Previously I said that in almost all situations it was better to use Rage rockets over faction. I would like to correct that point right now. Versus webbed MWD-fit frigates and above then, yes, Rage is the correct answer. Faster ships such as those with an afterburner are going to give you problems and you should switch to faction missiles. To illustrate this point here are some plots. For the Vengeance the switchover point is 300 m/s.

Vengenace shooting a frigate moving at 250 m/s.

Vengeance shooting a frigate moving at 300 m/s.

Vengeance shooting a frigate moving at 500 m/s.

Apologies for any confusion that I have caused. Oh, and for anyone interested I am generating these plots using the excellent pyfa fitting utility.

Whenever I’m feeling pretty flush I start running around with a head full of implants. To some this must seem like madness. After all I am predominantly a null security solo frigate pilot, I must lose implants all the time. To a certain extent this is true, I do lost more pods than gang pilots or low security PvPers but it is not anywhere near as bad as most people imagine. For a start, I view solo interdictors as very good targets. Anyway, digress, the point of this post is to discuss the relative merits of fitting implants.

As always let’s make this discussion about a particular ship. Here is my current Enyo fit, nicely boosted by the blaster changes that Crucible brought us:

[Enyo, MWD Neutrons]

Hobgoblin II x1


Those of you who’ve seen my previous Enyo post will notice that the improved fitting has allowed me to squeeze on a nosferatu. At Jita sell order prices this fit comes in at a nice round 37 million ISK which is really not bad for a frigate with 7087 EHP that can push 269 DPS out to 4.72 km + 4.84 km range (with Null) and effectively hit a frigate with 500 m/s transversal for full damage between 2.5 and 6 km.

Can we squeeze some more out of this already excellent hull without spending a ridiculous amount of ISK? Why yes, we can. A few implants here and there can make a real performance boost without breaking the bank.

Inherent Implants ‘Noble’ ZET300

No Gallente ship can consider itself complete unless the pilot has a ZET300 implant plugged into his head. For just 100,000 ISK you can give yourself 3% more structure hitpoints. In the case of my Enyo this boosts the EHP from 7087 to 7189, just a 1% increase to overall EHP but enough to potentially mean the difference between life and death on a ship that relies upon its structure buffer (3499 of those EHP are in structure). Its worth noting that in some markets you can pick up a ZET330 for a similar price and get an extra 0.5% structure buffer.

Zainou ‘Deadeye’ ZGS1000

This implant used to be a no-brainer for blaster frigates. It cost peanuts and delivered a 5% increase to blaster DPS. Since the Crucible patch prices have inflated and the current Jita market price is hovering around 20 million ISK. I would expect (hope!) that the price will normalise once speculation over the blaster boost settles down but I would be surprised if it returns to its previous low. Still for your 20 million ISK you get the Enyo’s damage boosted to a very respectable 282 DPS. If this is a bit steep for you then you can grab a ZGS100 for a 3% boost for just 600,000 ISK and get 277 DPS which is an absolute bargain.

Eifyr and Co. ‘Gunslinger’ CX-1

We are no longer in the territory of obvious choices now. This 3% damage implant will set you back a fairly hefty 20 million ISK in Jita. If you decide to splash out on it then (combined with the ZGS1000 above) your DPS will grow to 289. It becomes a decision as to whether you are willing to fork out this much ISK for what seems like just 7 DPS on a ship that already does more than enough. When combined with the cheaper ZGS100 it increases your total damage output to 284 DPS meaning that as long as small blaster implant prices stay high you are probably better spending your ISK on the more flexible ZGS100/CX-1 combination than a single ZGS1000. I say more flexible because the joy of the CX-1 implant is that applies to all turret types so you could combine it with a medium and/or large turret implant or even swap out the small hybrid one for another weapon system.

Zainou ‘Deadeye’ ZGC100

In the case of the Enyo you benefit more from boosting turret falloff than you do from a tracking bonus due to the ship’s native bonuses and the addition of a tracking enhancer on my fit. That makes this 3% falloff implant the best choice for your Slot 8 than the AX-1 in my opinion. Prices are highly variable but you can pick one up from Jita sell orders for 24 million. The actual net benefits of this implant are pretty questionable and I would suggest that you were maybe better off leaving this slot empty. The AX-1 adds no effective DPS to the Enyo at all so I’d steer well clear of it.

The graph below compares an Enyo fitted with the above implants to one with no implants. Both ships are shooting a hypothetical frigate with 500 m/s transversal.

