Minmatar are looking at some changes

As we all know, the Minmatar faction has been languishing as far as their armament goes. If one religiously follows the development channels one can find out various interesting (but not yet final things). It looks like the even the normal Typhoon and Tempest will be getting some love in the next expansion.

Oh, and artillery, and projectile ammo.

Links:

Proposed Tyhpoon/Tempest changes (should be on Sisi to try out soon)
Proposed projectile changes (Log in to see the graph, thank you CCP Nozh)

All in all I'm very interested in these being a Minmatar specialist. I think the proposed 5/5 split for the Typhoon is going to actually make it slightly newbie friendlier (not by much but every bit counts).

Lost in space (but not for long)

At one point late last night I decided to pop a neibouring wormhole in our wormhole system. 3 orca cycles, 1 BS cycle and a bunch of cruiser cycles and I get unlucky and end up on the wrong side of the wormhole. It was bound to happen one day but as per policy all my ships that transit wormholes except barges/exhumers are always equipped with a scan probe launcher.

CCP: we realy need barges/exhumers with a utility high at some point...

But I digress. Now I found myself in an un-explored (cuz we hadn't bothered) but populated class 4 wormhole system (lucky it seemed to be the local inhabitants downtime). Since I knew this was a possibility I was flying one of my "T1M0" throw away cruisers when this happened. At this point the decision is pretty straight forward: suicide and get back to BBW (name of the system I had not gotten back to) post haste or probe my way out.

If there was a pressing reason to do so I would have suicided and gone that route. But I was not needed immediately anywhere. Sure I had planned to do some mining, but you can do mining anytime you're not PvP'ing or running sleeper sites so it's not like that was any more pressing than usual. On top of that I'd never managed to get myself "lost" in wormhole space before. Hark! adventure calls!

So I pop out the probes and get scanning. I find an easy access K162 and end up in a class 5 system that is heavily populated. Yikes, back to the class 4. Some more scanning managed to find another wormhole to a class 3. Ooo, nice, it's uninhabited. Some quick scanning in this class 3 and I get lucky and I get a wormhole to a 2nd class 3. It's also uninhabited. More scanning and I get a class 1, now class 1's probably have a higher chance to get to known space.

This is where things get a little tedious. 15! ladar sites later (I'm not scanning them down to 100% just recording the sig when it hits 25%+ and moving on), I finally find a wormhole to 0.0 space. So I pop out and where do I find myself?

Paragon Soul. Deep Paragon Soul. Pardon the expression but that's like saying "the deep beyond of butt**** nowhere". 84jumps to home base... Oh wait a sec.

/me fiddles with his autopilot settings

Ah, only 72 jumps to home base (only 16 of which are in high sec). That's better (not by much). So the decision: It's late, about an hour and a half before i go to bed. Go back in and try to keep scanning for a better known space connection? or go with the journey that looks like it'll carve a swath through Period Basis, Delve and Querious?

/me fiddles with his map settings for pilots online

Humm, looking mighty dead in goon space, they must all be up in high sec suicide ganking hulks. Might as well. So off I go. I mean look It's an adventure, I'm in a T1 cruiser (Stabber) with T1 Metalevel 0 modules and an updated clone with no implants in my head right? Might as well go for it. Worse that could happen was that I get caught in a gate camp and get the all expenses paid express trip home to the home base. So I rename my ship to Forlorn Hope and off I go.

Even though I'm neutral to prety much all of 0.0. Which means exactly squat since just about everyone out here is NBSI. Except for providence where I'm apparently KOS, again not that this changes much since the incident that resulted in that happened in Catch - dont' get me stated on CVA's hypocritical stance of simply declaring all neutrals that are in gangs of more than 1 hostile and apparently catch is now theirs as well.

Most excitement I had on the whole trip? Finding out that KIA still had a system in Period Basis (thought they were up in Geminate). Running into a kestrel in low sec (where the alliance policy is NRDS so I didn't even bother trying to target him, while I was ratting 3 gate rats. Yep it was that dead, I decided to linger in low sec ratting at a gate. That 1 neutral frigate in low sec was the entire sum total of what I ran into during those 56 jumps through 0.0 and low sec.

