A few months ago I wrote a post about the DARK Knights (Dark-Rising Black ops wing): http://judasii.blogspot.nl/2015/03/dark-knights-ride-again-aar-22th-march.html
Today I present you a Black Ops video of a few of those actions back then as well as some new material. Lately I've been cruising around in my Cyno Tengu again and found a few interesting targets. I won't write a full report this time but here is a the new video. I hope you'll enjoy it.
Factional Warfare; the clash of empires, the eternal conflict; the empyrean age; the spinning of buttons in tech one Frigates.
Factional Warfare (FW) is a lot of things, but FW is mostly recognised for the ongoing struggle over low-sec systems between the four Empires. It has exciting unique mechanics that lets players fight for the “sovereignty” of low-sec systems and gain all sorts of fancy bonuses.
High-sec is an altogether different story, though. High-sec gates are patrolled by the (not so) fierce Navy NPCs at all times, ready to smash down any enemy of the state; a player of the opposite faction. This blog is about combatting exactly that; FW Highsec PVP.
To put into context, FW is divided into two parties: Caldari and Amarr VS Gallente and Minmatar. I.e., a Caldari militia pilot that would enter Gallente and Minmatar high-sec space gets hunted down by the NPCs. Similar CONCORD and the Custom Officers, the higher you go, the more fierce the NPCs react. Though the NPCs will never warp scramble a player, they will use all other ewar at their disposal to disable you. Starting with webs, up to Energy neuts and ECM.
This is where high-sec dwelling gets tricky. 0.5 high-sec systems are relatively easy to deal with: a ship with a half decent local-tank can easy hold itself against the NPCs. You will deal with two webbing Frigates and two sensor-damping Cruiser (that will respawn immediately upon destruction), but as long as you got enough Sensor boosters and are just sitting (read: camping) on a gate, it is not a problem. A few hundred DPS tank is enough to keep the Cruiser damage at bay, which is quite easily achievable on a T3 Cruiser or a BS.
People have been doing this for many years, camping enemy high-sec 0.5 traffic lanes, and have been doing quite successfully. The only problem is that local-tanking the NPC damage is only really doable in 0.5 system. As with 0.6 system and beyond the incoming damage is much much hazardous. Whereas two cruisers and two frigates are no problem in 0.5, a 0.6 system spawns an Energy neuting Battleship which makes local-tanking nearly impossible, not to speak of the extra incoming DPS. 0.7 and 0.8 systems spawns more Battleships, and 1.0 you will even face ECM. Again, all this means that camping in high-sec was more or less “restricted” to 0.5 systems only.
But this did not stop us. As members of the Gallente militia, our ultimate goal is to camp Jita, the economic heart of EVE. Of course, Jita is surrounded by high level security systems, and Jita itself is a 0.9 system too. Our gate camping Arty Lokis wouldn’t stand a chance against the Navy police. There had to be another way.
Thankfully, the Navy AI is miraculously unintelligent. It is true that the NPC would follow the player around the system wherever it warps, and respawn as soon as it gets destroyed. But we found one loophole: drones. Drones are not players, drones are just ... drones, but will get aggression from other AI nonetheless. As I said, this bit of AI in incredible unintelligent, but also very persistent. What we discovered is that when you deploy a combat drone in space, the Navy NPC will focus its fire on that drone as soon as you’ve left grid. It is then programmed to destroy the drone and then warp back to the player (wherever he is in the system). What’s the loophole? Make sure that drone never gets destroyed. As long as the NPCs have the drone targeted and is still alive they will never turn away from it. This means that the player ship is now completely free to travel across the system without being hunted by the NPCs. But how to execute this in practice. We’ve tried several things. We realised the alpha damage from NPC Battleships can be quite hefty so we looked at the drones with the most hitpoints; Navy Curators. And we needed enough Remote Repping power to keep it alive; RR Apocs and Nestors. As predicted our plan worked out quite alright in 0.5 and 0.6 systems, we would deploy a Curator drone on a safespot or close to a POS forcefield and have it repaired by neutral RR while the Lokis could then happily move around the gates. But two issues arose: one, the neutral RR ships would get a Suspect flag for aiding other characters in a high-sec war. And two, despite Navy Curators having the highest armor hitpoints, they would still get alpha’d by the NPCs in 0.7 and higher. It is important to note that each militia pilot gets an individual spawn for that character, but if you had multiple characters on grid (with thus multiple spawns), all the NPCs would eventually focus fire on only one militia drone, regardless who’s drone it is. One drone could take aggro for multiple militia characters. Enter the Rattlesnake. The Rattlesnake has got a ridiculous 275% (!) bonus to sentry drone hitpoints. To spare you the math; a Rattlensnake’s Navy Curator with a helping rig would get an astonishing 13.500 armor hitpoints. To put in perspective, an Megathron Battleship has the base stats of merely 6.500 armor hitpoints! 13.5k hitpoints, plus the RR power of the Nestor turned out to be enough to tank even multiple 0.8 system Battleship spawns! Another key element is that the Rattlesnake itself would be sitting idle on a station and not actually engaging any Wartargets, this means that the RR ships will never get a suspect timer either. But for what price? To run this trick you need a bare minimum of two FW pilots, plus one Neutral RR pilot for every DPS/camp ship. But to play it properly, with three guys, we use about 10 characters doing various jobs, four of them belonging to the Gallente militia:
A passive local-tanked Rattlesnake in militia
Camping Lokis in militia
Neutral RR (Nestor) for every Loki (+one Loki means +one spawn to tank)
Eyes on as many gates as possible
Warfare fleet links
Quite possibly backup Logi’s on standby
Seinfeld
“If we could just harness this power and use it for our own personal gain, there'd be no stopping us.” - George Costanza
After months and months of postponement we finally got the Knights back into action again.
