Well, today is the big day, the old character portraits are leaving us and its time to bring in something new. Here are the new avatars for my characters:

Wensley

Baltasar Kyros

Allii An’Har

I am particularly pleased with the way Wensley and Baltasar came out. Allii isn’t anything special but then again all she does is sit in Jita and buy and sell things for the boys so I don’t need to worry about it too much.

Edit: I’ve remade Allii now and I think she looks a lot better but I’m still not happy with her eyes. The pose I originally wanted came out with her eyes shut so I guess this is an improvement from that.

…its just that I can’t. I think its because its a big fat brick but there’s also the fact I just can’t fit it. I mean I fit my first Ishkur with a kinetic hardener, I am just that pro. So, during the extended downtime I’ve been playing around with possible fits and I’ve got a couple of them that I’m sort of happy with now. The Ishkur seems to be very much akin to the Jaguar in that it is a bit of a jack of all trades rather than being an out and out DPS or tanking ship.

[Ishkur, Blasters]

Hobgoblin II x5
Hornet EC-300 x4

This seems to a be a fairly standard fit. Although I have put a deadspace repair system and afterburner onto this fit I probably won’t do so on my ships for now. I don’t want to be dropping expensive loot while I get to grips with this ship. I originally had a passive explosive resistance module but there is enough CPU to fit a best named explosive hardener instead and this gives me much more tank against Barrage. Sard Caid tells me that he has found small capacitor control rigs to be a lifesaver on the Ishkur and another friend likes semiconductor memory cells but I’m starting to favour a maximum damage philosophy, especially on Gallente ships, so I’ve opted for damage rigs instead. Only time will tell if this is a mistake.

With Wensley’s skills, implants (Zainou ‘Deadeye’ ZGS 1000, Zainou ‘Deadeye’ ZGC 100, Inherent Implants ‘Noble’ ZET300, Inherent Implants ‘Lancer’ G1-Delta, Inherent Implants ‘Noble’ ZET500), and overloading I get the following out of her:

[Statistics - Wensley]

Volley Damage: 696.08
DPS: 274.98

So far my main experience using the Ishkur was camping a sling bubble in Pure Blind and I found her to be excellent for this. I don’t really see her as a deep nullsec roaming ship but much more for pottering around lowsec or setting up shop on a bubble. Maybe I should go set up shop in the Amamake area for a while and really get to know her. There don’t seem to be any systems in Great Wildlands that are optimal for camping in a frigate but I might be wrong.

Please, help me love this ship. Tell me what you do with her, how you fit how, how you fly her, and what you think of my efforts to get it right.

Over the last month or so I haven’t posted much except to say that I’ve been feeling an odd state of limbo. Over the last couple of weeks the seed of an idea took root in my mind and yesterday I finally made a decision. The final catalyst was an operation that had been called as a CTA where only a handful of people joined fleet. In the end we took out a corporation only gang and spent ages wandering around Providence and Catch failing to get a fight. Rionnag Alba is an excellent corporation of very talented pilots but life in Northern Coalition. has gotten stale for me and its time to do something new.

One of the chat channels I hang out in is Broadside, the public channel of Gunpoint Diplomacy [RANSM]. In there I chat with Sard Caid, Raxip Elamp, Ariatus and a whole bunch of other people and when I said I was feeling this ennui they suggested a holiday in Molden Heath and some good old fashioned small gang and Rifter PvP. This idea took my fancy and after thinking it over I put in my application last night. Wensley is now the newest member of Gunpoint Diplomacy and living in Molden Heath. Sard Caid very generously hauled my ships up from Tash-Murkon and I am now ready to go.

Molden Heath seems like a very fun place to operate out of. One thing that I don’t want to do is to go back to being a full time outlaw. The biggest draw of RANSM is that it is a small group – six including me – who just want to do PvP. No drama, no waiting around for the fight that never happens, no fuss. From Molden Heath I have easy access to a good market in Teonusude and a better one in Rens, Amamake is close should I feel like running the gauntlet there, and there are several nullsec entry systems that I can use to roam around.

So yes, I have a new home but I will be flying old school. No longer will I be flying logistics in snipe HAC, armour HAC, remote repair battleships, or Drake gangs. Instead I will be soloing around in various T1 ships, flying in small gangs, listening to Haddaway, making lots of wrecks, and rediscovering the joys of Eve.