Tired but amused, I dock at the high sec base and call it a night.

Looking forward to Moondoggie

In the blog "The second coming of Moondoggie" CCP Pleognost (how does one pronounce that?) explains that the old in game browser is getting a bit of an upgrade. If by upgrade you mean being ripped out and replaced. It's an older devblog but I'm bringing it up now since the first tests of it are now up on Sisi. My friend Cozmik R5 was able to start a blog entry from within the game. Others were able to post on the EVE-O forums from within the eve client.

Since this is based on google's Chrome browser development kit, it should allow our in-game browsing experience to significantly improve. This will allow us all to browse the internet in it's entirety from withing the EVE client. The thought I suddenly had was: humm, with Google Docs this means that a spreadsheet could be run from within EVE. I'm wondering if with web services and what not that the item data from CCP is usable from within a spreadsheet? Or if with Cosmos, this data will become accessible in this fashion. Should it become so, I can forsee some rather interesting spreadsheets developing, and being totally usable from withing EVE. Now all we need is some form of "skin" for an online spreadsheet browser and all of a sudden we'll have a truly immersible experience on the industrial front.

I know the combat bunnies will be going "so what" but all the production dudes are going "oooo yeah!". Ah EVE you are such a multiple personality beast. So the only MMO with an in-game calculator will finally have an in-game spreadsheet capability. Now all we need is some light weight accounting software to make our alliance management tasks easier and we'll be all set.

Caffeine please

Sunday morning got me up a little early. Seems to be the same for various of my pilots. Much caffeine was called for. Amusing anecdotes about pilots reporting that they shocked their significant others "I can never get you up this early on a Sunday but you do it for a game???". This says more about the level of hate carebears have for griefers than it does about Sunday morning sleeping habits I think.

At any rate scouting revealed that the enemy had discovered our little present. After an aborted attempt to repair things (which mirrored their aborted attempt to put the alt corp POS into reinforced), they proceeded to evacuate what they could. Since my pilots were still waking up, we held off from trying to interrupt this. No reason to screw up an already fairly successful operation and we stuck to our plan. A much smaller fleet (only 17 at high water mark) went into action on schedule and we rolled in on their POS for the second time.

Took out the small gun they managed to online (we had ignored an offline gun the night before). And settled in to bash away and wait to see if they would try and oppose us in any way. Turns out not. The only organized oposition we encountered was some obviously beyond bored BNC (yes that ex-BoB corp that was involved in the downfall of BoB) pilots that came by in their stealth bombers. Guys, really, what were you thinking? You almost lost that SB and you barely dented that cruisers shields... Would someone mention to these guys that SB's changed a few patches ago? They are no longer the cruise missile spamming frigate and cruiser killers of yore.

The traffic situation is interesting in Tabbetzur. It's one of the low sec pipes used by russian alliances and there were plenty of occasional Russian pilots flying by. We didn't bother them, they didn't bother us. But we could tell by the people popping in and out of local that there was curiosity as to our doings.

Sure enough after a while down went the tower. We swooped in and offlined all 7 modules we could. Turns out that the 20minute ones are longer than the global criminal flag we had. How convenient. There was also a 1h offline time for a medium intensive refining array. Basically I made the decision that when the last module except the refining array was picked up we would make our way to high sec and call the op. If one of the pilots wanted to snag that last module they could (the corp hangar array, ship maintenance array, mobile lab, and various assembly arrays and that stasis webifier battery were sufficient for us I figured, no reason to get greedy). The op ended up with one tower kill, and about 300mil of modules picked up for the loss of two cyno boats. Once again the lack of fight in these enemies puts them fairly and squarely in the griefer class and I slept better than ever Sunday night.

