Archive for July, 2009
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 30, 2009
The Captains Log 31/7
Just to show people what happanes when your allaince leader pisses off everyone around you, resulting in being blobed and then the alliacne leader just disbanding the whole alliacne.
Ahh well. We are now reforming and moving on. I have been moving all my assets up into Stain NPC space so I can sell it all there. This has worked out quite well as all I have lost is a Merlin (our killboard is dead so no link). I even managed to move my orca (that was scary it warps so slow).
Related Posts
The Shoes of a Diplomat
War With Stain Empire
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 30, 2009
The Captains Log 31/7
Well it is amazing how things can change in a matter of hours. How the mood of an alliance can change from one of euphoria to utter despair. So after our first few skirmishes with the forces of Stain Wagon they sent down their battle fleet making short work of our cyno jammer and then proceeded to jump in 20 capitals (along with the other couple hundred people in system). Our home was under attack and completely controlled by Stain Wagon. We could do nothing but watch it all burn.
So I did something I have never done before. Something that had to be done as none of the other leadership was doing it. I opened up diplomatic conversation with Stain Empire.
The Cause of this Debacle
The first stage of the diplomacy consisted of setting up a meeting to negotiate terms with them. This was done shortly, though at an early time for me. Additionally, they wanted the CEO of the Corps to be present, which could be hard due to different time zones. During this time I also learned why they were attacking us. Our alliance leader Stra Tegist had tried to negotiate lower rent with Stain Empire but had done so in a way that pissed them off so they came down and attacked us.
The next morning I started the second round of diplomacy, which took two hours to complete. Basically it boiled down to four options
9119 > in first option you can contine rent this const
9119 > 2nd: you leave peacfully and pay us reparation
9119 > 3d: you dont pay us – fight is continue
9119 > 4th: you join Stainless and rent space
In this case reparation consisted of 7 bill in isk or assets while joining stainless was exactly the same as continueing what we were doing before. Well after a little discussion in alliance chat I decided it was best to move on and find greener pastures. So we payed two billion isk upfront and got blue standings with Stain Wagon. We now had three days of blue standings to get our stuff out.
Then end of Cartel Syndicate
After this I went away and came back a little later only to find out that our alliance was dead. One of our corporations Obsidian Operations had left the alliance along with our alliance leader. On the way out Stra Tegist decided to make life hard for us. He had disbanded the alliance taking all the assets he had in the executive corp (not that there was much), he messed around with the stations settings resulting in refining having a tax of 100% and a docking fee of 25 mill. Well this was the end of Cartel Syndicate, an alliance I had helped to create and put a lot of work into. Ah well such is eve. The worst part of this was that the standings I had negotiated for were now gone.
However there is good news. Our CEO, Nan Shoku, had been offline for over two months due to technical difficulties, but now he is back. This has provided some much needed direction to the corporation. He reopened negotiations with Stain and got some of the standings redone and convinced them to let us join Stainless for a few days so we can move our assets out. Unfortunately, Systematic-Chaos was still hostile towards us and began attacking us again. But some quick work by DefiantFury fixed that up (and at the right time as well as they were planning on bring down a cap fleet to give a new FC some practice).
The future
So now we have to find a new future for us. Currently this is in discussion, but the future still looks bright for us. We are still sticking together and that is what matters for our members.
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 28, 2009
The Captains Log 29/7
So I Iog on today do some missions while I am stuck in empire and go into voice comms only to hear this
“Morning Prom, got some bad news for you. Stain Empire has gotten Stainwagen to drop standings with us, we are now at war with them.”
We do not know the exact reason for this yet, but apparently it is due to us not paying rent (which we have been doing and the next batch was not due for a few days). Well this means we get some good PvP nice and close to home : ) The up side of this is that our alliance has had a surge in participation, vent is full and moral is good.
So I clone jump (naked clone no implants) back down to 4GQ and fly my pod down 0-0 and get my Taranis all fitted up and ready to fight. We have Stainless contacts further up in the pipe in a Armageddon and a Raven. The fleet move up to the systems to and quickly takes them both out. As they didn’t try to get away from us I presume that Stainless hasn’t reset their standings yet. Ah well we didn’t start this.
