Well it’s not actually a tale; it is only that the last two BTA fleet ops both had to do something with POS‘. The first one was an op to destroy a POS tower someone forgot to disassemble before leaving the area and the second op was about looking at a POS that got reinforced and hoping for a fight.
In both cases there wasn’t a fight, but we still had a nice time on comms (and I could make a few screenshots).
I was happy to be able to participate in two more roams. The first one was technically not really a roam. It was just us trying to set up a fleet to break a large low-sec gate camp. Sadly we didn’t have enough people in fleet to be able to have any chance of succeeding. Our FC therefore spoke with others who were also interested in breaking that camp and we did form a fleet together with them. It was quite a nice sight!
The eyes we had on the target gate-camp weren’t cloaky though so our reshipping to armor and combining fleets left the campers with enough time to summon help which came in the form of a fleet even larger than the gate camp. We did manage to get a straggling Abaddon from the gate-campers before their two fleets got us in a pincer movement. We got unbelievable lucky as the supporting fleet didn’t engage us on gate but instead jumped through to combine with the gate-campers. This gave us the time to dock up. We later just undocked in pods and warped away. This mass-undocking of ours even managed to scare their fleet away 0:)
It was a really nice fleet! Hope to see another like it soon!
The second roam was just yesterday where a BTA shield BC fleet of some 10 pilots roamed into the northern part of Syndicate. Sadly it was pretty quiet and we didn’t manage to get into any fight so we went up into the BMN pocket where we finally got some attention (from Goons) who annihilated our 10 man BC fleet.
What I did like was that we finally got more and more people to roam more often and that each fleet this and last week so far had a different FC. Go you guys! 🙂
I was very happy that I could get into another fleet yesterday evening. It was an ACAC fleet and it was the first time I was flying an Omen. We went into low-sec with the fleet and found a fight near Gonditsa where there were two other large fleets battling it out. We first took a peek and saw that they were much stronger than us (they had double the number of Guardians than we had Augurors). There was a vote if we should suicide and it was decided to go for it and so we did.
We died in a blaze of fire, but it was quite a nice fight and an impressive fleet. Especially congrats to our FC and Scouts!! I hope to see another one of these soon (I already just now bought the modules for another Omen) 0:-)
I have been out of the dark EVE Universe for quite some time know and only poked in again yesterday and was quite happy to find me a BTA Frig roam. Here are some screenshots from this Demolition Derby which was mostly a fleet to help train new FCs. For that it was quite nice, as we managed to evade 2 larger fleets in Fountain before suicide in Period Bases.
The TCU in the first pic is a TEST one (guys plz get an alliance logo – those make for much nicer screenshot 0:-) )
I finally managed to get myself to try out FCing and had my first try at it yesterday. I stared it with advertising the roam via our forum:
>>> secure connection opening ..
>>> transmission commencing ..
Dear BTA pilots,
Solitude our quiet and remote home has a is also the home of countless Gallente people who do have the same problems like us: namely living in the same remote location far away from the other Gallente regions. So most of their foodstuff is produced locally. Sadly Solitude high-sec doesn’t offer many oceanic worlds to fish-food is not very prominent which makes beef very important. Sadly some local cows have contracted the mad-cow disease for which treatment is unfortunately quite costly. So when I heard that a new form of treatment is being tested by Duvolle labs I decided that we – as Solitude residents – should help in this research project which involves ferrying some research-livestock which has been treated with the new active ingredients on our ships through as many warps as possible to test if it hyperspace fluctuations can make the vaccine even more potent in the test cows.
If you are willing to help, please proceed to (censored) station on Saturday May 5th at 18:00 EVE time in a Destroyer with enough cargo space left for the unit of livestock.
Thank you in advance for your help in this research project!
Regards,
Zargyl
>>> EOF
>>> connection closed
This Mad-Cow destroyer roam is meant to be a fun-event which will surely end in lots of explosions on our side (especially as it is my first roam) so please make sure your destroyers are insured and that you do use implant-less and up-to-date clones!
To entice you into giving it a try I have some prices for participants as well! Prices will be: 1x Hound, 1 x Taranis, 1x Purifier, 1-2 Thrashers.
All ships are BTA products (the thrashers come from my own production line whereas the t2 frigates have been produced by no one less than the esteemed BTC director swisstuck which could make them collector-items as well 8) ).
The winners will be announced after the roam. I can already announce two categories though:
One Thrasher will go to the first person in fleet – so don’t be late 😉
Another ship will go to whoever gets killed first 😮
Hope to see you soon!
Cheers,
Zargyl
__
The advertisement did manage to get 18 pilots into fleet which was quite a lot considering that they were all flying to their doom with me doing this for my first time ..
The MadCow fleet undocking
MMMMMMOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Thankx guys for having me!! It was a huuuuge fleet and I was very happy to many of you did make it!! My last try at a fleet got me not a single pilot so I was very happy to see so many of you guys this time!
We had 18 in fleet which is quite a nice showing!!
