Aww Yiss!

Undocked to do some industry on Sunday to find a couple of friends 40km off station killing a JF that made the mistake of passing through. I dock up and ask, for it is polite to do so, if I might whore on the mail.

 

A minute or so later I receive the ok to do so. I nearly undocked the Rorqual and used drones but instead I used a Corax and managed to contribute a total of 3% of the total damage. I even used my industry ships to help salvage and get the loot to station without the cloaky camper in system interfering.

 

It was a nice Anshar kill and big thanks to Acki for letting me whore on his hard work. He even let me have the single ORE Cargohold Expander that dropped (I didn't ask for a split, it was his hard work but he insisted).

 

It's been a LONG TIME since that character had a kill on his Killboard, according to zKillboard it was November 2013 when I last whored on a killmail :)

 

Still I'm stuck in Null Sec for a week or more thanks to a laughable war dec from Marmite (Marmite are NOT laughable but the people who paid for it are). Oh well, I guess netural out of corp alts will do my hauling whilst I sit in fast locking ships waiting for cloaky campers to be stupid... possibly.

Purple Moros Down

[So they wanted to kill a purple carrier, but then they turned on you.]
I knew they would.
             - Apex Bex.

What follows is the After Action Report by Apex Bex, longtime friend and EVE compatriot, who has returned to living in a WH and also working with some people of "dubious honour". I post it here as its a great story about how people create content and how friends can turn on friends for fun.

Now, it’s important to identify what a ‘MATE’ roam is. Basically, its a group of Aussie corps/pilots who get together now and again for PvP roams and other shenanigans. There are affiliations within the group, but largely it’s a not purple, shoot it kind of arrangement and little love lost between many of the participants. 

The Story

It was getting late on Friday night and having made some ISK in my C2 Wormhole, I was jumping through high sec to Jita to unload some products. It’s at about this point that my CEO mentions one of the guys on his ‘MATE’ roam is busting out a Chimera, to what end I had no idea. 

Caldari carrier, makes a nice big explosion when killed

So Trinket gets it in his head that it’d be pretty funny to drop a Moros on the Chimera. There was apparently someone else of similar thinking bringing another Moros and he would be the secondary target. Since going back to W-Space I’ve barely even looked sideways at my cap fleet and the Blap Moros was definitely my favourite of the bunch. 

[Blap Moros]

3x Limited Mega Ion Siege Blaster I

1x Siege Module II

2x Heavy Capacitor Booster II

1x Sensor Booster II

2x Tracking Computer II

1x Damage Control II

1x Capital Inefficient Armor Repair Unit

3x Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

2x Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

2x Capital Trimark Armor Pump I

1x Capital Hybrid Collision Accelerator II

I almost never use it, so I volunteered to be 'the guy', I could insta jump to my clone in Aurohunen anyway and did.

I should’ve checked the clone before I jumped to it, as I found out later it had a full LG crystal set in it. Less than ideal for an armour Moros, but what the hell. This was in LowSec anyway, only galactic stupidity would see me lose my clone too. 

As the moment to jump drew nearer the destination system was linked in private chat from Trinkets. Tama. Fucking Tama. OK, this was almost certain death then. I thought ‘fuck it – it’s just pixels’, spent half a billion on insurance and undocked the Moros in Aurohunen, waiting for the cyno to go up.

Jump, Jump, Jump

Moments later the cyno is lit and I clasp my balls firmly in my left hand and jumped into Tama, appearing at the sun no less. Sure enough, there was a swarm of purple that comprised the ‘MATE’ fleet and the Chimera was among them. I immediately sieged and let fly with Guristas Anti-Matter from about 15km’s. 

The poor Chimmy never had a chance. TeamSpeak was alive with hoots & wtf's as purple opened up on purple and the carrier exploded less than a minute into my siege cycle.

Kill: Bam Stroker (Chimera)

Suddenly, Oh Bugger, Surprise!

It was at this point that I learned just how loyal the ‘MATE’ fleet was =]. I was kicked from fleet and the 30 odd sub caps opened up on me. It was about now I was really pleased with myself for taking the insurance. My 3 Billion ISK Dread was fully covered now and I was just going to try to take as many with me as I could. 

