Less Planetary Interaction, More PvE and PvP

I was flying one of these hull-tanked Megathron battleships.

Our Sunday night roam led into a great battle where we teamed up with RDraw and temporarily with CalMil in order to whale on some guys that had just left the Snuff alliance. Kirith wrote about it here - our fleet lost 5B of ships and killed 16.4B. Our job was to land after the main forces had engaged and take out their five repair ships. Props to the brave pilot who got us a warp-in so we could land right where we needed to be.  I got out with a nice chunk of loot too, some of which I'm using for PvE. I could've got more but my cargo was full and I forgot that I could transfer some of the cheaper loot INTO the wreck with the juicy loot in order to make room for said juicy loot. I'd already done one jettison operation and couldn't do another in time. I left with my fleet before the CalMil guys decided that the temporary truce was over.

PI Sales

I have been watching PI prices at Jita and slowly selling the stockpile of 13,000 P4 items I have accumulated over the last couple of months. The prices are mostly drifting slowly downwards, except Sterile Conduits which has climbed. Broadcast Nodes had been holding at 4.4M each but just this morning dropped to 3.6M. I haven't seen any notable spikes in price so I'm going to push the remaining stock out faster and take my profits. I'm also still considering what to do with my PI setup: I'd like to set up a much less labor intensive scheme. I'm still doing well on High-Grade Ascendancy implants so I need to at least keep making Gel-Matrix, Cryoprotectant and Synthetic Synapses.

Besieged

I solo'd my first Besieged Covert Research Facility! After watching this video I modified his fit a bit and tried the first Besieged site I found in Fliet. I wasn't watching my sentry drones and lost one. I went back to station for another, and to strengthen my tank, which had been failing. This took a while and by the time I got back and repositioned myself the site timed out and vanished.  But I tweaked the fit a little more and the next night I ran another Besieged site. Success! Shitty loot (9M isk) but I cleared the site.

UPDATE: THIS DOESN'T WORK!  I'll leave it here in case you want to try tweaking it. Mordu's Legion actually do omni-damage, (the advice in that link is good!) hitting you wherever you are weakest. It worked once for me, maybe because the first wave had only two battleships, but the two subsequent tries both failed. I tried increasing my tank with a second ENAM and a Reactive Armor Hardener, but my reduction in DPS meant I couldn't finish the site in time.

Here's the old incorrect advice and fit - 

Here's my fit - I'm going to try dropping the ENAM and putting a Thermal Hardener (or maybe a second Kinetic), since Mordu's Legion do 70% Kinetic, 30% Thermal. It'd be nice to fit two guns too. I may put a deadspace armor repper in place of the tech II version I'm using.  This fit is cap-stable at around 40%.

[Ishtar, Ishtar - Besieged Covert Research Facility]

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

Damage Control II

Medium Armor Repairer II

Centus C-Type Armor Kinetic Hardener

50MN Y-T8 Compact Microwarpdrive

Phased Scoped Target Painter

Cap Recharger II

Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Small Remote Armor Repairer II

250mm Railgun II

Drone Link Augmentor II

[empty high slot]

Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I

Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump II

Warden II x5

Salvage Drone I x5

Garde II x5

Ogre II x2

Hammerhead II x2

Hobgoblin II x1

Hornet EC-300 x5

I'm continuing to assemble ships to be ready for various PvE sites like that one. I've sorted out my best probing ship so I can scan cosmic sigs down faster, I want to have ships ready to roll for 3/10, 4/10, 5/10, various wormholes and of course our corp doctrine ships, of which I have plenty already.

Lastly I want to try some solo PvP - I found a couple (Jalep) of good (Solomon - I love this one!) Atron videos that I intend to start with. The Atron's falloff bonus is a really useful tool that doesn't get used effectively by a lot of pilots.

My Eve Weekend

My wife and son went out of town for a few days, which gave me two evenings and a weekend to play a lot of Eve. I had planned in advance what activities I wanted to focus on: PvE in combat sites, with the hope of getting an expensive loot drop at the end, pirate relic sites in wormholes or nullsec, and level 4 faction warfare missions, since my militia was in tier 3 and the loyalty point payouts came with a nice 75% bonus.  I also wanted to join my corps regular fleets and go out and shoot spaceships!

tl;dr I ran some sites with corpmates, flew with our fleets, did three rounds of FW missions, lost a 500M ISK Proteus and spent some time in wormholes.  I found very few pirate relic sites and the constant possibility of getting jumped by someone (which happened once, though I escaped) was a bit too much to want to repeat.

Battalyst Fleet Part Two

Hendrik has posted this excellent video of our fearsome Battalyst fleet in action, with the highlight being the last fight, in which they tear apart all comers.

If you want to be in such fleets, apply to Aideron Robotics.

How not to fly a brawling Vexor

We got into a rather fun fight in Akidagi last night, with Templis CALSF. I died just as we were breaking their tank and taking control of the fight, so here's a look at the first half. It was really exciting, high pressure stuff! Our logi said several of them finished in low structure.

But I made a lot of mistakes; I pointed out a couple in the video subtitles but I've been shown a couple more by our CEO. So in the interest of educating brawling Vexor pilots, here's what I have to work on.