The most hillarious part of this op was witnessed after I had logged off to get on with my day. One of the scout pilots had slapped together an Itty II with a cloak in hopes of waiting out the remaining 40min on the refinery array. I figured he would not be able to get it - low sec being low sec but hey might be worth the chance. Turns out I was right. Soon after we left apparently word went out all over local low sec that we were gone. Soon enough my scout ended up being entertained by various pirate corps fighting over the 42.5mil refinery array. Final losses were one blockade runner and a Phobos(I'd love to see the kill mails on those). I'm not even sure if anyone ended up with the refinery array. I am reminded of two packs of hyenas squabbling over the remains of a lion kill after the lions have moved away. My scout lost his itty 2 to a gate camp on the way back to high sec, but figures the entertainment value of watching the pirates kill each other over the array and the incapacitated batteries was more than well worth it (the dude was killing himself laughing apparently).

I finished my weekend mining over 10k of Arkonor in wormhole space. All in all a pretty satisfying weekend. No cap losses, the cap pilots got to shot things, everyone had fun and we don't have to call any Monday evening ops.

o.O we HAVE capitals?

Resuming the story. The dis-satisfying end to the festivities of the previous weekend had my CEOs and my PvP'ers talking. And there was the fact we had discovered a non-high sec vulnerability of this griefer corp. They were kind enough to lead us to their low sec POS at one point during this aborted war. It turned out to be a badly fitted medium tower (2 cruise missile launcher modules were part of this medium Minmatar tower).

Lets see, they rebuff all diplomatic contact and they drop the war they started like a hot potato. It is evident that all they want to do is play high sec griefing games where they pick on one or two man corps with towers in high sec. It's like dangling chum above the shark tank. Regardless of the fact that I've got a decent proportion of carebears, these are the type of guys carebears want to kill more than the PvP guys do (Makes my life easy when EVERYONE wants to kick these guys in the nuts).

So we decided that going to visit the low sec POS and apply a little of the lessons we've been learning in the various wormhole POS bashes we've gotten under our belts. The only question in my mind was whether to war dec these guys or just take the sec hit and pull a surprise assault on their POS. Once it was decided that it was a go, we only used un-affiliated newbie alts to make sure they didn't take down the tower. The initial plan was to do a surprise attack on Friday night (they seemed to be more euro time zone), with the plan that if we timed it right the tower would come out of reinforced for Sunday evening.

And that's when the capitals started coming out of the wood work. Don't get me wrong, but with our concentration on wormhole operations, capital ships are not a big part of alliance planning. And it turns out that quite a few pilots had carriers and dreads stashed away in secret low sec pockets. The opportunity to dust of the ships and actually get some use out of them proved very telling. With a week to prepare I was sure my pilots would be ready when the day came.

Well things got re-scheduled a bit when it turned out that Saturday night would be better for the capital pilots. I was a little worried about this since conventional wisdom would put the fight for the tower on Monday evening but went with it anyways since I wasn't primary FC for this one.

So late Saturday night rolled around and we got things underway. All the capitals that were going to support the assault managed to get within jump range of Tabbetzur and as the last capital got itself into position and the BS heavy main fleet was gathered at our designated kick of point, we gave the green light and charged into a rather sparsely inhabited low sec area. 23 man fleet including 4 capitals and 2 members as pipe scouts with an emergency cyno alt went to town on the target POS. Really the sec hit was not that bad since I think all of us stayed positive and right before kick off, known enemy CEOs and Directors had logged off so the "put into reinforced" part of the operation went well... for the most part. We did loose one cyno alt's frigate to a gatecamp and due to a mixup on the pilots part a cyno main managed to loose his cyno stabber at the pos itself (was trying to dock up and switch to a combat BS from one of the carriers - but forgot that ships with non-ammo things in their cargo bay don't go in any more).

The actual cyno vessel at the POS was kept repped up and it's pilot was able to switch to a cov-ops and scouting duty soon after. So all in all not too bad for getting into position, although the rust was showing in places. A fairly concentrated assault allowed us to disable all the guns in canonical order (scram first, then all medium guns (only 3???) then the two missile launchers then the small guns last - leave the web it might actually help someone warp out faster).

The 1st phase ended up totally un-opposed. And apparently my scout reported that the local pirates consider a 23 man fleet to be a "blob"... ok ... yea ... right ... if it makes you feel better...

