Low Sec Forgetten? I think not!!!

Welcome to the twenty-first installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check for other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month topic comes to us from @ZoneGhost who a few month ago asked "Is Low Sec the forgotten part of EVE Online?" Is it? I'd like us to explore this even further. Is Low Sec being treated differently by CCP Games than Null Sec (Zero-Zero) or Empire space is? Can one successfully make a living in these unsecured systems where neither Alliance nor Concord roam to enforce their laws? What's needed? Or is everything fine as it is?

Lowsec is forgetten? Certainly not, it's just a place that everyone avoids. Too bad really, because lowsec is a really interesting place. Where else can you say you are truly living by your own wit? In High Sec, you have concord to help keep you safe. Sure you can still get killed, but concord makes killing you less desireable. Null sec is the very same situation, the only difference being CONCORD is a player entity with your corp's or alliance's name attached instead.

Want to learn how to be productive in low sec? I mean really productive, not just burning through case with a pirate, and making money with an alt to support your pirate habit. I mean do you want to learn to be productive and safe in the face of danger? Then run over to http://lowsec.org/, where the United Trade Syndicate (the low sec industrial and trade alliance), is publishing the information YOU need to operate safely and productively in Low Sec.

Fitting for Low Sec is Fitting for High Sec

As many High Sec residents are learning, High Sec by no means is an indication of safety. Sure High Sec is safer, because there is a less pronounced and less spontaneous PvP activity in high sec, but it is not safe. Nearly every high sec PvP victim is a result of fitting with the false expectation of safety.
So what does this mean for the everyday eve pilot? It means that no matter what you are doing, what task you are performing, or what ship you are flying that you fit and prepare for PvP. PvP does not necessarily mean fitting for in your face battle. It means fitting your ship so you can respond appropriately when under threat. In some cases this means fitting your ships for in your face pew pew, but it can also mean fitting your ship for evasion and being able to get out of dodge before it’s too late to get out.
I fit all my industrial type ships (Industrials, Exhumers, Orca) to be able to evade threats. My ships are fitted so that when flown properly, I can bust through gate camps without a scratch. My hulks are fitting to get to warp under 4 second. I also fit most of my ships with ECM or EW modules and a flight of ECM drones that will help me to escape in the unlikely event I do get snagged in a trap. No they don’t guarantee I will get away, but they grant me a dice roll 2nd and 3rd chance to get away.
My mission running and ratting ships are fitted pure ‘poke you in the eye’ PvP. They are not the most efficient for PvE, but when I get snagged, I am not sitting in a PvE ship, I am sitting in a PvP ship. This is something many aggressing PvPers are not counting on. They are counting on you to be fit like rib racks with those little chef hats on each tip, in other words, to die under their fire. However, you can turn the tables on them simply by being ready.
Another long term affect this would have, is if all pilots fit for PvP of one sort or the other (evasion or poke you in the eye), then aggressing PvPers at large will all think twice about your ship being simply a tasty morsel on the buffet table. Beyond your individual survivability, Eve as a whole will change for both the PvP and non-PvP playstyles. There will no longer be the jaded division between pirate and carebear, but the division will more equivocal. Yes it means PvPers will bring larger teams and fly solo less often, but that is good for you, because it means the roams will likely be more condensed, less profitable for the pirates, and therefore a less frequent encounter. Of course that only will happen with a paradigm shift of basic fitting styles at large.

Seriously? Seriously?

So I get a lot of crap flying my Orca through low sec. I mean, you know I pretty much have just converted the crap into tears which I collect just like any good pirate would if the circumstances were reversed, but seriously...

If I hadn't figured out how to fly industrial type ships out in low sec, then you Mr. Baddy Bad Pirate wouldn't have any targets except the occasional clueless newb and other pirates. Is that really what you want? Seriously?

Wouldn't you rather have some big juicy targets that are harder to catch, but a whole lot more valuable and a whole lot more frequent? I mean really, low sec is low sec, of course and that means we have to defend ourselves out there, not CONCORD to help us out in a bind or take retribution. I get that, but you seriously would rather I wasn't flying my Orca full of goodies around low sec, and you seriously don't want me to spread the word how? Seriously?

Low Sec Hulk

Yes that's right. After much thought and deliberation as well giving up time after time, I finally have come up with a low sec hardened Hulk setup. In fact I have two sets of fittings for different circumstances.

Due to the safer nature of the Orca setup, I  recommend moving hulks into, out of, and around low sec in the Orca's Ship Maintenance Hanger with the Hulk agility maxed. (2x T2 Istabs and 2x T2 Low Friction Nozzles). The agility fittings provide a 4 second align to warp which if you are on your toes is most likely safe and suitable for safe mining so long as you follow proper safe low sec mining protocols (bookmarks, distance from belts, etc). Not everyone can do this though, and so here I have two setups, the one briefly described above, and the one that follows.

The following setup is safe for busting through gate camps as all my low sec hauler setups are, but they have an additional training componenet to make the setup work; Thermodynamics. Overheating your Y-S8 Hydrocarbon After Burner gives you just enough boost to push you past the minimum 75% warp speed needed to go to warp as you decloak. It's tricky getting the fittings on, and it requires fill Engineering Skills training to make it possible.

Highs:  1x Improved Cloak II
Mid: 1x Y-S8 Hydrocarbon Afterburners
Lows: 2x Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
Rigs: 1x Low Friction Nozzle Joints II, 1x Ancillary Current Router II

How you chose to fit your other slots is up to you, maybe if you sprung a few more ISK for Micro 'Vigor' I Core Augmentation variation of the power core, you could give yourself even more power grid and fit some extra shields, ECM Bursts or whatever. I choose to fit for max evasion so anything that gives me an extra slice of time to get away, I fit it. That's shield extenders, ECM Burst, ECM Drones.

Now, the procedure. Although it's nearly identical to the Occator and Orca and just as those two ships have slightly different operating procedures, so does the Low Sec Hulk.
1. Align to warpout.
2. Overheat Mid Rack
3. Start Afterburner
4. Initiate Cloak
5. Turn of Afterburner
6. When AB is EXACTLY 75% complete, turn off cloak (this gives a half second of extra AB boost while decloaking before actual warpout occurs.
7.Immediately hit Warp.

This procedure is exact. It must be followed precisely to maintain invulnerabilty between decloaking and warping out. You will gain a few percent of AB boost between decloaking and when your AB cycles down, and that pushes just past the minimum warp velocity. Any deviation from 75% increases the amount of time while decloaked, and leaves you vulnerable.

I am very happy to present these Low Sec Hulk Fittings, and I hope you find them to be of good use.

Yours Truly,
Escoce


EDIT: For those of you who haven't thought about this yet, you can carry a third strip miner in your cargo hold, get to where you want to mine, dock up, refit stripper and Istabs. When done, redock refit Cloak and Power Cores and AB to move to next system. You are using bookmarks to undock right?