Our Vexors' main drone flight is 2 Ogre IIs, 2 Hammerhead II and 1 Hobgoblin II. Mine also had a Minmatar jam fitted.  Ideally I should have launched drones on landing (waiting till the warp-in was completed!), and tried to jam a Minmatar target. Scythe would have been best, but the Sleipnir I eventually picked was good too. I'm not quick about recognizing the race of ships above cruiser.

Secondly, I spend a lot of time trying to fly to the primary targets as they are called. This is not how I should be flying. My drones should be sent to the primary, but I should have picked my own target to orbit at 500 and hit them with my guns, scram and web. Ideally, make sure nobody else is doing the same to your target, so you're keeping as many enemy ships pointed as possible.  I've heard our FCs give these instructions dozens of times, but I didn't properly absorb the lesson.

(Update: Or not. Sometimes it is better to fly to the primary, MWD on, and burn through it. When the "spread points" command is given, that's when we start looking for other targets to lock down.)

By not noticing my drones hadn't launched, and spending a long time not firing my guns, I missed out on applying a lot of damage.

Lastly, I should have broadcast for reps when all those yellow boxes appeared. I did notice it happening, but I didn't want to distract our logi squad from the repping they were already doing. They said afterwards, just broadcast and we'll get to you if we can. At the very least they'd have time to have me locked up and ready to send reps when the damage started landing.

And on the killmail-whoring side, I had the Loki targeted for the whole time and didn't actually do anything to him! So I missed out on that 200M+ ISK killmail, not that it matters.

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On the other side of the game I'm continuing to build Catalysts, Comets, Enyos and Atrons for the corp. My pet wish is that CCP add a "rename your ship to match the fitting name" in the fitting window, so each ship automatically gets renamed. I've already sent it up the usual flagpoles and I hope CCP Punkturis sees it sometime soon - it seems like an easy change and a good time saver.

My PI operations have slowed down, but I'm still acquiring the P3 inputs I need when the prices are low, then building the P4 outputs, then selling them when P4 prices are high. I'm sitting on a good cash buffer, so I don't need to chase PI quite so hard any more.

I just completed Gallente Cruiser V, so I'm a short train or two away from the Proteus (FW missions!) and Ishtar (kill all the things!).

Enter the Batalyst

It was a fun and profitable couple of hours in Eve last night. I started by running a couple of plexes in once-more-Caldari-held Heydieles and got a nice chunk of Loyalty Points. I've been spending my LP on high-grade implants. They sell very slowly, but are worth up to 8000 ISK per LP, more than four times what I usually consider a good conversion rate. I'm not in a rush to get the LP converted to cash, so this may be a good way to get the most bang for my buck. Check the fuzzwork lp store for a list of possible targets.
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I've recently been building large amounts of Small Transverse Bulkhead I rigs for use in our cheap hull-tanked ships. Last night I had my first opportunity to actually fly one; a 3M ISK Catalyst that we call the Batalyst (here's one).

You can see a brief video here. We ran into a small frigate gang and we took them apart pretty quickly. I picked up 20M in loot afterwards, on the promise that I spend it bringing more of them in from Jita, which I will do.

We had flown past a 16-ship CALSF cruiser fleet during our travels and they were headed to Fliet, looking for a fight with us. Corp members logged in to bring up our numbers and we took our cruisers out to meet them. The results were...one-sided (see 2:55 to 3:00 AM 2014-09-04). We lost no ships and killed 12 of them. Here's a video from Keewee Maleewi in a neuting ship, a perspective I haven't seen before. I flew logi anchor in this fight and I'm happy to say we kept everyone repped and in-range.

Everythings Coming Up Iskies

From flickr user Jeff Babbitt

The past few days have been pretty action packed for me! There was a grand fight (two capitals were lost, 5 Archons dropped in at one point) in Abune during which I lost my Exequror; I'd burned moved away from the gate and when the order came to crash the gate I was a bit slow in following it. Being the last one on field the guys from Templis and Overload Everything finished me off. BUT that was just the start of the fun! One of our scouts kept eyes on the gate and reported the victors left the field and didn't take the loot...there was loads of great loot just floating around!

I jumped in my travel-fit Imicus and while our mostly Irish gang (God, those guys are fun :) !) were talking about the capital wrecks I grabbed 50M ISK of stuff from the wrecks nearest the gate. I flew back to Fliet and dropped it off. Comms reported visitors from The Irukandji had come to loot too so I jumped into an Atron (our cheap 1.5M Rinzler fit) and headed out to drive them off. We succeeded in doing so and the looting continued: I put 25M ISK of stuff in my Atron and went back to Fliet. I grabbed my Imicus again and put another expanded cargohold in the lows, returned to Abune and grabbed another 30M of loot and drones. I even had a chance to salvage an elite wreck for a bonus 4M ISK of goodies.

That was my first time being in a rich, juicy loot field with good protection and every expectation that we'd clear the field. It felt very satisfying; I hope you get the chance to do it too!