The biggest surprise was finding out that our nice opponents only put 6h of stront in their tower o.O

"Ok, phase 2 of this op will resume one hour after downtime tomorow, the enemy will have one hour after it comes out of reinforced to do something but we need our sleep."

And a week ago.

Ok, so I haven't been posting a lot lately. Part of that was due to real life part of that due to opsec. It is kind of hard to post about something that may give a clue that we're about to lower the hammer on some idiots. Just in case those idiots are following my blog for intel purposes. As an alliance leader I sometimes have to walk a fine line between letting you guys know about various aspects of life in EVE and operational security to make sure that any surprise we may be whipping up is still a surprise when we execute.

So, at the start of the weekend of the 2nd week of alliance tournament VII, one of my CEOs comes to me and tells me his high sec research corp just got war-dec'ed. Some scouting and intel dump later and "yep, have your corp apply to the alliance - it probably wont' be exciting but things should work out".

Apparently he attempted to talk to the leader and diplomat of the attacking corp, but was simply rebuffed by having his conversations shut down. How rude. So this 24 man corp doesn't realize it but it's just picked on a research tower associated with a wormhole alliance...

So as per policy, what can be shutdown is and the tower is gunned up. The alt research corp applies to the alliance and we settle in to wait for the war to go live first then for the alliance to get sucked into it second.

Phase one of this little jaunt into "Diplomacy and scouting are important in EVE" starts off with a weekend of some of my pilots engineering sneaky kills off these guys, and them damaging the shields and some of the guns at the tower. Note that they are unable to place the small tower into reinforced even during the 6-8h where the alliance could not help to it's full effect (this qualifies as FAIL - as we've seen in wormhole ops, small towers are easy to crack open if you know what you are doing - even when opposed.

Once the alliance joined the war (gotta love inheriting wars on the cheap), what followed were station games and not a lot of conclusive action except for one of my pilots loosing a Megathron to the lack of a headset and the EVE server going down on Saturday.

During this period, at one point the (by then) wartargets split from the area were they were attacking our tower. Judicious use of the locator agents managed to allow us to localize them where they settled down. Humm, Tabbetzur... Some scouting revealed that they had a low sec POS in that system (Thank you guys for leading us straight to your POS).

By this time it was pretty evident that these guys are basically high sec griefers. They amuse themselves by war-decking defenseless research corps and get their shits and giggles with station games. By the end of the weekend the wardec had expired and the PvP was predictably lackluster.

to be continued...

Congratz PL

Pandemic Legion won the 7th Alliance tournament this weekend. AMC would like to congratulate them on a well deserved victory. The final itself, although not the most exciting of the PL fights was still a showcase for how to use outside the box setups. They also prove conclusively that the Caldari tankfest is not the way to win the alliance tournament.

Jaw - Meet floor

To echo Kirith:

Woah!

Finaly some meat!

Although I am committed to getting deeper into wormhole space, that does not mean I don't follow the developments with regards to sovereignty that are upcoming in the November expansion. This week saw the quick fire of two separate blogs. The first one was pretty much a detailed mission statement from CCP laying out where they see the problems are and the large lines of what they want to do to fix the situation.

As can be expected there were immediately 3 voices in the comment thread that followed. Please note that it is worth going into that thread for the dev answers to questions. The first is the applause. Anyone who doesn't like the current sovereignty system is looking forward to the changes, no matter how radical and would be cheering from the sidelines even if it was abolished entirely.

Then there are those who are worried that their ship specializations will be affected (dread pilots worry that they won't have anything to shoot at). Or those crazed individuals that actually like the current system.

The most vocal however are those that go "ok yep, speaking to the converted. Where's the meat???". These people want details and they want them yesterday (probably so they can try to manipulate the market but hey - that's EVE). It's like watching someone throw chum into the shark tank.

However this was quickly followed by the first piece of "meat". Upcoming capital and supercapital changes. The immediately following blog went into gooey details about the upcoming changes.

