The Eve blogoshpere has been too quiet, and I've been too busy with other things to blog, much less properly play Eve. Where did I leave off? Oh yeah.
So... I decided in the end that, since there were only three days left til my alt could fly my recon ships, I might as well move the small amount of gear I had in the wormhole into the lowsec system we were currently linked to, grab a shuttle to fly back to Evati, and have my alt fly the rest back at the earliest convenience. Moving out didn't take very long. I think if we'd had more people in the w-space and active, it might not have been so painfully dull, and we may have scored something. As it was, with only a handful of alliance members on sporadically, there wasn't much to do.
I'd left the bomber and the Arazu in the incredibly quiet(!) lowsec system our wormhole dropped me in, bought a shuttle and was partway home when I passed through the Hellcats' old main base of Vitrauze. It felt good to see the place again, and being inundated with cheerful welcome comments in Local from our old blues was even better. If only I'd not been in such a rush and decided to fly the bomber back, I could have got in on the fun they were having -- I was sad I had to turn the fleet invite down.
But it got me thinking. It'd been a while since we'd used the secondary base out in Amamake. In every corp I've been in, I was always happier if I had a secondary base to go to when I wanted a change of scenery. Why not move my stuff from Amamake back to Vit?
To the alt!
It took a couple days to get everything moved over, and I've spent the last couple weeks out there, saying hi to old mates an especially the Tuskers (<3 ya, guys!), Ghost Festival and Veto. The Hellcats have reopened our old office, and our other members have invitations to stick a couple ships in, as well. Once I'm back from holiday, the corp will reopen recruitment(!), using our secondary base as a place to run Hellcats-only ops from, so that we can get a sense for how well the recruits work within the corp.
Unfortunately, I've not been able to do much, since I've been working on the last chapter of Space Captain Starke (it is epic, and will be done tonight!), and spending the rest of my time trying desperately to find a job before I face deportation (my student visa expires in a month. It's not fun).
Tomorrow, when my boyfriend gets off work, we'll be catching a train across to Glasgow to spend the night, then an early-morning flight to London, and then up to Reykjavik for a week of fun and geekyness. I've been looking forward to this trip all month! Hope to see some of you up there ^_^
Showing posts with label eve tourism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label eve tourism. Show all posts
Sunday, 27 September 2009
Wednesday, 2 September 2009
Scar
Day... how long? I've forgot how long I've been sitting in this forsaken w-space system. Let me check my mail. Day five, I think.
Damn is this place dull.
It's pretty, mind, in a 'someone dropped a handful of oil pastels in the sink' sort of pretty. Rather bland, too, the number of cosmic anomalies is fairly low.
I made a safespot in warping-distance to the corp tower once I realised how awful being inside the shields is. I didn't really believe Cerys when she'd said the shields gave her a headache, but... it's true. After a bit spent sitting there, the horizontal banding and the way it wavered started to make my temples pound.
This may be the longest I've ever spent continuously in a ship. I can't particularly recommend it -- a stealth bomber is not the best of places to be stuck with four crewmembers who also only want to get home. Privacy is minimal, and thank fuck the air scrubbers were just serviced; as it is, we're begining to get a bit snappy. It's crazy that, while craving each other's company, we drive each other mad just by all being stressed and lonely.
To distract myself, I chat to people in various channels and scan around looking for... well, anything. After three days of that, I was clawing at the walls of this spacious prison I've come to think of as Scar (for the red-edged black gap in the otherwise fairytale nebula). It was so quiet, so... empty.
I spent most of today probing around. We've had a few visitors from other wormholes that have opened into Scar -- a Vagabond and Navy Caracal the other night, a couple different people in cov-ops ships today. Nobody sticks around long. Every wormhole I find, I bookmark, hop through for a peek to see where it leads, bookmark and scan, then go back through. The bookmarks are all placed in a can so that others in the alliance can grab copies.
Today was the best I've seen since joining Mynx in here. Wormhole number one led to Caldari lowsec. Number two led to a class-2 wormhole system which was dark, unimpressive and had signs of occupation. Number three... oh, number three. The entrance to the second w-space system was opened sometime during the day by one of its occupants. I think I fell in love with the system the moment I saw it.
Blue-green nebula. Red giant star. Yeah, red giant. I've never seen a red giant system before, probably because the physics which makes stargates function makes those systems impossible to link to the network. I couldn't get enough of looking at the place, flitting from planet to moon to planet, discovering the quite well-fitted tower the occupants had put up.
I scanned around a bit, hoping to find any more wormholes which led to k-space, but they mostly only had asteroid belts. I hung around a bit longer, taking picures and marvelling at the site before reluctantly deciding it was time to go back.
Do I really have to go back?
The only reason I didn't decide to ride the spatial disturbance current was that my other ships were still in the corp hangar back at the tower in Scar. I'm hoping to find an exit close to Evati so I can move all my gear back out in one go. For all the wonders out here in unknown space... there's not enough to entice me to make a permanent move.