I started locking up everything big enough to hit and not moving enough. Primary was of course going to be the Armageddon that was neuting my capacitor hard. It went down rapidly and I moved onto the Megathron. It too succumbed at point blank range in just two volleys. 

Kill: Ceadeus (Armageddon)

Kill: Kech Eistiras (Megathron)

Even a Drake that was silly enough to sit still for a minute went down. 

Kill: Kato's Pete (Drake)

I’m still behind on the ISK war but was having too much fun to give too much of a fuck at this point, so now with only cruisers on the field and no tackle to hold them still enough I dropped a depot and quickly refit for cap regen as I was almost out of boosters. 

Need to refit in space? The mobile depot is the "must have" deployable

Amazingly they let my depot deploy and I dropped the tracking computers for cap rechargers but that was as far as I got when the depot started taking fire. I scooped it up but the opportunity wouldn't present itself again to drop it on the field.

I still had at least 6 siege cycles worth of stront left so no trouble tanking this sub cap fleet now, but I was also made aware that there was a Snuff Box fleet en route. They wouldn't be 'kitchen sinking it' and their arrival would be the end of me, unless I could get the cap to jump out.

The Final Countdown

Under the sustained DPS and cap warfare I could never quite get enough cap to jump, the closest I got I was still about 5% short and moments later the Snuff Box fleet landed, comprised mostly of Command Ships with a Heavy Interdictor and a Neut Armageddon. 

The Armageddon maintained just enough transversal to be unhittable to my guns, especially without my tracking computers fitted, and he would soon have me neuted out and unable to operate either defensive or offensive modules let alone jump out.

If I was going to die I would do so trying to take as many of them as possible with me and I did notice that one of their Command Ships was sitting dead still about 3,000m off my starboard side, so I took the shot Hilariously, he popped on the second volley and now the ISK war had a half a billion ISK Command Ship on my side.

Kill: Tau AD (Absolution)

Then, eight minutes later, I finally succumbed to the incoming fire and exploded:

Kill: Apex Bex (Moros)

and notice the lack of pod killmail, yup he was a jammy bastard and managed to save his LG Crystal Clone equipped pod in the melee that developed.

R.I.P. Wrong Again, Bob

Second View

Trinkets Friend has posted a shorter write up of the "MATE" roam on his blog. Go have a read of it (and favourite it as he's got one of the better written blogs in EVE) and then laugh at Apex Bex just as I have been as I've been writing this.

Does this look like a trustworthy character?

Oh and save your ISK, I know full well Apex Bex is a Space Rich bastard and does not need any ISK donations.

Oh Mai, Killing a Titan

So I went out for dinner last night, a last minute decision and it cost me a slice of 115 billion ISK kill...

I returned to be greeted with a killmail for a Against All Authorities (-A-) titan that my friends caught and killed in Mai.

George Takei approves (possibly)

What I said when I was shown the killmail I won't repeat but I did congratulate my friends for their good fortune. I have the privilege to know some very good players and the group whom ply their trade in Mai is both diverse, great group and amazingly skilled for what they do.

High Fives and Back Slapping

I've seen numerous capital ship kills, far too many Jump Freighters that had poor cyno's and I've even been involved in a few kills but this is by far their largest and most successful kill. Congratulations again all involved, it was a spectacular kill.

Honeypot Glaze gets a shout out for turning up in a Ibis and putting that Civilian Gatling Railgun to good use...

Face Palm

This morning I checked EVE News 24 and TheMittani.com and only EN24 had a story on the titan kill so I read it.

I'd like to just go on the record and say I have nothing personal against EN24 but I do at times cringe and shake my head at the poor reporting, writing and even worse spelling and grammar I see in their stories, but I still read them.

The story is just plain wrong. The whole timeline of events and the facts of how it went down is comically incorrect.  It's as if they didn't speak to anyone involved (which I believe they did not) and I'm going to set the record straight with the details as I was told them.