I Am Escoce

Welcome to the eighteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the
monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by none other than
me, CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of
gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a
week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting
articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead
serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the
EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com. Check out
other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!


On May 6th 2010, EVE Online celebrated its 7th Anniversary. Quite a
milestone in MMO history, especially considering that it is one of the
few virtual worlds out there to see its population continually grow
year after year. For some of you who've been here since the very
beginning, EVE has evolved quite a lot since its creation. With the
expansion rolling out roughly twice a year, New Eden gets renewed and
improved regularly. But, how about you the player? How has you gaming
style evolved through the years or months since you've started
playing? Have you always been a carebear, or roleplayer? Have you only
focused on PvP or have you given other aspects of the game a chance -
say manufacturing. Let's hear your story!



I am Escoce. I have always been Escoce. I do not have alternate identies and Escoce grows and deals with the consequences of all my actions, whether that is doing well on the markets, mining asteroids, busting gate camps with more vocal bravado than normally recommended or not. That is who I am and who I will always be within New Eden.

If one wishes to read all the details of my history they can start at te beginning of this blog with post #1, because I have kept a loosely organized journal of my goings on. However, I'll try to sum it up briefly with what I think the greatest changes are that I have made.

I started out very timid, mining asteroids in the cistuvaert system. I was afraid of getting lost and didn't even jump out of the system for at least several days. I had no idea how detached one really is from their home system. I think I made my first excursion out of Cistuvaert when there was no asteroids left to mine. I had no choice but try another system. I found one next door called Aidert. I minted for a bit there, and learned about NPC pirates and I got my little frigate blowed up if I recall and I became scared of 0.6 security systems. I tried to stay in cistuvaert as much as possible since I didn't know of any other 1.0 systems near by (remember I was a newb who had no idea how small geographically or astrometrically the game actually is to a more experienced player). I ran into my first player pirate can flipper from Whiskey Pete's Dry Cleaning, and got my butt handed to me. Later when I could fly a vexor, which I used for mining I also started carrying flights of drones and I ventured out into aidert once again and let the drone take care of the rats while I ignored them.

The same can flipper showed up, flipped my can. And I went ahead and sicked my drones on him. I actually almost had him, he was deep into hull before I went pop. Ah well I felt pretty good for the try, but I was still mostly broke as new miners typically are. So I started again with the frigates. I graduated to industrial ships and when I didn't have time to mine with 1 minute cycles into cans, inwiuld park my uterine of various grades over time next to the asteroids and jus let the laser fill the cargo bay before thenroids went pop. It was still really slow progress. I could barely afford new skills let alone ships.

Anyway I kept in mining until I could fly and mastered mining with the hulk. I went into debt to get the hulk sooner, but had to work hard to pay it off. All that work soured me to mining. I was so sick of mining.

I figured i could still deal with minerals since I know what they are worth and I sold my hulk and used the capital to start buying minerals in Arnon and its neigbors and selling them in Oursulaert and Jita if the price warrented the longer trip. As I could afford rigs, I fitted them (this was when they were still one size and ultra expensive). My Iteron V was gradually become more costly than an obelisk, but it was a little at a time. After about six weeks of all night back and forth, I was about halfway togetting a freighter.

I ended up borrowing a billion isk from a total stranger (believe it or not), and I bought my freighter, realizing after the fact that I still had 4 days to go to complete Spaceship Command that I needed to train Advanced Spaceship Command so I could fly the darned thing. So anyway started hauling with the freighter and the ISK started to flow. Over a period of a few weeks, I started carrying mining equipment to Arnon to sell as a loss leader to get the miners working in Arnon and neighbors to stay put and mine more rocks for me. It worked. I started pulling 3-5 freighter loads of tritanium out of that constellation every single day since people don’t like hauling Trit. It takes more time to haul the Trit to Oursulaert than it does to mine an equivalent amount of ore for the other minerals.. After some time it dawned on me that the names of the people dumping minerals on my buy orders were rather random looking and I realized I was buying Macrod minerals. I filed a petition saying that look, I wasn’t doing anything wrong, but I think I am buying illegal minerals in a legitimate manner. The GM told me so long as I procured them in good faith at a fair price and I wasn’t buying them for something like 0.01 ISK, that I was safe and thanks for the notice. Well that combined with my internet connection going out for 10 days or so, the whole market collapsed. I tried to restore the mineral market, but my steam was gone, and it was no fun and a constant trade war with the other people who moved in while I was gone. So I changed everything and became a low sec trader.

I had trained for bigger and better ships, and I started flying occators through low sec to pickup minerals I bought with region wide orders than I could get cheaper than staying in high sec. I hauled those minerals for cheap out of low sec (for a fair price, just a better price for me). I did just fine with that and the extra margin made up for the loss of volume. I stopped trading tritanium because now it wasn’t worth it for me to haul it anymore since I couldn’t use my freighter to pick up minerals in low sec, and I started hauling the higher valued minerals (Pyrite was never good for trade for me). With the fit I had with the Occator, I was pretty much invincible with the shield extended up the wazoo and I carried WCS in my cargo hold in case I found a heavy gate camp to bust. I did just fine with ammo bouncing off of my shields until I went to warp until I ran into my first Heavy Interdictor in low sec. I didn’t know they could use their Warp Distruptors in low sec with a special script, but I learned it that day. All low sec operations halted while I figured out how to make this work again. I finally developed the Invulnerable MWD/Cloak/Warp for the Deep Space Transports. I haven’t lost another Occator since.

Every since then, I have been figuring out how I can draw more people out to low sec to reap the benefits of low sec, and increasing available space for all pilots by spreading out a little and all the other benefits that go with that…more targets for pirates, better targets that are harder to catch and so more fun to hunt, safer grounds for the industrialists that aren’t too carebear-ish for low sec. I began developing “safest” fits for industrial ships like mining frigates, mining barges and exhumers. I started an alliance meant to foster this education and use of low sec (which is still very much in development due to lots of spring time outdoors AFK from many alliance members, but mostly me).

Finally, the piece de resistance, the low sec Orca fit I recently developed and wrote about. I have been using it to bust camps with great confidence and non-chalance since, moving tons more stuff through low sec than ever before possible without a jump frieighter (requires alts or cyno team mate and 5 billion isk for just the ship). It can be flown solo, and carries roughly half the stuff the jump freighters can carry. Good shit!!! My mission is to continue to help develop low sec, write an article for E-ON magazine describing how to fit, fly and behave as an industrial based character in low sec in order to survive and thrive. I will continue to be very vocal about the benefits of being in low sec and how one can fly there safely if one follows the basic rules of low sec piloting. One might even be safer in low sec than in high sec if one considers that they let their guard down in high sec. I honestly can say that since I have lived in low sec that I have lost more ships in high sec than I have in low sec…all because I drop my guard.