So what can we conclude from this? Well, for the price of a couple of very cheap implants you can get a fairly respectable performance boost for the Enyo and, by extension, whatever ship it is that you fly. For a bit more you can really push the margins and if you’re willing to try and get things on buy orders you can do it without breaking the bank. Personally it means that I am going to streamline my implant choices a bit and rather than rolling with the best part of 100 million ISK in my head I am going to drop down to just a ZGS100, CX-1, ZET300 and a +3 learning implant for my current skill’s primary attribute coming in at a nice affordable 30 million or so. Much more reasonable, I’m sure you’ll agree while still squeezing a bit more from this and other hulls.

Last week I did an interview with Marc Scaurus for the Ransoms and Roams podcast. They’ve just released their latest episode and it includes our discussion. If you want to hear me talk about my time in Eve, ship fitting, and other odds and sods as well as the guys discussing fittings and the CSM then head to Ransoms and Roams and check it out.

PS – Man, its weird listening to your own voice.

I posted a bit back that I was taking a break from Eve to focus on getting some things done in real life. Well, the good news is that I did manage to meet my deadline and as a result I now have a new job and am in the process of moving to a new flat. The bad news is that, while I could barely shake the addiction when I had to, my life is now full of all sorts of bits and pieces and as a result Eve has been suffering.

Its weird how when you need to give something up it is hard to do but then all of a sudden other stuff comes along and you happily toss what you were doing before away.

That’s not to say I’m quitting Eve or packing up this blog. Just that I have noticed that I am barely reading forums any more, haven’t posted here in an age, and have pretty much stopped reading most Eve blogs. Maybe its just the summer. Maybe I’m moving on. Maybe I just need something new. Who knows?

So please, bear with me while this feed is a bit slow. As soon as I have a good story to tell, you will be the first to know.

Hi guys. Remember me? Hope you’re enjoying patch day. Anyway, I’ve been out and about in some spaceships having fun. Still a bit too busy to blog properly but I thought I’d share the map of where I’ve been on my travels. There aren’t many places I haven’t visited these days. Not sure I fancy a trip to the deep south any time soon.

Thanks to everyone for their kind words. Don’t worry, its not a crisis just got to be a busy, busy bee. Already getting withdrawal symptoms. Must. Stop. EFTing.

With the cruiser lottery completed I finally have all my affairs in New Eden in good order. It seems like an appropriate time to tell you all that I have un-installed Eve.

Don’t worry, this is by no means the final chapter in Wensley’s tale. Its just that I have a lot of pressing stuff to deal with in real life and I need to focus down on it. Roaming and chatting to my friends and corp mates is just too much of a distraction from all that so I’ve bitten the bullet and put myself on an enforced hiatus for the next month or thereabouts.

Fly reckless, guys, and I’ll see you all in the summer.

Wensley out.

Today’s post is a guest piece from Xola Zuni. He’s been researching the mechanics of overheating and asked me if I’d share his results with you. So, here they are.

Greetings Space Warriors, Xola Zuni speaking. First of all, many thanks to Wensley to give me the opportunity to publish this article on his blog!

I did some research on Overheating, especially on how you can prolong it’s duration. The
short and simple result: You can overload your modules longer at no costs if your ship is properly fitted!

This article will explain how you can do it and how the result should look like.
A Minmatar assault frigate, the Wolf, was mainly used for these studies. 4 different high slot
fittings were use, each of those setups were tested 6 times, equaling in 24 runs total. The
200 mm ACs were overloaded and then activated untill they burnt out. As soon as the guns
went offline the rounds fired per each gun were counted and then compared with the other
results:

Shown in the graph below is the average of rounds shot per gun after 6 runs with each
setup.

The green and the yellow setups do a lot better than the other two. The best fit (yellow;
33,5 rounds avg) allows to get a bit more than 4 more shots out compared to the worst
(blue; 29,33 rounds avg) before the ACs die. That’s an improvement of almost 15
percentage.

The best fit has a offlined salvager in the fifth slot and in 5 out of 6 runs produced the
same result (33 rounds shot per gun). It also produced the best single result with 36
rounds fired.

The results of the two fits with an empty fifth slot (green & red) fluctuated a lot more than
those with a fitted fifth slot.

Although the big difference is not made by the fact that the fifth slot is fitted or not, it depends
upon how the ACs are arranged. The fits where the ACs are separated by the fifth slot
are both superior to the conventional “all guns to one side”-fittings.

Explain these fittings again…

The Wolf has 5 high slots and you can fit them differently. Mostly it is fitted:

AC; AC; AC; AC; (somethingelse or empty)

Thats the red/blue fitting in the graph: 4xAC+Salvager and 4xAC/empty

To get the improved results, the Wolf has been fitted:

AC;AC;(empty/smt else) AC; AC

Represented in the graph as 2AC+Salvager+2AC (yellow) and 2AC+empty+2AC (green).

Important sidenote: You can still group all 4 ACs together, grouping does not have impact
on the results.