The next night Aideron joined a Galmil fleet which flew out to Nennamalia for a POCO defense; we fought a huge Eagle-based fleet on a gate and , unfortunately, we lost. But I got on 4 Gila kills (1.6B total) with my Vexor Navy Issue, and survived the fight. I think my name being further down the alphabet (so-called "name tanking") has really helped me survive more than my fair share of fights.

And that brings me to last night, when I did a bit of everything and had everything go right. It was quiet on the fleet front, so I did a bit of exploration. I found a relic site in Abune and the first can had 8M ISK of T2 salvage. The rest of the site was not so juicy, but I still got 10M of loot. I had d-scanned Fliet on the way out and saw a lot of T2 drones floating in space so I decided to go and rescue them. I used the new Sisters probe I'd bought to go with the 8 combat scanners I'd looted from the Abune fight and in about 10 minutes I'd picked up 20M ISK worth of drones; most of them were in one cluster, which made it easy. See this video which explains how, if you'd like to try. I really recommend it as an activity for new pilots: you learn d-scan and probing skills and make a good amount of ISK (for a newbie, of course :) )

A friendly fleet entered Fliet while I was taking care of some industrial stuff, so I joined them as they rushed into a FW plex to take on five Punishers and 3 Navitases. We lost three (four?) ships during this encounter, but my name-tank held and I flew through the fight without a scratch. I helped take out all the ships except one. Watching the video I can see a couple of mistakes, though...I didn't have all my weapons running when they could have been. My default orbit was set to 25km instead of 500m...maybe that helped keep me alive?

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Industry: The new UI is nice but is missing a critical piece of information. I'd like to be able to see how many science and manufacturing jobs I can run WITHOUT having to either go to the jobs tab and count the existing jobs OR pick a blueprint and select manufacturing/science-jobs to see the jobs counter display. It's the first thing I consider when deciding what industry stuff to do; what CAN I do right now? All that black space you see when you launch the industry screen is just wasted.

I'm still supplying the corp with ships; the best seller is the aforementioned Rinzler, which I sell in two-packs for 3M ISK. The process of fitting and contracting them has way too many clicks, and I hope CCP revises this soon. The "Copy Contract" function won't work for me; it doesn't recognize that the contract is for a fitted ship, and it will just try and grab a hull and loose modules to assemble. Here's a simple thing they could do (CCP Karkur!) - a bulk ship naming function would be great. Let me select several ships and give them all the same name. Maybe also add a checkbox to the fitting window that, when checked, will rename the ship to the

A Week of Eve: Day One and Two

My family are out of town so I have more time than usual to play Eve. Here's some notes on the first couple of days. Today is Day Three, and so far it's not a good one: my air conditioner is broken (90 degrees outside), I locked myself out of the house after leaving the other car at the dealer to be serviced, and my video editing templates are gone or screwed up.

Day One: Before work I popped over to our local asteroid belts for a spot of ratting. I took my trusty kiting Algos, rigged to apply about 250dps with drones alone, while I sit at 70km away sipping tea.  I found what I was looking for, a Clone Soldier and deployed the drones. To my surprise, I started taking damage! I tried to move further away, and he managed to chase and get closer to me, hitting me all the way! What happened?! I recalled drones and got out with a scrap of armor remaining. I repaired and tried again with the same result!  A little googling revealed that Clone Soldiers got buffed in the last patch: they move faster and hit further out. Small kiting ships can't do the job any more, sadly.

That evening I joined in on small gang roams around Fliet. We found a cruiser gang, and came back later that night and had a big ol' fight in Iwisoda. We lost 3 Exequrors right off the bat, and 1 Vexor but our DPS wore them down and we eventually killed 13 Caracals and Ospreys (here's one kill). The chase to hunt them down took a while and the best part was Marcel's palpable glee when our scouts reported them going into Iwisoda, a dead-end system.

Here's a moment where our three remaining Exeqs saved a Vexor from the edge of destruction; I burned out two reppers because I didn't un-overheat them. I know I suck at logi :) Luckily the fight was swinging our way at that point.

Day Two:  I've read recently that the nullsec powers are bored and have started to come and play in lowsec.  Today I found out it's true.

Overload Everything fleet taking out our POCO

I started the evening with some plexing in Heyd: it's nice to get some LP again since the Gallente militia are in Tier 3.  We then did POCO defense in Fliet and after a few minutes some visitors cyno'd in:12 Abaddons, 2 Loki, Proteus, 2 Archons and an Armageddon Navy Issue from alliance Overload Everything! We warped away and our shield repping Scythes tried to come back and get some last-ditch reps on our poco to slow them down, but we were alpha'd off the field quickly.

Overload Everything quickly destroyed our POCO and set up their own. When their Archons and Abaddons separated we tried to tackle the Archons while we hit the Abaddons with Vexors, but the battleships warped off as soon as we tackled the Archons. We should have, in retrospect, hit the battleships first, or as close to simultaneously with the Archon tackles as we could. We sent out scouts to try and find them, knowing their Abaddons would be slow to move around using gates, but we couldn't find them. Then we noticed there was an Erebus in system!  This meant that not only had they used a Titan to bridge in, they'd used another to bridge out. That's some serious firepower!