Titans are getting directed single shot weapons. Apparently they will be "serious damage" weapons and "instant obliteration" for sub-cap ships. Major HP increase as well. The other change is mother ships. They are getting a much more defined role. They are also getting a new drone type to play with: Fighter Bombers. These are like anti-capital versions of fighters that are only useable by supercarriers. Interestingly it was confirmed later in the thread that they won't be assignable. This means supercarriers will need to be "on grid" in order to use them. They are also loosing their clone vat bays, triage mode and gang link bonuses.

Carriers will see the introduction of fighter and fighter bomber bays. This will control the massive drone proliferation in typical carrier deployment (take a look at the number of normal drones on a typical carrier loss mail). Dreadnoughts will see very little change (mainly the Moros with the loss of it's drone bonus outside of siege mode and possibly a re-balancing of it's main weaponry as a consequence).

I think I see the intent here. Carriers are meant to be major roaming fleet support (changes in triage cycle times and costs support this). Dreadnoughts are meant to be anti-intallation/anti-capital primary units. Titans and Supercarriers are meant to be capital fleet busters (with their higher than normal anti-capital firepower).

It's interesting that supercapitals will now need to be on-grid in order to use their firepower (much like dreadnoughts) leaving the lowly carrier as the only ship in eve able to project it's power beyond the current grid (by assigning fighters).

I suspect these changes will be hotly debated on the forums and tested on Sisi when they hit that server. For those of us not directly affected, the verbal fireworks should prove entertaining.

o.O

All the plans of mice and men and all that. Since my last post, I made some decisions about what I needed to do. Namely get a list of ships and POS modules and BPOs I feel I need to get in place in order to get back in the saddle again.

The biggest immediate move is to get my PvE Cyclone out of storage and get it prepped for wormhole work again. The next is to get a mix of PvP cruiser sized ships ready (both T1 and T2 equipped). I really need to get working on those frontier grav and ladar sites in order to get the isk rolling again. I've also decided that the high sec manufacturing plant is diverting too much of my attention from going after sites and working with others so that's getting closed down.

So I'm in the middle of planning and starting to move things around in order to get things straightened out when...

Some high sec greifer corp war-dec one of the alliances high sec alt research corps. Brilliant move. So my plans get put asside for a weekend of real life interfering with PvP. Wonderful fun. So my weekend happened in snap shots. Stories about various engagements both before and after the alt corp joined the alliance. The almost instant dropping of the original war deck as the greifer corp suddenly realized they chewed off more than they could handle. Using locator agents to find out where these guys fly to. Locating their low sec POS. Getting my battery typhoon setup.

As you all know we're a mixed bag of pilots in my alliance. Some serious experience and a mix of mid-life and newbie pilots. The sad truth is that we tend to have more Osprey pilots than Basilisk. Shield repping a POS with mostly normal fit ospreys is enough to drive most pilots insane. There is however a trick. Refit the ospreys with 3 large and 1 medium shield transport modules (or three large or two large and two medium if your skills are not quite there yet fit wise - yes you will need CPU modules). Then fit out a BS with as many Large Remote Energy Transfer modules as you can conceivably perma-run. (Cap Recharger II and PSU II and Egress Port Maximizers as I recall). Setup correctly you can keep one osprey powered per pair of energy transfer mods. Each osprey effectively becomes half a Basilisk (there are known fits where a fully skilled Basilisk pilot can permarun 6 large shield transporters). Which is much better than a bunch of medium shield transporter Ospreys trying to rep a POS.

So by today all wardecs are over and I can get back to getting shit put in order. Fun Fun.

Loki down!

Well, I got overconfident with some sleepers in my Loki and it paid the price. *sigh*. Ah EVE you are a cruel mistress. Good thing I snagged that Loki BPC as part of the share auction. I'll be able to build myself a 2nd Loki soon enough. Damn that smarts though.

And put a fork in the T3 Project

Holy crap do I feel light now. Pretty much since the start of Apocrypha our alliance formed a project to go and manage our T3 resource collection and manufacturing since a) we weren't rich and b) we needed to build up the skills to manufacture T3. Last week I decided that the project had outlived it's usefulness and it was time to close it down.