Wish or Witchcraft? How does that work?

As I did not make the game nor did I check what the code looks like, I only can assume
how it works. But this assumption should be sound.
The first thing to know is that not only the overheated module takes damage, it also spreads
heat emissions onto the neighbouring modules. The closer they are, the more damage will
be applied. The next module in line gets the most emissions, the second in line the second most etc.

Now let´s have a close look how the heat is spread on a 4AC+ and on a 2AC+2AC Wolf

On the 4AC+ setup the heat sink slot only has to deal with one major heat source. This is
good for the heat sink slot but not so good for your guns, they will burn out faster as they do
have to buffer more heat emissions. Compared to the 2AC+2AC fit, the heat sink slot has
to buffer two major heat emissions. It will burn out faster, but the guns won´t. The same
rule applies also to the second, third and fourth in line heat emission.

So on the 2AC+2AC Wolf, the heat emissions are spread more equally on your guns and
the heat sink slot can function as a proper heat buffer.

Conclusion:

The further away the overloaded modules are, the longer they will last.

Footnotes:

This rule does/should also apply on your mid and low slots and also on other shiptypes. I
did some tests on a Hurricane (highs and mids) and the first results were promising and
confirming the results I have got with my Wolf. Unfortunately, the repair costs stopped that
project from being finalised.

If you have some spare ISKies laying around, send me some and note as reason “Xola
should last longer”. I will just buy one space tonic out of your isk. The rest will be spent on
my research projects. Promise!

Here are my skills regarding RoF and thermodynamics as they havea major impact on the results I have received:

• Gunnery 5
• Rapid Firing 4
• Thermodynamics 4

The wolf was fitted with 4 x 200 mm ACs and 1 x Gyrostabilizer.

So, thats it, thanks for your attention and kudos to Wensley to let me share my research
results on his blog!

Xola Zuni

Thanks Xola for taking the time to do this. I had been meaning to write about overheating for a little while. There is a thread on Failheap Challenge (the phoenix that rose from the ashes of the now defunct Scrapheap Challenge) that discusses this exact topic. The use of heat sink modules has been well known for a long while but it was always assumed that heat wrapped around the rack. Xola’s experiments and the ones detailed on FHC both show that this is not the case and you should arrange your modules accordingly.

You might have noticed lately that my hosting has been a bit sketchy. This is obviously not a good thing and makes life frustrating for both you and me. Because a large number of you have your own blogs I wanted to ask you for any hosting recommendations you might have. Ideally I want a UK-based provider but European or even American isn’t the end of the world.

Just to give an idea of what I need here’s my usage statistics for the last few months.

So, yes, I get quite a lot of traffic and need about 10 GB a month bandwidth to cope with peak usage. My current data footprint is 150 MB.

All suggestions and ideas gratefully received.

Okay, actually, I am fully in support of CCP’s planned change to jump bridges and am looking forward to seeing more of the same but the post title was just too good not to use.

Back in early April when the CSM campaigns were starting to pick up I began to write a post about the issues in Eve that I think need looking at and the kind of solutions I’d like to see. For one reason or another I never actually finished the post but here’s an excerpt from the draft I still have saved:

Jump Bridges

Kirith Kodachi posted a defence of jump bridges yesterday that read to me like he was actually calling for them to be boosted. I disagree with pretty much every word that he wrote. When I lived in Catch we had a jump bridge network that spanned three regions and allowed ships to move from one end of our empire to another in about 7 jumps with almost complete invulnerability thanks to death star POSes. There is no way that this can be considered a fair and balanced thing.

While I have no out-and-out objection to jump bridges being used to provide a home advantage for sov-holders I don’t think they should provide day to day invulnerability. AAA’s jump bridge network was pretty minimal but when you look at the NC’s infrastructure you can clearly see how there is a problem with jump bridges as they stand. There are plenty of people out there who would like to seem them nerfed into the ground with one suggestion I read being that only three are allowed per region and others asking for them to become phenomenally expensive.

For me jump bridges and titan portals have taken all the risk out of moving a fleet around. In AAA we could take the jump bridges to the staging system, form up in a POS, and then titan bridge right into the fight. We could even use Atlas’s network to get all the way from Catch to critical fights in their eventually doomed defence of C-J6MT. However, when we had to move fleets through open space there was an element of risk. We had to co-ordinate, stick together, and use intelligence. Cloaky camps could interfere with our movements and pick of stragglers and it was… excellent. So, to add some risk to using jump bridges without completely nerfing them into the ground I would like to see CCP change it so that only one bridge may be anchored per system. Doing this forces people to continue to use stargates and allows small gangs to interfere with hostile logistics and hence gives home defence gangs something to do. Small gang combat wins.

