First looks as the boys at CCP are planning  a new type of site, namely comets that can be found via CCP, these will be a new form of exploration based mining, designed to offset the dependency on lowsec moon mining. Basically a smaller style of moon mining, no word on if this is lowsec only or will be surveyable in highsec as well but definitely tickles my fancy.

Next is the word that CCP is working on Tech 3 Frigates! Yes bringing all the wonderful tech 3 modularity we’ve seen but down to the frigate sizes… Personally i’d have loved a destroyer t3 but oh well still sounds awesome, and hopefully this will mean we will see eventually more and more t3 ships (battleship t3 anyone?), They’ve already said that Tech 3 frigates will be substantially cheaper than the strategic cruisers, but just how much cheaper is anyones guess and will depend on alot of factors, personally i just really hope the skill requirements aren’t too difficult for me to get No word on when the t3 frigates will see the light of day yet though.

Another big thing with tech 3 is the news that CCP will start to seed Tech 3 Loot drops to the mix of things which should be great for just about everyone.

Treaties apparently missed the Dominion time frame but will eventually make it into the game early in 2010.

Planetary Interactions are also on the upcoming plan, It’s not going to be based on planet ownership but more of planet development and policies and politics, apparently not much like simcity but a darker more eve centered development style, i personally wonder if this ties into the fact we’re getting the new planet graphics

We all heard that Walking In Stations has become Incarna, well it looks as COSMOS the social network and tools for eve has also gotten a new name “New Eden”.

Also formations were apparently mentioned again but they haven’t confirmed or really gone in depth as to what they will benefit or how they will be controlled or implemented yet which is kind of a bummer.

They’ve also confirmed that Dust514 atleast initially launching on “consoles” will not be a subscription based MMO, and will mostly be financed by microtransactions where players can purchase “thousands of blueprints”. CCP says that Dust will have one of the widest variety of weapons and vehicle customizations ever seen in a FPS.

So we entered the first deadspace with my Megathron fully fit with Mega Neutron Blasters (12m a piece when i bought em but ohh so powerful 2500volley no matter resistance on the rats is just too nice.), Our new Wing Leader Robert (great guy) he was in a really nice amarr battleship, the really expensive 150m one, and Nakiti in a drake (he doesn’t really pvp or pve, mostly industrial but he wanted to hang out with us so he came along and helped out we just kept most of the agro away from him)…

Anyway first room went great, second room cleared out in about 5 minutes, and then a guy in a cormorant showed up he must have combat probed us out to find us. It was a ninja salvager that Robert had scared off a previous day apparently… since he had been chased off before, rob and me opened fire and the guy buggered off quite quickly.

Now I don’t know if it was that it was late and I wasn’t really paying attention or what, but when the name appeared back I didn’t check the show info or character age or anything, i started firing, set my AB and approach to get into gun range, and all 3 of us opened fire to get rid of him. Only as I approached and he scrambled me did I realize he wasn’t in a t1 or t2 battleship as i had expected. Only when my friends Amarr battleship disappeared from the watch list did i realize that this f*cker was in a Tengu and a well fit one at that. His radial velocity was well beyond that of my Blasters tracking range as he turned his caldari navy missles at me, he shreaded my shields in a matter of seconds and withing 4-5 volleys my armor was gone, i was truely strucken in astonishment as i realized that with 10 drones (t2 and t1 mediums) all attacking, my neutrons barely scratching him, and nakiti’s missles smashing into the pirates shields, he had only lost 30% of his shields! And at this point had destroyed Rob’s BS and mine was falling apart, I called for Naki to withdraw but he was scrambled, i realized i wasnt scrambled any longer and tried to warp away, but before my ship could enter warp it disappeared with a flash!

Naki managed to get the only real damage on the tengu pilot, as my large blasters and the large amarr lasers just couldn’t keep up with the tengu’s speed fit… before Naki could break the scramble his ship was gone as well. We all managed to keep our clones and dock up safely but the day had come to a horrible conclusion.

