Faithful Are The Wounds of a Friend; But the Kisses of An Enemy Are Deceitful – Aesop

In the spring of 2006, I downloaded a computer game called Eve Online. I watched the introduction trailer from beginning to end with the excitement of a 5-year old waiting to open gifts on Christmas morning. I digested volumes of text from the web about the New Eden universe and its inhabitants. I literally spent weeks thinking of my character and how they would interact with this immerse galaxy. The first thing my character did, was give himself over to God.

I love good role playing (not the bedroom kind of stuff, although that can be fun to). The Amarr race of Eve is intoxicating to me. An ancient powerful empire who is now struggling to keep itself together after wars and rebellions have raged for decades. The fluff to draw on for role playing was so good, I just couldn’t pass it up. I’ve loved every minute of playing as an Amarrian. I’ve spent time in the militia battling the rebellious scum of the MinMatar and the freedom loving anarchists of the Gallente Federation. It’s been an absolute blast, and long ago I vowed to never betray the Amarr empire or lose my faith in its leadership.

But I stand before you today a conflicted man.

I live in wormhole space. Probing and space exploration are how I fund all of my Eve based adventures. But as I browsed through the Amarrian arsenal last night I came to a realization that had been lingering just on the fringe of my conciseness for a long time now. Amarr has no ship worthy of wormhole space operations. It kills me to admit it publicly, and I hope that you the public can prove me wrong, but as I see it we just do not possess a ship that can perform to a sufficient degree in worm space.

Rebellious scrap heap

Well how about some justification for such a statement. Living in w-space requires one thing above all else. The ability to probe cosmic signatures. Sure there are plenty of Amarr ships that can do this, but none that can do so, cloak, and still possess some kind of military strength. The answer for other races is simple. Their respective strategic cruisers can be configured to deal respectable amounts of damage, have a modest tank, cloak, and still probe a system down. The Legion cannot. A covert fit Legion is made of paper thin armor and has no offensive potential to brag about.

Up until now I’ve used my Pilgrim to do the combat in w-space for me. I generally scan our w-space constellation and find a target worth killing. Then I’ll head back to HQ, swap into the Pilgrim and return to the target’s system to engage it. But this all takes a long time and the prey never stays still for long. No one in w-space does. It’s a matter of survival, I don’t sit still for very long either. But what is an Amarrian loyalist to do?

Gallente vomit barge

I’ve started looking at training for another race’s ship. I really really don’t want to but I’m not sure if there is any other way. The Proteus and the Loki are such potent killers and can cloak and probe as well. It’s hard to pass them up for the sake of staying true to my role playing roots. I am still resistant, if for no other reason than it would take a long time to train the skills to sit in either ship, and I don’t feel like doing it. So I am here to beg the citizens of New Eden to bless me with their wisdom. What is an old war horse to do? Train for a Loki? Commit the ultimate sin and fly a Gallente ship (it’s bad enough I use their drones now)? Or does someone know of a ship that can fill this role within the Amarr arsenal?

Emboldened By Fancy Flying

What an interesting evening in the sandbox. I log in to find nothing in system but a Radar, Grav and our static wormhole. I scan to make sure that no new holes have popped up since the last scan check and board the corp Legion to harvest some anomalies that have populated our system. I don’t even manage to get through the first Frontier before being interrupted by a Loki and Hound.

I warp back to the tower and switch to a stealth bomber Oz had lying around. Everyone in the system is cloaked. I’m surprised that the intruders are not trying to harvest up the wrecks I’ve left in the anomaly. Actually now that I think about it, I don’t remember actually finishing all the sleepers in this anomaly, but there are none left to harass me now. I bookmark each wreck and warp between it and the sun or some other bookmark over and over, picking up the loot one by one. It’s slow going, but it’s safe and and I’m making my isk.

Then I see a Thrasher show up on my scanner. This looks like the salvage boat I’ve been waiting for. I jump into my Oracle and warp way out on the anomaly off a distance sniping bookmark I had made for just such an occasion. The Thrasher is there looting and I lock on to him. I blast away from about 200 km and quickly get into the ship’s armor. He is able to warp off and a Hurricane is now joining us in the anomaly. This is going to make things more interesting.