Since CCP announced the changes there has been a lot of anger on the forums. Most of it seems to come from members of the Northern Coalition (including the Deklein Coalition). The main argument seems to be that this change will hurt the individual’s ability to make money in null security space while not having any appreciable effect on fleet movement. This just isn’t true. In fact it is so untrue that even The Mittani has come out in general favour of the change being made.

Any null security (or in fact just any) corporation, alliance, or coalition worth its salt has at least one intelligence channel monitoring hostile movements in local space. When a threat is perceived, a gang is formed and the threat is dealt with. By monitoring intelligence channels and actively reporting hostile movements life in null security space is very safe. Couple this with pockets where the inbound gate is covered in anchored bubbles and the systems accessible via jump-bridge and you have almost complete safety. Eve isn’t supposed to be safe. Heck, even high security space isn’t safe so why should player-held null sec be so?

This change does not in any major way break jump bridges. You can still have a network that spans eleven regions and allows fast movement. You can still protect important pockets. What you can no longer do is have an invulnerable chain of bridges from one end of Eve to the other. Someone on Twitter posted that travelling through bridges was already difficult enough because “sure, I can go from KU5R-W to LS-JEP with only 4 gate activations, but I use up about 2-3m in LO.” That’s nothing! Considering the time it would take to do manually using Grismar’s navigator then in a HAC the same journey would take half an hour assuming you just warped gate to gate. Realistically you can probably add another 15 minutes for the time taken to use pounce spots on each gate. Now if we assume that ratting brings in 20 million ISK an hour (a low estimate) then the time saved using the jump bridge network more than pays for the LO costs. So no, the cost of using jump bridges does not mitigate their advantages.

The question you have to ask yourself is “what are jump bridges for?” Their current prevalence makes people treat them like superhighways through space. The Eve universe has shrunk to the point where deep null sec regions are now just a few bridge jumps away. CCP have already stated that they want different regions of space to have different values and this is why they have changed the way that anomalies work such that true security influences the quality of anomalies generated (personally I would prefer to see a sliding scale on NPC bounties but that is outside the scope of this post). One thing that jump bridges do is make deep-lying regions as accessible as empire border regions. This is contrary to CCP’s vision so some way of limiting that was inevitable and the superhighways had to go.

The way I see jump bridges is that they provide a tactical advantage. The bridge into the bubbled ratting system is a good example. It allows the defenders to move fleets around hostiles and gives them a tactical advantage. Short range bridges on pipes allow defenders to trap hostile fleets and prevent them from wreaking havoc in their space. This is the way I would like to see them used. Not to move vast fleets across space. So, on top of the current nerf, I would also like to see their range reduced as well.

Now the other argument that has been floating around is that this change is effectively inconsequential because the range of titans and supercarriers means that their ability to project power is untouched and the use of jump drives that we see at the moment. This is in many ways true but I am hoping that in a couple of weeks we will see another post announcing a reduction in the range of these ships making them much more localised in their use and renewing the roles of dreadnoughts and carriers in long-distance logistics.

There is a lot of talk of the people who support this change just wanting cheap ganks. In some quarters this is true but from my own point of view I used interdiction of stations and gates as a way of provoking fights. Sure, I gank one or two people, but the idea is to force a response and that is where the good fight comes from. I honestly believe that everyone will benefit from this change once the initial shock has died down and people accept the new status quo. Defenders still have the tactical advantage but the ability of hostiles to force fights has been increased. If your corporation, alliance, or coalition does not come to defend you from hostile gangs then maybe you should reconsider your allegiance to them.

My own personal vision for the future of sovereignty space is that an alliance’s ability to hold sovereignty should be directly tied to how actively they use that space. Outlying regions should be far easier to take than core systems. Bandit country can be established by small groups and it is up to the local powers to police their space. If they don’t then their grip on it will drop and someone else will come along and take it. If you don’t actively control your space then the timers on your sovereignty modules will fluctuate more wildly, reducing defensive advantage, but core systems will be harder to take. In effect we’d see something like the distinction between high and low security space with the alliances deciding how actively they want to police various areas of space. That’s enough of that for now, there’s a whole post in there somewhere.

In summary of this rambling post, the changes to jump bridges are not the end of the world. They are not even close to that. I know plenty of people who would like to see them removed completely. Also, I am not talking out of my backside. I have been part of an alliance and enjoyed the use of their bridges and I have been a hostile raider thwarted by well-planned bridge networks. I have travelled across multiple regions in almost complete safety to take part in wars. Changing bridge mechanics isn’t going to solve all of Eve’s problems but its a step in the right direction. In fact, its better than that, its an iteration. This is a small change being made now not a big, buggy feature in a future expansion. Let’s hope CCP keep moving this way.