The future may look a little dark but this is what we live for. Free rent and lots of PvP.
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 28, 2009
The Captains Log 28/7
Welcome to the tenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!
This month’s banter leans a little, OK a lot, on the academic side. It comes to us from xiphos83 of A Misguided Adventurer, who asks the following: ” Victor Davis Hanson argues that western culture, comprising of ideals such as freedom, debate, capitalism, and consensual government, are what make western society so successful at waging war. These ideologies create a warrior who’s direct participation in government, ability to think freely, and desire to remain free, fights harder and is willing to suffer more than his conscripted foe. Though a military must remain a structured oligarchy to fight a war effectively, why in a world where military conflict is as familiar as breathing are there so few alliances that embrace these ideologies when governing their members?”
Well I have a can of coke, a bag chips and I’m sitting on top of my favourite Goonswarm POS waiting for a juicy hauler to come through, so ill bash out a response to this while I wait.
The Perfect Solider
Firstly, I find the whole premise of solider that comes from a country whose government is based on liberal ideals fights better then a solider from a different political structure is wrong. A soldier who fights for the ideals that his culture believes in (and that he believes in), whether they are liberal, socialist or religious will fight just as hard the other as these soldiers are all fighting to protect their homes, their families and their way of life from the enemy. An example of this is the Peloponnesian War between Athens, a true democracy (even though women and slaves could not vote), and Sparta, a militaristic oligarchy. (Any quotes from 300 will result in the beheading of the offender) Both nations fought long and hard but in the end it was Sparta that prevailed (thanks in part to Athens putting a lot of its military leaders on trial), only to be conquered latter on by Macedonia (definitely not democratic). In Eve though you have the extra layer of people wanting to fight ‘because it is fun’ and they will continue to fight no matter what the political ideology of their alliance or corp is. Also often what makes a military strong is not the ideology of the nation but the experience, numbers, resources and technology that that nation has. Again this is in Eve. A well equipped and experienced theocratic alliance will overcome the poorly equipped and unexperienced democratic alliance, no matter their ideals.
A true democracy?
So that leaves the second part of the question, why are there no/very few democratic alliance or corps in eve? Ga’len and Manasi disagree with this and believe that a lot of alliances (or what they have seen) are democratic as the corps and alliances they have been part of or observed have been fairly democratic. I have to disagree with them, mainly as I believe what they describe are no democracies. *Disclaimer: I am not part of those alliance so forgive if I do not know all the internal workings of them.* Just because a alliance allows for free speech does not make them democratic, free speech is a part of democracy but is not democracy itself. Any alliance that ignores the comments of its members is soon going to find that it has no members, so it is prudent for all alliances to allow free speech no matter its organisational structure. Also just because an alliance has a council in which the leaders of various corps discuss what the alliance is going to do does not make it a democracy. That is an oligarchy. Unless the members are directly voting on proposals for the alliance, or voting in representatives who make these decision for them (along with allowing free speech, freedom for members to what they want and grow) they are not a democracy.
So now we come to the question of why are there so few democracies in Eve. Firstly, because I think it is a hell of a lot easier to run a dictatorship or an oligarchy so long as the member base is willing to follow their leadership and the leadership is willing to listen to the concerns of the members. This is particularly true in the last alliance I was part of. We had a good experienced leader who knew how to run an alliance, but as the membership grew older and wanted to branch into new things the leader refused to change the alliances policy to suit the needs of its members. This resulted in a lot of people leaving the alliance (including my whole corp) and forming a new one. Secondly, you have the problem of participation. You can’t really have a democracy if only a quarter of the people vote. In today’s society there is a lot of apathy towards politics and government and people don’t really vote (unless you’re like me and live in Australia, which has compulsory voting), which I think is carried somewhat into Eve. We have this problem in my corp. We try to run it as democracy, with lots of discussion and votes, but it is always the same 20-30 people who participate (out of 142 say around 60-70 not including alts). The others people in the corp don’t really care what happens so long as they can build, rat, mine or shoot. Even though we allow people to vote on polices and discuss new policies the leaders of our corp and the alliance are chosen by the current leaders and I suspect this is true of most corps and alliances.
Anyway I’ll quit rambling now and go back to hunting Goons.