That’s who was a timid miner afraid of leaving his home system to become, low sec trader, low sec developer, low sec industrial educator and crazy ass pilot finding ways to make the big ships safe to bust camps.

I am … Escoce



Participants:
CrazyKinux's Musing: The Heroes with a Thousand Faces
StarFleet Comms: Life. Evolved.
A Carebear's Journeu: This Carebear Thinks He Is Developing Teeth
The Elitist: Our ventures in EVE
A Mule in EVE: From a guppy predator
Travels of the Ronin: Evolution and Adaptation
The Ralpha Dogs: The Past Through Tomorrow
Where the frack is my ship: A journey, not a destination
I am Keith Neilson: 7 Year Itch?
Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah: Evolution Me
EVE Opportunist: A long history of a short time
Roc's Ramblings: Things Change
Guns Ablaze: Onwards and Upwards
EVE On Real Life: Haven't you grown up yet?
More as they get published...

[Delicious Tag: eveblogbanter18]


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Low Sec Orca Fitting

UPDATE: In the fittings, I changed T2 Covert Ops Cloak to T2 Improved Cloak. My mistake.

Ok I have been researching fits for the Orca, and I have dramatically improved flying safely in an Orca for Low sec. I feel as comfortable flying my Orca through low sec as I am now with my Occator. You too can fly an Orca safely through low sec. That is if you have a few billion ISK to spend.

Implants in your head: Full Set of 6 Nomad implants, Alpha through Omega

Faction implants have secondary effects in addition to the attribute boosting effects most people are accustomed to. The Nomad faction implants give you +2 to each attribute, but in addition to that primary effect, they also grant a boost to your agility. With a full set of 5 implants, you get a raw 15% agility bonus, plus 10% bonus for the set of 5 implants granting a total of 16.5% agility boost. If you have the sixth Omega implant, you get a further 25% boost to the bonus giving up to a little more than a 20% bonus to agility. Better agility lets your ships turn and accelerate faster. These cost approx 2 billion isk at time of writing, though haggling can get them for less though. I got mine for 1.5 billion ISK by haggling with people who had contracts up for 2.1 billion ISK. That’s a 600 million ISK savings. Of course if you have 400,000 loyalty points or so with the right corporations, you can buy them from the NPC corporations that sell them. Phoetec Pharm makes them; I don’t know who else sells them for loyalty points.

Ok so you are asking, “Why would you spend 1.5 to 2.1 billion ISK for 20% boost to agility? You can get that with a T2 I-Stab”. Well mate, yes you are right, but consider this. My low slots are ALREADY filled with T2 I-Stabs and I still need the extra agility. “So why don’t you just use Low Friction Nozzle Rigs?”. Answer, I did that, but it still wasn’t quite enough. Plus I _discovered_ Engine Thermal Shielding, which boosts my MWD duration by 20%. Two of those and my MWD cycle is 14.4 seconds rather than 10 seconds. That’s 144% duration to my MWD cycle, the length of the MWD cycle means I have more time to align to warp WHILE CLOAKED. Which means I stand a MUCH better chance of being in warp before my cloak has dropped. So…..implants, these give me that extra sliver of agility that guarantees that I am in warp before my cloak drops instead of _almost_ in warp. Being _almost_ in warp, means you are going to eventually be _not almost, but actually and really_ dead.

That 1.5 billion ISK has let me fly my Orca in low sec with exactly the same confidence I have flying my Occator through low sec. What does that mean? That means, with my skills, I am able to fly a transport style ship through low sec that can carry 34,500m3 in the main cargo hold, 40,000m3 in the Corp Hanger, 50,000m3 in the Ore Cargo Bay (if I carry ore, which makes sense to carry some ore instead of minerals for this purpose). Plus several assembled (depending on size) ships in the Maintenance Hangar. My Occator could carry a little more than 38,000m3 which is pretty big, but this is MUCH bigger. No it’s not a freighter, and it’s a bit smaller than a jump freighter too, but I don’t need a Cyno team member, nor an alt…e-gad…and I fly normally carrying a lot more than the largest regular industrial ships you see flying around.

What are the drawback? The cost obviously…I have a lot of ISK in my head right now, so that really means I have to stop auto piloting around…even in high sec…unless I am flying a ship that can take a beating while waiting for CONCORD to come and clear the area for me. Last night, on my way to picking up the implants, my Helios was destroyed and I was sitting in Jita in my POD. On the way back I Auto piloted again (dumb mistake), and when I got back, my ship’s armor was gone and half the hull was gone, but my shield had fully recharged. CONCORD successfully intervened just moments before my ship was destroyed. I shouldn’t have been auto piloting a little light ship like that anyway, but it was REALLY stupid of me to do it with so much ISK on the line now. Never again. If you are going to autopilot through hisec, make sure you are flying a ship with enough raw hit points and resistances to take a good beating until CONCORD shows up.

Ok so the fitting:

Implants:

Nomad, full set of 6

Rigs:

2x Engine Thermal Shielding, for a 44% increase of MWD cycle time.

1x Ancillary Circuit Router (gives extra Grid so you can fit an MWD)

High Slots:

1x T2 Improved Cloak

2x of whatever else you want(I fit tractor beam and salvager)

Medium Slots:

1x Meta 4 MWD (You can’t fit a T2)

1x T2 ECM Burst, so you get another roll of the dice to get away if you do get caught.

1x Large Regolith Shield Extender for extra hit points to your shield so you last longer while trying to break target locks with WCM Burst and ECM Drones. Invulnerability Shield Hardener for Resistance Boosting (Giving you even more effective hit point on the shield)

Low Slots:

2x T2 I-Stabs, for more agility…i.e. faster align and acceleration times

Drone Bay: 5x Medium ECM Vespas (to gain more dice rolls to let you escape if you get caught…If you are doing mining support in low sec, launch these drone ahead of time so they automatically lock an aggressor, also keep your distance from the belt and stay cloaked until you need to tractor a can in, your tractor beam can pull from MUCH farther away with ship role bonuses.)




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Orca 1 : Pirates 0

So I have been busy and mostly away from both Eve and therefore by extension haven’t had anything really to write about. In March, I spent a week in the desert speaking at the 3rd annual organic beekeeping conference. Being out in nature and away from all thing internet for a week really changed my perspective a bit, plus spring has arrived and all the outdoor work that is involved in that, including beekeeping stuff, like building beehives and managing the colonies that survived winter, etc. Anyway, so much in Eve for me hasn’t happened except to log on to manage my skill queue and ensure I am still training something useful.