I continue the cat and mouse game for a while, warping out and back again to various bookmarks I have around the anomaly. They can never get closer than 80 km from me and I’ve managed to almost destroy the Thrasher as well as blast a bit of the shields off the Hurricane by now. I decide the only decent thing to do is pop all the wrecks they’re planning on stealing and be done with it. Once that’s done I warp to within 100 km of the wormhole and begin to orbit hoping I can manage to pick off the Thrasher now that there is no reason for it to stay in system. I get a few shots off but he manages to get away.

The Hurricane leaves, but then comes back and he almost out smarts me by warping to a celestial behind me. But I’m all too familiar with that trick and am gone before he has a chance to get back and kill me. Some times goes by and I’m in my Pilgrim now about 100 km from the wormhole. The Hurricane shows up again at what I assume is his bookmark for where he last saw me which is also about 100 km from the hole. We both start slow boating towards the hole. I’m tempted to just let him leave. I’ve been a big thorn in their side, and so far I’m on top of the isk count. But there is something about this Hurricane.

Hurricanes are a bitch. They hit damn hard, and can be a pretty tough nut to crack. I assume that he’s got his Thrasher buddy on the other side of the hole, but even that isn’t really a deterrent. I am far enough from the hole that I can align and get out of trouble before he’s a factor. My faction webber should keep the Hurricane pinned down enough that I get to dictate range and be able to escape should things turn sour. I’ve wanted to test this fit against a Hurricane for a long long time and decide now is as good a chance as any. That and my fancy flying earlier may have had my ego every so slightly inflated.

I decloak and MWD my way towards him while my drones engage him. I’ve made sure to double check my orbit distance after the little blunder I made last time I fought in my Pilgrim. Everything goes off without a hitch. I was able to visually inspect his ship and know he’s running autocannons, which don’t have a prayer of hitting me at 12 km with 2 TD II’s on him. I’ve got him webbed, disrupted and my drones are starting to eat away at him. He has a fleet of ECM drones or something on me but I don’t pay them much mind as the wormhole flares.

Alright this is what I was worried about. A second Hurricane arrives through the hole. I’ve already started to align to a celestial…or at least I think I have. Turns out I hit a wrong button somewhere. I’m 20 km away from Hurricane number 1 but I’m not aligned and I still can’t warp. A little blunder with getting my ship pointed in the right direction may have made the difference here. Still I gain on my pursuers. I manage to put 24 km between me and the closest Hurricane but their disruptors are still hitting me! This is not good. I can’t web both of them at once and Hurricane two is rapidly closing on me.

It’s only a matter of time before their able to get their claws into me and bring the mighty Pilgrim down. My pod manages to warp away safely. We exchange some ‘gfs’ in local and I try to ask them which disruptors they were using, but they’ve become tight lipped. It always kind of annoys me when your killers won’t engage in a conversation with you after a fight. Fighting is the only way to learn and get better, I know I always take the time to talk up a victim if they have questions about how I won. Oh well what can you do. It was a fun fight, a costly loss, but a fun fight anyway. I think I would have been able to secure the kill if it had remained a 1v1, but you can never count on such things. The Pilgrim will return, and my thirst for Hurricane blood has only grown as a result of today’s events!

Oracles, Hurricanes, and Stealth Bombers…Oh My!

Cheese and rice what a trip this day has been. I’m going to skip a lot of the usual build up to the action and just dive right in for the most part.

Our C3 neighbors are still connected to our HQ system and Snow and Oz are inside harassing them as is customary. I was fleeted immediately upon logging into the game and brought my Oracle into the system to offer what help I could. The locals have a Loki sitting peacefully in their force-field and we’ve seen a Buzzard zip around once or twice. Much to our amusement the Buzzard attempted to scan our location with a single combat probe. I had parked my Oracle on a hi-sec wormhole connection that Oz had already bubbled up.