After they'd left the system we stayed in our Vexors and started hitting their new POCO. They came back in Ishtars, with Zealot, Scimitar, Lachesis and Huginn for support and took us on. We sent them packing, including this 245M Ishtar and 179M Scimitar piloted by one of the Overload Everything guys.  I think our inclusion of jams on our Vexors always surprises people that haven't fought us before!

Here's video of that fight...we need to have more pilots in small ships to apply tackle and keep their bling on the field so we can kill it. If you're a new player and wonder what's your place in battles like this, watch the video and notice the end, when we're unable to keep the enemy on field: you could have been there to help us! :)

The slightly mood was considerably lightened by this hilarious Firetail which arrived at the end of the fight. 217M ISK of random stuff, including Snowball and Fireworks launchers...we'll take it :)

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We continued our recent run of structure bashing/defense ops in Heyd, attacking a POS and putting into reinforce. On the way back we ran into a Gila fleet on a gate, but most of our fleet had warped off. We lost a Vexor Navy Issue and a Talos, but killed a 511M ISK Gila.

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My security status is dropping and I might just let it slide for a while. I don't have much reason to go to high-sec, except to the island next door for occasional manufacturing, and at only -2.2, I'm not in danger of being blocked from there anytime soon. My PI operations are at a halt, as planned, and I've got plenty of stock for selling Tristans and Algoses to corpmates through contracts: I've sold five so far.

Outnumbered in Oinasiken

I can't think how I forgot to post this here! I worked really hard on this video, learning a lot of new (for me) techniques. This is a great fight we had on March 30th 2014, in which we lost no ships (except an Atron, piloted by a new pilot) and killed eight out of sixteen enemy ships. Our five Vexors (cruisers), two Algos (destroyers) and 3 Exeqs (cruiser repair ship) took on not only a larger fleet, but they also had several battle-cruisers on their side.

If this kind of fighting interests you, please use the links on the right to check out Aideron Robotics, the corp I'm proud to fly with!

A really good couple of days in Eve

Longest fight I've had so far!

Sunday and Monday nights saw some exciting times in Eve for me. The fight you see above was a cruiser gang sitting on the Heyd gate in Old Man Star. We shipped into cruisers and took them on; it was a long battle. It took twenty minutes but we eventually won and with very few losses. We didn't get their shiny Guardians or Armageddons, but took out a lot of other ships. See here on March 3rd around 02:45 in OMS.

We had a good sized fleet last night, around 25 pilots. We started with deplexing then went on a fast tear around the neighbourhood getting lots of kills in the process. I'll make a video when I can. I mostly fly logi now, but in a Navitas you can fit one drone...might as well be a combat drone :) I got on seven kills!

My T1 industry bits are in place -- nothing major, I just wanted to be able to make all the small rigs we use on our ships. Prices in low-sec are higher, generally, than in high-sec and I've set up my manufacturing in Yvangier so I can't lose stuff in faction warfare mechanics.  There's a pilot in the corp who does free jump freighter runs from Jita (thanks!!), which is an incredibly valuable service to provide. I used that to acquire some of the ingredients and blueprints I needed to get a decent volume of stuff made.

I also fixed the audio problems on my computer - it's a bit tricky getting the microphone/speakers/volume set up so that you can properly record Eve videos, but I think I've finally got it right.

I also sold a lot of expensive items through my trader and I've finally understood what station containers are for. If you regularly receive trade items after a fleet and don't like losing them in the general mess that is your hanger, buy a couple of station containers. Keep all your stuff in them, and keep your hanger empty. When you receive new items and transfer them to your hangar, they'll be the only things there. It came in very handy yesterday when, at a moment's notice, I received a bunch of modules to fit to a borrowed ship and had to refit quickly.

Laugh of the day: This World of Warcraft player came to Eve and just did everything wrong. He spent a fortune (like $1300 REAL MONEY) buying a ship without realizing he could lose it. On losing it, he then got conned out of ANOTHER ONE, by two slick-tongued scammers. Welcome to Eve :)

Cruiser fight: Aideron vs Sniggwaffe

Feast yer eyes on this slaughter! Sniggwaffe pilots spread their damage so thin that they only manage to take out one of our combat ships while we cut them to pieces. Our Vexors and Exeqs take on their Exeqs/Celestis/Thoraxes and it's a very one-sided battle. I'm flying logi and spend a good chunk of the fight jammed by their Celestis or ECM drones, including the point near the beginning where I'm trying to repair Rajeet as he loses his slicer.

The Atron was lost was actually due to friendly fire. A friend of mine, not a member of Gallente Militia, was flying with us in order to try out PvP. He showed up as neutral on the overview of the Blackfox fleet which arrived and they took him out. He has sinced joined Aideron (smart move!) and is settling into low-sec life after just a few weeks since starting Eve Online.

A major lesson to learn from this video is to notice how the Sniggwaffe guys spread their damage. My watchlist, covering about half our fleet, shows lots of our guys taking damage at the same time. We were easily able to repair this (except when we were jammed). We, I think, focused our fire better and took their ships out one by one.

Fantastic new video intro put together by Baynex - thank you!

First Ghost Site and Lots of Other Stuff

My first successful ghost site

I had a busy Eve weekend, with a couple of fleet engagements, setting up some T1 industrial activities, lots of station trading, an encounter with a Jita scammer, building ships for other people, recruiting a friend to join Aideron AND I ran three ghost sites!

Ghost Sites

I'll start with the ghost sites, which I'm pleased to say I ran in a gifted Vexor hull. I've watched videos about these sites, but never seen one and figured they were just too rare. I think CCP might have made a recent change to make them easier to run and, my speculation, more common? Waaay back at the start of this blog I talked about a kind capsuleer who read a post I made on reddit. The Vexor she gave me was still packaged and sitting in my hangar. I owned another Vexor, combat fit, but what I needed here was a simple fit like the ones I'd seen in the videos. I unpacked the Vexor and threw on 1600MM armor, 2 ENAM IIs, a damage control II, data site analyzer, 10MN MWD and cargo scanner. Done; no weapons, no drones, no rigs.

The first site was too challenging (I only have hacking III) and the tower blew up in my face, taking me down to about half armor. I thought about trying another can, but didn't want to lose the ship so I docked up and repaired it, then hit the second site. Success!  The first tower contained a blueprint, which I knew are the best thing you can find here; I hacked it, grabbed the goods and left, not wanting to risk losing it. The third ghost site I ran was in Fliet a day later (3 in two days after never seeing one?! It really looks like CCP have made these more common) but the two cans I hacked didn't yield anything great.

Fleet Activities

I had mixed results from two fleets this weekend; Aideron took out armored cruiser fleets several times and I was able to join two of them. The first resulted in getting sent packing back to Fliet; I think it was a communication and intel issue. We hadn't confirmed that our allies were going to enter the medium plex with us, and our scouts were unsure how to use eve-dingo.com or another tool like it. Luckily my Exequror survived; I'll post video later (see post above, on 2/28/2014). The Sunday night fleet went much better; we hit a Sniggwaffe Celestis/Exequror/Thorax fleet and took out 17 of them, losing only two Atrons and a Stabber Fleet Issue on our side. I am tasked with distributing the loot from that fight, which the FC generously awarded to those flying logi.

Station Trading and Scam Attempt

My station trader alt got a lot of attention this weekend, since its an activity that I can perform in very short bursts; if I have a couple of minutes to spare I can update several orders. She bought and sold several cybernetic arms and tattoos, but the trend seems to be more buys than sales. There are some items of which I have two or three because buyers aren't coming along fast enough; I was as low as 300M cash, while I had about 4B in buy orders. Luckily some sales come along and pushed me back up to 1.5B.

I had listed a couple of valuable items on contract and your character name is publically attached to that contract. This attracts scammers, who try and trick you into giving them the item. This guy convo'd me and, of course, I think "Scammer!" because Jita. He offers me a slightly lower price than I was asking and I say "Sure", wondering how this would work. It turned out to be pretty transparent: he made a contract and asked me to click it, but it would have resulted in me giving him 430M instead of the other way round. I tell him, innocently, "Oops, you seem to have made a mistake." "One sec, I'll fix it, he says". "You have one chance to get this right." I reply. The new contract he makes would pay me 430,000 ISK for the item. I reject the contract and close the window. A rite of passage, I feel :)

She finished the weekend with 4.1B in sell orders, 4.7B in buy orders, 1.5B cash and, I think, 2B in escrow. I think you could make more money sitting down and running level 4 missions, or doing wormhole activities and other time-intensive stuff, but if you just have a few minutes at a time to update orders, with priority interrupts from Real Life taking precedence then station trading at Jita is very effective. Here's my guide to doing it.

One last point about this character, I'm trying to find out if there's a non-grinding way to raise her standings with the Caldari Navy. This would reduce the broker fees that she pays, which is currently about 0.78%. I gave her some training queue time and built her a simple combat Kestrel. I'm raising her Social and Connections to IV before I go out and run missions, but I've also read about Data Centers where you can get one-time standings boosts just by delivering tags, which, of course, I'd buy at Jita first. This will also let me easily run high-sec missions for fun, should I feel like doing it. The use of the "Percentage" on that site is a bit confusing...is that a percentage of my current standings, or an absolute figure that gets added to my standings?

[Update: Later that day...] Yes, the increase you get from data centers IS a percentage of your current standings with that corp and faction, so to do that with my almost-zero standings is a waste. Good news: I don't need to increase standings with the Caldari faction, just with the "Caldari Navy" corp which owns Jita. This can be done by running missions for them (lvl 1 and 2 agents are just 1 jump away, in "Perimeter"), and there are even people who offer this as a service. If you're in their fleet and they share the rewards with you when they turn in the mission, you'll get a standings increase without actually having to go and fight! Google "Caldari Navy standings service" and you'll find them.

T1 Industry and Ship Building

I've felt the siren call of building ship modules, so I made (what else) a spreadsheet and figured out that there are some items, mostly rigs, that I can easily make and sell in low-sec for a big profit. I rounded up all the BPOs I needed and the necessary ingredients and found a nearby factory in a non-faction warfare system. That should keep a steady, if small, income coming to me. It's ironic that Caldari militia pilots are among my was frequent customers :)

Lastly, I put together three simple scanning ships for Aideron pilots to use prior to our exploration fleets going out. We have a weekly event that, so far, has gotten lucky and found good combat sites to run. But with these ships I think we'll be able to more easily search nearby systems for the richest sites to hit.