Well I have been spending some time in low sec as you all know, and in fact I hadn’t been back in high sec in several months, except for a few weeks ago I did take a few loads of minerals purchased in lowsec over those months to sell in high sec for some quick cash.

Last week however I decided to bring my industrial gear deeper into lowsec where I planned to operate most of my industry related stuff, so I did a brief scouting of the route in my Helios checking for local activity along the route (not just kills). I returned and hopped in my Orca full of working ships, and headed out along the way. Immediately someone popped into local, and we apparently arrived together at the same gate along my path, and of course my heart skipped a beat before I realized it was a Bestower. Ok no big deal, so we went along on our business following mostly the same path, and nothing else exciting happened.

I hadn’t flown the orca through low sec in a while, so I was being as careful as I could be to hone my gate camp busting skills at each gate even though I didn’t need to use them. It’s a good idea really to do it in low sec anyway. You have no idea how quickly you can get targeted and HIC scrambled compared with how long it takes to align an uncloaked Orca. As I approach the last gate to my final destination, I discovered the blood rush pounding in my ears could get louder than it ever had before, or rather at least as loud and hard as the last time it happened. I flew right into a big cloud of pirates.

For the sake of disclosure, I cannot purely say I have never lost an Orca in low sec, but at least I can say I haven’t lost one due to a lack of skill or negligence or poor piloting. I lost one many months ago when I first skilled up and learned how to fit and make safe an Orca for low sec use. I can legitimately say I lost my ship due to my client locking up. You see I run LINUX on my computer which then in turn requires I use WINE to run windows applications on my LINUX system. This ordinarily works perfectly, however the release of WINE during that encounter had a known bug (which I didn’t know about), that caused a Fatal Exception Error to occur during certain types of graphics glitches (such as shading and texturing of models) which are common but barely noticeable for Eve-on-WINE users. Anyway, as soon as I got shot, the graphic representation of the Orca has or had one of those glitchy graphics and being hit caused my client to crash. I had to work fast to kill all the EVE and WINE related processes running and stuck, so I could restart Eve to hopefully find I had warped to a logoff safe spot. Well, when I finally logged back in, I found myself in my backup clone with about 3.5 billion to spend to replace what I had lost. That was the first time the blood rushing in my ears pounded this loudly. But look, I am not a carebear. It hurt, and it wasn’t my fault and not fair, but it was part of my choice to live life this way and the only thing to do is file a petition, and hope and just move on forward. I don’t recall getting even a response for the petition…I don’t even remember if I filed one…ah well besides the point.

So here I am in space, in an Orca, just flown into a gate camp, and they were 5 or 6 sensor boosted HICs waiting at the gate for my arrival. This isn’t the time to think about what to do, either your training takes over and you just do what you are supposed to, or you die. I am glad I spent months training all my navigation skills to max out my agility and align times and fit all the modules and rigs to bring my ship to bear quickly on my warp out point. I spent weeks perfecting the timing involved, because the operation is slightly different than the Occator which I am as comfortable in as my own skin, but that slight difference in operation is the difference between life and death here and now.

I jump through the gate. There is one pirate on the other side scouting that side of the gate. Again, there is no time to let them to regroup and get ready, I must act instantly. Within the bat or two of an eye, I align to station, hit my MWD and cloak. Pirate ships are jumping in all around. Boy the ship sure does turn quickly when she’s at stop, agility boosted, and with the MWD going, and the cloak running. Yes the cloak helps your turning speed by slowing down forward acceleration. This helps the ship turn faster since a moving ship turns much slower a ship that is stopped. I turn off the MWD and wait for the cycle to reach that critical moment to shut off the cloak and hit warp. More ships jumping into local, four, five then six of them all trying to find me. There, I do it, and I am sitting there waiting for the Orca to lurch forward. It sure seems like I am visible and vulnerable for a long time. Then finally she accelerates to warp speed.



To sum up what followed:

The very next thing I see in local from some girl toon is:

 /me jaw drops to the floor
Next thing I see from someone else is:

 ^#%^W cheater


The girl said something like, “Hey, you’re the guy that does ”

I said, “Yea, you read my blog then?”

She, “sometimes”

Me, “Well now you know I wasn’t bullshitting”

She, “That was really impressive”

In private convo shortly later with the gang leader who didn’t want his guy to start swearing angry again so made it private told me when I asked that my ship was totally invulnerable to target locking during that episode. I thought that was pretty awesome to have feedback from someone genuinely trying to kill me.

All in all they ended up being a really straight up gang, and I think I made some friends, though I am certain they’ll continue to try and kill me. I’ll update this blog post with their names, but I am writing this at work and don’t have the chat logs with me. I’ll also post the edited for brevity chat logs in another post tomorrow or the next day after I can clean them up a bit.


Anyway, I thought you might like to read about my first TRUE gate camp busting episode with an Orca.




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Low Sec Mining and Probing Gravimetrics Sites

So in the spirit of preparing people to move into or at least make use of low sec, I decided to try a few thing I hadn't yet done. This is a justification, not a howto. I have linked two sites below for good tutorials on how to do this.

One of those thing to do is mining. Well when I ran the numbers, I realized it made no sense to mine in low sec. I could make slightly more money in High Sec, for far less risk. Wait, did I just say that? I did, and it bothered me a bit to say it.

But wait...

Astrometrics, the science of cartography helps you find better stuff right? Better rats, better complexes, all sorts of things. Well what about asteroid belts, after asking around a bit in my favorite channels, I got a good amount of data about astrometrics and probing, but no one knew a whole heck of a lot about scanning down asteroid belts. So I reviewed my skills, and luckily I already had the basic requirement to start scanning down deep space sites. I did a little bit of reading on http://rift.chromebits.net, and some stuff written by ccp greybeard on the eve online website. I hoped into a covops ship I already had (a Helios) since they are given astrometrics role bonuses, and fitted it with all t1 gear for scanning.

Since it was my first time, I did some practicing I. High sec and learned the basics of making the system work, then in an hour or so I headed out to low sec.

I systematically probed out each system in the region. Let me tell you what I found. I found null sec ores. Yep, I found crokite, dark ochre, and gneiss. Wow, that's the stuff that alliances work really hard to protect from foreign miners out in deep null sec, and it's already right here in empire.

Now before you ask, no you can't find this stuff in high sec, I looked. In high sec, if you successfully scan down asteroid belts, you'll find they will be higher quality high sec belts, and some of the standard low sec asteroids that don't warrant scanning down in the first place since veldspar is worth more than low sec asteroids, and it's the same stuff that made going out to low sec to mine really stupid.

So this means that if you are willing to hunt down some belts in lowsec, you too can mine some 20 million isk an hour asteroids with joining or paying a null sec alliance to do it.