Robert was really depressed after loosing what was nearly a 300M ISK ship and fit, and well my 180-200M had me down as well, Nakiti shrugged it off alot easier considering the cost of the drake and he hadn’t really had it fit with any named weapons etc. Robert apologized for what he felt was a lack in leadership to have us not evac immediately back to base to wait out the agro, but truly their was no way it was his fault, none of us could believe how ineffective our ships were against a single Tengu, the fact is we did loose a lot of cash but it’s only a few days of L4ing to get back into our ships, or even 1 really good day So live and learn, the night was truely an awakener  to pay more attention to which ninja pirates your deciding to attack, especially the reminder to check the fact the guy is a 2007 player, and the fact he was  a “AntiPirate Corp” didn’t seem to matter

I eventually messaged the pirate that had popped us, and told him it was a good yet unbelievable defeat but all the best to him, i wanted to be a good sport. He was very courteous and actually explained that with the size of our guns, and the fact he had his Tengu speed-fit the only things that actually were hitting him were the drones and Nakiti’s drake missles, he agreed we should have aligned and warped out faster, and the fact that i had forgot to align early enough really did piss me off but as i said every lost ship is a learning experience, just wish it hadn’t been such an expensive one

Either way I’d rather loose a ship to a well played offensive from a player that respects his victims than to some moron that sits in local boasting about it.

So I can’t remember his name specifically (its buddied though, with a bit of negative standing to keep us wary of him and his corp), tecal31 I believe was his name but I’ll have to check it out later.

Lesson of the Day, Check Employment history, and stay aligned for gods sake!
Lesson #2 of the day, a few wrecks isn’t worth risking a fleet of expensive mission fit battleships

This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!

Ok I’m a new blog that doesn’t mean I can’t start participating in the blog-arena with the other eve-celebrities, and so I’ve decided I’ll start participating in the blog banters . This topic really strikes a cord because I’m an Iphone owner who hates Apples, in fact I’m a macbook and iPhone owner who hates Apple (don’t ask it’s a long story). But the fact is I sincerly think people are underestimating the power of modern phone gaming. Look at the iPhone 3GS and even the ZuneHD (it’s not a phone but I can almost gaurantee we’ll see a phone version eventually of it with similar hardware).

We’re talking small devices with the power of small computers. yes eve is a big game, theirs no doubt, but the fact of the matter is its doable. Yes right clicking is an issue, but really eve on the iphone wouldn’t be for those people that want to go ganking in highsec and need lightning reflexes it’d be for traveling a bit or doing a trade run while on the train with your 3G. Lower res textures, lower poly models and the new hardware being released on the latest smart phones, could easily handle a eve-micro platform. Things would have to be different for sure it wouldnt be just a shrunken copy of eve. You’d have to make collapseable chat tabs and work on a multitouch input to make control as easy as possible.

Connectivity is an issue, but to be honest, I live in the caribbean and our cellular internet is about as stable as our home internet trust me I work for an ISP. So why not? All online games have to deal with their environments, ya you can loose ships from internet cutting but thats the same at home, and really if your using a mobile client chances are your going to play a bit safer in highsec even.

People tend to shoot lower than they need to when they look into their imagination of whats possible, sure porting cosmos and an IRC style chat for talking to friends, and even skill maintenance would all be doable and probably easily deployed to the most hardware platforms, but i stand to visualize the farthest something like this could go with the state of the latest technology, why not have a eve-client on the iphone properly done with opengl, with optimized textures and sounds and models to reduce load and size, i dont see why it wouldn’t be atleast feasable and for those Capsuleers like myself that sit around 23/7 thinking about eve it’d be awesome!

Lord Helghast (my main), is pretty much the jack of all trades character currently, he can fly mainly galante ships and can easily solo most L4 missions (actually just moved from a highsec-L4 area (Jel) to another highsec-L4 area, that’s not near lowsec, as in Jel I kept getting damn lowsec L4’s and it was driving me insane no way I’m risking 100+M ISK of Megathron and Fittings because the damn agent keeps sending me into lowsec with it. So far so good in the new Fed Navy L4 spot no lowsec missions.

Lord’s currently training for Mining Barge V, as I said hes a jack of all trades and well during the week I mostly do Veld mining with Nakiti as I’m normally only on 2 hours a day and L4’s can tend to take 2-3 hrs.