Another Glorious Day in the Corp!

Video link - Aideron Robotics Cruiser Roam Fight

Aideron had a really good weekend, racking up a ton of kills and securing our hold on our home system of Fliet. Some of our pilots woke up early in order to deny the Caldari the ten or so un-opposed plexes they been taking after downtime each day. We have taken Fliet from 60% contested down to under 30% and are feeling more secure.

We've also been going out in fleets more often and getting great results! We have 441 kills so far this month; that's as many as we had in the whole of October 2013!

The most unusual incident I saw was the discovery of a pilot-less Guardian at a gate. We had jumped through and seen a pirate Ishtar, who we pointed and killed. The Guardian that we thought was with him sat still through the whole fight, leaving us wondering what was going on. Our FC brought up the radial menu on the ship and noticed that the option to "board" the ship was present, so after some whooping it up and ship swapping, we had ourselves a faction fit 340M isk Guardian! We decided to take it back to Fliet right away and had to dodge a large neutral/pirate fleet that was roaming the area. Props to our scouts for keeping us out of trouble!

I flew my Vexor into four fights over the weekend and despite being in the thick of the action, came out without a scratch :) That includes landing on a gate camp which, for some reason, didn't point me as I warped away. Eventually my luck will run out, of course, but for now it feels pretty lucky!

My Jita trading character had a very successful weekend, though it was quite a roller coaster. After selling a couple of large items she had 1.7B isk in the wallet. I spent it all! A succession of pricey buy orders got filled and I went as low as 50M ISK before the sales starting happening again. Cybernetic Arms and Tattoos (both under the Apparel section) are the heavy hitters for me right now.

In the Line of Fire - moved to Fliet

We had a GREAT fight last week. While plexing we were attacked by a fleet from RAZR and Green Berets, and although we were in frigates and destroyers, we cut their cruisers to ribbons. (For some reason Youtube wouldn't let me embed the video here, so watch at the link. Ashterothi is FC, followed by Arcturus (I think?). We killed a Cynabal, Wolf, Blackbird, Deimos, Auguror Navy, Harpy, Cynabal again, Harpy, Corax...a 30 second break...and more arrived, so we fought on...Coercer, two Thorax, two Vexors, Thrasher. And a Vagabond escaped us. What a fight! See kills here  between 03:53 and 04:00 AM on 01-25-2014. I was flying logi and my Navitas was the first to go down -- I was jammed and scrammed, but I did assign a combat drone to the FC and got on four kills :)

Aideron Robotics has moved into Fliet, a system right next to Heydieles. The move was done last night and went smoothly. Unfortunately for us, Old Man Star fell to the Caldari this morning (see the top part of this map) and the next logical target is...Fliet!  The coming days may be interesting.

My station trading activities continue to grow: I have 2.2B in buy orders now and have switched focus to just big ticket items: at least 50M profit per item. I have moved my cheaper buy orders into a "Cheap" subfolder in my Quickbar, and I'll attend to them when I can, but I do the expensive stuff first.

I finally undocked my Brutix and ran some level 3 missions; they were interesting, though I can see how the novelty would wear off pretty quickly. Eve-survival.org is a very useful site (it tells you what kind of damage you should prepare for on any given mission), and again I say that information should be in the game!  The only people who don't use it are new players, the very people you DON'T want to frustrate and annoy.

Zao Amadeus takes on two Thrashers in a Fed Navy Comet

This is a fun video!  Zao is known as a pilot that can fly most of the ships in Eve and fly them well. He does regular live streams, so tune in when you can.

Random Things

Here is a video with some interesting moments that I haven't included in other videos. In the first segment I'm introduced to gate guns and the consequences of attacking neutrals; unfortunately mentioned a bit late :) . In the second those same neutrals have reshipped and come to fight us in a plex. In the third we encounter some Eve Uni members who run into us at a planet after we've skirmished with someone else and in the fourth we encounter a Merlin at a gate and he picks me as his target.

Among the most frustrating losses I've had in Eve is where I respond to someone who is excitedly trying to reassemble a scattered fleet to jump to them and help attack someone. This usually ends in failure, as some of the fleet responds and some don't, and those that do just trickle in one at a time and get killed.  If you're the one calling for help, please try and honestly consider whether you might really win if help reaches you, or if you're just getting your friends killed.  Instead, ask people what they can bring, how quickly they can get there, and possibly where they can stage so they all reach you at the same time.  It might be difficult to stay together enough to do that while you're in a losing battle, but it's better than just hoping your buddies will reach you and be helpful.

As a bonus, watch for the many times I do NOT have my ship's weapons activated. This is due to tunnel-vision on my part where I'm so focused on doing something that I forget to do something else. In our ships we usually have several things to keep track of: drones, guns, scram, web and sometimes a neutralizer. I often forget about one or more of these. If you are looking for one good reason to record your Eve Online combats, this is it! Watch your videos and see where you made mistakes.