About this time we had two Hurricanes and a Falcon jump into the system via the hi-sec wormhole. As soon as the Hurricanes uncloaked I opened fire. The first Hurricane’s shields evaporated in a single volley from my large tachyons. The Falcon immediately cloaked and the two battlecruisers burned their way out of the bubbles and warped off to a safespot, but not without taking a good bit of damage.

Snow probed down one of the safespots the Hurricanes were hiding in, but they weren’t sitting still much. I think they were on edge for some reason. Just as we were about to ambush them at their not-so-safespot, they returned to the hi-sec wormhole. Oz was there this time in his Harbinger to provide some close action support and a webifier. The tachyons began spitting out damage again, although I had been on the move and was slightly out of optimal range. The cloaked Falcon had kept me on my toes and now I was out of position. Oz did what he could and the Oracle blazed away but the Hurricanes managed to get back to the hole safely.

We began to wait again, we still had a Falcon in system, not to mention the local corp who seemed content to sit in the POS’s shields the whole time. As time wore on I got the feeling the Hurricane pilots were on their way back to help their Falcon buddy get out unscathed. No one listened to me though. I was right in the end, although I do wish the timing had been a little different. I had warped around the system for some reason, I can’t remember what it was now. I warped back to resume my vigil over the hi-sec hole but managed to get myself sucked into the bubbles my own corp had placed putting me within 10km of the hole.

Then the wormhole flared. A Maelstrom and a Typhoon instantly decloak and start locking me. I never even got a chance to see the turrets fire. The Oracle disappeared in a brilliant blue blossom and my pod warped for a nearby celestial. The Oracle is a great ship able to do a lot of damage at range while remaining agile and cheap. But it is the epitome of a glass cannon, and arriving at the wormhole just as the enemy corp returned through it was a really unlucky turn of events.

Anyway after retrieving their Falcon, the corp we had been battling moved off. Apparently that was enough discouragement to keep them from exploring the system any further. So we moved on to our next objective. Destroying the local POS. The lone POS in the system had little to no defenses setup and the corp has been itching to get back into worm space for a while. So we began to hatch a scheme to evict the residents from their system. We didn’t want to risk any large ships and so we decided to use a somewhat, unorthodox POS bashing approach.

We all got in frigates.

Confusion was on the menu for today’s local corp. A group of two stealth bombers and one Tristan decloaked at their POS and began attacking their warp scrambling battery. With only cruise missiles as a defense, our tiny fast ships were untouchable for the most part. As long as they didn’t bring out any ships to defend their assets, we were going to slowly grind through them. All without risking more than 50 million isk in the process. We had almost brought the warp scrambler down when a small fleet of ships finally arrived and ruined our fun. But oh what fun we had!

After a quick break I returned and flew to Amarr to fit out a new Purify-i-core stealth bomber that I desperately wanted to try out. I insured the ship, since I wasn’t terribly confident in how it was going to perform and headed off to lo-sec. Right off the bat I find a Retriever mining away in a belt by himself. I’m surprised considering the large number of pilots in local, but the bloodlust and curiosity is high, so I engage anyway. Suddenly a fleet of CONCORD ships arrive. Odd, I’ve never seen CONCORD in lo-sec befo…BOOM!

My ship explodes, and I realize that I, in fact, was not in lo-sec but rather one jump away from lo-sec. Man is that embarrassing. I did get almost half way through the miner’s armor before being ganked by the fun police, so at least the damage output seems promising. I head back to Amarr and refit. This time I do make it to lo-sec and I manage to find a Hoarder sitting, apparently afk, at a planet using my directional scanner. I engage the ship and start to bust through it’s armor in no time. The pilot comes to and starts to burn away. I was a little slow on the uptake and managed to drop my disruptor when he got out of range. Man this is not my day.

All in all an exciting time. The new stealth bomber fit has a lot of potential, but it will take a little more time in the pod before I’m proficient at using it. The future looks bright though. As I’m writing this reports are coming in about further eviction operations and potential moves back to worm space. I must say it feels good to be the attacker in a battle for once.

