Carebear in disguise

It has been a long week or two since I last logged, and worse I’ve had to spend it planetside!

There is no great story to it. You must visit your relations every now and then, even if they look at you as though you are a freak at times. (They probably think they hid it well and I never noticed, but how can you miss it?) It appears that I am aging less than any of my siblings. My eldest brother looks like an old man now, and he is only 50. I guess the stress and strains of planet life are greater than I remember.

My youngest niece idolised me all the time I was there and asked all sorts of questions like “Have you seen a sleeper?”, “How many pirates have you killed?” and the one that stopped the conversation at the dinner table one evening: “How many times have you died?” I didn’t answer that one. How could I? Either I look like an over-confident braggart or a major failure of a pilot.

It turns out that my niece’s greatest ambition is to become a capsuleer, just like Aunty Darina, so she can rid the Empire of pirates and thieves. It was very sweet, and I must admit that I didn’t correct her misconceptions too much and talked up my role in the saving of the empire a bit more than I should have. Her parents, my brother and sister-in-law, tell me that she has talked about little but spaceships since I left for orbit and they are terrified that she will follow this ambition of hers through and begged me to dissuade her. She is very smart, and she would make an excellent capsuleer, so I can’t see why the mortals are so afraid of the choice she wants to make. I took her aside and told her what her parents had said and advised her to conceal that particular ambition. I then created a hidden trust with the local bank to pay for her upgrade when she comes of age.

Was that wrong of me? Probably, but soon I’ll have a wingman that I can definitely trust. At least until she discovers the vast numbers of vices available out there. She should be able to cope, but who can tell?

After the family visit, I hopped back into orbit and reconnected to the neocom network. Seems we are at war again with some griefer pirate-wannabes. Unfortunately, we’ve already lost one POS, so perhaps next time I won’t spend so long planetside – things just fall apart when I am not there to keep it together!

/save and exit

Always make sure you know who your neighbours are. If a wormhole opens from your w-space to a trade hub, like Jita or Dodixie, then you will have a large number of visitors and they are likely to want to fight – it is time to organise a closure of that wormhole!

You have the upgrade to become a capsuleer, and you spend most of your time in space – whether that is a station, or a ship, it doesn’t matter. Worse, you are alone in that pod!

If your ship systems are fully automated (like mine) you do not need crew, but even if you did they can not speak with you directly while you are piloting (and it is difficult to talk to non-capsuleers when they know you are effectively immortal and are likely to take risks with your – and maybe their – life every 5 minutes!) You must rely on electronic communication to speak with friends, colleagues, station personnel and anyone else you feel needs to be talked to (or at). It isn’t perfect, but if I ever meet the person who managed to get the communications to travel faster-than-light, I think I would gush all over them. I can talk, in real-time, to people in completely different regions of the galaxy! That must be the best invention going in the whole of new eden, don’t you think? Without it, we’d probably go mad (or more mad!) and just stare into the distance!

But like I said, it isn’t perfect. The textual communications could do with an upgrade or two, to help with this complex arrangement we call social communication. Passing information to one another over vast distances is all well and good, but why do I have to spend nearly two minutes searching the system database so that I can link the database for the other pilot’s convenience? Surely this is a job for Aura? She should be able to scan my text comms and link to systems or modules automatically, and I should be able to link pilot and corporation names with a mere thought or (at least) key press. You’d think voice comms could do this by now, let alone text comms! But I’ll settle for help with text comms for now. Definitely needs someone to look at it. I would do it myself, but there is only so much I can do to influence the larger capsuleer-tech corporations in new eden.

Another thing that would be useful in text comms is the ability to list when you are away from your pod (AFK, it is colloquially called by capsuleers.) Obviously, it isn’t desirable for unknown capsuleers to know when you are not in control of your ship, that could lead many of the less moralistic ones to find you and destroy you while you are in the cargo hold trying to find the last can of quafe. But it saves many friendships and other relationships if the other person knows you didn’t read their last text message! Here, the CSM is ahead of me and trying to influence the bigger corporations. For those who don’t know, the CSM (or council of stellar management) is a capsuleer “interest” group who work with the major corporations to improve the capsuleer interfaces. This is a group I can really get behind… even with some of their really mad ideas.

