T1 Cruiser Purdification Backfire

Surrender your mysteries to me!

A stubborn heart shall fare evil at the last; and he that loveth danger shall perish therein.

Sirach 3:72

On my long voyage to purdify New Eden there's situations when I know the odds are bad but I have to take action. Consider the Celestis for example. The Celestis - and I want to be completely honest with you - is one ass ugly bird. On a scale of ugliness - where most gallente ships inhabit the upper (uglier) quarter - ... or, let me put it this way: In a universe of ugly ships the Celestis would still rank high among that universe's ugliest. In summary:

The Celestis poses a severe disturbance to the aesthetic balance in the force!¹

Seriously, I'm just messin with you kids, I think the Celestis is a marvelous ship. I will tell you why in a second.

Part IX of Minmatar 
Girls Gone Wild

I've had only few encounters with this Gallentian beauty, only two I can remember and both caught me off guard in my Rifter while all along I was thinking I caught them off guard. Until I was sitting in my pod that is.
A few days ago, I had just finished watching the surprisingly well directed Debbie does Heimatar (with a spectacular Bambi Woods' PvP jump clone) I spotted a Celestis in a belt and with the strong feeling that there's an aesthetic correction waiting to be performed I engaged at my comfy range. Drones? Sure, but not a problem as far as I remember. What I distinctly remember is that at some point I was getting too close. Web range close. Dual web range close! (Which is essentially the same as single web range, but I wanted to use this rhetoric figure thing to catch your attention, you little internet junkies! I know you're secretly longing to play HALO on your ATARI!)

And that was it for this Rifter.

Now I wouldn't have mentioned this if I hadn't found another Celestis yesterday, other pilot, other belt, same System: Siseide. Again I was very tempted, I warped in at 100km and watched. The pilot jumped to another belt, he didn't seem too eager to fight. Now that was a cunning move, because it pushed me over the edge: I followed the guy to the next belt and engaged at 20km to work on his coating. A set of T2 drones was unleashed and I managed to take out two or three before my opponent called them back. Meanwhile an unwelcome tracking disruptor had been working on my artilleries tracking, and I noticed I was doing too little damage. So I went in just a little closer. Just a liiiittle. 12800m. Ka-ba-ba-boom!

Solo Rifter pilots beware!

Now in concludification of this post: I'm very unpleased to see more and more anti-frig cruisers out there. I guess most of them will be after shiny Dramiels kills with these fits - which I support wholeheartedly - but there will be a lot of Rifters in the by-catch, like the those Dolphins accidentally caught by tuna trawlers!

Anyways, GF everybody!

¹Now go and put this into your red pilot's notebook!

Incursion in da Hood

"Should super heroes commit a crime? Even to save lives? I need moral guidance. Bender?"
Philip J. Fry

In English: Free Loot!

I've been sacrificing a lot of ships to the space gods. A lot of good ships and some were virgins, too! But strutting around belts and safe spots in strange patterns and weird fits like some cotton pickin quack from the Micronesian backwoods didn't bring the much needed rain to the hemp fields of my home planet! But it paid off in another unexpected way: The gods sent me a Sansha Incursion in Auga and the surrounding systems! On a Saturday! Oh, my tormented soul, rejoice!

I never felt fighting was an integral part of piracy at all, as it usually involves losing assets now and then thus diminishing revenues. I'd rather just take the stuff from dead people's trunks. This Incursion thing gave me the option to just cut the PvP crap and loot all those wrecks piling up at the gates.

What you see is what you get!

My first scan immediately revealed a battleship wreck in Siseide, I warped in with my capsule and bookmarked the wreck: 720mm T2 guns and a lot of other nice T2 stuff (along with the pilot's dirty undies which I left there to rot for all eternity). Then I changed into a free (like in free beer!) Reaper and warped back to the wreck. From my prior experience with Sansha gate camps I knew I had to be very fast, but I had trained my fingers playing MADDEN NFL ALL WEEK ON MY XBOX BE4 GOING TO SCHOOL, so our new Sansha overlords were no match for me. I was zippin' all over the place without any decent restraint! During the the day I repeated this pattern, but somewhere in between my stupid RL alt insisted on going on a bike tour for a few hours because of the weather! Can you imagine this? Hours of looting lost just because that pathetic earth sun showed its ugly cancer inducing face ...