The Story

As usual the story starts with people being attentive and watching the comings and goings in a system. Pilots are cataloged, checked, cross-referenced, noted and information shared in a private channel.

The cyno character was initially believed to be that of a JF pilot who has previously lit cynos on gates so people were ready on Mai's only gate for this but instead the cyno went up near Planet 7. A Purifier, flown by Honeypot Glaze, warped to the cyno and seeing a titan aggressed it, he then attempted to bump it out of it's alignment.

We're going to need a bigger fleet

Unfortunately the titan was fit with a smart bomb and the purifier started taking significant damage so he had to get range at which point the titan warped to what was either the Sun or Planet 2. The purifier warped at range to Planet 2 but no titan could be seen. Fortunately for Honeypot Glaze someone was smiling on him and on his moving about he managed to get the decloak and this caused the titan to enter warp again.

Tackle

This is where the titan's luck ran out, it warped to Planet VII Asteroid Belt 6 where a HIC and two BS were in warp to, having used d-scan to narrow the titan location, on arriving the titan had already cloaked but then inexplicably "combat logged" revealing himself to the HIC that was only 15km off him.

Friends and friends of friends were woken up (quite literarly in one case) and told of the capture and the need for ships. Sev3rance were called upon as Against ALL Authorities is red to them and had ships available in system, as veteran member N00b FO0 explained it:

"Well, some of my friends poked me, saying 'N00b, we got an enemy titan of Provi-Block tackled, we need your help'. So I Jump Cloned over, and called over a few guys from the Alliance, some of which got there in time, and some of them didn't. I was just psyched when I saw that it was an -A- [Titan], Providence Victor man"

The pilot, Carinia, attempted to refit using mobile depots but the attacking fleet was wise to this and alpha'd any attempt to deploy one as soon as it appeared. This must have frustrated the pilot who logged off and as a result all his active modules went offline, making the task of killing him easier.

Reinforcements

Black Legion were not involved initially, up to now the work was done by a combination fleet of members of different alliances who work together in this one system. When the titan reached ~50% shield the call for help was made, because there was concern that a call for help had been put out and PL/-A- reinforcements would be arriving shortly.

BL reinforcements arrived, via a cyno on station which they used to jump carriers in with their sub-capitals inside, and then question no longer whether the titan would die but how quickly.

No Help

It's often said that Supercarrier and Titans should have a cyno fitted in order to be able to provide a way for people to come to their aid should something like this happen. Eagle eyed viewers will notice in this case the titan was fitted with a cyno but it wasn't used, the obvious reason being that there was no help available because there doesn't even seem to have been an attempt by -A- to even raise a rescue fleet.

Says It All

Had there been reinforcements and the titan gotten any help could it have been saved, chances would have been slim but it may have helped. Even a couple of carriers with remote repair modules might have made the difference.

The Story Continues

After the titan was killed (not before as EN24 has said) did the following come to light:

• the Titan was only purchased by Carinia no more than 24 hours before it was lost as shown in this EVE Forums post
• the infamous Chribba took part in the sale as the "trusted" 3rd Party as shown in this screenshot 
• Tempest Legion were 'sniffing' around having seen the sale too and in fact a interceptor was killed on the wreck

Outbreak and Black Legion both released videos shortly after the kill from their points of view and -A- have been silent on the whole thing.

Thanks

Thank you to FrEeSoUl5150, a55mu11e7 and Disposable Ensign for help in writing this. Big thanks to EVE Scribe for his version and his stellar job of translating what he was told by N00b FO0 into English.

Happy Day

Sunday Morning 23rd February 2014 at 5:37am this happened:

It took 45 days and several times I wanted to change to other skills but I'm glad I didn't listen and kept with this.

Since the first day I got EVEMon and saw carriers I wanted to fly and own an Archon. I achieved that after a year but its the past two I've progressed my skills enough to actually be competent when I needed to fly it into combat again... I can still remember the first, and only time, I took my carrier into battle.