Whoever you guys are in J110043, you are so damn lucky to have a view like that.
Damn is this place dull.
It's pretty, mind, in a 'someone dropped a handful of oil pastels in the sink' sort of pretty. Rather bland, too, the number of cosmic anomalies is fairly low.
Pretty but unremarkable.
I made a safespot in warping-distance to the corp tower once I realised how awful being inside the shields is. I didn't really believe Cerys when she'd said the shields gave her a headache, but... it's true. After a bit spent sitting there, the horizontal banding and the way it wavered started to make my temples pound.
This may be the longest I've ever spent continuously in a ship. I can't particularly recommend it -- a stealth bomber is not the best of places to be stuck with four crewmembers who also only want to get home. Privacy is minimal, and thank fuck the air scrubbers were just serviced; as it is, we're begining to get a bit snappy. It's crazy that, while craving each other's company, we drive each other mad just by all being stressed and lonely.
To distract myself, I chat to people in various channels and scan around looking for... well, anything. After three days of that, I was clawing at the walls of this spacious prison I've come to think of as Scar (for the red-edged black gap in the otherwise fairytale nebula). It was so quiet, so... empty.
Scar's scar.
I spent most of today probing around. We've had a few visitors from other wormholes that have opened into Scar -- a Vagabond and Navy Caracal the other night, a couple different people in cov-ops ships today. Nobody sticks around long. Every wormhole I find, I bookmark, hop through for a peek to see where it leads, bookmark and scan, then go back through. The bookmarks are all placed in a can so that others in the alliance can grab copies.
Today was the best I've seen since joining Mynx in here. Wormhole number one led to Caldari lowsec. Number two led to a class-2 wormhole system which was dark, unimpressive and had signs of occupation. Number three... oh, number three. The entrance to the second w-space system was opened sometime during the day by one of its occupants. I think I fell in love with the system the moment I saw it.
Blue-green nebula. Red giant star. Yeah, red giant. I've never seen a red giant system before, probably because the physics which makes stargates function makes those systems impossible to link to the network. I couldn't get enough of looking at the place, flitting from planet to moon to planet, discovering the quite well-fitted tower the occupants had put up.
Wow.
I scanned around a bit, hoping to find any more wormholes which led to k-space, but they mostly only had asteroid belts. I hung around a bit longer, taking picures and marvelling at the site before reluctantly deciding it was time to go back.
Do I really have to go back?The only reason I didn't decide to ride the spatial disturbance current was that my other ships were still in the corp hangar back at the tower in Scar. I'm hoping to find an exit close to Evati so I can move all my gear back out in one go. For all the wonders out here in unknown space... there's not enough to entice me to make a permanent move.
Whoever you guys are in J110043, you are so damn lucky to have a view like that.Monday, 27 April 2009
Road Trip
I caught a windfall the other day. I was passing some time chatting in a public channel for one of my former alliances and mentioned that I was having some more interceptors delivered. One of my old mates said, 'Oh! You fly those?' and the next thing I knew, I was receiving a contract for yet another Taranis. Redric couldn't be bothered to fly all the way out from the place he was based in to retrieve the ship, so he'd got it off his inventory list by giving it to someone else to deal with; namely, me.
There was a catch, though: the ship was still in our old hunting-grounds in Kor-Azor. Seventy-six jumps is a long way to go for one ship. I could easily pay a friend to travel the comparatively short run through highsec and bring it back, and I'd be out little more than a million in exchange for a t2 frigate.
But it was early in the day, there was nothing else happening, and I'd not been out there in nearly a year. So I packed a full inty fitting into the hold of an Incursus, plotted my route to Schmaeel, and plugged some good tunes into my personal audio player. A brief map check showed there'd been some heavy casualties in the past hour in Sakht, but I figured any fighting was more likely to be either on the 1-SMEB gate or over the dysprosium moon in there, and would probably have petered out by the time I would be passing through. I let Mynxee know where I'd be disappearing to for the next three hours, and set out.
Travelling around New Eden, despite what many people think, does not actually take that long. I suspect a great deal of the impression of long distances and time-consuming travel comes from people flying on autopilot and/or in slow haulers. In my Incursus frigate, I'd calculated a minute's travel between gates. Unless I went through an exceptionally large system, the trip out and back would take two and a half hours, and I was planning on a cup of coffee in the bar in Schmaeel and a little hunting in the inty on my way home.
The riskiest part of my trip would be at the start, which took me through Egmar, where our neighbours GiS and Com-Star tend to base from. Our pilots had frequently reported gatecamps there, along the route towards Amamake, so I trod cautiously. There was a GiS Phobos on one gate, and another pilot pursued me for a few jumps beyond, but by the time I reached Frerstorn, I was on my own again.
