points because I’m buffer tanked (tanked for maximum hit points, with any passive regen being icing on the cake) and I never expected to be involved in a fight on a gate, solo against a small gang. Nevertheless with my maximum shield regen at 73hp/s and my shield resistances ranging from 78% to 91% my passive regen ranges from 347.6dps to 811dps! depending on the damage type being done of course – not bad for a buffer tanked ship in any case. With kinetic resistance being my second highest resistance at 87% and the manticore using kinetic torpedos (they get a bonus to kinetic damage), no wonder they were having a hard time taking me out.

I guess this post puts me officially in the shield-tanked Heavy interdictor fanboy club….

alright, fine – here’s some eye-candy before we finish up: