Good morning Campers!

Podded again

It has been a colorful few days in my corner of New Eden. I took a cloaking Imicus (Prototype Cloak, so no MWD trick) out to look for data sites and, after passing through wrecks fields near gates in several systems (FORESHADOWING!!), I found one of the new Contested Guristas Research Facilities. After some googling and consultation with corp members I decided it was safe to go in alone. I did the hack easily and got a Guristas Data Sequence. I decided to head back to Fliet...in hindsight this was my first mistake. I knew there were gate camps in the area, the Data Sequence is only worth 1.5-2M at best and I should have docked up and left it in a station if I really wanted to keep it safe. First mistake made.

Two jumps back towards Fliet and I land in a 3 man gate camp: Apocalypse, Proteus and something else...what should I do? My friend advises me to just try warping off, and, if I get caught eject the Data Sequence (we both still think it's worth something). Now I *had*, on the way out here, passed through a gate camp where I double-clicked on space (to remove my gate cloak) and immediately cloaked up. I waited a couple of minutes and the camp left. In hindsight, I should have tried this again.

Instead I tried to warp off, got caught, killed in two shots and was a little slow in trying to warp my pod out -- they podded me too (50M ISK). Jeez...now that I see the kill mail I forgot I had a warp core stab! I guess they must have both disrupted me, or I'd have succeeded in warping off. My new clone was slightly insufficient too, so I had to train a couple of hours to restore one of my skills.

I put the kill rights up for sale, picking 50M ISK each randomly. We'll see if anyone hates these guys enough to pay me for them :)

There have been a lot of gate camps in our area recently. I'll have to either move my factory work from Yvangier to a closer system to avoid losses, or get a more expensive ship and better cloaking skills (like the MWD trick). It also gives our corp some targets to aim for.

Speaking of which, we set up a pretty large fight in Heydieles last night against a fleet from alliance "That Escalated Quickly". It was pretty tense as we tussled for location; we started in a large faction warfare plex so they couldn't use a cyno to bring an Archon, but they didn't engage us. We headed to a stargate and after jumping through once or twice we finally engaged. We had about 35 in fleet, 13 Vexors for DPS, Blackbirds for jamming, 6 Exeqs for logi. They had 10 battleships (I think?) and an Archon. Our plan, however, didn't work and we were unable to kill our first target. As our ships began to die (Dominix, 4 Vexors, 3 Exeqs, Blackbird) we bailed out. I survived, lucky for me!

It was very interesting to hear the discussion afterwards, with the FC and several knowledgeable players dissecting the fight, deciding why it didn't work and what we could have done differently. Then they moved on to thinking about changes in fleet composition for the next fight. It was all calm, no recriminations or shouting, and it's scary how much these guys know about Eve!

Over on the trading side of the house I'm finding a new balance after taking a hit. My tattoo trade has put me in the red after the New Eden Store opened and included two tattoos (Prototype and Wreckage) for 1000 and 1500 Aurum respectively. This translates to approx 200-300M ISK. Unfortunately I was buying for 600M the night before and some clever-clogs sold me one of each. (Later Update: To clarify, the orders were created the night before, and were fulfilled the next morning at 9:00am EST. I didn't consider that the new store might have existing items in them, at a lower price, thus killing the market for those items. My mistake!) I've been buying at the new lower prices too, which have settled around the new values, but have no sales yet. I have 6 tattoos in the hanger and 3 for sale, plus a couple of cybernetic arms.

My PI sales are steady, though I have to be quick because the prices of my items has dropped. The price of the inputs has dropped too, but its good to get a quick sale of the finished products and not wait for a rebound that may never come. My spreadsheet tells me it's still a decent profit, though I'm careful to NOT fly to my factories when Local is unfriendly...one cargo is usually worth about 300M ISK.

That's it for now - more of the same to come later.