Wavy Lines, Wavy Lines

It was two years ago I first used the Archon, the purpose was to defend a tower and repair it in low sec from some "aggressors". I got myself onto two dreadnought kills and a carrier in the battle, as fun as that was it was a rookie mistake that I made and have kicked myself for ever since.

The mistake, I focused so much on attacking the enemy that I didn't attempt to repair the tower that I was sheltering in and supposed to protect. I wasn't a huge loss and we'd expected to lose the tower but I still laugh at myself now for the stupidity in not locking and putting reps on the tower during the battle.

Name Dropping

Just because "I can", have another look at the battle report and see a couple of famous people there. Corelin of the Mad Haberdasher blog was there in his 'potato'. So was founder/head of Sev3rance FuriousPig and former Lead FC for Sev3rance Disposable Ensign, who now runs an growing Empire in NPC Null. 

I once was in space, in the same system as someone famous. TheMittani who!

Actually it's quite good to see people on the BR that I'm still friends with or have moved into other corporations and I've gotten to know. Great people, good times.

Back to Reality

Well that's my memory moment over, I was smacked back to reality when I added Amarr Dreadnaught V to the skill queue. Not quite as long as Amarr Carrier but still 39 days of training for an extra 5% damage, damage that will be used and needed at some point.

Still could be worse I could be training Amarr Titan...

Conflicted

Yesterday I participated in the killing of a Rhea in low sec, I was quite happy to be on the kill mail because it's rare I'm online using the right character and able to make it before something dies.

I'm not conflicted about the kill it's the accepting of the 330m ISK I received as a cut of the ransom that wasn't honoured.

Situation

I was 20km off the Rhea and it was just in structure when all firing stopped as one person contacted the pilot to organise a ransom. After a minute he said someone needed to write "guarantee" in local to confirm that the ransom would be honoured and three people did (using various spelling of the word, one said he was channelling his inner Frenchman). A 2 billion ISK ransom was paid and then the order to fire was given, which we all did.

Suffice to say the pilot was not polite in local at this and I felt a little uneasy at this, more so after I returned from picking up the wife from work when I found 330m ISK in my wallet.

Conflicted

I like the fact I'm on the kill but I cannot help but feel uneasy at the ransom that wasn't honoured, I didn't write 'guarantee' in local nor did I say in anyway, shape or form that I wouldn't shoot. I was following what was being said by the FC.

But I still feel that I should not accept this ISK but should I return it to the Rhea pilot or to the pool for the pilots that participated in the kill? I just don't know.

Help Me

My valued reader, please help me by commenting on this. Should I return the ISK1 and if so whom should I give it to, the Rhea pilot or my friends who were on the kill?

Crystal Ball Gazing

By now most people will have heard about the fight in B-R5RB, the outcome is the loss of at least couple of trillion ISK and bloodied noses for most of the major alliances in the game.

 

The death of a Titan is something few and far between and usually only one at a time, this was something else. To see over seventy die in one engagement is quite something but looking at the killmails more so.

 

Replacement Ships

 

Titans aren't easy to come by nor are they to produce. BPC's easily command a couple of billion ISK not to mention tens of billions of ISK needed for the raw materials to make one. Add in the build time, at least 2 months in a secure null sec location.

 

I don't believe the alliances have spare ships in the quantities lost, they may have a couple but not dozens needed to replace the losses seen. It is going to take many months perhaps even a couple of years before these losses will be replaced.

 

Fancy Modules

 

Looking at the killmails it shows a lot of expensive deadspace and officer modules being destroyed, these modules exist in small numbers and as a result they commanded a high price. These modules no longer exist in-game and as a result we may see more officer or drops within DED sites to replace these.

 

This should be good, I can count on one hand the number of good drops I've had in 9 or 10/10 DED sites and the one Officer spawn I've had was pretty terrible when compared to drops others have had. Not that I wasn't happy for the ISK I got as my cut.

 

Effects

 

Short-term: I think there is going to be very little change, perhaps some players who can secure replacements will buy new modules and will invest as such, but there will be little else.