Because I'd arranged my course to keep me as much in low-sec as possible, my route bounced back and forth between Metropolis and Heimatar, with a quick skip through Devoid and the Bleak Lands and another bounce between Sinq to Everyshore and back, until I reached Amarr space. It was a straight route through Domain to Kador, Genesis and then Aridia. Aridia was my biggest problem now, I figured, since there was a nice little highsec pocket in the middle of nowhere which extends clear across the route. The last time I'd tried to avoid that, I'd ended up on a massive detour through 0.0 which had left that particular clone with more than a couple premature silver hairs.
But that clone was long dead somewhere deep in Syndicate, and when I hit the next gate in Van I flew straight through a fight in progress involving several pirates and a hauler of some description. It was tempting to ninja in on the kill, but I had sentry guns and the high-end interceptor fitting in my cargo to think about; I jumped without pause, briefly wondering if that kill would be worth the attackers' efforts.
Aridia, so far from highsec proper and riddled with pockets in which outlaws dare not linger, is a desolate place. You may go several systems before seeing another pilot or tower on scan. So it was to my surprise that I jumped into Yehaba only to notice a pilot who looked vaguely familiar. An instant later, he invited me into a private comms channel.
In the midst of my chat with Izo, I'd passed through my one highsec jump in Sazilid; the police threat had blared across my comms, momentarily drowning out the other pilot, but it was little more than an automated alarm system and the few police cruisers who appeared were too slow to catch my ship. I've often wondered if they're always deliberately slow to lock the outlaw who chances into highsec and if the MO isn't simply to speed the evildoer from the system before he gets too comfortable. Only in CONCORD-sovereignty systems have the police ever pounced with extreme prejudice.
I'd been right about Sakht having calmed down; there was still an unusually high number of people in the system, and the sheer numbers of wrecks on my scanner gave me a headache. The scavenger in me cringed at the thought of so much tech-2 salvage going to waste.
If Izo had thought he'd had deja vu seeing me twice in an hour, it was nothing compared to how I felt upon entering the kingdom of Khanid. Chitiamem, Nandeza, the idiotic fight in Goudiyah which cost us a fleet of battleships. Arzieh, where I'd spent so much down-time running missions and being called a coward by some null-sec dweller who'd undocked his carrier on us. Vezila, Ashmarir and the Querious gateway in A2-V27 Icefox and I had used on our trip to see the ruins of the first titan. I knew these places so well, it was a wonder I hadn't been through in nearly a year.
I docked in Schmaeel, remembering when we'd first moved to Kor-Azor and I'd opened my first cyno field to bring our gear in, not realising at the time that the system had been taken over by the BeachBoys in the time since Atrocitas had last moved out. Oh, the nights spent sneaking around the towers watching dozens of capital ships returning from fights in nullsec; sitting cloaked a hundred kilometres off the Oguser gate counting fighters from Omega Alliance and Nex Eternus as they came looking for easy targets. I have so many bookmarks around that little cluster of lowsec systems, they don't all fit on one page in my NeoComm.
I checked that the Taranis was in the hangar, ordered her prepped and fitted with what I'd brought, and went in search of a cup of coffee and something to eat. It was a typically Amarrian station, all towering arches and gold accents and people in robes eyeing me suspiciously without once dropping their kindly smiles. I was raised to be polite, and despite having no religious belief to speak of, when an Amarrian bids 'God be with you', I return the favour. As long as they don't try to evangelise, it's all good.
The little verses printed on the take-away coffee-cups are kinda patronising, though.
Most of the pilots in this system were nothing but haulers, I realised. The sort who never seem to take a break, continuously back and forth for some agent or other hauling rubbish and support staff; but then, why would you need a break when you're only flying from point A to point B on autopilot? Might as well get a 'bot to do it all for you, in the end. On my way back to the hangar, I spotted a couple faces whose uniforms sported the BeachBoys insignia; I guess they didn't all move out, after all. They left me alone, and I ignored them.
These systems used to be fucking hazardous. What's happened to this area?
My Taranis was ready by the time I returned, and I wibbled a little over a name for her -- I dislike flying a ship without a proper name. It's like denying each unnamed hull its soul, and without a good, fitting name, you can't trust it to return your love and respect. Eventually, I called her Little Missile, despite lacking launchers of any description; the Taranis' DPS output is high enough that I felt the name was justified.
I'd intended to go hunting on my way back, but every system was either depressingly empty, every pilot was docked, or any likely targets were on gates. The one cruiser I attempted to tackle in a belt was already aligned and was hitting warp as I landed; he had too much experience, and I mused on how frustrated enemies must have been trying to nail down my anti-Serpentis Myrmidon in Syndicate.
Egmar, when I went through, was hosting what appeared to be a mining operation, but I'd had enough by then and merely wanted to get the Taranis back to my hangar in Evati. Nobody seemed to have even noticed I'd been gone; quiet day all around, but it had been a good morning for a road-trip.
There was a catch, though: the ship was still in our old hunting-grounds in Kor-Azor. Seventy-six jumps is a long way to go for one ship. I could easily pay a friend to travel the comparatively short run through highsec and bring it back, and I'd be out little more than a million in exchange for a t2 frigate.