See you in space!

It looks like Wensley has a relative working for Brutor Tribe in Amamake. All this time pirating there and he never noticed.

Thanks to Slotos for noticing this.

I’m still in a bit of a limbo state in Eve at the moment. Originally it was because all of my stuff was in transit to YZ-LQL but even after it got delivered I haven’t really felt the urge to log on properly and take part in things. It sounds like I missed lots of fun and drama in Fountain but with IT bringing their full force to bear on us it isn’t a surprise that we’ve moved on again. This time we’ve come back down south to join up with Ev0ke again and look for fun in Providence. With the presence of Ev0ke and NCdot disturbing the balance between CVA’s attempts to retake Providence and the non-invasion pact coalition’s (NIP) ability to defend it, it looks like the evacuations have already begun.

This time all of my ships made it to our staging system in good order and I was able to get my frigate collection out of Outer Ring at last and safely into high security space. One thing these last couple of moves have taught me is to keep a minimal hangar in our alliance base of operations and store the rest of my roaming ships in high security space. Next time we move I think I’m going to just take a Stiletto, Vagabond, Hound, Guardian, and Scimitar with me. This gives me something worthwhile to fly in pretty much every operation that we do and also leaves me some options for soloing if I have time to kill. The Vagabond might get replaced with a Cynabal when it dies and I might drop the Stiletto for a Dramiel just to make sure that I’m fully flavour of the month. This way I’m not hauling unnecessary stuff around in the future and can make moves quickly and easily.

I haven’t actually taken part in any operations down south yet. For a little while I have been using my shopping alt to run a trading experiment out of Hek but now I am starting to wind that up. It made good profits but as always when I start trading I got bored pretty quickly and didn’t want to take training time off Wensley to improve Allii’s skills. At the moment I am just running a single account so Grr’k is unsubscribed for the time being. I have been learning to run level 5 missions though and after quite a few teething problems it looks like I’m starting to get the hang of it. Once I’ve got a nice, smooth system running and really got to grips with it I’ll post a guide up here but for now just a shout out to Slotos who has been guiding me through it and helping me out when I bit off more than I can chew. One of the big advantages of starting to run these missions is that I don’t need my mission Maelstrom any more (sorry, level 4 missions have been a guilty secret for a while) so I can take that apart and sell the goodies from it. This has given me a great cash injection and, along with the sales of ammo from the loyalty point store, should keep me in shiny ships for a while.

So yes, things are a bit quiet in here. I’m pottering away in the background but at the moment Eve isn’t calling to me as much as it used to. Christmas will be here soon and maybe the holidays and new year will bring me out and get me involved again. Until then my mobile hangar will follow Rionnag Alba wherever they go and I will occasionally try and PvP in a half-hearted fashion and pointlessly lose a bunch of ships.

Things are a bit quiet here at Rifter Drifter. NCdot have moved from 4C-B7X in Outer Ring to YZ-LQL in Fountain core. This is an excellent move, I think, and puts us right in the thick of the action rather than being 15 jumps from any real PvP. The downside is that I have a hangar full of frigates to move as well as my general gang ships and no carrier to do this in so I am relying on help from my corporation. As I write this three of my four giant secure containters have been delivered to YZ-LQL but all of my ships are currently either in a low sec staging system or still in 4C-B7X. The ships left in Outer Ring are my roaming frigates so its not the end of the world having them there, I can just keep my clone in that system and fly them back one at a time. Stupidly, though, I shipped all of their ammo down to Fountain so I’m going to have to run back at some point and drop off some small ammunition and drones.

So yeah, I’m currently in a kind of limbo. We have been wardecced by the Orphanage too so it means I have to be careful in high security space and can’t even play in my mission ship for now (yeah, yeah carebear I know). Maybe its time to head to Rens, buy some Rifters, and have a play in Amamake and the surround, old school style. I’ve just finished training Gallente cruiser V as well so I can now fly the Ishtar.

Edit: Some of my stuff has made it to YZ-LQL now but this move seems a bit more chaotic than our previous two and I have an odd collection of some of my own things and some of other people’s. Trying to sort it out now and at least I have the most important ships and there are always corp logistics for fleets.

I don’t think I’ll be complaining about a lack of roaming ships any time soon!