Aura tells me I am nearly at my destination now. Better get back in the pod before somebody guesses I’m not flying the ship and tries to ransom it.

/save and exit

I can’t go back into the wormhole to make extra ISK because we’ve just had war declared on us. We didn’t do anything to warrant the war except mine in a hi sec system… so its basically a shake-down! Some criminals are just so stupid, and unimaginative! Pursuit of Power are the aggressors, but I shall leave further judgement of their mental faculties and fighting prowess to later.

As I am the one of the few capsuleers within the corporation who can fight (albeit, rarely successfully!), I need to stay around the areas where the younger members of the corp may stray. TransMiners take on a lot of young capsuleers and teach them the way of the Dissimulo Gero, but sometimes that leaves us a little weak in terms of combat strength. Funny, isn’t it? Working for a corporation, a collection of people working to make profit through business ventures, but still talking about physical combat! Surely our species just hasn’t evolved at all!

One thing I am looking forward to though, is a proper test of my abilities. (I know, even I haven’t evolved, but I am the same species as you! At least, I hope so…) If the war lasts long enough, and my ISK resources do not dry up too quickly, I shall attempt various methods of warfare in an effort to actually come out ahead in this war. Some of my disguises can be very useful in war, if done correctly. If there are any readers of my logs, I wonder if they would comment on some tactics for me?

My exploration skills leads to a knowledge of covert operations. I can locate any capsuleer within the same system as me, given a little time, and give any allied combat pilots a spot to warp in and surprise the enemy. I’ve not tried this, yet, so any advice on how to do this quickly would be appreciated.

My knowledge of wormhole physics and sleeper space may allow me to travel vast distances in a short amount of time to catch any enemy fleeing or laying an ambush. However, I do not know if there is an easier/quicker way of finding a path between two systems other than scanning down various wormholes and traversing a few sleeper systems. Is there any advice on this out there?

My privateer skills don’t differ very much from working within a war fleet, except the enemy is clearly defined with the help of Aura and the ship’s overview. I can fit any role in a war fleet but I am not comfortable in a leader’s position. The ability for some leaders to assimilate data and formulate a battle-plan within seconds astounds me! I am not unintelligent, so why should I find this a daunting task? I think it is because there are tricks of the trade that these leaders know that make things easier for them. Would anyone care to share those tricks with me, or at least hint at what they might be?

I’d better get back to patrolling amongst the rookies. They’ve probably lost all their ships in just the few minutes it took to dictate this log to Aura!

/save and exit

At the moment, I am not in the wormhole. I found that the wormhole dried up to quickly if too many of us were in there at once, and I couldn’t meet my outgoing costs. So I’ve returned to my original ISK-printer for a week or two, creating Tech 2 ships for my fellow capsuleers.

We used to run a moon mining operation, and that helped my tech 2 production immensely, which is why I got into it big time, but we don’t run that operation anymore so I need to fork out incredible amounts of ISK for moon materials. This time around, I spent 800 million ISK just for the materials to build 2 Ishtar, 1 Deimos, 1 Occator, 1 Nemesis and 6 Hulks. Is it me, or is the capsuleer market spiralling out of control? The same number of ships cost me only 500 million a month ago! I was dancing for days after I sold them all for a total of 1.3 billion! This time around, I might not make enough ISK to build the next set of ships and to replace my lost battleship.

You may be wondering what that has to do with a disguise for a carebear, but I am getting to that.

Obviously, I am a miner, manufacturer and explorer, but I do enjoy attaching myself to groups of pilots who go out looking to kick the rears of any dangerous pirates out there. Yes, I sometimes use the disguise of a privateer!