You do need to spend a couple of days training g to be able to scan grav sites. You'll find them, but with only the basic skills, you'll not be able to pinpoint them enough to actually bookmark or warp to them, but it's worth it to be able to mine stuff worth 4x as much as the best asteroid belts in high sec.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Arnon and Peccanouette

It's been a long time since I had been to Arnon. However; in the course of the mineral market taking a downward swing, my bid to buy minerals in Essense region reached Arnon and the surrounding systems in the constellation Peccanouette. I flew over there in my freighter to pick up the massive amounts of minerals that quickly accumulated. I was amazed at how much the place has grown since the days I built up the mineral market there.

When I began my career as a miner I lived in the Peccanouette constellation mining plagioclase, omber, scordite and veldspar, but mostly plagioclase. I quickly learned that bringing your minerals to Oursulaert was much more profitable than selling to the nastily cheap bids to be found out here on the far edge of the region. Another thing quickly learned was that a hauler full of tritanium and/or pyerite didn't get you a whole lot of extra money and it made more fiscal sense to just dump your cheap minerals on the market where ever you were so you could fill up on more Mexellon and Isogen. Since I soon got bored of mining on my own, only getting into large mining operations on a rare occasion with my friends, I tried something different.

I started buying the tritanium that people didn't want to haul to Oursulaert and carried it for them. Some people still hauled their own tritanium when the price was really bad, but if I offered a fair bid at about 30 cents less than the bids in Oursulaert, people were more than happy to sell it to me. I was giving them a fair and much better price and there was enough margin to operate profitably. I soon began working in both directions, carrying at first mining crystals, and then mining modules and mining frigates and finally mining barges, exhumers and strip miners.

I started talking to miners in the newbie systems and invited other veteran miners out to Peccanouette to reap the benefit of a cluster of good mining systems plus a mineral market and mining supply chain right there in place right where you are. I soon found in my Iteron Mark V, that I couldn't haul enough to keep up with business. I was running back and forth constantly between Peccanouette and Oursulaert and inventory grew faster than I could move it, but so was my net worth climbing as well, and one at a time I fitted rigs to my Iteron Mark V until I maxed out what it could carry.

I finally bought my Obelisk, and steam rolled Peccanouette and built it into a really nice marketplace, and the best part was i was making enough to stay ingame strictly by buying GTCs with isk to pay for my subscription. I was in a great position to keep the competition out, and I learned market warfare and all that stuff that makes life easy for me but hard for the other guy. Things like artificially raising prices letting the others penny me and each other up, then going ahead and dumping my inventory on them for a profit without having to haul it anywhere, and setting the market back where I wanted it.

Seeing my project grow from something I created to support my own habit, into becoming the central mineral market serving three regions really tugs at my emotions and pulls out the best salty carebears tears...tears of pride.

Anyway, why am I telling you this again? Because oh my god, the tiny mining hub and mineral market I created has grown to colosal proportions. It's the mineral equivelent of Oursulaert, not quite as big but pretty close focused on stripping all mineral resources of Peccanouette. And...everyone, everyone, everyone, my corp, my mining associates, and traders alike...all of them thought I was crazy to haul tritanium, and it made me a multi-billionaire. Today, people are now calling me crazy for turning efforts to low sec, and say I can't possibly create a market hub in low sec. I am now done focusing on one region's low sec and beginning to branch out into a second region of low sec. What do you think?




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

Partyin with Hellcats

So tonight last night (i feel asleep while writing this) we had us a party. The hottest chicks in the eve universe hosted a PvP party in Evati and it was a blast. I didn't give myself a lot of time to get ready, and threw a bunch of Rifters and fittings in my Occator and headed on over to Evati.

Rule #1, when getting ready for a PvP fest, don't get dressed in a hurry, I had decided to go full vanilla T1 because I knew already I was going to get my ass handed to me over and over again. Well being in a hurry I showed up with the wrong ammo. You see T2 ammo doesn't fit in T1 cannons. Gah!!! Mynxee was kind enough to bring lots of toys for us to play with, but I was too embarrassed to ask for a new ship every minute and a half (that's about how long all the timers last between getting killed and being able to finally undock again). So I flew off to go buy some proper cannons for my ships. Paid a terrible price for them, but in was in a rush looking for the closest group of 30 cannons and not looking for the best deal. OMFG, only 24 autocannons fit in a rifter cargo hold...GAH! Lesson here again is don't wait till the last minute to get dressed for a party.

There were billions of ISK in prizes handed out and the evening was absolutely crazy. Faction ships, cash, T2 rigged ships, corpses, exotic dancers and all sort of other fun stuff were passed around, one prize per 10 minutes I think was the going rate, I think it ended up hovering around 1 billion ISK being handed out every 30-45 minutes.

Events finally started to slow down, I packed my things up to go since we were talking about it being pretty much over. I didn't get to fight mynxee or Shae Tiann, but halfway home I hear they're out dogfighting...er is that catfighting? GAH! (I seem to be saying that a lot in this post) I missed to chance to fight with the two greatest loves of everyone's Eve lives. That alone would have been worth every ISK in my wallet. Ah well.

The Hellcats PvP party was truly a blast, and I hope to be invited to the next one. It inspires me to host an event of my own, but with a different spin, instead of random PvP fest (which was a blast, but that belongs to the hellcats).

Mynxee, Shae, and to the rest of the hellcats; thank you so much for a great great time and gratz on a job well done indeed.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone so deal with the spelling, grammer, and odd out of place or mis-autocorrected word.

A sort of page two...YOU WANNA DO WHAT???

As I mentioned earlier, it was a little premature to post the mission and goals of Interstellar Tritanium (Ticker: ITTRI), but I honestly needed to post it having not posted anything on the blog for a while, and the fact that I have been sitting there doing not much except performing some of those said roles instead of recruiting and getting people on-board with it. Let me try to explain a little more about the purpose of Interstellar Tritanium....This is another lame attempt at writing well, I also wrote this in a rush, but here goes with round two of the initial recruitment docs and orientation about who we are and what we do.

First and MOST importantly, the mission of Interstellar Tritanium is to get more people into Low Sec. Yes that means by increasing ITTRI membership, but that's a small sliver of the mission. It is ITTRI's mission to get OTHER poeple out to Low Sec. Why would we want to do that? Well most people once they've either taken heed of others or experienced the perils of Low Sec on their own and paid for it and DON'T want to go to Low Sec unless they have aspirations of Piracy and Faction Warefare. Currently low sec is like a DMZ, on one side you have High Sec which is controlled by CONCORD and the Empire Factions, on the other side you have Null Sec which is sporadically controlled by alliances. Pretty much, if you stay in your own space, either in High Sec or you own alliance owned Null Sec regions, you are fairly (though not completely) safe. In the middle you have this DMZ or no man's land, where there are really no consequences to being out there other than being vulnerable...honestly though you are only vulnerable due to your own weaknesses, but I digress.