To The Victor Go The Spoils

For those of you who don’t know, operating in wormhole space can be a stressful and hectic experience. With the spawn of every new connection comes a change in the rules. Nothing stays the same for very long and that is what leads to a lot of the excitement. Even if sometimes that excitement comes at the cost of your profitability, planning, and health.

Summer Friday had me out of work early today and I got home as quickly as I could to log in some Eve time. Just before getting home my phone had lit up with messages from the corp saying there was trouble brewing in the HQ system. Am I the only wormhole pilot that isn’t in a European timezone? I swear I am always missing the action. Anyway there is a K162 connection in our HQ which has lead to some class four inhabitants. Apparently a few of them are parked in our system in battleships and other nasty things. Our forces are apparently in stealth bombers monitoring the situation. I log into the comms channel in time to catch Oz formulating a plan of attack. It sounded something like this:

Oz: “You guys warp in and get into bomb range, while I fly around over here and kite the Dramiel.”
Me: “You’re going to kite a Dramiel?”
Oz: “To keep him off the bombers while they make their runs.”
Me: “You’re going to kite the fastest frigate in the game?”
Oz: “Yes?”

Good luck with that. I’m going to work on my target practice. The enemy ships were clustered in one of two bookmarks, which Snow had already scanned down. Oz and I took potshots at ships when the opportunity presented itself. We even managed to take down a Kestrel at some point. Unfortunately they managed to catch Oz during one attack leaving the score 1 T1 frigate to 1 T2 stealth bomber. Oh well, this has been fun either way, and in all honesty I’m glad for the chance to practice bombing on real targets for a change.

The enemy fleet begins running the three anomalies we have in our system. They have an overwhelming force present. A pair of Ravens, cloak fitted Loki, Dramiel, a few Drakes, Hurricane, and Onyx make up the fleet that we know about. Anything else can still be on their side of the wormhole. There is no way we can force them out of our system in a direct engagement. But we can make their trip as frustrating as possible and deny them as much isk as we can.

We deploy Snow into the anomaly they are currently working on and have her bookmark wrecks from the sleeper ships as they come up. Oz and I then position ourselves around the enemy fleet for what I am calling “surgical bomb strikes of annoyance.” When the intruders get a couple of wrecks up Oz or myself decloak and attack the wrecks denying them the loot. Sometimes we used torpedoes, sometimes bombs. We attacked their drones when they would cluster them around a single target. Basically we did whatever we could in our outclassed ships to harass and demoralize the enemy. It worked well.

In the first anomaly they only made off with the loot from a single cruiser wreck. The second anomaly they fared slightly better with two or three ships worth of loot and maybe one or two salvages.  We couldn’t keep them from stealing all our anomalies, but by god we were going to make them fight for every damn isk they tried to take. I would say the mission to make them wish they had never bothered with our system was paying off, right up until we got the idea to try to collapse the wormhole on them.

Now I’m not sure when that idea came about, I was busy bombing wrecks and drones. I think it was a bad call to be honest. They were about done with our anomalies and I don’t think they would have caused too much trouble after they got what they had come for. Regardless, a wormhole collapsing fit Abaddon was eventually caught on the wormhole and destroyed. We tried what we could to draw their attention away from Snow’s cloaked ship, but with that number of hostile ships buzzing around the wormhole it was only a matter of time before they found her.

The engagement ended and I logged off to grab some dinner. Hopefully I can wash the taste of defeat out of my mouth with a few slices of Sicilian pizza and Pepsi.

Return to the Pod

The pod goo is colder than I remember it being…

It is good to be back! After a long stint planetside, I’m finally back in the pod. A lot is going on planetside. I’m moving back to Brooklyn, just broke up with my girlfriend of four years (well she broke up with me), and things are pretty crazy in general. The good news is I’m finally settled in and seriously back in Eve.

The whole corp was online last night and we began telling old war stories as we pillaged the anomalies of a neighboring C3 system. After a particularly exciting engagement a few nights ago, Oz convinced me to start writing in the blog again. A fantastic idea, and this fight is definitely worth the spotlight of the first in the re-opening of Capsule in the Void.