But it was early in the day, there was nothing else happening, and I'd not been out there in nearly a year. So I packed a full inty fitting into the hold of an Incursus, plotted my route to Schmaeel, and plugged some good tunes into my personal audio player. A brief map check showed there'd been some heavy casualties in the past hour in Sakht, but I figured any fighting was more likely to be either on the 1-SMEB gate or over the dysprosium moon in there, and would probably have petered out by the time I would be passing through. I let Mynxee know where I'd be disappearing to for the next three hours, and set out.
Travelling around New Eden, despite what many people think, does not actually take that long. I suspect a great deal of the impression of long distances and time-consuming travel comes from people flying on autopilot and/or in slow haulers. In my Incursus frigate, I'd calculated a minute's travel between gates. Unless I went through an exceptionally large system, the trip out and back would take two and a half hours, and I was planning on a cup of coffee in the bar in Schmaeel and a little hunting in the inty on my way home.
The riskiest part of my trip would be at the start, which took me through Egmar, where our neighbours GiS and Com-Star tend to base from. Our pilots had frequently reported gatecamps there, along the route towards Amamake, so I trod cautiously. There was a GiS Phobos on one gate, and another pilot pursued me for a few jumps beyond, but by the time I reached Frerstorn, I was on my own again.
Because I'd arranged my course to keep me as much in low-sec as possible, my route bounced back and forth between Metropolis and Heimatar, with a quick skip through Devoid and the Bleak Lands and another bounce between Sinq to Everyshore and back, until I reached Amarr space. It was a straight route through Domain to Kador, Genesis and then Aridia. Aridia was my biggest problem now, I figured, since there was a nice little highsec pocket in the middle of nowhere which extends clear across the route. The last time I'd tried to avoid that, I'd ended up on a massive detour through 0.0 which had left that particular clone with more than a couple premature silver hairs.
But that clone was long dead somewhere deep in Syndicate, and when I hit the next gate in Van I flew straight through a fight in progress involving several pirates and a hauler of some description. It was tempting to ninja in on the kill, but I had sentry guns and the high-end interceptor fitting in my cargo to think about; I jumped without pause, briefly wondering if that kill would be worth the attackers' efforts.
Aridia, so far from highsec proper and riddled with pockets in which outlaws dare not linger, is a desolate place. You may go several systems before seeing another pilot or tower on scan. So it was to my surprise that I jumped into Yehaba only to notice a pilot who looked vaguely familiar. An instant later, he invited me into a private comms channel.
Shae Tiann > can I help you?It was about then that I recognised him as the outlaw Arazu pilot who'd given me a start on the Evati gate in Arnher at the very beginning of this trip.
Izo Azlion > Hey there
Izo Azlion > Random question!
Shae Tiann > go for it
Izo Azlion > Did I see you in metro?
Shae Tiann > um, probably
Izo Azlion > I've just popped through a wormhole from there in the last 20 minutesWe chatted for a bit, mostly about wormholes and the difficulties involved in finding them before signing off to go about our individual business.
* Izo Azlion grins
Izo Azlion > Figured I'd seen you there and down here, thought I'd say hey seeing as I had a bit of a deja vu!
* Shae Tiann laughs
In the midst of my chat with Izo, I'd passed through my one highsec jump in Sazilid; the police threat had blared across my comms, momentarily drowning out the other pilot, but it was little more than an automated alarm system and the few police cruisers who appeared were too slow to catch my ship. I've often wondered if they're always deliberately slow to lock the outlaw who chances into highsec and if the MO isn't simply to speed the evildoer from the system before he gets too comfortable. Only in CONCORD-sovereignty systems have the police ever pounced with extreme prejudice.
I'd been right about Sakht having calmed down; there was still an unusually high number of people in the system, and the sheer numbers of wrecks on my scanner gave me a headache. The scavenger in me cringed at the thought of so much tech-2 salvage going to waste.
If Izo had thought he'd had deja vu seeing me twice in an hour, it was nothing compared to how I felt upon entering the kingdom of Khanid. Chitiamem, Nandeza, the idiotic fight in Goudiyah which cost us a fleet of battleships. Arzieh, where I'd spent so much down-time running missions and being called a coward by some null-sec dweller who'd undocked his carrier on us. Vezila, Ashmarir and the Querious gateway in A2-V27 Icefox and I had used on our trip to see the ruins of the first titan. I knew these places so well, it was a wonder I hadn't been through in nearly a year.
I docked in Schmaeel, remembering when we'd first moved to Kor-Azor and I'd opened my first cyno field to bring our gear in, not realising at the time that the system had been taken over by the BeachBoys in the time since Atrocitas had last moved out. Oh, the nights spent sneaking around the towers watching dozens of capital ships returning from fights in nullsec; sitting cloaked a hundred kilometres off the Oguser gate counting fighters from Omega Alliance and Nex Eternus as they came looking for easy targets. I have so many bookmarks around that little cluster of lowsec systems, they don't all fit on one page in my NeoComm.