We proceeded to a resource auction amongst the shareholders. Out of 59 shareholders 11 participated in the auction and 9 different bidders won their bids. Anything not bid on (there was a minimum bid) simply got dumped in Jita. About 400mil worth of "stuff" (mostly salvage and some gasses) hit the markets in Jita on Sunday night. The rest of the resources (polymers, BPCs with about 600 runs of assorted subsystems and 13 hull runs, Melted Nanoribbons, Some left over subsystems) got distributed to the shareholders who bid on them. I managed to pick up the last Loki run (woot!).

On Monday I distributed the isk that was still in the project so the shareholders got 9.9bil isk split between them. This concluded the shutdown of the Project. As the biggest shareholder said "well one less thing to worry about". Man you have no idea.

Well I'm not running something like that again. It was a good experience though and did allow us to get plenty of pilots in the alliance into T3 ships (they are sweet). Now of course we've still got plenty of T3 manufacturing experience so we'll be able to continue with the T3 manufacturing within the alliance but now it'll be up to the individual manufacturers to do their thing.

This should free up my time to both address Alliance level issues and corp level issues. I think I'm about to go on a recruiting spree in a few days looking for mid and experienced SP pilots for serious wormhole work. Based on my experience so far here's what I'll essentially be looking for:

• Able to fly serious BC (i.e. Full T2), HAC, SC, BS (for later plans). Those are pretty much what you need to go after the deeper sleeper sites.
  
• PvE/PvP pilots. I.e. no PvP only and no PvE only pilots. Must be able/want to do both. I'm finding the pure PvP'ers aren't getting the steady PvP they crave and this is proving to be problematic at the alliance morale level for these pilots. The pure PvE guys on the other hand are just as useless as we need them to be able to switch over to PvP footing once an intrusion happens. Wormhole environment point against PvE only pilots who can't pull their weight in combat.
  
• Self starters. Look this is mostly small gang work on both the PvE and the PvP side. This means that individual pilot initiative is necessary. The "Feed Me" types will get booted pretty quick. The "I'm bored" types because they are only looking for one experience won't be happy with wormhole life. If not enough people are around for going after hard sites, then the ability to go after alternate sites is almost a requirement.
  
• Scanning skills are a must (not necessarily cov-ops but at least able to use cloaks would be good).
  
• Lower SP pilots are not what I'll be looking for in the short term. Sorry guys but until I have a core of good Mid to high range SP guys to quarterback deeper wormhole work there wont' be enough pilots to support the lower SP ones. Once I have my corp up to the size that can go setup and operate in a constant class 3-4 environment with occasional class 5-6 work and have some good people who could run a class 1-2 teaching section THEN it'll be time to work on recruiting lower SP pilots.
• Audio a must - I'll no longer be supporting any pilots that can't get on audio. No excuses.
  

However it'll be a few days before I'm ready to start recruiting actively. I need to hammer out some plans and some corp rules and what not and get it seriously sorted out as well as come up with an overall alliance plan now that the T3 project is wound down. Clean out the dead wood. Ah the leadership fun stuff.

On the personal front I'm going to finish up getting reverse engineering up to snuff and I'll finally be able to a-z a T3 ship. I just need to get the Reverse Engineering and the 5 Subsystem Technology skills to 4 and that will be good to go. I finally finished getting Recon IV and Heavy Assault Ship IV, so once the Reverse Engineering is in place it'll be a question of getting back to core skills (gah I'm lagging on some rather necessary skills there) and some tank and T2 weapons skills (need to get my missile/rocket skills up).

I'll also be able to concentrate on making some iskies and building myself a 2nd Loki and getting my stable of ships sorted out. Getting a few last modules for my POS. Sorting out the logistics of what needs to move where. Etc... Ah the fun of organization in EVE.

The difference

This battle report will demonstrate the difference between experienced wormhole inhabitants and people who are new to the wormhole scene.

First of all a tactical lay out:

We have BBW which is connected to a class 4 and a class 2
The class 2 is connected to an inhabited class 2 and low sec (over in metropolis - fairly uninhabited near nein)
The class 4 is connected to some other system not relevant to our discussion.

How it all starts.

I get on late and after nailing all the sites in BBW's location using my cov-ops I decide to check out what's in the class 2. Not much but it's un-inhabited and has a mag and a grav site along with 3 combat sites.