Wait a minute, rewind a little here. Why would I want to do this?

There are more valuable things to do in Low Sec than in High Sec, but no one except the very confident, daring or stupid go to low sec. Why? Because of the added Risk vs. Reward factor. Currently since nearly the only folks that inhabits Low Sec as a home are Pirates and Faction Warriors, and of course yours truly, the risk to spend time in Low Sec to get that better percentage of value is too high, but that real value is there. There is more valuable ore not to mention more of it since no one is mining it, the missions and complexes are usually much better. There are more Ice Belts, there are OMGWTFTONS of empty queues for Manufacturing and Researching. There are OMGWTFTONS of EVERY resource left untapped and wasted.

Ok so why don't you go out and grab it?

Well I am, that is what I am doing right now on my own and doing it successfully from a profit margin standpoint, but I have also realized this space would become a LOT more valuable if more people came out here.

Why would more people make it more valuable?

One word. Volume, but .... Well because right now using myself as an example, for it to be effective I have travel all around 5 regions in a Deep Space Transport (much much safer than a freighter) gathering all kinds of different stuff at fuck cheap prices from minerals to ammo to modules to ships, to bring it all to central staging points in High Sec, so I can pick it up from those staging points, carry it in a freighter to drop it off in another staging point in High Sec to near a Low Sec Market turn around and bring it back out to Low Sec in way far too many DST trips to sell it at Market. It takes days and weeks to make a single complete cycle. I operate profitably and I have a constant flow of merchanise because there is real demand for stuff in low sec, but by keeping my prices really low, I make sure that people buy from me rather than hop into freighters with their alts, go to Jita to buy expensive stuff (which puts money in OTHER people's pockets). That's a little backwards IMO, and I think it would make more sense if there was a more viable economy right there in low sec where I am working.

Huh? Who cares?

Ok, so lets say I am mining in Low Sec and I now have all these wonderful minerals that could be used in manufacturing. If I want to make a profit from these, I have one of two choices, I can haul it all back to Oursulaert or Jita or Hek or whereever else, and turn quite a tidy profit, but I have to haul it all there...in order to do that safely, I need to use either blockade runner or deep space transport (I prefer the DST for low sec hauling BTW), but those ships are so so tiny compared to a freighter, but I really can't safely fly the freighter in low sec because of the danger involved. OR I can dump it on the market, and sell it to the highest regional bidder (currently yours truly). The first way, ensures I make more profits for what I mined, but the second way means I can stay put and mine some more. However, hauling it out has it's risks, you have to get through the gate camps to and from your mining spot and high sec. And if you get your ship blowed up, it was full of sparkly highly valuable minerals that you just lost. Plus you loose valuable time hauling it. The second option is safer because I am not running gate camps full of minerals (which are likely more valuable than my mining ship), I am risking only the loss of my ship and with a modicum of sense and piloting skill I can get to safety with relative ease. Not only that, do I REALLY want to carry Tritanium and Pyrites over multijump routes to get them to a market? It is really worth it?

Wait a minute though, there are all these unused research and manufacturing facilities out here. What if I could just drop my minerals off here where I already am. I wouldn't have to haul them away, and because I am not wasting my time I can sell them for a little bit less that I would have to if I were hauling them all the way to market and I can make more money because I can mine more minerals. Not only that, but the people using these facilities wouldn't have to bring their own minerals either, meaning using these facilities would be a LOT more attractive for all parties...AND AND (yes that's right two) because everything is a little cheaper and less work, THEY can afford to pay someone to haul the products out so "I" don't have to do it (well what I mean is, "I" want or someone else wants to haul YOUR shit for you), or EVEN BETTER sell that shit right where they are, or only a couple jumps to the closest market hub, which incidently the closest market hub will likely be in Low Sec, instead of in Oursulaert which is probably 9 or 10 jumps away. Gosh can you imagine how much easier all that is? It's like High Sec, but not as congested. Being able to mine, manufacture and sell stuff all in the same station or system, or Holy Shit even just in the same constellation would be nice for a change.

Have you ever tried getting a manufacting or research job in Oursulaert? Really, have you tried it? How long are the waiting lists? Did you look in the rest of the region? I am willing to bet that in Oursulaert the waiting list approaches 2 months before your job even starts. In the rest of Essense High Sec, it probably trickles downward the farther out you go to a average of 1 month, and if you are lucky MAYBE you can find a single slot with a job that can start in 5 or 6 days because no one grabbed it yet, but it's 12 jumps away and you gotta haul all the materials out there before you can queue up the slot, better hope someone else doesn't jump on it before you can pick it up. Lets not even talk about queue camping. Ok, back up again....There are a CRAP TON of empty research and manufacturing queues in low sec....Did you catch that?

So this is how more people getting into low sec makes it more valuable for EVERYONE, and that includes for ME too because now I don't have to haul this shit to and from kingdom come to make this work alone.

Ok this actually makes some sense, but how are we going to do this? I mean there are still pirates out there looking for exactly this opportunity finding a fleet of hulks in an asteroid belt and drooling over the t2 components that are gonna drop when I get killed...

That's a great question really. And this really applies to all scenarios in Low Sec. Pirates are looking for targets regardless of what that target is, miners, haulers, mission runners, etc etc. I have developed a friendship and trust, and I am working with the various prominent Low Sec organizations to foster an unofficial alliance or blue chip corp/alliance wide standings to help make our job a little easier (by not shooting down our members). By us reciprocating Blue Chips with each other will help in two important ways; 1) Since we're blue to them, they won't shoot us, 2) since they are blue to us, we know we have are in the presence of friends.

Why would pirates want to give up targets? Why would they let us pass and do our business freely?

Because of the mutual benefit. Yeah on face value it looks like they are giving up targets, but honestly without the arangement YOU wouldn't be there anyway right? So they havne't given anything up. Further, if you consider everything I mentioned above, we are going to be DRAWING customers out to Low Sec, all those customers are fair game, it's only our corp and alliance that enjoy the negotiated peace. Plus once all those people do start coming out, there is some safety in numbers. If a pilot is flying around solo in low sec, you can almost guarantee that if a pirate is hunting, they are hunting that solo pilot, but if there are 50 other random pilots flying around, the buffer of additional pilots dramatically increases the chances of that one pilot flying away safely. The more people there are in low sec, the better the place will be for everyone, carebears, faction warriors and pirates alike. Safer for the carebears and more fun for the pirates.

But why would I want to help a bunch of asshole pirates?