Anyway, I took mods worth over 70 million during the day, I'm sure many of the other looters may have got more, but I'm satisfied nonetheless. Most noteworthy two Cover Ops cloaks and a few cheaper faction items. Sometimes I used my capsule, sometimes my new Anathema (which now sports one of the new cloaks!) for bookmarking and I lost like 10 non-faction Reapers with ridiculously expensive cargo, but what the hell, it was all FREE! Another fun element in that chaos was the incursion channel stuffed with local pirates trying to lure gullible pilots to Pator Tech School station in Amamake, which is—in case you've never been there—the ugly mother in law of all permanent low sec station camps:

[ 2011.04.09 10:12:39 ] rev risingdawn > I'm trying ot fight this incursion but no one comes
[ 2011.04.09 10:13:11 ] rev risingdawn > formup is at pator tech school, you cna use fitting service of fleet carrier outside station if you need to refit from travel fit to combat fit
[ 2011.04.09 10:13:45 ] Saint Juliana > its risky doing this stuff in low sec. The filthy ammamake pirates could swoop in at any moment.
[ 2011.04.09 10:14:08 ] Sobczynski > pirates?
[ 2011.04.09 10:14:18 ] Micky Nox > By pirates you mean rev risingdawn? ,-)
[ 2011.04.09 10:15:02 ] Saint Juliana > exactly! They're already there - lol
[ 2011.04.09 10:15:03 ] rev risingdawn > I'm not a pirate I'm a guy who did bad things when drunk and has now sobered up and wants to kill the shanshas

Oh, how I was moved to see local pirates, faction war pilots and carebears unite in peace to fight back the Sansha invaders! It was like Enterprise TNG all over again! You know, like when Picard met these other guys and they didn't shoot each other for no reason?

Unfortunately the incursion ended somewhen Sunday afternoon while I was offline riding my bike in my RL alt. When I came back I was forced to pew and pew once again. Meh.

PVP Secrets #7: Failing in Style

Sentinel: Recommended with EAF V

I don't sleep too well these days. The ghosts of ships that were dear to me haunt me, the memories of long lost station floozies and of course my bladder which also interferes with long roams. (The facilities in those Minmatar ships are not very comfy and honestly, I'm a little finicky about toilets. I've visited the greatest station rest rooms in low sec. Hell, I'd take a camped low sec station without repair facility but with with a lavish toilet over a safe pig sty any day! One day I will write a book about this. Don't laugh, I've got publishers interested and shit!)

Now I don't sleep well these days. I've got bugs in my head. I think it affects my flying in ways that are weird and deeply confusing. For example I bought a new Sentinel the other day, beautiful craftsmanship, business package, intelligent light, sport suspension, alabandin grey[1]. Breathtaking! Some less required skills (e.g. EAF IV) were still in queue but I thought, well, a little killing meanwhile wont hurt the karma of the ship, right? Two jumps later I ran into a Jaguar pilot, which was not only willing to fight, but also seemed quite familiar with his ship while I was figuring out what all the buttons meant. Not sure whether I have mentioned this before, but I was raised in a Rifter, so I was still fiddling with the unfamiliar Amarr controls when suddenly I was confronted with the much simpler interface of my pod.

I wasn't lazy either: I 'm sure he capped out during the fight.

Yesterday our Pator Tech School company medical guy allows me to fly again and I jump back into my Rifter and almost instantly find a Covetor in Bosena. Killed, podded and looted the guy. I think I should have ransomed, but ok, I'm glad I didn't get killed by the mining vessel's T1 drones in the first place! With GCC still on I find a Vengeance in the same system. (Since reading this excellent post I was very eager to get my hands on one!) After some waiting, warping to and fro and finishing a bad egg salad sandwich I found the Vengeance at a gate to high sec, along with a cane. Let's warp to 100km and have a look!

Five Minutes of Raw Dogfight Thrill!

I immediately docked and pretended in local I didn't cry which was hard to do. Thank god a very friendly fellow felt my pain and offered a rookie ship duel during which I showed him who's BOSS![2] Thanks Captain! I won't go into details here, because, as Wensley said, "the logs show everything"!



[1] I don't make this stuff up, it's all in the brochure!
[2] Miura B. in the Overheated Redheads Channel.