I checked that the Taranis was in the hangar, ordered her prepped and fitted with what I'd brought, and went in search of a cup of coffee and something to eat. It was a typically Amarrian station, all towering arches and gold accents and people in robes eyeing me suspiciously without once dropping their kindly smiles. I was raised to be polite, and despite having no religious belief to speak of, when an Amarrian bids 'God be with you', I return the favour. As long as they don't try to evangelise, it's all good.
The little verses printed on the take-away coffee-cups are kinda patronising, though.
Most of the pilots in this system were nothing but haulers, I realised. The sort who never seem to take a break, continuously back and forth for some agent or other hauling rubbish and support staff; but then, why would you need a break when you're only flying from point A to point B on autopilot? Might as well get a 'bot to do it all for you, in the end. On my way back to the hangar, I spotted a couple faces whose uniforms sported the BeachBoys insignia; I guess they didn't all move out, after all. They left me alone, and I ignored them.
These systems used to be fucking hazardous. What's happened to this area?
My Taranis was ready by the time I returned, and I wibbled a little over a name for her -- I dislike flying a ship without a proper name. It's like denying each unnamed hull its soul, and without a good, fitting name, you can't trust it to return your love and respect. Eventually, I called her Little Missile, despite lacking launchers of any description; the Taranis' DPS output is high enough that I felt the name was justified.
I'd intended to go hunting on my way back, but every system was either depressingly empty, every pilot was docked, or any likely targets were on gates. The one cruiser I attempted to tackle in a belt was already aligned and was hitting warp as I landed; he had too much experience, and I mused on how frustrated enemies must have been trying to nail down my anti-Serpentis Myrmidon in Syndicate.
Egmar, when I went through, was hosting what appeared to be a mining operation, but I'd had enough by then and merely wanted to get the Taranis back to my hangar in Evati. Nobody seemed to have even noticed I'd been gone; quiet day all around, but it had been a good morning for a road-trip.
Wednesday, 24 September 2008
The View from Amamake
... is full of people who would merrily kill you.
I'm getting ahead of myself. Mynxee's already bloggled about this, but I thought I should make a record of my own. This blog needs something other than random babble for once, anyway ^_^
I was feeling rather bummed out from all that time spent playing highsec hauler, so Mynxee suggested we go for a little roam. I say 'little'; the full route turned out to be something like thirty-five jumps. But what the hey, I needed a little action and a change of pace. I had two hours before I needed to log for the night, so I clonejumped back to Ladistier for a cruiser. After a little conference with Mynxee, we realised we had enough ECM birds between us to choke a substantially larger vessel, so I brought Sugar with her classic gank fitting, and away we went.
The first few systems out were quiet, and we took time to grab safespots and I took a few pictures (I'm like this in RL, too). The few people we did see were either docked or not viable targets (meaning bigger and scarier than we were); I spotted a couple of old war-targets from the early Arzi days. We'd been going for maybe an hour or so when Mynxee noticed we were close to Amamake.
I also feel that the old curiosity killed the cat line is a better reference to Schrodinger's theoretical experiment than to a hapless feline poking its nose somewhere it oughtn't.
The first thing I noticed was a Local population of forty-five. Yikes. The second thing that registered was that we'd materialised in the midst of a moderately-sized gatecamp of primarily positive-sec pilots. Oh, crap. Mynxee had lag, and my jumpcloak timer was ticking down as I scanned for a safer place to warp to.
Then I noticed how small the place was, and how many stations there were. Bloody hell!
Tick... tick... tick...
If I didn't want to get squished on that gate, I'd have to find a safespot fast; Mynxee had a little more time than I did. I spotted a planet I'd fallen roughly in line with; crossing my fingers, I punched Warp and waited tensely to see if it worked. Either they were slow on the uptake or their locktime blew goats - only a Malediction flashed briefly yellow before I was gone.
Mynxee's voice came over the comms.
A Magnetometric Quest probe was dropped in the water. I should really have been more concerned than I was at the time, but I've only used Quests to find deadspace complexes and was preoccupied looking for the more obvious Snoops and Spooks. At one point, Mynxee suggested warping from belt to belt to see what would happen. I was ready to go along if only because it would answer the question of whether the cat would die (btw, Mynxee, I was never the smart, sensible one in school - I was the one who spent all her time reading or drawing because everything else was boring and my classmates were shallow).
We made the mistake of lingering too long, too often in one particular spot while we debated our options, and as I started to warp to the next safespot, a Falcon showed up practically on top of us. I was already gone, Mynxee managed to get out, and we agreed Amamake was too small for that sort of tomfoolery. We headed through an apparently clear gate into Siseide and breathed a sigh of relief.