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 26, 2009
The Captains Log 27/7
The Inability to Fight
One of the downsides of our op out in Cold Steel space is that all my PvP characters are now stuck in Empire until a wormhole opens allowing me to bring my ships back. So upon logging on I decided to take one of my alts out for a little roam in a Thorax. It took a bit to get him to where I wanted him to be as I had to travel to corp offices and join my corp then pod kill myself and travel a little more only to find out I couldn’t use the fitting on the Thorax and there were no other modules I could use to correct the fitting so I gave up and logged off.
Take Two
Logging back on that night I decided to mine and get all that ISK I needed, however upon joining the Obsidian Operations voice comms RnProphet, flying a Omen, and NCP Bullet, flying a Drake, announced that they were going to go on a roam in low sec. This was great news for me as I had a Thorax up in empire ready to go on Prometheus09. Now low sec PvP isn’t something I do very often as I personally prefer 0.0 warfare as it has more freedom then low sec, but hey I needed to shoot something. So off we went to Molden Heath where we were joined by AntonioBanderas, flying a Rupture, a friend of Bullet and Prophet, who is also a member of Triumvirate and thus a enemy of my alliance, but hey I can put that aside for now and shoot him latter.
Aggression
After travelling through a few systems Prophet calls out a potential target “Hurricane on scan, pinpointing him down.” Followed shortly by “Pinpointed, jump through and enter warp.” Eager for blood the rest of us jumped through with our weapons running hot. Prophet enters the belt with the Hurricane and quickly points him only to have him warp out. This was going to be difficult. We had lost the element of surprise and now we had to chase him around the solar system until 2 or more of us got a point on him. All of a sudden he leaves local, but checking the D-scanner still shows that he is in system, he has logged off but still has his 15 minute aggression count down. Well this has made things easier for us, though, unfortunately for us we have no probes. However a quick of check the local market shows there are some for sale in system at a high price. We buy them, we use them, we find him. We fell upon the Hurricane like hungry wolves ripping the hull the pieces in seconds. Upon destroying it the pod flew off into empty space only to be probed down. The others in the gang didn’t want to pop it due to the sec hit they would take. I decided to do it as I had a security rating of +5, again it popped easily. Checking my sec ratting afterwards I sure had taken a large hit.
10:04:29 Notify For participating in the podding of Digitallama your security status has been adjusted by -2.5000.
Well good thing I had plenty to begin with. I collected his corpse and kindly contracted it back to him with the message “When you logged off you left your corpse behind.” He still hasn’t accepted it.
After this kill our luck didn’t hold as well. We flew out a couple of more systems and found a Fleet Stabber Issue on our scanners, though we couldn’t quite find where he was. Local then began to climb so we got out quick with members of the same corp as the Stabber we got our quick. The trip afterwards was uneventful and then downtime began.
Oh lovely Bistot
The next day I decided to mine some Bistot and have collected around 12000 units so far. Some nice ISKies for me. During this peroid of mining a lone CVA Stealth Bomber entered our space. I didn’t realise this at the time as the chat I glanced at in alliance I thought was about the fitting on one of our members Stealth Bomber. Guess I’m lucky he didn’t crash my party. One question this raises is if this is the precurser to a CVA attack on our space?
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 24, 2009
The Captains Log 24/7 12:44
So I had a bad few days losing ships, then some good days killing ships and now my luck has swung the other way again. After getting my ships out of K1Y-5H and jump cloning back down O-06 into my +4 clone there. Hallan Turrek announced that he was going to go shoot something in a Rifter. That sounded fun so I thought I would grab my T1 fitted punisher and head out with him. Normally I wouldn’t PvP in a +4 clone, but I wanted to shoot something after getting back from vacation, so off I went. So we went down to 6Y-0TW and found some macro ratters that didn’t want to stay and play. CCP has to do something about that, like not letting Ravens use cloaks.
After a lack kills there we headed off to Period Basis towards Zenith Affinity space. More macro ratters on the way and some Burn Eden people who were all cloaked up. Upon getting to 1-NJLK Zenith Affinity brought out a Sabre and a Demios to defend their space. The Sabre set up a bubble on the exit gate so Hallan decided to attack him… and die. It was expected, but he was hoping that it might have been fitted badly. Me on the other hand, warped around for 15 minutes till my aggression countdown went and then I logged.