After Mining Barge V, I plan to get Exhumers IV so that I can move from my retriever over to a Mackinaw and a Hulk, as I do ice mine in my retriever when Naki and Doc are Ice Mining but its just too damn slow, so the Mack will be nice so i can participate in more corp-mining ops, especially now that we have some Orca’s in the group. The hulk, well the hulk will just mean finally breaking the 4M ISK/hr barrier i seem to be hitting currently on my Retriever with Veld mining, which will be nice.

After i get into the hulk, Lord will be going on a top-up skilling run, basically training all the generic skills from 2 and 3 up to 4, Electronics, Armor Rep, Hull HP etc, as right now i have a few to 3 and a few to 4 but i want to get things up to a nice even setting. And as 4’s for pretty much all skills are relatively short (1 day each) I figure getting everything to L4 atleast will give me a nice boost to my skills and won’t take inherintly long. After that I want to skill up my drone and hybrid gunnery skills (finally want to get T2 hybrid ammo, and Sentry Drones)

Lord FunkyMunky is a bit different as hes just starting (1 week old), he probably has the most defined skill plan to date of either character, hes training straight for a hulk, and then an orca, and the necessary fittings for both (basically added the #1 battleclinic fit for both and did optimize in EveMon).

As it turns out the learning skills recommended by evemon take Funky right up to the end of the 1.6m SP 100% boost. So as he finishes the learning skills, i’ll have the learning skills to finish boosting the regular training, in all within 1 mth i should be in a hulk with both of my characters.

In reality I actually cheated a little on LFM’s skill training i slipped in a few basic skills to finish the tutorial, and also I trained 1 day, to get a Bestower so that while hes busy training for the hulk, he can atleast haul my ore for me during my weeknights of mining on the main. It’s working out quite nicely. For those that know me LFM started as a caldari, so why the crosstrain to a bestower? It’s a better looking ship than the caldari hauler, but thats not the real reason, the real reason is after some forum research it turns out the best L3 Industrial is the bestower for hauling amount, and as i said i didnt want to burn a lot of time out of my skillplan on the hauler, so I only wanted to go to L3. The nice surprise about this is that while the Amarr have the best T1 L3 hauler, it turns out their T2 Transport is also the biggest of all races, which is eventually where i want him to go (transports).

For those going for an alt just thought i’d give you a heads up, on my skill path the books were bought up front at lowest price possible, and totalled around 45M ISK, on top of that I also got him +3 Impants for all except charisma (charismas useless on my alt) and those ran me 10M a piece so in total around 90M investment in my Alt not to mention eventually the hulk and fittings but after that he should be pretty much self dependant. And will definitly pay for himself eventually, as well as be a big help after i eventually get him trained into a remote repper to help on the harder L4 missions.

For 3 days when I rejoined i thought Nimz and Korin were 2 seperate people until he told me it was just his alt… While with the Doctors I always knew they were 1 and the same. So I decided Lord would be my alt as well, Now funkymonkey… well thats not really something i can explain other than I like monkeys and it was 2am when i created the account.

We’re a small corp 11 players, don’t ask how many of those are alt’s actually it’d surprise you But the fact is we get along and crack each other up and help each other out when we need help and that’s what really matters when it comes to finding a corporation to join, good people that are interested in the same type of gameplay as you.

I’m starting this blog as a way to try to document some of the goings on in both the corporation and in New Eden in general. Maybe one day i’ll be in the blogpack or capsuleer even For now it’s kind of nice just to have a place to vent again.

Now as you might notice I mention this is a starter home, well i eventually plan to move over to my own domain where i’ll have a bit of more freedom with plugins and themes etc. Especially since I am a programmer/webdeveloper so it only makes sense but as cash is tight now podlogs, is a great solution for the intermediate time. You might have also notice that this isn’t called Lord of Space, it’s called Lords of Space, well that’s because unlike my first foray into New Eden my main character Lord Helghast isn’t alone in his journey, as of last week I now have my first Alt, Lord FunkyMonkey! Ya I know strange name eh, I’ll explain that in my next post I think as i’ve gone on rambling for a while now for a “introduction”