I switch to my Loki and call Apis Java (one of my pilots) over in a salvager to clean up after my kills since it's inefficient to keep going back and forth to switch ships all the time, and extra eyes on the d-scanner are always welcome.

I quickly kill off the grav site rats so Apis can get to work while I head for the mag site and start killing it (Forgotten Frontier Gateway for the curious). I"m into the last wave when Apis says "We dont' have an Arazu do we?". And I hit d-scan and sure enough there are combat probes out. "nope get out, get out, get out". And I abandon killing the frigate I was on and warp to the wormhole to BBW. Note that I have been hitting the D-scan regularly as well, but combat can be distracting and two eyes are better than one. Score one for our side - an experienced low SP pilot with plenty of wormhole time under his belt makes sure that we collectively don't end up on the wrong side of the killboard.

Now at this point we're headed back to the our POS. Someother alliance pilots are either kicking in BBW or in that unknown class wormhole on the other side of the class 4. I advise them that PvP potentially may materialize, and the Arazu jumps in to BBW just as Apis is warping from the wormhole to our POS.

At this point I switch ships to my cov-ops while forces gather. Getting back to the wormhole I have the Arazu on scan but he disapears before I can get eyes on him - either cloaked or jumped back. Note that the odds are he would not have spotted my Cheetah since I had cloaked up on warping off and the wormhole is out of scan range of the POS. When I get on grid (but not on the WH obviously) , I ask around to see if anyone sees probes. The answer comes back negative from all pilots spread around BBW and forces warp to me as I move off plane and closer to the wormhole. Rather quickly an Ishtar and a Vagabond as well as a Harpy and a Rifter (Apis) start showing up on our side of the hole. I then zip back into the class 2.

Well well well well... "Proteus on scan" with core probes out (not necessarily his but still). My immediate thought is that he's going for the site that I had not completed. So I warped cloaked to it and keep hitting the d-scan for intel. At this point I notice that he's got Hammerhead II's out, still no sight of the Arazu and he has not apeared at the site I was working (incidentally I get confirmation that Apis had gotten all the salvage/loot from the grav site kills). I notice an increase in wreck count. Humm ok they chase us off and go for combat sites? *shrug* what the heck...

I hit the onboard scanner and get the 3 combat sites that are in system on my scanner. I then get lucky and warp (cloaked of course) to the first one and there he is: a nice shiny new Proteus killing sleepers... Needless to say even with an Arazu in the area the PvP is on. This is where some aggressive cov-ops piloting and some patience on the part of the 4 other pilots (who did not jump into the class 2 yet) pays off. Since he's occupied and I haven't deployed probes he's unaware of the stalk. I did have time to observe his speed - 482m/s - humm AB fit obviously. I get to within 7km while keeping my LOS clear of any missed missiles and making sure I'm on opposite sides of the target from our wormhole connection.

"Jump Jump, warp at 10 to Letrange, Jump Jump warp at 10 to Letrange". Sure enough my boys all land about 8-10k from the target. Rather rapidly all 4 of our ships lay tackle and the fight for the Proteus is on while I keep an eye out on the d-scan and get a bit of separation from the fight.

He's got a good tank but we manage to kill him before any of his friends show up. Once he's dead I tell the frigates to get out of dodge since there are still sleepers there and we've been lucky and have no losses yet. While they get out of dodge, as we're looting the Proteus a Rapier shows up and the Vagabond and the Ishtar get out (the Rapier only managed to get a web on - not a point). As my buddies head towards our wormhole, an Astarte and a Raven also show up.

At this point we decide that since we don't have more reinforcements and there's still the Arazu kicking around, we might as well head back and relax at our respective POS's. After some rather elated banter in voice I log off for the night.

The end result: One rather fail fit Proteus kill on the right side of the kill board, no losses on the wrong side. We did abandon the mag site but can't have everything.