So I log back on about four hours latter and got out easily enough. About half way home I run into a stiletto sitting on a gate. No problem as he is blue. I jump through, he jumps through, he locks me and shoots me, so I shoot back. Apparently we are not blue anymore. Sigh.
So we shoot each other, I cant hit him at this range and he is not hurting my shields either. That changes when a Sacrilege jumps through the gate and joins the party. Amazingly though my punisher is holding up quite well. The shields go fast but my armour is being reped at a steady pace, though the damage is coming in faster so I go into structure and start structure tanking until I my Punisher went pop shortly followed by my pod. Another corpse in space with +4 clones in it. Sigh. More money I need to get things I want.
Could things have gone differently?
Well hindsight is 20/20. If I had of done things differently there would have being two things I could have done.
- Instead of orbiting the Stiletto I should have flown straight at him in the hopes that he would have overshot me allowing me to get my warp scrambler on him and knock out his microwarp drive. That could have allowed me to go in for the kill and die a good death.
- Flown back for the gate. Why didn’t I do this? But then I was aggressed and couldn’t jump the gate.
Either way I have learned something I hope. Mostly that a T1 Punisher is a good ship. It did well.
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 24, 2009
The Captains Log 24/7 6:54
Caldan09 finished training recons 4, just a few more days training some drone skills needed for the Pilgrim then I’ll be putting on onto the path of a Rapier. Fishy Night finished training Torpedos 5, allowing him to use citadel torpedos. Did some price checks on some skill books for capital ships and found out they were not as expensive as I thought, though I am still broke (need to do some mining). Prometheus09 had to change skills while I went away so he still hasn’t finished training for interdictors (2 days left).
A alliance member bought me a Arazu so have a good ship once again (though it still needs to be fitted, sigh more money needed)
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 24, 2009
The Captains Log 24/7 6:45
Got back from my vacation today, so I’ll give a rundown of what happened with the Covert Ops campaign. The alliance obtained some more kills which included a Ishtar, Covetor, Harbinger, Vexor and a Raven. Apparently Cold Steel didnt like this so the closed down the whole constellation because of us.
Locking down a constelation.
We tried to get Cold Steel to pay us to leave, but they didn’t like the idea of that, so the op was ended and everyone was jumped out of Providence using our Redeemer pilot. Unfortunately for me, I missed the bridge out as I was on vacation, so when I got back I had to get an alliance member to light a cyno for me so I could get my Widow pilot to bridge out my Stealth Bomber pilot and cyno 5 alt. No big deal really and it was uneventful.
What did I learn?
Firstly, I knew people complained a lot the lack of a fuel bay in Black Ops but didn’t quite release what it meant in practice. I found this out when I used my jump portal and found that I could only bridge through a transport ship and jump myself through and back again before I ran out of fuel.
Thankfully CCP is fixing this with the next expansion by adding in fuel bays.
Secondly, while waiting for targets we ran the numbers and found out that it would take 30 stealth bombers around 10 volleys each to kill a carrier, and 300 to alpha one (variable according to resists and fit). I would love to see this done.
And finally, what would really improve our covert op fleet is mobility. By having more black ops pilots and cyno 5 pilots it would be possible to lock down more systems and increase our reign of terror.
Related Posts
Revenge is Sweet
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 19, 2009
The Captains Log 19/7 13:14
- Fossa77 > lol my guess is if you are not in there alliance you will die
So the alliance ran its first Black Ops op over the weekend. The target system was K1Y-5H, part of Cold Steel Alliances domain and the same constellation were I lost my Manticore and close to where I lost my Arazu. After being beat up on by Burn Eden and their Black Ops fleet it was nice to get out there and make someone else suffer. After doing a couple of practice jumps through low sec to our jump location we bridged in our scouts who quickly found a Orca outside the station who looked like he was going to go outside docking range. Fortunately, for him he didn’t venture to far, though an Abaddon also docked and warped too a belt.
