Ghosts And Stuff

Last night I got to fly a Hound and actually participate in a bombing run! I’ve been a bit enthralled with stealth bombers ever since I saw the ship class in game. That curiosity grew even more when I heard a Declarations of War episode featuring a guy from Dirt Nap Squad. (For those of you unfamiliar with DNS, they are a group that specialize in all things cloaky.) As I remember, he was on the podcast while simultaneously leading a black ops drop. It was pretty funny when he would hit the wrong PTT button and you would get a giant string of expletives at a random corp member.

While I had been curious, I’d always been told that bombers weren’t that useful in game and so I mainly trained my gun skills and the standard alphafleet ships even though quite literally the only skill I missed for flying a Hound was bomb deployment I. So last night, I was playing some Deus Ex: HR (amazing game btw) and get a broadcast over jabber that some bombing stuff was going down. I immediately bought bomb deployment and trained it to level I. The training finished just as we got into the target system. Along the way I quickly read a couple of bombing guides to refresh my mind with the proper techniques. Once in the target system, I quickly loaded up an electron bomb, cloaked, got about 35 off the gate and waited.  While the bombers were doing this, a main fleet was trying to get an IRC gang to engage us. Unfortunately,there was a massive fuck up with mumble going down and the FC of our main fleet got DC’d. The FC of the bomber squad had to then command both fleets at the same time. Needless to say, the situation got sticky for main fleet. We had quite a few hurricanes die, but eventually the IRC gang jumped onto the gate that the bombers were camping. As soon as they landed, we launched bombs and GTFO. Unfortunately, in all the excitement I forgot the most important part of launching a bomb; pointing at the target. I had hit align, but didn’t wait long enough before I launched my bomb. As soon as I’d launched it, I warped out and cloaked at a safe. I was pretty pissed that I couldn’t Use My Erection (Parts 1 & 2) to get some kills, but I will be all the better next time. Another mistake I made was not bringing any torps with me. I was so concerned about the bombs that I totally skipped putting them in my bay, again I won’t make that mistake again.

After my failed attempt at bombing, I went back to some DX only to have another Jabber broadcast go out saying that there were PL supers tackled and to bring neuting canes to the fight. I got in fleet and we quickly took a titan bridge to the target system where we found and Avatar. We pounded it into 10% armor, but lost all of our dictors so it warped off. :rage: After the Avatar left, we got some more points in system and ended up taking down 6 carriers. After poking around, someone found a PL Nyx that had drifted out of POS shields. He wasn’t outside of those shields too long.  We’d heard his cries to get back to station and answered by popping his pod. I’m sure he’s thrilled now.

All in all, it was one helluva night. Fights and experiences like that help keep the game fresh for me and I was sorely needing that. So what’s the moral or this story? Get a jabber server and use it for broadcasting.

This song helped me stay so lucid during the fighting.

Fly safe gentlemen.

I have an annuity, but I need cash now!

I logged onto Skerrit Boy’s alliance TS server just to shit it up a little bit while playing some TF2. The head of our alliance, PyroTech03, was on and we chatted for a while about the direction for the alliance and some ideas for easy people people into small gang stuff. For the most part, the US TZ guys of the alliance are all for doing some small gang stuff and are interesting in ship fittings etc. Anyway, I gave pyro some advice on hybrids and just some general fitting guidelines for them. After about 30 minutes of being complete shit at Tf2, I logged into Eve with some hopes of taking some guys out on a lowsec roam. After an hour or so, a couple of us had decided to roll out in some frigates and a cruiser. We had met in Jita to fit our ships, the headed out to the metroplis region via perimeter and Rancer. Going into Rancer, I knew that The United would be camping the gate and I jumped in to scout the gate for the other two guys. On the other side of the gate there was a gate camp of about 10 guys from united. I warped away quickly  to a celestial talked over what to do with my two other fleetmates. It was decided that our caracel would die if he jumped through, so we were going to find a way around. I warped back to the gate that had the camp at 0 and mid warp assigned that gate as my first waypoint and turned on autopilot so that I could jump through immediately. I must have actually turned on autopilot because the next thing I knew, my merlin and pod were gone. I was mostly embarrased because I was supposed to be the more “experienced” PvPer of the three and I made a silly mistake. I had to log quickly after because my wife got home, but I’m determined to get back into the swing of lowsec small gang stuff. It’s not an issue of ignorance, its an issue of practise. More to come friends.

Scratching Ze Head

Last night I logged on to fit my destroyer for some frigate killing fun. I threw some 260 Arties on it with sensor boosters and some tracking rigs thinking that I would blast some lvl 2 NPC’s from like 30km out. I was completely wrong. I jumped into an L2Q3 mission that was a simple search and destroy mission. There were 10 or so “Merlin” frigs that appeared and I wasn’t too afeared as I have gunnery level 5 and several other support skills. The flaw in my thinking was that I am only a level 2 in Arty skills. Hmmm…. Needless to say, I got pounded from 20km by the merlin’s missiles while completely missing with my guns. I warped out and decided to just jump into the stabber that I’ve got since it’s tank significantly higher. It’s fit with 220 AC’s so it shouldn’t be a problem right? (My medium AC skills are level 4) Anyway, I got blasted in that too! I could only chuckle at how pathetic it was. I never got into structure, but I didn’t kill any of them.

After my mission fail, I joined a E-Uni class on tackling. I listened to all of the “lecture” section, before jetting the class. I didn’t really learn anything that I didn’t know already, but I never felt like it was a waste of time. I need some PVP. Need it.