Well most people who are carebears don't really understand very well how this game works. And I don't mean from a spreadsheet understanding the math and mechanics of the game. I am talking about those two or three buzzwords, "the sandbox" and "the butterfly effect". Carebears tend to think this game shouldn't be a PvP game, or think that since I am a carebear you should leave me alone mr baddy pirate. And groups of carebears tend to hold hands and perform the "carebear stare". Well it doesn't work, but that's besides the point. Before you get your panties in a ruffle, understand...I am a carebear...we actually, I am an industrial/trader pilot who doesn't consider himself a carebear. Why? Because I face PvP on a minute by minute basis flying around 5 regions of low sec to perform my "carebear" stuff. PvP isn't just head to head or blob to blob combat, and this is where people seem to not understand this game at all, especially the carebears. Here I explain why and what's missing from their understanding.

A trader is constantly PvPing with other traders for money. We are constantly trying to get the best deal before everyone else, we are taking their money and putting it in our wallets. But at least I am not shooting anyone. Aren't you? When you are trying to make a buck trying to sell your stuff or buy your stuff and that guy ALWAYS seems to get his order for one penny better than you before you can move your stuff? You can't seem to sell it for a profit because someone is always making the deal sweeter and putting you out of business a little, or forcing you to mark down your items below profit margins. That's not PvP? Well ok, but what about me? I am just a miner and all I do is practice Player vs Rock, I don't PvP at all. That's what you think, how much fun is it when a corporation operation comes in and wipes out all your asteroid belts in your favorite systems and leaves you nothing but scraps. How about when you spend hours just looking for a belt to mine and can't find one? Or how about this? What do you think those rocks they were mining is going to be used for? How about your rocks, what do you think they are going to get used for. Sure you are just selling your rocks on the market or dumping it on some cheap buy order, but you aren't PvPing are you? I am afraid you are...there is only ONE reason you are mining, you are gathering the materials required to blow up someone else. What the fuck are you talking about? That's right...your rocks are getting other people killed. You think your rocks are going to get used for some peaceful activity? Sure in some stages of the game, maybe. They'll get used in science and manufacturing, sure sure, that's true...but why is that person doing that? To make shit to blow someone's ass up. Funny thing is, it's very possible that you even got your self blowed up because you mined the particular minerals that we used to make the ship that blew your ass up. That's what this game is about, blowing shit up...end of story really.

Yeah but pirates are still assholes and they suck.

Really? Why do you think you have a job in Eve? ..... Anyone? Because someone blew up someone else's ship up. Just as much as I tell the pirates to shut the fuck up because they owe carebears a debt of gratitude for doing the stuff you don't want to so you CAN do what you want, you carebears also need to shut the fuck up because you owe the pirates a debt of gratitude for making it possible for you to do what makes YOU happy. You wouldn't be mining anything at all if it weren't for pirates because they blow shit up so YOU can sell your stuff. Pirates are a VITAL part of the economy in Empire, both High Sec AND Low Sec and also have an effect on Null Sec too because that's where lots of the T2 building materials come from.

Well you are wrong, most ships are blown up in alliance wars and elsewhere in null sec.

Well that's true for the most part, but what you seem to misunderstand is that most of those big giant deep space alliances support their own independent economies. They have their own groups of miners, scientists, researchers and manufacturers. Most stuff they produce on their own and get blown up all on their own without having the slightest effect on life in high sec. Yes it's true some of it does trickle up to high sec, but very little in fact except the T2 building materials I mentioned previously compared with the amount of ships blown up by pirates and NPCs. Besides, what's the difference? Someone got blowed up that didn't want to get blowed up, maybe most of those battles can be considered "consensual PvP", but the whole game is PvP, miners, traders and everyone are PvPing on one level or another. And anyway, do you REALLY think that when an alliance totally destroys another alliance that it's not the same or worse than you loosing your mining ship to pirates? Holy shit, that hurts a whole crap ton more than the pain you feel when you get blowed up, or when a salvage ninja comes to get your wrecks....Honestly. People loose trillions of isk, and have to abandon several freighterfuls of stuff in stations they'll likely never visit again, but their asset window will unendingly remind them of their massive massive defeat. Of course they could just "trash" the stuff so they don't have to look at it anymore. How would you feel to "trash" a few carriers, mauraders, and billions of units of isogen?

Ok ok I get it. So now back to your corp, what's the catch? What do I gotta do?

No catch. You gotta be able to support yourself. You have to commit to align with the corp mission and actively work towards that goal. You need to be comfortable losing your stuff, cause it's gonna happen and you need to be ok with it. We'll provide training and coaching on how to pilot safely in low sec, but after that it's up to you to practice and keep your senses and reflexes keen. The only thing I ask you to do is practice your career in low sec, in a coordinated fashion with the rest of the corp to maximize our footprint and prevent intra-corp and intra-alliance competition. I.e. one person takes gallente ships modules and ammo, another specializes in Minmatar kits, another does mining vessels, another does minerals trade, implants, rigs, etc etc. Keep the market divided by product so we can all work together on the same systems with the same goals without getting in each other's way. Once we have a good economy growing in one region to the point where we have drawn competition into low sec with us (remember that's good), we can continue growing our numbers take advantage of MORE of those untapped resources and finally spread to other surrounding low sec regions and make us all some more money.

Low sec was designed to be a bridge between High Sec and Null sec, instead it became the pirate's private little hell where life is hard. Lets turn Low Sec around and build it into the bridge where null sec alliances and high sec citizen comingle together and do business with each other as was intented. Pirates get a kick back from this, all teh extra targets that otherwize would have said at home.

Blog Banter #12: Dynamic System Security

Welcome to the twelfth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed here. Check out other EVE Blog Banter articles at the bottom of this post!

This month’s banter comes to us from CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following: First there was the MMO on the PC, and now with the recent announcement of DUST 514, EVE will soon be moving onto consoles. But what about mobile? Allow your imagination to run wild for a second and describe how you would see EVE being ported to mobile devices, whether the iPhone/iPod touch, Blackberrys or Android-based devices. Dream the impossible for us!

Cas at Ecliptic Rift completely covered almost word for word what I wanted to talk about in the blog banter, so I had to think of something else. It's interesting that Cas and I will both be guests at on this weeks Missions Collide podcast. Anyway, here is another idea that I somehow though about this evening, I hope it's a worthy idea, but honestly I can't see how this could go wrong, in fact I think it's nothing but right.

Dynamic System Security for Empire Space

Yep. Instead of the security status being static, and no matter what happens in each system the security status remains the same. Well how about when the goon squad rampages through Jita, is that still HISEC? Come on....How about all those high sec systems out at the edge of empire, the high sec islands in the middle of low sec where you see no one and the system is surrounded by systems loaded with red blinkies? So how about those LOSEC systems that you never seen any badies in, only see unmolested industrious care-bears going cheerfully about their business, is that system really lost to the depths of bedlam?

