Crime & Punishment

Pandemic Horde had been fighting our Deklein neighbours, Darkness, on and off for a few hours. They eventually brought out their capitals and our leadership thought we should respond in kind. A ping went out to the capital group while I was a dozen jumps in the wrong direction, trying to terrorise locals in my Svipul. I had found a fight with a solo TEST Drake but he was cheating with a Rapid Light fit that nearly killed me. Of course I forgot to take my Blue Pill and didn’t have the right ammunition loaded, but by the time I had corrected these faults he was nowhere to be found. It is a pity - I would have liked a rematch.

Anyway, as I was saying, a ping went out. I docked at a friendly citadel and jumped to my clone in O1Y. At first, I was quite disappointed because shortly after that we were told that our capitals would not be required after all. So I hopped into an Osprey and joined the logi channel. However, a few minutes later a fresh call went out and I decided to abandon my logi bros and return to my Moros. I wanted to play with my capital ship, dammit!

I was soon sitting in the dreadnought, safely tethered on a Fortizar undock and awaiting instructions. The call came and we were soon on the field, watching 150 Hordelings pounding two Apostle Force Auxiliaries. These support capitals have enormous local tanks and the subcap fleet of Feroxes was not able to break them. That quickly changed with the arrival of the dreadnoughts.

I will describe how it went for those of you who have not done much capital fighting. First, we were told to “go siege green”. This meant that we were supposed to turn on our siege modules. Surprisingly, I had remembered to pack the Strontium Clathrates which the module uses as fuel. Siege modules greatly improve dreadnought local reps, damage and e-war resistance, basically turning a dread from a good battleship into a super DPS machine. The drawback of these modules, however, is that they disable all forms of propulsion, including jump drives. You are stuck there for 5 minutes.

We entered siege and turned our guns against the Apostles who quickly melted under the added fire-power. We were then told, rather urgently I thought, to go “siege red”, meaning that we needed to deactivate the siege modules so they did not automatically cycle again. We still had 2-3 minutes to wait before we could make our departure so we spent the time shooting the Darkness Proteus fleet which was dying at a positively alarming rate in the absence of their logi support. Of course, the dreadnought guns (not high angle) had practically zero chance of hitting the cruisers but killboards are killboards and it is nice to have a record of your deeds.

The urgency with which we were instructed to go “siege red” was prompted by the imminent arrival of a White Legion fleet. This would not be good news for any capitals who remained on the field. So we waited, not particularly patiently, for our siege cycles to end and our capacitors to get above 71%. Finally! Just as the first White Legion pilot entered the system I jumped to the out cyno who was safely tucked up next to the O1Y citadel. I even remembered isotopes for the jump drive!

Apostle 1: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54663727/

Apostle 2: https://zkillboard.com/kill/54663732/

On a side note, I have decided that the Moros is not the best ship for this sort of thing. It has good tracking but appallingly short range. I reckon it would probably work pretty well against big subcaps with the new high angle weapons but for hitting capitals I think I want a different dreadnought. Or maybe I just need to get T2 guns and Barrage and remember the optimal range script for my tracking computer.

I built a capital ship! Actually, I built five of them and counting. Capital production is usually done with great planning and careful preparation. This time, however, it was done Zappity-style, and that means it was done pretty much by accident.

I had a problem with tritanium and pyerite. It was a large problem. Enormous, in fact. I had accumulated so much of the stuff that I couldn't possibly use it all. The buyback program had developed spectacularly well and was now turning over between 50 and 60B per week. A proportion of this, of course, was mining products. Ore can be compressed 100-fold which, as far as I am concerned, is its only redeeming quality. I had become quite proficient at compressing and refining with Innocent Scout having wearily plodded through the reprocessing skills.

The magnitude of the problem was magnified once I discovered module reprocessing. I had become far more familiar with ratting loot than I had ever intended, with most of my previous trading focusing on more valuable faction and T2 items. I had been perfectly content to ignore the lower end of the market. Now that I was selling huge quantities of these things, however, I began to notice things.

First, HIC points and stasis grapplers sold tremendously well in their hundreds. They barely hit the market before they were snaffled up. I was puzzled because the killboards surely did not contain sufficient destruction of these items to account for the volumes. I pondered whether it was simply a case of traders moving stacks between themselves in an endless cycle. But the truth became apparent when I checked what reprocessing such items would yield in terms of minerals. Reprocessing them was worth considerably more than selling them! And they said gun-mining was dead!