We readied the DARK Knights at around 12.00, presenting Karashur, Schwarze, Mitch, and me. Accompanied by 3 Vanguards (cyno hunters) we rode into Providence. Mitch went afk.
Karashur was on the ball and soon after we started we found our first pray; the most myriad of all; a Raven-class Battleship. But even the mightiest of all shield tankers crush under the force of two Redeemers and a Sin combined. And due our secret super weapon, a Proton Smartbomb, we manage to turn his capsule to dust, too.
Meanwhile, Schwarze found various potential targets in space, varying between rare Mordu's Barghests and Hulks, but unfortunately none were located on time to catch.
We jumped back to our staging system Irshah when no less than 20 minutes later Karashur found an Armageddon-class Battleship in the very same system! Luck was on our side. In the 'Geddon's dying breaths he activated his Micro Jump Drive to fly off into safety, but alas, a warp scrambler had cut down his escape in short order indeed.
Underking, aka Judas, was on the hunt as well. I found a Rattlesnake sitting in belt fighting off the wicked Sansha Nation. I was about to decloak and land tackle when a most unexpected visitor disturbed my doings. A Drifter Battleship warped on grid! The Rattlesnake pilot too realized this was no ordinary foe and fled the scene, not to be seen again. Alas.
But again! Karashur hook caught bait. This time a Guristas Rattlesnake-class Battleship. The scorching of laser fire burned through his shields turned him to dust.
At this time our Jump Fatigue cooldown has risen to more than two hours so we decided to log off in Provi, in space, and take a break. At this point Mitch returned from being afk.
Our work was not finished yet. A few hours later our fatigue was down and set the hunters loose again and with avail!
In the distance I saw a golden glittering; a beacon of light. And when I looked closer I saw it was another Armageddon!! But there was more. While the Armageddon's armor crumbled we noticed a Typhoon on D-scan, undisturbed by our presence. Mitch was afk again.
A very unorthodox manner of Blopsing happened next. Because the target was in the same system as the Knights were we couldn't use a Cyno. Instead had to warp the Blops on top of the Typhoon in other to get it. Nevertheless, success.
By now the Jump Fatigue had risen to an unmanageable high point and we had to call it a day:
Still, I think we had a good and enjoyable run. We've not done Black Ops in many months and it's nice to be back in business. Right now the Knights are back in Irshah ready for a next adventure!
The last two or thee week we (Executive Outcomes - alliance) has been harassing V.e.G.A. alliance in the Syndicate region. We have been hitting their towers furiously but unfortunately we don't get as many as many good brawls as we hoped to. Still, managed to capture a little bit of Fraps material. Hope you like it! :)
Personally not a huge fan of the Ishtars. Dropping drones and assigning them isn't nearly as fun as blasting your own guns. They make good ships for bashing a tower though with unlimited ammo :P
I absolutely love the Tempest and I'm really glad we had a chance to roll these once again. We were finishing up a Tower when VeGA formed a counter fleet. Excellent brawl, enjoyed that. Could've used a bubble though ....
Memory Log 100.42 RAL In a world where life no longer more has value, would the dead have a price? The Veschens documents never truly explained what happened with Axroth after the experiment; Yomir Veschens said the Reborn have been dead since their birth. How appropriate, I thought, that the only consorts on this journey are a migraine and the bootlegged documents written by a mad man.
More than a year ago I finished a piece of work called "Fan Fiction: A First Attempt". Today I present you with a new story.
Fan Fiction: Metempsychosis
Metempsychosis follows the tale of the narrator cruising among the stars in search for a mysterious capsuleer named Sideryn.
The work is too large to post in a thread or blog thus for your ease I've uploaded a PDF you can download here: METEMPSYCHOSIS.pdf
This is my second EVE related fan fiction and I hope you like it. As ever, I would greatly appreciate any feedback. Happy reading! :)
The story itself is largely build around CCP's lore for EVE but I took the liberty to build upon that and nearly all names, places and characters can be looked up in-game.
Example screenshot:
Have you ever heard of 'speed baiting'? Probably not. I just made that up. But here's a short AAR of one particular fight I would like to share with you.
Last week I spotted a Garmur orbiting a lowsec gate. Garmurs are the pricey Mordu's Legion missile frigate that are usually set up with a kiting fit due their Warp Disruptor range bonus; they orbit and spam missiles from 40km or whatever without getting anything close to them.
This Garmur was orbiting the gate at a fair 5000m/s, maybe 5500m/s, taking nice loops and circles, playing around, and at some point he found himself 300km off the gate.
5500m/s may be fast but I know my dear old Firetail can easily go 8000m/s with a bit of heat and my Snake implants. The only problem is that if the Garmur is 300km away, and I burned towards him with 8000m/s, he would see my speed and quickly compute the fact he won't be able to outrun and kite me, and simply warp off before I get close to him. This would result in no fight at all.
What to do? The only way he would take a fight is with a slower target, so that is exactly what I give him. I warp to the gate at a distance (out of Sentry gun range, mind you!). The Garmur is still more than 150km away, but I act like a noob looking for a fight and approach him but lowering my speed to merely 4000m/s ... Much slower than his top speed.
What happened next is rather predictable. He sees me coming, quickly points his nose towards me and takes the fight like a nerd. Once he's in his comfortable orbit I overheat my shit at max speed and quickly get a scram on him.