Eight in Local, mostly carebearing types with a habit of sitting in belts chatting. We ricocheted around the system for a bit, making safes and being friendly with the locals, and at one point I called into my headset,
As I was making another safe, Mynxee asked,
I was still watching the scanner warily, and at one point I thought, That Deimos looks familiar. And that Thorax, too. Huh... Maybe they were just passing through? No joy: they stayed around, and in space. I started checking for probes but came up with nothing, and nothing, and nothing again. And they were still there.
Mynxee ganged up Wensley in case he needed help with the Cynabal he was tracking, and we continued searching the system for targets. We really were in there too long.
It was deja-vu. I warped off to my next spot and started to run up the directional again when Mynxee said,
It was tempting to stick around and see how long it would take them to catch me, but by then it was edging on one in the morning and I had initially intended to log half an hour earlier. My Global timer had run down without being noticed, and Mynxee was lining up to pod-streak the long run home. In the end, I followed her out of the system, chased by a bit of rude commentary from the Arazu pilot.
There were a few 'eek!' moments on the way back. One gatecamp I jumped into I was certain would munch my Thorax like a Mars bar, but didn't, in the end, seem interested.
I'd love to know what sick mind created a system like Amamake. Penirgman is bad enough for stations, and that's in highsec and rather on the large side; a place like that in lowsec is already a deathtrap without being fully within a ship's scan radius.
Will I go back? Probably, with perhaps a little more preparation, now that I know what to expect from the system. Will I die there? I think I used up one of my remaining lives in there already, so there's now a one-in-eight chance of somebody getting lucky. Will I have fun? Of course I will; it's not every day I get my dreadlocks ruffled like that ^_^
I'm getting ahead of myself. Mynxee's already bloggled about this, but I thought I should make a record of my own. This blog needs something other than random babble for once, anyway ^_^
I was feeling rather bummed out from all that time spent playing highsec hauler, so Mynxee suggested we go for a little roam. I say 'little'; the full route turned out to be something like thirty-five jumps. But what the hey, I needed a little action and a change of pace. I had two hours before I needed to log for the night, so I clonejumped back to Ladistier for a cruiser. After a little conference with Mynxee, we realised we had enough ECM birds between us to choke a substantially larger vessel, so I brought Sugar with her classic gank fitting, and away we went.
The first few systems out were quiet, and we took time to grab safespots and I took a few pictures (I'm like this in RL, too). The few people we did see were either docked or not viable targets (meaning bigger and scarier than we were); I spotted a couple of old war-targets from the early Arzi days. We'd been going for maybe an hour or so when Mynxee noticed we were close to Amamake.
'Hey, that's where some of the guys seem to get a lot of action. Wanna see if we get some kills?'I have heard things about Amamake. I know people who have pirated there and people who have died there; most of them were the same.
I also feel that the old curiosity killed the cat line is a better reference to Schrodinger's theoretical experiment than to a hapless feline poking its nose somewhere it oughtn't.
'Eh, sure. Why not?'So we jumped into Amamake and popped the lid off the theoretical box. What was the worst that could happen?
The first thing I noticed was a Local population of forty-five. Yikes. The second thing that registered was that we'd materialised in the midst of a moderately-sized gatecamp of primarily positive-sec pilots. Oh, crap. Mynxee had lag, and my jumpcloak timer was ticking down as I scanned for a safer place to warp to.
Then I noticed how small the place was, and how many stations there were. Bloody hell!
Tick... tick... tick...
If I didn't want to get squished on that gate, I'd have to find a safespot fast; Mynxee had a little more time than I did. I spotted a planet I'd fallen roughly in line with; crossing my fingers, I punched Warp and waited tensely to see if it worked. Either they were slow on the uptake or their locktime blew goats - only a Malediction flashed briefly yellow before I was gone.
Mynxee's voice came over the comms.
'You're being followed.'Hmm, a taste of my own medicine; it wasn't that long ago I was doing the same thing to others in Kor-Azor. I was already picking my next warp-point, this time with my Places tab open and ready to take bookmarks. Did they have enough stations in here? Jeez! Removing them from my overview helped a bit, but as we bounced from point to point, we landed a little too close to some of those stations for comfort. With an eye on the directional scanner, we kept moving. Two ships worried me particularly: a Deimos and a Thorax which kept showing up on shortrange scans, clearly warping from planet to planet in hopes of trapping one of us.
A Magnetometric Quest probe was dropped in the water. I should really have been more concerned than I was at the time, but I've only used Quests to find deadspace complexes and was preoccupied looking for the more obvious Snoops and Spooks. At one point, Mynxee suggested warping from belt to belt to see what would happen. I was ready to go along if only because it would answer the question of whether the cat would die (btw, Mynxee, I was never the smart, sensible one in school - I was the one who spent all her time reading or drawing because everything else was boring and my classmates were shallow).