Having run out of roaming ships the other day I decided that it was time to head to low sec and round up some of the loot that I had lying around. There were some faction goodies that had been sitting in stations for over a year. After clone jumping to Rens I bought myself a Drake. So far I’ve played with a HAM Drake and a regular Drake and found both of them to be a bit fat and slow for my tastes. This time I went for something a bit different

[Drake, PODLA]
Ballistic Control System II
Ballistic Control System II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II

Warrior II x5

This is called a PODLA Drake after Naxias of the Pod Liberation Authority who demonstrated its effectiveness. When The Tuskers had our outpost in Molden Heath we fought this thing a few times and were always impressed by its performance. It is fast and nimble as well as having solid DPS and excellent tackle. Perfect for roaming and anti-pirate combat.

Off I went with joy in my heart and missiles in my launchers. Jump followed jump followed jump followed jump. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Not a single camp or hostile to shoot. Fifty jumps later I found myself passing through Hevrice and decided to hang about outside the station and see what was doing. Lncognito saw me hanging around and undocked in a Drake of his own. I wanted to make the most of my non-flashy status so cautiously hung around at a comfortable distance from the station undock so that I would have time to respond to any change in circumstances. Lncognito and I locked each other up and then he started firing on me. Excellent. I rather cautiously hung around outside of point range to see what was going to happen next. Pretty quickly I saw that Lncognito’s shields were crumbling, mine were holding fine, and nothing was undocking and I began to swoop for the kill. At almost exactly the same time Lncog realised the mistake that he had made and began to flee from the field. Despite my speed advantage I’d been over cautious early on in the engagement and was unable to get a point on him before he warped off. In The Tuskers Public Channel there were gales of laughter and I quickly hopped onto Tuskers TeamSpeak to have a laugh at Lncog too. It turns out he’d been so excited about fighting me that he had forgotten I was no longer an outlaw and just charged in for the kill. In a straight slug-fest he would have beaten my frail but speedy ship but with and extra 352 DPS on my side it would have been pretty one-sided.

While I was on comms with them the Tuskers invited me to join their fleet and we went hunting in Lisbaetenne. We found a Hurricane in a belt and I went in as bait but he was about 250 km away from the centre of the asteroid field and it was too far to burn out to him. While our prober worked on getting a warp in I saw that he was ratting and the second a wreck appeared I locked my navigation systems on to it and initiated warp. “Wensley has point. Warp to Wensley.” Ah, it was like the old days. Again I was careful and didn’t dive in too quickly. Again it turned out that being cautious was the wrong response and the Hurricane began to burn away. I overheated my MWD but there was no way I was going to be able to keep hold of him and land my webs. The Hurricane warped off as the gang landed behind me. Damn. Sorry, lads.

It wasn’t over, though, and we soon found a Megathron and Dominix in a mission. A warp in was made and we sent in the tacklers. Both ships warped out but the Dominix warped to a beacon in system and we quickly descended upon him and destroyed the remote repair battleship. Instinctively I pointed the pod before realising that getting involved in the pod kill would ruin my ability to get into some high security space and sell my loot. When it became obvious that we weren’t going to get a ransom I jumped out of system in the hope that the session change would clear my aggression but sadly it wasn’t the case and moments later I found myself at -3.08 security status. Seeing as I need access to Rens and Jita to buy and sell ships and loot it was time to fix this.

Still on Tuskers comms I set course for Great Wildlands and headed out in my Drake to do some ratting but not before I’d completed a 70 jump roam to collect the last of my loot. Guess what. Not a single hostile encountered at all. Out in Great Wildlands I found myself a loop of systems and got to work. In V-2GYS I ran into a hostile gang who warped into my belt just as I destroyed the battleship I was working on. I was aligned to my out gate and ready to go but tackled by frigates. Damn and blast. I set my drones on one of the frigates and double webbed another for my missiles to go to town on. While doing this their Arazu pointed me and then their Rook jammed me. Shit. Now it was down to just my drones and I was beginning to feel like this might be it. Suddenly the rats were down and a pulse of my MWD later I was in warp to the gate. I landed on the gate and somehow had managed to get an aggression timer. Fuck. The Rook landed with me and when I could finally jump he followed me and decloaked on the other side in time to get a point on me. A Hurricane was there with him and he was soon joined by a Vindicator and the Arazu. This didn’t look good and I burnt back to the gate and jumped through to the other side where I was able to get safely into warp. I made some deep safes and bounced around a bit while Sisters combat probes appeared on my overview. After I was sure that I’d managed to sit out my aggression timer I powered down my ship and took a break to let them cool down.