Last night, I joined one such roam where I was flying a rifter frigate fitted for speed and tackle. There were 15 of us, and we plowed through the low security space not far from HQ. There were very few pirates to be found, and in fact the only fight we got was when we had to deviate from our roam to save the drake of one of our pilots who had stumbled into a gate camp that we had deemed too large for our paltry guns. In the four hours I spent on this roam, I fired 16 projectiles and 12 rockets. Not a great roam, but the camaraderie of the team was fun.

I hate old bears who tell war stories all the time, but the last roam I was on involved 70 frigates and one interdictor flying through null security space under the tutelage of Agony Unleashed looking for a fight (not quite privateering, but I need to learn the basics of ship to ship combat somewhere!) We found a fight in M-MD38 where the Cult of War alliance had a small fleet, including one Avatar-class titan! If you check the BattleClinic.com killboards, looking for Miner Bob, about the 12th July, 2009, at 00:34, you’ll see the list of ships that an avatar’s doomsday weapon will wipe out. What was really fun about that encounter was that the doomsday wiped out about 100 times more value in CoW ships than our whole fleet combined! I escaped the DD due to the fact I was warping at exactly the right moment. I was one of only a handful that escaped that blast, and I regret not being on a killmail with a titan even to this day!

To top it off, later that morning we encountered Goonswarm in D-IZT9 attacking another alliance’s station. So we attacked them, to show them what it feels like to be swarmed by tech 1 frigates! Obviously, we lost big time, but you don’t have to win to have a fun roam!

I hope Goonswarm and Cult of War won’t hold a grudge against me, for pointing out these two embarrassing hits. Its not as if I could offer many of them a decent fight by myself!

/save and exit

The question posed to me last night was: “Is this possible?” Is the turnover of sleeper salvage and data in a class 2 wormhole large enough to actually support a tech 3 production line? The production line would have to be small, obviously, but I think it is possible.

It is possible to produce tech 2 ships in high security space, although you need to purchase the moon materials required for component production. Is it the same for tech 3 production in a quiet class 2 wormhole? I think this question needs to be answered, and that is going to be my little project for the next few months.

I bought the skillbooks to fly a Proteus and a Loki, and the skillbooks to invent and build the hull and subsystem blueprints from sleeper salvage. I just need to get all these booked into the queue. I love being a capsuleer! You can’t even imagine learning new skills this way if you are a planetsider!

/save and exit

As I’ve said before, there is so much a capsuleer can do that I wish there were more hours in the day-cycle!

The reputation capsuleers have (amongst the planet-siders) of being rich is well founded. I can pull out my trusty Hulk and mine for a day, and at the end of that day I can build a new battleship. With that battleship I can either sell it, or fit it and do some odd jobs for various corporations destroying fleets of pirates or other enemies. Either way, I then make more in a day than most planet-siders see in a year.

But because many other opportunities are open to me as a capsuleer, I find that I want to try everything to see where the most money can be made. I tried mining and selling ore/minerals first and that was very profitable, and enabled me to save enough ISK to look at other opportunities that were less repetitive. Building ships is always profitable, especially in war-torn areas (alright, profiteering on war is not very ethical, but can be lucrative!) but it isn’t very fulfilling and the logistics of moving your produce around for the best prices is just a big PITA.

Much more profit can be made by building the next generation of ships – the specialised ships:  Exhumers, Heavy Assault frigates and cruisers, Interceptors, Recon cruisers, Marauder battleships, and my favourite, the Covert Ops frigates. All of those ships are very profitable to build and sell, and people will come to you to buy them. All except the covert ops ones which I find incredible! It is so much more interesting exploring the various regions looking for places that want to stay hidden from Concord (like pirate data warehouses and staging posts) or small pockets of rare ore. You also find wormholes with this type of ship which then leads (eventually) onto even more profit and excitement as I’ve already mentioned.