Nov 18th 2013

It's the night before the Rubicon expansion hits, so I'm doing a couple of random things before logging off. I ran a level 2 security mission in a derp Tristan, just to see what happened. It went fine, though I lost a drone. I also bought a bunch of skillbooks and trained Planetary Interaction skills. Its an area of the game I haven't touched and I wanted to give it a try. I also sold another load of data/relic site loot for a tidy amount of ISKies.

Nov 24th 2013
I'm on vacation but have taken my laptop with me to play a little Eve when I can. Heydelies was at 99.8% contested this morning but has been pushed back down to 80% or so this evening. But when the US timezone pilots sign off, things will be looking dicey for us.

Heydieles is stable!

Wow, what a mad ride!  Heydieles was *this* close to slipping from our grasp on Saturday morning, but by Tuesday night we made it a safe as it can possibly be. 0% contested, 100% stable in Gallente Militia control. I was there for the last plex and made the video above. My thanks to Tennar for bringing the fireworks!

A medal was created and given to all members of Aideron Robotics to commemorate the occasion.

But our victory does not come not only from our tenacity. After all we've been as persistent as we could for the past few weeks and were still losing ground to Old Man Gang and their allies. It seems that an internal dispute at OMG caused one of their 5 corporations to depart, taking some of their best pilots with them. I'd like to think that the pressure we were applying had something to do with it, but who knows?

As a bonus we also wrested control of OMG's current home system of Fliet from the Caldari. Our next campaign will be to help stabilize the systems around Heydieles.

Aideron vs TEST Alliance, I-Hub bash in Ladistier

You can watch this without music, if you prefer.

Last night saw several first time experiences for me, all enjoyable and I didn't get blown up while doing them! It was my first hub bash, my first time using Hobgoblin IIs and my first Tristan fight.

Our group of 15 pilots formed part of an 80-strong fleet that flipped the ihub in Ladistier (Story at TheMittani.com). We brought 7 9 Taloses and 2 Oracles, among other ships, and the hub went down very quickly. At the end of the video above you can see the last few seconds of that action. We weren't confronted by any enemy activity at all.

The main fight of the night for us was an encounter with TEST Alliance, famed in song and story. Our scout spotted this group and we chased them from Ladistier to Sujarento where they were waiting for us at the gate. We remained cloaked while Marcel called targets, then a quick countdown and off we went!

We lost five ships in the encounter but took out way more of them, plus two pods. You can see the outcome on the killboard -- see 13-10-21 from 02:46 to 02:50 at Sujarento.

The fight was very easy on me; I was only targeted briefly and since I was able to send my drones to each target as it was called I got on six kills! But I only contributed a few hundred damage to each. My Light Electron Blasters were simply too short ranged to hit the targets, which got destroyed quickly as they were primaried. The next time we go out for a roaming fleet I will switch to railguns, and assign my drones to the FC (as we'd been told to do, but I forgot to do!) and focus on using the guns/scram/web properly.

After the fight we docked up and counted the loot: over 70 million ISK! Well....some of it must have been ours, from the five ships we lost, but it was a good haul. We then discussed the fight and what we did wrong, which I think is an excellent time to have that discussion, while it is fresh in everyone's mind.

Kill His Face

Some swearing in this video - NSFW

It was a fun night of combat in Ladistier, spiced up with some salty language. After the previous night's emphasis on space trucking I wanted to help with the plexing and the pew-pew so I got in an Atron (big help, huh?) and joined the thirty-five member fleet led by X Gallentius, to whom I offer congratulations on passing 10000 kills!

We were in Ladistier and ran a couple of plexes without getting a fight, though we did chase a couple of targets. There was a couple of speed-boosted ships that sat on the plex gate that we tried to snag a few times, without success.

The video above comes from a successful pursuit of a couple of ships that were seen going between Ladistier and Old Man Star. There are a couple of things to note for myself: firstly I again failed to turn on damage control and secondly I'm not sure why the Prophecy (kill mail here) didn't return fire. I'm assuming its because he was jammed and was therefore unable to lock anyone, but if I'm misinterpreting something please leave a comment below. Also I might have taken a big chance by opening fire against FC's orders -- was he not sure if the gate guns were going to open fire on us?

The best bit of the fight came afterwards when a friendly Tristan started shooting at fleet members (see 2:30 in the video). A guy who sounded like he knew the perpetrator, and was pretty mad at him, urged to "kill him, kill him, kill his face." This drew some laughs -- the poetry of aggression perhaps doesn't cross the language barrier very well -- but the guy was taken down and the FC remarked later that he'd get on comms with him and explain why he was killed, which I thought was very diplomatic of him.  It was odd that the "kill his face" guy, who sounded so eager to get this done, immediately urged us not to kill the pod.

We returned to Ladistier and kept plexing. A huge TEST Alliance fleet was seen entering the system: 17 Mallers and a bunch of other cruisers. FC considered reshipping to take the fight but we didn't have the numbers. There were some non-fleet militia in the medium plex with us and they stayed behind when we left. It must have been a huge, though brief, surprise to have 30 cruisers land on them! Here's one of those kill mails -- poor Anna Ashington is a new player, or alt, and our FC is actually on this killmail with some ECM.