We made the mistake of lingering too long, too often in one particular spot while we debated our options, and as I started to warp to the next safespot, a Falcon showed up practically on top of us. I was already gone, Mynxee managed to get out, and we agreed Amamake was too small for that sort of tomfoolery. We headed through an apparently clear gate into Siseide and breathed a sigh of relief.
Eight in Local, mostly carebearing types with a habit of sitting in belts chatting. We ricocheted around the system for a bit, making safes and being friendly with the locals, and at one point I called into my headset,
'Hey! Wensley is in here!'We gave a hail and hello and chattered some more whilst looking for something tasty on the Local buffet.
As I was making another safe, Mynxee asked,
'What's a Tormentor?'A cackle echoed over comms as I warped in to keep the cruiser from running as its shields crumpled. The already-popped frigate pilot continued to recruit in Local, to our amusement. Sugar's shields took a beating from a determined frigate rat who didn't know when to quit, before I caved and put it out of my misery.
'Um, Amarr frigate.'
'There's one in a belt here. That Omen is here, too. Fight going on.'
'Need a hand?'
'He's going down.'
I was still watching the scanner warily, and at one point I thought, That Deimos looks familiar. And that Thorax, too. Huh... Maybe they were just passing through? No joy: they stayed around, and in space. I started checking for probes but came up with nothing, and nothing, and nothing again. And they were still there.
Mynxee ganged up Wensley in case he needed help with the Cynabal he was tracking, and we continued searching the system for targets. We really were in there too long.
It was deja-vu. I warped off to my next spot and started to run up the directional again when Mynxee said,
'There's an Arazu here.'The recon had her scrammed and damped in short order, and for a mad instant I considered warping back; if I could lock and sic the Vespas on him before he could kill my sensors, we stood a reasonable chance of taking the Arazu out. I was realigning when Myxnee said the Deimos had arrived, and that decided the issue for me.I like a good fight, but that was a suicide run; the boys from Amamake had tracked us down, and I was next on the hit-list.
It was tempting to stick around and see how long it would take them to catch me, but by then it was edging on one in the morning and I had initially intended to log half an hour earlier. My Global timer had run down without being noticed, and Mynxee was lining up to pod-streak the long run home. In the end, I followed her out of the system, chased by a bit of rude commentary from the Arazu pilot.
[ 2008.09.24 00:15:46 ] Van Steiza > When a man talks dirty to a woman, it's sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it's $3.95 a minute.Most charming, indeed.
There were a few 'eek!' moments on the way back. One gatecamp I jumped into I was certain would munch my Thorax like a Mars bar, but didn't, in the end, seem interested.
[ 2008.09.24 00:30:35 ] Shae Tiann > ooooh shinies!You meet all different sorts out in the spacelanes late at night. I scooped a clutch of Ogres that had been left on their lonesome near a gate, at which point I discovered what a LOLkillmail I'd have been: somehow, I'd slapped a frigate-sized microwarpdrive on Sugar rather than a more appropriate cruiser-sized module o__O
[ 2008.09.24 00:30:36 ] Mynxee > gogogogogo girl!
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:01 ] Mynxee > oooh the strong silent types.
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:15 ] Kuger > kiss me
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:18 ] Shae Tiann > prrrr
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:24 ] Triksterism > YOU WHORE KUGER
[ 2008.09.24 00:31:50 ] Triksterism > ITS OVER :(
I'd love to know what sick mind created a system like Amamake. Penirgman is bad enough for stations, and that's in highsec and rather on the large side; a place like that in lowsec is already a deathtrap without being fully within a ship's scan radius.
Will I go back? Probably, with perhaps a little more preparation, now that I know what to expect from the system. Will I die there? I think I used up one of my remaining lives in there already, so there's now a one-in-eight chance of somebody getting lucky. Will I have fun? Of course I will; it's not every day I get my dreadlocks ruffled like that ^_^
Sunday, 31 August 2008
Eve Gate
I tried to get to it once before, months ago when I was still based in Arzi with Atrocitas. Unfortunately, between Arzi and New Eden, there's a pesky 0.5 system in the middle of Aridia that I couldn't get through thanks to my low sec status. And I know, you say 'Of course you can get through there, silly! Just warp immediately!' Sorry to disappoint: I did lose a ship in there - a helios - when I was travelling down to join Tygris in Syndicate. You can't evade the local police 100% of the time.
Ah, but! But! I'm now based in Genesis, only a few quick jumps from the Gate. I logged in a couple days ago to see one of our guys saying, 'You should come check this out!' and decided I would, along with a few others. It was hardly a fleet op; all of us going independently down in little ships, some incapable of being anything more than a buffer tank around our pods. Some of the local reds clearly wondered what the hell we were doing; one of them was ratting/complexing in a Cerberus a couple systems down the pipe, and one of the local neutrals caught up and passed me in his Malediction a system past it. I ninja'd up on a planet in Promised Land to wait till the Malediction got off the gate (pardon me if an inty on a gate makes me a tad nervous), and watched a red jump into New Eden in a Hyperion.
This ought to be interesting.