Well it was about a week and a half ago. I had finally got a replacement Legion for the one that Oz borrowed and returned to me as a smoldering pile of wreckage. I was the only corpie online and a few anomalies looked more promising than scouting new wormholes or suckling Ladar sites. I align to my target and warp in to find the expected sleepers. So far everything is going as plan. I start popping sleepers, admiring my Legion’s shiny hull and blazing pulse lasers.

Huh, that’s funny, I don’t remember there being any Lokis in this class of anomaly, or any anomaly for that matter…

Oh shit. A few months away from the game has made me rusty. I was not spamming d-scan as much as I should have been. Regardless the reaction to the Loki appearing on my overview is instantaneous. The Legion begins aligning to the POS while I lock the Loki and begin to engage the new hostile. I should mention at this point, there is still a sleepless defender buzzing around who begins engaging the Loki as well. It’s nice to know the sleepers think this guy is as big a jerk as I do.

The cloak fitted Loki is no match for my tank or my lasers. His shields are dropping quickly, and it’s only a matter of time before he’s done for. That is until his friends in a Hurricane, Vexor, and Broadsword show up. I get it now. The Loki was just a point to lock me down until the real fleet can get there.

I start planning my next Legion purchase. It looks like the corp wallet is robust enough to handle another big purchase so I could be back in a new Legion by the end of the day. But let’s see what we can do.

As you would imagine the Broadsword catches up with me and puts the bubble up. It’s a good thing he does because now the Loki who is almost out of armor bugs out before becoming a casualty himself. I switch targets to the Broadsword, I need to bring that bubble down if I’m ever going to get out of here. The hurricane closes the distance and starts throwing his own weight into the mix. The Vexor thankfully is over 60 km away, not sure what he was doing out there, but I’m grateful he isn’t in the fight yet.

It occurs to me that the Broadsword has quite a tank, but is probably contributing very little to the damage being inflicted on my ship. The Hurricane is the real threat to my hull. I know my armor repair unit can handle the Broadsword, but the close range hurricane is beating me up pretty bad. I overheat the armor repairer while I switch targets to the Hurricane.

The Minmatar have fast ships that hit hard, but they are made of cardboard. Within 30 seconds the Hurricane has to disengage or succumb to my righteous lasers (my lasers have a special affinity for Minmatar). The Hurricane warps off leaving the Broadsword and Vexor. Well now what do I do, the Vexor is getting closer but still doesn’t seem to be in the fight. Might as well take this chance to pummel the Broadsword some. His tank is strong, but it’s passive, and he has no way to repair himself. His shields begin to evaporate just as the Vexor starts to realize he can’t shoot me from where he is. The Loki warps back in to the fray, but at this point I have a good read on their strategy and their ship weaknesses. I re-lock the Loki, quickly making him warp out again. Target focus is now back to the Broadsword.

Suddenly I realize the Broadsword is falling behind. Could it be I’m not wreckage after all? Sure enough I manage to get outside of the Broadsword’s bubble and slam the warp button to bring me back to the POS. I had remained aligned to the tower the whole time. I broadcast a “gf!” into the local channel which is reciprocated by the aggressors. I keep them chatting in local while I switch to a stealth bomber. I end up back in the anomaly aligned perfectly to the Vexor and launch a bomb to remind them they aren’t in hi-sec yet.

It’s a direct hit with something like 3,000 damage registering in my log. I get the obvious “that tickles!” in local, but they get the hint and warp out. I have a feeling the Vexor felt that bomb a bit more than he wanted to. Now it’s just me and a cloaked Loki looting my hard earned loot. I align to one of the last wrecks hoping to pop the wrecks with a bomb while damaging the Loki a bit. Unfortunately for whatever reason he leaves the last 3 wrecks. After floating aligned to the wreck of choice for five minutes, I decide to call it a day. This has been enough excitement for me thank you very much.

Welcome back to Eve!