A few hours later things looked quiet and I decided to make a break for it. This time there was no camp assembled and I was able to go about my business unmolested with only a lack of drones to show for my close call with death.

This Drake continued its charmed life in PUZ-IO where I warped to a gate that was camped by a Sabre, Vindicator, Rook, Arazu, an interceptor, and some other stuff. Once again I thought I was a dead man and held on the gate for a second to see what they would do. My plan was to get as much aggression on this side as possible so that once I jumped through I would have a chance of either fighting my way out or burning back again. In fact as I sat there waiting to see what happened, they all jumped through to try and catch me on the other side. Not a single one of them waited behind to force me through the gate. Laughing to myself I warped back the direction I had come and offered a small prayer to the Drake gods. I might not have had a proper fight in this thing but my word someone was looking after her.

After another loop of the area I stumbled across a Zealot in a belt and we were both quick to exchange fire. I played it cautious but his pulse lasers were able to rip my shields apart as long as I stayed in point range. Meanwhile my overloaded launchers were chipping away at his armour but not making enough headway to down him before my shields ran out. I decided to leave before it was too late and didn’t notice the temperature of my launchers hit critical levels. They fizzled out and died just before I entered warp and I was now stuck with no offensive capabilities at all. Time to head back to Empire space and repair. I just had to cross my fingers that I didn’t run into any trouble. Three jumps from safety I jumped into a former -A- pilot in a Dramiel. Playing it cautious I reapproached the gate but he didn’t have any support, didn’t know I had no weapons, and jumped out to safety leaving me to thank whoever had blessed this Drake and proceed on my journey.

With my weapons repaired I went back to do a final loop of the systems I had chosen. By the time I had finished my security status was back to -1.50 and I was once again welcome in all the systems of New Eden. Now I can head back to Rens to sell my stuff and move my mission ship back to my main agent’s system without worrying about it getting blown up.

Thanks to all the ISK in my wallet I sent my shopping alt to Jita and she has gone a bit mad. I don’t think I’ll be complaining about a lack of ships any time soon. Mind you, with Amarr Frigate V and Caldari Frigate V next up in the queue and Gallente Cruiser V finishing next week I’m going to want a whole new raft of toys to play with. Maybe best that I spend a bit more quality time in my carebear clone, then.

Wow guys. I mean really, wow. I just want to say a huge thank you to everyone who has donated me ISK or ships within the last few days. I honestly couldn’t believe my wallet this morning! I can’t wait to go to Jita and buy a bunch of ships and fittings ready to have fun and find some stories to tell.

Once again, thank you so very much.

Last night the call went up for Drakes and Scimitars. It was our regular 23:30 gang and despite the fact that I had a long night the day before I still signed up and grabbed myself a Scimitar. Sitting in a Drake and moving with the gang is all well and good but I like the extra challenge and responsibilities that being a logistics pilot brings.

Once we had formed up and got a decent fleet composition sorted our gang of 40 moved out and headed down to BLAST space. Our target was BLAST’s home space in Minotaur constellation. The plan was pretty simple, head down there, poke some of their infrastructure and see if we can get a fight from them. One of the great things about this alliance is that we have lots of good action without having to worry about fighting for sovereignty.

While we were idling in V6-NY1 our scout reported a Rorqual in a jump bridge POS. Our scout prepared a warp in and the fleet hot footed it to the jump bridge system. With the POS password entered into our computer systems we warped to the Rorqual and began the process of bumping him towards the edge of the shields. Just before he entered our heavy inderdictor’s bubble the capital industrial jumped out to safety. Or at least he thought it was safety… Scouts were sent to nearby cyno generators and we pretty soon had a hit on the Rorqual. The fleet burnt towards the target but this time made sure that we left some tackle on the original jump beacon. Once again the Rorqual was inside the shields but this time he appeared to be AFK. We went for the bump again and this time we were able to get him out, bubbled, and pretty soon destroyed.