I soon had a script that calculated the value of minerals from reprocessing vs both buy and sell price of each item I possessed at Jita. For a few days I painstakingly separated my meta items into two stacks (reprocess and sell) but then I realised that it took far too much work and ended up just reprocessing almost all T1 modules. Here is the result of a typical reprocessing run:

Reprocess all the things: http://i.imgur.com/vRaKugu.png

Of course, this resulted in simply gigantic quantities of minerals. I rapidly saturated the local market with locally-produced destroyers, cruisers and battlecruisers and had soon also dominated the battleship market. It was nowhere near enough usage! So I looked at the next logical step: capital ships.

Unfortunately, capitals cannot simply be built with minerals. You first need to build capital components. So I began buying BPCs and, occasionally, BPOs when I spotted a cheap one. I also began buying carrier and dreadnought blueprints.

And so here we are. I currently have a Thanatos, Revelation and Moros in build and have enough components to build the next few. Of course, I also have enough minerals to build about another dozen of the wretched things and am now thinking about building Fortizars!

I was considering what should be done with the immense stockpile of minerals I had accrued from the buyback program when I found over 300 Capital Cargo Bays in a station deep in the mining constellation in Fade. I hadn't noticed them before. Unfortunately, these are far too large to efficiently transport by jump freighter so I decided to use them up instead by building capital industrial ships.

People had been complaining that there were no Orcas for sale in the region so I built a few of them first. Naturally, they didn't sell. Then, mostly out of sheer bloody mindedness I put a bunch of Rorquals into the oven. The dire prognostications from the mining community regarding the rebalance (‘wtf fozzie ima not gonna go on grid who do you think you are’) was not comforting but I had confidence that the long-awaited changes would be enticing enough to soak up a mere ten additional hulls.

The other problem was pyerite. I had accumulated an enormous quantity of this hateful mineral as a result of the enormous popularity of bistot, an ore which is unfortunately rich in this substance. So I fired up my production queue again, this time with the purpose of making as much big stuff as possible. This soon led to a tritanium shortage (I had much more pyerite than tritanium) but this was overcome by purchasing compressed ore from Jita. A couple of dozen capital hulls later I had started to get on top of the pyerite problem, retaining a nice balance of minerals with which to respond to the upcoming industrial arrays.

And as for the Rorquals? They idled in station for a few days before the dev blog appeared. Then they all sold within 24 hours. People seem pretty happy with the changes!

After four months away I was finally home and de-jet-lagged. Time to PvP. I decided that an Incursus was the right ship for me. I needed to reconnect and get rid of the shakes.

I safely exited Jita and made my way toward the Cal/Gal warzone near my old stomping ground of Ishomilken. A couple of jumps out saw me in a system with two players with suspiciously similar names. They were piloting a Vexor and a Kestrel according to d-scan. I taunted them but they declined to fight. Actually, they just ignored me! Rude.

In the next system I found a Worm flitting between plexes, evidently looking for people to kill. I don’t like Worms. I remember that they were hideously overpowered the last time I did this sort of thing. But I wanted a fight.

I warped to his plex and sat on the acceleration gate until I thought he would have spotted me on d-scan. I then warped to the adjacent plex at 10 km. I wanted to catch him before he had the chance to kite-scrub me. Sure enough, he was soon on short scan. I overheated all the things and tackled him before he had a chance to run away.

I activated my repper a little too early and wasted the first cycle. Then all my armour disappeared and I was glad I didn’t have to wait long for the next cycle! The Worm hit REALLY hard. But his shield was disappearing pretty quickly, too. I guessed he was buffer fit and, sure enough, his armour disappeared in huge chunks. I was still repping hard when he entered structure and exploded. Ha!

Worm: https://zkillboard.com/kill/56936008/

I said ‘gf’ in local but he did not respond. Rude.

I went next door to Ishomilken and repaired my modules in the station. I undocked just in time to see an Epithal warp to a planet! Oh joy unbounded! I chased him and we landed at about the same time. Now, I am wary about Epithals, always suspicious that they are fitted with nasty warp core stabs. So I bumped him good with my afterburner while killing him slowly. He popped! Unfortunately, he had not yet gathered his planetary whatsits so the killmail was cheap. But he did indeed have stabs fit, so it was a moral victory.

Epithal: https://zkillboard.com/kill/56936202/

This.

THIS IS THE ONLY THING.

Everything else is nonsense.

Confirming Griffins; and Grif Navy's in particular, are The Devil.


TEH DEVIL.