The last of our 'fleet', a friend of one of our guys, showed up in an unfitted Rifter and jumped in as I was in warp. Arriving on the other side, I noticed two things at once: first, the absolutely amazing view, and second, that our blinky Rifter friend had been tackled on the gate by the blinky neutral Malediction (see, this is why inties make me edgy - they don't get aggro for shooting me, either) with the Hype sitting there sounding incredulous:
The Hype left, the Rifter went pop, one of our guys warped in to bait the inty, who bit... not noticing that Thmuses wasn't blinky like the rest of us.
Teilla left in his pod, we buzzed about for a little taking pictures, but never did try to see what happens if you try to get close to the Gate. On the way home, Cap sets a different route.
Think 2001: the Monolith is a reference, a big, black rectangular solid drifting in space. If it's meant to have any significance in the development of Eve history, I've not heard it. It looks impressive, and I'd love to know if anything interesting happens if you bump it. And yes, it is indeed full of stars.
The run back home was uneventful, though there was some fun involving getting stuck on the ruins of a mining outpost on one of the gates on the way home. That is one damned treacherous gate, though there's some logic in putting an outpost right on it... wonder if that's meant to be a relic from the early days, or if it was just put there to make people nervous ^_^ The development of Eve's background and history is something I find fascinating, and is one reason I've trained an alt for exploration. Someday I'll send her on a Grand Tour, but for now I'm content to pvp and be a bad girl ^_^
Ah, but! But! I'm now based in Genesis, only a few quick jumps from the Gate. I logged in a couple days ago to see one of our guys saying, 'You should come check this out!' and decided I would, along with a few others. It was hardly a fleet op; all of us going independently down in little ships, some incapable of being anything more than a buffer tank around our pods. Some of the local reds clearly wondered what the hell we were doing; one of them was ratting/complexing in a Cerberus a couple systems down the pipe, and one of the local neutrals caught up and passed me in his Malediction a system past it. I ninja'd up on a planet in Promised Land to wait till the Malediction got off the gate (pardon me if an inty on a gate makes me a tad nervous), and watched a red jump into New Eden in a Hyperion.
This ought to be interesting.
The last of our 'fleet', a friend of one of our guys, showed up in an unfitted Rifter and jumped in as I was in warp. Arriving on the other side, I noticed two things at once: first, the absolutely amazing view, and second, that our blinky Rifter friend had been tackled on the gate by the blinky neutral Malediction (see, this is why inties make me edgy - they don't get aggro for shooting me, either) with the Hype sitting there sounding incredulous:
[ 2008.08.29 20:10:43 ] unclesam88 > you came all this way just to gawk at this thingy>?Yes, yes we did. Is there anything wrong with that? I once went 80-odd jumps through 0.0 to see the Ruins of Steve, evading a gatecamping BoB titan's DD in the process. The little jaunt to the Gate was nothing, by comparison.
The Hype left, the Rifter went pop, one of our guys warped in to bait the inty, who bit... not noticing that Thmuses wasn't blinky like the rest of us.
[ 2008.08.29 20:18:05 ] Teilla > oops :PNormally, I'd say alcohol and pvp go quite well together, since some of my best memories are from drunken ops... in nullsec. Alcohol and sentry guns don't mix quite so well.
[ 2008.08.29 20:18:45 ] Chakrai > ...
[ 2008.08.29 20:18:51 ] Teilla > booze ftw
[ 2008.08.29 20:18:55 ] Chakrai > rofl
[ 2008.08.29 20:18:58 ] Thmuses > ?
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:07 ] Captator > can we have km please- ceo needs to know we did something pvp orientated ^^
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:14 ] Chakrai > did thmuses whore onto the mail?
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:46 ] Teilla > only sentrys
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:50 ] Thmuses > nope
[ 2008.08.29 20:19:54 ] Teilla > he didint even lock me
Teilla left in his pod, we buzzed about for a little taking pictures, but never did try to see what happens if you try to get close to the Gate. On the way home, Cap sets a different route.
[ 2008.08.29 20:41:10 ] Captator > we gonna go look at the monolith too while we down hereI'd forgotten about the Monolith. Like many other hidden features of Eve, it doesn't appear on the map. I never would have known it was there.
Think 2001: the Monolith is a reference, a big, black rectangular solid drifting in space. If it's meant to have any significance in the development of Eve history, I've not heard it. It looks impressive, and I'd love to know if anything interesting happens if you bump it. And yes, it is indeed full of stars.
The run back home was uneventful, though there was some fun involving getting stuck on the ruins of a mining outpost on one of the gates on the way home. That is one damned treacherous gate, though there's some logic in putting an outpost right on it... wonder if that's meant to be a relic from the early days, or if it was just put there to make people nervous ^_^ The development of Eve's background and history is something I find fascinating, and is one reason I've trained an alt for exploration. Someday I'll send her on a Grand Tour, but for now I'm content to pvp and be a bad girl ^_^
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