The difference: Turns out after a conversation between the Proteus pilot and the AMC pilot that got the kill mail that this was one of the first wormhole experiences for the Proteus pilot. You'll notice the difference in reactions and situational awareness. We spotted the opponents and reacted correctly, Switched to scout/pvp ships and went on the offensive (never just hole up in a POS - at the very least get in scout ships and scout aggressively). The enemy was fat and lazy and assumed that just chasing us off would allow them to go after sleepers in peace. They then had the gall not to keep an eye out for us. Neither stationing observers nor slamming the d-scan.

I once again prove that the Cheetah is the ship I have the most skill in (kind of embarrassing that the alliance leader engineers these types of kills but never shows up on the KB but oh well it's about presenting targets gift wrapped to the combat pilots, not about getting on the killboard). And I once again prove that situational awareness is key in wormhole operations. Also the flexibility to change from PvE to PvP at the drop of a pin. Even on defense aggressive scouting helps. It gets you intel you need to make intelligent decisions and make sure you're not a quivering pile of goo behind your POS shields.

Quick peek on the test server thread

With the auction of T3 resources started within the alliance I have a little free time to check things out. So I wander over to eve-o's forums and check out the test server threads to see if there's anything interesting...

Woah, the proposed changes to navy ships is up. All Navy Faction Frigates and Navy Tier 2 BS are getting reviewed. And for those out there who wanted navy Tier 1 BS, they are on their way with Dominion. Navy Typhoon anyone? Navy Dominix? There was much droolage.

The Typhoon Fleet Issue was especially drool worthy:

Typhoon Fleet Issue:

• Slot layout: 8 high, 4 med, 7 low, 5 turrets, 5 launchers
• Fittings: 660 CPU, 13125 powergrid, 350 calibration, 3 rig slots
• Hitpoints: +50% hit points on hull (9316), armor (9316) and shields (8203)*
• Dronebay increased by 25m3, bandwidth unchanged
• Speed: +10% max velocity and agility increased by 10%
• Sensor: +25% ladar sensor strength

* Standard Typhoon armor and shield values have been swapped as well

I don't know about you but 200m3 of drones, swapped and +50% shields and armor, 5/5 split and speed, maneuverability and sensor boost? Someone put a bucket under all the typhoon pilots they know. The biggest problem I can see is that they are FW LP only. And they need a lot of LP. But either way - woah! That is going to be one tasty BS.

Closing down the alliance wide T3 project

Well it's outlived it's usefulness and it's become a major time sink and drag personally so I've decided to close down the alliance level T3 project. This does not mean that we'll be leaving wormhole space any time soon, but on the other hand it will free up my play time to you know go kill things and mine things.

All in all it's been an interesting experiment. Next time I do something this big I'll be splitting it up between various people much better. Now to go split up those billions of isk in resources and T3 BPCs and billions of isk between the various shareholders.

This means that various T3 manufacturers in the alliance will be able to go and plan their own manufacturing plans at their own pace and I won't be a bottle neck controlling things any longer. It also means I will be able to concentrate on such things as my sadly neglected corp and things like that.

For myself personally I'll be getting the T3 Reverse engineering skills at some point soon and be able to generate my own BPCs from relics soon enough. Then it'll be on to ship and combat skills for quite a while over winter.

Heavy Assault Ships 4 finishes soon.

EVE Dominion

Well, the next EVE expansion is locked, loaded and coming down the pipes like a freight train. Info on the ground is sparse at this point in time. What little is known is that THIS expansion will be the great big sovereignty revamp.

For the less "in tune" with EVE or those who are eyeball deep in ROI spreadsheets, this will affect the 13% of EVE that lives permanently in 0.0. And by implications the repercussions and speculative investment will echo off of Jita like a tsunami.

In theory this should be the great big shift from POS carpet bombing to some form of gate/planet control mechanism for system/constellation/region control. The details are for the moment being kept close to CCP's chest but since they promise extensive testing (on Sisi) we should have quite a good idea what will be involved when this hits Tranquility. I will note that if POS'es are not being used for Sovereignty then this could have a crash effect on the ice mining market. Time will tell.

This will not stop either the howls of anguish and glee from erupting in CAOD. Batten down the hatches, incoming MIRV nuclear drama bomb on the way.