Imagine what it would be like to be a pirate, only to wake up the next morning and you have to make a mad rush to LOSEC because the SEC status of the system you slept in was bumped up a notch while you were sleeping. Imagine being a miner working at the edge of HISEC, when all of a sudden the SEC status drops a point into LOSEC. Goon squad totally rampaging through Jita, intentionally trying to cause mayhem and push the SEC status of Jita down to really low LOSEC status, and the surrounding systems too, forcing pilots far and wide to change their plans for a while. And another benefit, it could totally kill Jita lag, because the market would be forced to move around

It really shouldn't be too difficult to setup. I mean security status goes from +1.0 to -1.0, it's just a value with 0 being in the middle. There must be some balance algorthim that could be used to dynamically change the SEC status of each system at each downtime, but the SEC status can only move a max of 0.1 per night, so that seriously broad sweeping changes don't happen over night, the line of scrimage so to speak should only move forward or back a little at a time. HISEC should still be protected by COSMOS, but ganking and other security lowering activities should affect the direction of the move each downtime. The security status of the surrounding systems should add weight to the SEC status of the system being evaluated, for example, if a HISEC system has five jump gates out and four of them go to LOSEC, then that should weigh some on the security evaluation routine.

Conversely, the number of HISEC status people who travel through and populate each system should weigh toward the positive climb of SEC of a system. Successful mission running, and ratting and killing of player pirates by players should improve the security status of a system. Obviously seriously low status players (ex. -10) couldn't be in a HISEC system, but if they were dispatched in the system adjacent, it would have a positive weight to the surrounding systems.

To offset the possibility that HISEC were completely overrun by LOSEC seeking players, the Regions of each empire should have heavy weighting, to simulate each empire and COSMOS exerting their influence.

I am by no mean suggesting what the technical security status routine should be really, I am just tossing ideas into the aether of how it “could” work, but you do get the gist of it.

This could as some serious news reporting and story telling possibilities as well. Dynamic system security, I can see that being SOOO much fun.

The Occator

Ok it's time I talk about a hauler ship and fittings for use in Low Sec. As the title implies, I am talking about the occator. A lot of people continuously recommend I fly a Viator instead, however I believe the Viator really is a weak choice for Low Sec hauling. Let me explain why.

Firstly, my first fitting for an Occator was totally invulnerable to attack. I fit it thusly:

Highs:
Small T2 Smart Bomb (for keeping interceptors and frigates out of blaster range)

Mids:
2x F59 Shield Extenders (double shield HP, and therefore double shield recharging)

Lows:
A mix of Cargo Expanders and Warp Core Stabalizers (depending on cargo needs and danger level of the system)

Rigs:
2x T1 Cargo Optimization Rigs

This ship resulted in a hauler that could literally just sit there and take a pounding while waiting to go to warp. Never had any group of PvPers or Pirates broken past 50% of my shield. Until one day, I learned about HICs in Low Sec being able to destabalize your warp core no matter what level of warp strength your ship is fitted for. I began that encounter not worried in the least bit, until I realize that I wasn't warping. It took 12 minutes for that ship to take me out, but between being distrupted and being webbed to something like 12 meters per second, there was nothing I could do to escape. I lost a VERY expensive ship, and my cargo, and therefore a month's worth of income. Ouch.

So a Viator DOES seem like the best option. Well no, I still don't think so. First off, it's cargo hold is WAY too small to have any positive advantage to going out to low sec. One tiny shipload at a time, over and over and over isn't a lot of fun. The risk of low sec is still there, and the more back and forth between two systems in low sec, is just asking for more trouble. The ONLY advantage the viator has is it's covops cloak. That's a big advantage for sure, but honestly, I can mimick most of that advantage with an MWD and an Improved Cloak. You might ask how? Well, all cloaks stop working if you are too close to your station, so you can't cloak until you get outside the 2000 meter circle, so you are vulnerable while trying to get to 2000 meters, and if you get target locked before you cloak, you won't be able to cloak at all. Therefore those of us who fly slower ships should use Instant Warp Undock Bookmarks. Even a Freighter can warp instantly out of a station if you have a good bookmark setup. So make your bookmarks. Use a fast ship like a the faster frigates, interceptors or covops ships to find the spot WAY out in space that you can warp to instantly, and book mark it. Test it, because if it's a little off, your Occator is going to take a moment to align first, and you are going to get Warp Disrupted by a HIC. If the bookmark is "perfect", you will warp within 3 seconds of seeing your ship in space and while still inside the ring of protection of your station. Then you have a few moments to get your bearings, and warp off where you need to go without worrying about that red blinky blinky that was on your screen at the station.

If you work on your timing, you can do something similar to using an instant undock bookmark at the gate. This involves coordinating your use of the MWD, cloak and warp drive. The sequence of events goes like this. After you jump and while gate cloaked, hit "align to" where ever you are going (gate or station), then hit your MWD, and then hit your cloak. You will align quickly, and be accelerating towards your warp point. As your MWD is about 75% complete in it's cycle, turn off your cloak, and hit warp.

You may ask, so what does that do? Ok well, the MWD does two things. It helps you align really quickly, and it builds your speed up, and you'll be at about half speed with your MWD one when you hit the warp controls. However, when your MWD turns off at the end of the cycle, because your MWD isn't on anymore, your speed is now somewhere between 75% and 200% of top speed. Thus....Insta Warp.

If you mess up your timing, either forgetting to shutdown your MWD or missing your high speed window of opportunity, you'll just have to wait to go to warp, hopefully you don't get scrammed before then by a HIC. (slight chance only, but still very real)

So how do we fit this occator?

High:
Improved Cloak (for higher speed and agility)

Mid:
f59 Shield Extender (trust me you want some tank)
T2 MWD

Lows:
6x Cargo Expanders (the 2+ native warp stabalizers should be enough for the extremely short moments you are vulnerable)

Rigs:
2x Cargo Optimization Rigs

You really need the Shield Extender. I have been caught and shot at before, even with the warp schemes, and this saved my life. An occator "CAN" be brought down in a single Volley by a heavily enough armed ship. One pirate even took the time to ask me how I survived that one shot before going to warp. The answer my friends is that Shield Extender...in one volley, that pirate brough my shields down to almost 0%. If I hadn't been trained in my Shield Skills, and been Shield Extended, my ship would have popped in one shot like an Iteron.

So let me restate this. You REALLY need to train all your shielding skills.

The occator is a great ship to fly in low sec, so long as you keep your guard up and don't get lazy and keep up on your keyboard and mousing skills, you'll have a wonderful time moving through low sec carrying your merchandise with ease to and from your Low Sec Market hubs, and watching your various pirate nemeses get frustrated with you constant slippery nature.

Remember this is a Low Sec fitting, not a 0.0 fitting, the rules are different, and you'll get caught with your pants down in 0.0 if you try to use this setup out there (think bubbles).

Happy Flying