The only line of work open to a capsuleer that I find distasteful is the line which leads to the destruction of another capsuleer’s property. Perhaps it is just a problem of comprehension. I do not see the point in destroying someone else’s hard work. I can almost see a point if you were doing it for profit or a cause, but surely destroying a ship and salvaging the wreck is much less profitable than building the ship in the first place, and much more risky? It also really hurts when your pride and joy is torn apart by a small group of badly dressed and ill-mannered thugs. I think Concord needs to take a more careful look at how they respond to these acts of violence, and intervene a bit more for the non-agressor.

To be honest, though, I think I can see the excitement in that line of work. Its like stories of planets where the law doesn’t have a foothold yet; where it is just you versus the environment, the natives and the greediest of your fellow settlers. I might think on this a little more… the industry world brings in great profit, but not too much excitement. Perhaps I need to don another disguise?

/save and exit

We all make mistakes. It is part of learning, and if you understand what you did wrong then you are unlikely to make the same mistake again. I made two mistakes in two days that have cost me dearly.

TransMiners upgraded their wormhole POS. It was skillfully handled by my fellow director apart from one little thing. He asked me to ship extra fuel to the new POS tower but hadn’t told me that it was incredibly important to do this within an hour! So, as I was happily moving the contents of the ship maintenance bays and corporation hangars into the new versions, the new POS shields suddenly dropped.

I was alone at this point, and I am a little unfamiliar with POS management, but I think I did the right things. I immediately got the fuel required and set the POS back to online status. However, as any POS-managing capsuleer knows, it takes 30 minutes to online a POS tower. So I sat there in my heavily armed megathron protecting the items now unprotected by the shields, hoping beyond hope that nobody would discover my error.

It was too much to hope for. With only 10 minutes left until the shields restarted, two capsuleer ships appeared and proceeded to blow my ship out from under me! I wasn’t worried at first, as I think my ship would have been the victor if I had done things slightly differently. However, a combination of ECM jammers, warp scramblers and stasis webifiers caused me to be a sitting duck and my ship was torn away from me. Luckily, the POS shields came online shortly after I warped my pod away so the rest of the items were protected again, but it cost me dearly! You can not survive in a sleeper infested w-space system without a battleship, and I had only thought to bring one. Silly, silly bear!

The exit wormhole at the time did not open into a safe place for me to buy, fit and bring in a new battleship, so I thought I would wait for another wormhole to open. My scan ship was still operational and untouched by the previous attack, so I was not in any serious problems. I would need to wait for a day or two for a new wormhole to open, so I found some dark place away from celestial objects and went to sleep, growling to myself in irritation.

On waking, my scan ship was able to track down several cosmic signatures and I found that some of them were new. My fellow director had even woken earlier than me and found a decent exit where I could replace my needed battleship (maybe with some opposing e-war this time?), so I warped to him. I sat by the wormhole, waiting for an opportunity to leave w-space, and while there I completed the scans looking for the other cosmic signatures that I’d spotted earlier. While I was concentrating on the starmaps, I failed to notice that I was too close to the wormhole, and I also failed to notice a beautiful Loki enter through it. There I was, uncloaked, stationary, and looking at the map console, when powerful vulcan autocannons started tearing away my shields, armour and hull in seconds! The loss of the ship was devastating, but I was not quick enough to get the pod away as well and I awoke in a new clone in Teonusude. Stupid, stupid bear!

The station medical staff got me up and about fairly quickly, even though I woke screaming and lashing out at anything moving. They were very understanding and managed to calm me quickly, and I am very happy with the service they provide. Being immortal does have its downsides, and living through death more than once is one of them. However, I will never look back to my life as a station docking mechanic. The capsuleer life is too much fun, despite the odd upset every now and then.

/save and exit

If you spend time in the same w-space system, some of the cosmic signatures will last for a few days. To clear the known ones off your list of sigs to probe down, warp to the previous bookmarks and you can find them in just a single scan by dropping probes, rearranging them for shortest range and separating them a little. Note: Do not do the scanning while uncloaked! Chances are you will be popped very quickly while your attention is on the map.

You can clear any grav sites in just over half the non-crystal-utilizing time if you can use the required crystals in your modulated strip miners. The Caille University industry skill set is your friend!