Our scouts followed him into warp, the Stealth Bombers primed their torpedoes and the Arazu’s cycled their points. The Arazu followed the Abaddon into a belt and soon yelled out “I have point!!” “Cyno lit” “Jump Portal up, all ships bridge through now.” With the jump portal up the Stealth Bombers jumped through and immediately entered warp to the belt the Abaddon was sitting in. With five Manticores pounding on its hull it didn’t stand a chance, with the resulting explosion taking place 34 seconds after the first volley of torpedoes was launched. Next an Imperator was killed as it was trapped in a bubble.
For some reason this seemed to aggravate the locals and they dropped a large fleet into system to hunt us down, rather ineffectively. After this I powered down my ship to get a bit of rest while the rest of the fleet continued their rampage and succeeded in killing a Drake, 2 Myrmidons and a Griffin until the locals started to leave their system.
I was also able to use my Widow to Jump a few people into the target system, which is the first time I have ever done this.
A few hours later our Crane pilot was putting up bubbles on the station when four Cold Steel Stealth Bombers uncloaked and started shooting him. The Crane got away and the Stealth Bombers started shooting our bubbles. At this point dinner was called so I left for a little bit. Upon coming back the rest of the fleet had killed a Manticore and a Nemesis as they were shooting the bubbles. The Cold Steel response to this was to undock three carriers, two Chimeras and the Minmitar one, and kill all our bubbles.
So after camping there system for a day and a bit I think our OP can be summarized by the words of one of Cold Steel members, who was running a gatecamp in a attempt to capture us. (why would we use gates with have Black Ops?)
sha LiGeng > Jaggermeister leave the system
sha LiGeng > K1 closed
A pity really, Jaggermeister was flying a Paladin
During my sleep time the rest of the managed to kill a Caracal and a Punisher. As for me I am now leaving the system as I am going on a vacation for a week. The rest of the fleet though should still get some more kills. Upon getting back ill write a discussion on this op and what could have been done better.
Posted by prometheus09 on
July 17, 2009
The Captains Log 17/7 4:32
So I lost my Manticore due to stupidity.
I then decided to mine some bistot to by a Pilgrim for Caladan09 when his training is finished, and if I had time I would mine some more Bistot for a new Manticore. I cleared out one belt of Bistot easily tanking the spawn there. I then moved onto a new belt, it had plenty of Bistot and a easy spawn to tank. So I set up my mining lasers and started chewing up the rock. I switched to my hauler account and started hauling to our POS. My haluer warped back to Caladan09 as he was mining just in time to see his hulk explode. I figured what had happaned was that my mining lasers were not cycled properly, so that they caped me out and turned off my tank. Sigh. Two ships in one day through stupid mistakes.
The next morning we had a alliance op going so I decided to get Prometheus09 to station so I could dock up and clone jump him back down to our systems and take out my Onyx. Unfortunately for me, I ran into a gate camp composed of interceptors, an Onyx, and a few other ships. I couldn’t even cloak with all the insta-locks that got me, my shields died, my armour evaporated and the structure was non-existent. My pod shortly followed, losing another set of +4 implants.
What did I learn from all this (and you should learn)? 1. Pay attention to your surroundings. 2 Have a scout for your Arazu – cloak is not invincible.
So after I clone jumped back home I got my Onyx out and took a wormhole up into empire with my fleet, from there we headed down to N-RAEL where we set up a gate camp. Unfortunately my bubble couldn’t cover the gate so a few ships got away. We did manage to get a Manticore kill, he could have got away but he felt it was necessary to launch a bomb at us, which killed nothing and doomed his ship, a small consolation for my earlier loss. On the way back home we found a Charon that seemed like it was about to jump into low sec, though it unfortunately didn’t.
In Other News
In corp news I bought enough mex to start build some battle ships to sell and increase the corp wallet. Also bought some Thrasher BPO’s and the Cryptic Data Interface to start running some Sabre invention jobs, as well as buying more isotopes to run our POS. The wormhole that was found proved quite useful in transporting these goods. On the topic of POS our logistics manager and I spent a fair chunk of our play time over the past few days reconfiguring our POS setup in an attempt to reduce the number of POS we own to lower our fuel bill. This was done successfully and reduced our fuel bill in half (it is fun taking down POS’s : ).
Prometheus09