 

Medium-term: Minerals in high sec will be bought in large amounts as alliances start to accumulate the materials needed to replace these ships or to replace those materials already used in production. High end officer/deadspace modules will see an increase in numbers for sale with most being bought within a week or two of being put for sale.

 

Long-term: We may see a dip in the amount of minerals available for sale but aside from this I think the long term effect of this battle will be not industry related but force projection. We'll see, at least for a year or so, little use of titans or supercaptials in battle and more use of expendables such as dreadnaughts and sub-capital ships.

 

Alliances will not be tempted to use their titans/super capitals for sometime after today, losses will be harder to replace and as such the authority to use these ships will not be given lightly.

 

Wrapping Up

 

I could be wrong, I probably am but I stand by what I think we may see over the next three, six and twelve months.

 

All sides will spin this as a victory or loss or even a "oh I never wanted that ship" but what happened will have ramifications for everyone in New Eden. I'm hoping CCP release a devblog on the server node/nodes that held the battle as after the issues previously this node held up much better.

Heavy Hitting

I've had a Revelation for a while, it's been fitted and ready for use but as of yet I've had no chance to use it.

 

That changed late last week when I logged in and was convo'd by a corp mate immediately.

 

"Do you have a dread in [system]?"

 

Luckily I did have my dreadnaught in that system and it was already in space having been there from an aborted op the previous day. Turns out a corp had left the alliance but had left an unfuelled faction tower up on a moon and a Director of our corp/alliance had given the go ahead to kill it.

 

I login in the character and join fleet, it's me and two other corp mates. One in a revelation and the other in his carrier and his alts in missile fitted battleships. I checked that we could use Siege mode, we could, and I warped to the tower at about 30km.

 

 

 

I dropped out of warp and immediately sieged, it was quite nice to see the animation of this. I'd never seen it before and then I locked up the tower... 30 second lock time :\

 

That went by and I started firing at about 13% shields gone and the damage I was dealing was between 35,000 and 60,000 per salvo. Wow, this was not going to last long.

 

I chatted with my corp mates on Teamspeak and watched intel for any reds nearby, we had a couple, one a known hot dropper, two systems over but he didn't move into our area whilst we were active.

 

Six siege cycles later and the tower exploded, it was a nice explosion and even nicer to get the kill mail. I did about 33% less damage than the other dreadnaught (7.25m vs 5.5m) but I managed to get the last hit in.

 

We finished off the remaining six guns and docked up. It was a fun 25 minutes or so and I finally got to fly a dreadnaught in combat.

 

I can ticket that off my "things to do in EVE list".

Character Selection Screen

I logged into EVE last night to do my tower management tasks and found that I didn't have to. My corp mate had done the emptying of the output towers in one system and the other system had another 24 hours before I needed to do anything.

This left me with a conundrum... what to do.

I saw a few friends were hunting targets so I logged into TeamSpeak and listened in as they did their stuff, whilst this was going on I did a bit of null sec ratting in a Tornado and made a few million ISK for shooting those red crosses that invade the local asteroids.

Not exactly rocket science but whilst I was doing this I heard my friends bump and point a Revelation so I logged in my alt in the same system and undocked, joined fleet and warped into the fray.

I landed about 40km off the revelation that was already in 25% armour as I approved, at 20km I locked him and switched to Hail and then opened fire. What I wasn't expecting was the revelation to lock me and fire back, that was a little surprising seeing the mass of white laser energy leap out at me and seemingly connect with my ship.

He missed... at least I took no damage and after re-seating myself I made to orbit at 5000m where I started to add some nice dps to the mix.

A couple of minutes later and he explodes. Loot Fairy was not nice at all but still a kill is a kill.

I docked up when my timers ran out and logged out, then back in to the character screen where I spent the next hour and a half whilst my friends tried to find a new victim. I managed to buy and fit a Tempest whilst I was waiting, it should arrive in system in a couple of hours ready for use.

Unfortunately a little miscommunication let one chance go past and another was missed because the character lighting the cyno actually used a good spot over the station so all the capitals entered system within docking range rather than just outside. So no further kills last night.

So another evening spent watching the character screen, at least it beats watching reality TV... :)