Speaking of TEST Alliance and their entry into faction warfare, I asked the fleet what was the collective opinion of TEST's PvP abilities. A chorus of "sucks!" was heard though I can't remember what follow-up reasons were given.

I bugged out to Yvangier and re-shipped into my cloaky Imicus, ran a data and relic site (~20M total), docked up and logged out. My corpmate has picked up all my ships and supplies from my old home base, but it hasn't been delivered yet.

Heydelies is Liberated!!

My video of some this weekend's fighting

Heydelies is free (see 10-14-2013, 07:55) from the corporate jackboot of the hated Caldari! Its people will now be forced to party 24 hours a day, Gallente-style!

Big Picture

Report on themittani.com

When I joined Aideron Robotics a month ago, I was told that reclaiming Heyd was our goal. We plexed, we fought, but whatever gains we made each night were rolled back by the next day, as players in other time zones undid our work.  But thanks to a concerted push (as reported on themittani.com), Heyd has been reclaimed and Old Man Star is on its way to being under our control too.

Congratulations from this blog to Aideron Robotics and everyone involved in this effort! I think our ability to quickly co-ordinate effort on our shared Teamspeak server is a big help in this.

Little Picture

I spent the past couple of nights with the corp plexing, naturally, as we tried to reclaim Heydelies.  On the first night I was using up my last couple of Atrons and not doing much damage.

But on the second night I was able to produce longer videos of these fights (still at low res, sorry :( ) thanks to the great support of our logistics (repair) ships. You may notice in the video that I'm on my overview pod saver tab AND about to Warp Out until I notice that the logi's reps are tanking me! Therefore I was able to be the main damage dealer on Anslo's Stabber, which I locked because it was the closest target to me when we entered the plex. Frigates, including me, were supposed to take out their frigates and I forgot that a Stabber is a cruiser! But I used my scram, neut and web correctly (eventually), though I forgot to turn on Damage Control for at least one of these fights.

On Friday night the FC handed out "Attrition Thrashers" and two waves went out. They were intended to be lost, but at 1M ISK a piece we did FAR more damage to the enemy. A second wave was sent, followed by a derptron (cheap Atrons, same idea) fleet from Aideron. After taking out a Stabber Fleet Issue (73M) and a Hurricane (61M - see video), among other things, the Caldari retreated and did not re-emerge.

Other Stuff

During a short downtime I found a couple of data sites and scored 21.5M and 15M ISK of loot -- not bad for 20 minutes work with no enemies in sight! I've also studied Marketing III which allows me to set up sell orders up to 10 jumps away. That covers 99% of my stuff, so I have started selling the big piles of ammo I've been accumulating with buy orders in Arnon. I have also created buy orders for some the equipment we commonly use in Aideron ships, just to see if that works. 

Honestly though, the hands-down best way to make money is to run data sites. It usually yields 10-20M ISK per site (in low-sec; I haven't tried nullsec) and there are very seldom any other players around if you pick a low-traffic system. There are also no NPCs (except in wormholes) so you don't need to worry about combat.

[Late update: On Sunday night I stayed away from the fighting; it was late and I'd been out. So I just explored and found only a couple of data sites, for a total yield of about 15M. It would have been more if I hadn't failed a difficult hack on a juicy tower.

I found a relic site in high-sec (0.5) and decided to run it, just to see what I'd find. I shouldn't have bothered, and never will again. Three towers yielded 24000 ISK of T1 salvage. That's not a typo - twenty four thousand ISK. What a joke! CCP should buff the yield of these sites if they want high-sec players to take an interest in exploration.

Busy Busy

Another busy night in New Eden! It was a strange sort of busy-ness though, with fights never quite happening until the end of the night.

I took our new Atron fit out for a spin with Kyle and two other corpmates. We ran two plexes and roamed a little but didn't find any action. So we returned to Yvangier to practice slingshotting and pew-pew each other down to structure.  As 9PM hit several more corp members logged on and we got a bigger fleet together. The word came that Brave Newbies were stomping around in Heydelies so I was sent to see what I could find out. I messed up a bit here, through inexperience. They wanted me to use d-scan to determine the fleet composition, using this tool, but instead of drawing correctly my browser just downloaded index.php to my hard disk! So I reported as best I could until another corpmate got into a cloaky ship and went directly to where the BNI fleet was. I had reported dscanning them at the Villore gate, but it turned out they were at a nearby station which lay in the same 5 degree "cone of view".

We joined a QCATS fleet in stalking the BNIs but no fight resulted. It was interesting, for a first-timer like me, to bounce around from gate to gate trying to get BNI to fight, but they avoided us and eventually docked up.

There were eight Aideron pilots left so we hopped into a medium plex, bypassing a cluster of chain-repping battlecruisers on the gate, and as the clock ran down on the plex a Caracal showed up on d-scan.  We're not sure why a single pilot decided to enter a plex with eight ships in it, include two logi (repair) ships, but he did, and the kill shown in the video above is the result. The new fit includes a Nosferatu, which drains energy from the target and transfers it to me.

It was a good night for plexing too - I was in five capped plexes and made about 15000 LP.