With the operation off to a roaring success we then moved to 9DQW-W where we began to shoot the cyno jammer. This didn’t provoke a response and after gently extricating ourselves from a very spiky, messy POS we moved on to one of the jump bridge POSes and started working on that. Thankfully, although it was gunned, this POS was far less difficult to work on than the original and we didn’t have too much to do. Which is good, seeing as I was jammed for the whole fight. As the jump bridge slowly went down we got word of a Wildly Inappropriate armour HAC gang on their way into the area. They were reported as being about 80 strong with half a dozen or so Guardians. We had pulled ourself off the POS and were ready to engage them when local began to spike and they were reported entering system. It was on. We warped in to them and as soon as we landed our FC began to burn away and gave the order to anchor on him with MWDs on. Our superior speed began to move us out of range as targets were called and we began to punch through the hostile reps. The WIdot gang had a Rapier who decloaked and webbed our anchor, slowing down our whole gang’s progress and before a secondary anchor had been assigned they were upon us and melted two of our Scimitars before we could keep them up. A second anchor was assigned, the fleet began to pull range again, and we removed the tackle from our FC. With this done the fight went by the numbers and we used our range and speed to chase them off and hold the field in a victory that was marred only by our Scimitar losses. The Stabber Fleet Issue that we killed was equipped with lots of faction loot including an Officer plating worth about 100 million ISK despite our killboard’s lower estimate. We managed to lose a third Scimitar when we turned around and began to reapproach them at one point, rather than keeping our gang between him and the enemy our fearless pilot burnt his logistics cruiser straight into the heart of the enemy fleet and got himself melted.

The fun wasn’t over, though. We got further intel that there was a sniper HAC gang moving into the area and we prepared to engage them. We found them set up on 57-KJB gate in A-HZYL and the order was given to jump in. The FC hesitated over the order initially but I’d hit jump as soon as he said it the first time so I was one of the first into system. We held cloak and then first of all our heavy interdictors, then the Drakes, and finally the Scimitars were given the order to decloak. Because I’d been there so long my cloak broke earlier than intended and the first I knew about it was when the hostile fleet locked me up and an Arazu tackled me. I quickly hit the orbit command on our FC but because of our relative position this sent me careening towards the enemy gang with my MWD blazing and my transversal at almost zero. I overheated my hardeners and my fellow Scimitars got reps on me fast enough to keep me out of trouble while I got myself heading in a sensible direction and negated all the incoming damage. While this was going on our fleet had burnt into the heart of the hostile gang and we began to let rip into them. Another victory for NCdot with our only loss being the Ares that had originally scouted the LAWN gang.

While we mopped up the field and set up scouts and tackle one of the WIdot FCs was invited onto our TeamSpeak and explained to us that the WIdot gang was a training fleet and hadn’t intended to fight us. Various smack followed and people who died were ridiculed. Not expecting to see them again we were surprised when a scout reported them heading towards us. We were down to just a few Scimitars and had lost our gang links already but never mind, we’re up for a fight. The omens for this engagement weren’t good when a rather drunk Broadsword pilot seemed to have fallen asleep at his keyboard and got himself killed. The armour HAC gang warped to us and we began round two. The initial engagement went pretty well but when the WIdot gang warped out to a ping spot in order to come back in to us at their preferred range things went a bit wrong. On their initial warp in we had been instructed to align to a planet and the Scimitars had burnt ahead to pull some extra range. It looks like I didn’t hear a new alignment being called because when they warped in the second time I was away from our main gang and seemingly burning right for the hostiles. A sharp turn and some frantic hammering of the warp command later and I was safely out of trouble but it meant that I wasn’t on the field for the main fight and had let my gang down. The third engagement of the night didn’t go so well in our favour and in the end we were pulled off the field by our frustrated FC and burnt back home to lick our wounds and be told off for not even getting the basics right in a simple gang format.

I blame tiredness for my own errors. When we set out it was 00:30 for me and we didn’t get back to 4C-B7X until 5:00. Far too late for my brain to be functioning properly and something I am regretting this morning. Still, the Drake format is a very simple gang to participate in with the only things you need to do being orbit the anchor, burn your MWD when told to, and shoot the primaries. If done well it doesn’t matter about warping in and out against armour HAC gangs because in the time it takes them to warp in you are already burning out of their range and able to shoot them in relative safety. Scimitar pilots need to be paying attention to align points and making sure that they are in the right position. A dead Scimitar is of absolutely no use to a gang and they are vital for keeping our DPS ships alive. I definitely learnt some lessons last night, and not just that very late night gangs are a bad idea. Next time out I will be a better Scimitar pilot.