The cow-fleet undocking
Sadly the cows weren’t too happy because quite soon they would turn into beef (as promised). Though I do hope that at least Duvolle got enough research data to get a vaccine for the madcow disease 😉
For the first part of the roam I had planned on flying through low-sec and using a bait-badger to entice a pirate to attack and then to pounce on him. Sadly there was quite a lot of activity going on and when I did get a Cane to aggress the bait-badger the warp was sadly too long (or the tank of the badger too weak) and the badger died first.
Also he did get backup so we had to retreat back to high-sec and lost ships during retreat 😦
Valiantly some of those who lost their destroyers did reship! Go them!
As bad luck would have it our voice server decided to break down and we had to visit another one which did cost us some time. Due to this I tried speeding things up a bit (fearing bored pilots) which in retrospect was probably not the best idea either.
Our next try was to go to Syndicate with where we had reports on a Stabber and some ratters.
We first went into the direction of the stabber and did manage to hunt him down. Sadly those of us that got close enough to the stabber in time wheren’t equipped with points, so he did escape 😥 (Instead he fell prey to another gang in system).
I was quite anxious the whole time and so time went by very fast. We had to make a short break and docked up for that.
Fleet undocking after a 10min break.
I got the report of a large gate-camp in one of the adjacent systems and therefore decided to check out the other one to which a Phantasm was moving. Some of us did manage to engage the Phantasm which promptly jumped through the gate.
There I made another mistake: I told the fleet to jump after it (hoping to catch it on the other side and not believing on there being a gate-camp as well). Luck wasn’t with me: there was a gate camp on the over side of this gate as well 😦
As I still had an aggression timer I couldn’t follow myself and didn’t see the size of the gate-camp. I guess I should have tried to get us at least some kill from that gate camp instead I ordered the pilots either to re-approach the gate or to try to get out of the bubble. This resulted in all hands being lost regardless.
The loss on eve-kill.
The few of us that did escape (hadn’t jumped through because of aggression timers) when retreating found out that the third gate of the system (in the direction of our home) also had a gate camp. Seems various fleets managed to box us in quite well while we had our bio-break.
So all in all I am a bit of a sad panda: So many cows lost and no real kill for us :-\
Some MMMOOOOOs in local where had though 😉
At least I had some prizes to give away at the end of the fleet (which actually lasted nearly 3 hours instead of the 1 hour I thought it would last).
Feedback and tips are welcome!
Black Thorne Corporation is always trying to offer its members opportunities to experience the dark universe of New Eden to its fullest (with the exception of griefing, scamming and such). We are especially trying to grow more combat-wise (pvp). Due to the hard work of Ossmo together with other alliance pilots can now offer our pilots even more possibilities than before, while working together with more experienced combat pilots. We already were doing excursions into Syndicate once in a while but now have an as-of-yet unprecedented number of active pilots there.
Even I have finally managed to get into more action and am therefore quite happy to be able to post some camera-drone images from my latest travels to Syndicate.
For more info on Syndicate I would like to point out these two nice blog posts:
Azual Skoll’s Syndicate post as well as the one by the master-poster Jester himself.
Corpie patrolling a gate in Syndicate.
Hostile bubbles on a region-gate.
In rust I trust – my Cane.
Thankx especially to the FreeBeer guys! 🙂
We do have quite some happy times in corp. We seem to get more and more pvp activity and back in our home systems the activity is also quite refreshing to see. We even had an incursion by Sansha slavers in a constellation near and quite a lot of fleets did form to defend the poor Gallente people who were their target.
Yesterday’s incursion fleet was in for a surprise though. Just as we finished forming up the Sansha masters decided to recall their fleets. Instead of disbanding our fleet though Deth instead encouraged us to stay for a few missions and as we all already had been on voice for the anticipated Sansha-fight we stayed there even for “just” running missions. I really did like the nice chat we had there.
The shadow of a Raven battleship undocking for the mission op (I kinda like that one as it does remind me of the Shadow ships in Babylon5 0:-) ).
Nightmare on Larryn gate.
Battleships gather and another Apoc arrives on scene.
Burning for the acceleration gate (sadly I lost the race)
Deth’s Nighthawk is being targeted
Tornado firing away.
Go corpies! 🙂
Not all of the silence in here is due to me having been away from New Eden because of issues over the so called Monoclegate affair. Before that I actually was quite active in getting my first feelings for 0.0 sov space and testing the waters to see if a small Alliance might be able to venture forth and get their name up on the starmap with a single system.
Some time ago (see older blog-posts like Gone ratting) my Alliance already tried that once using a renting system. But when the alliance we have been renting from (Atlas) fell, we had to go as well. Renting was quite an interesting first option for us to get a few corp-mates interested in the capsuleer ruled vastness of the outer regions of known space to experience that part of New Eden for the first time. It also managed to whet our appetite.
After this first taste we started trying to get more people into the corporation interested in excursions into 0.0. Before we knew it – thankx to diplomatic contacts – another opportunity did present itself to us: That of trying to get our own solar system. This time around it was a step up from renting: We would have to try to get our own system together with other corps and alliances.
Hostile i-hub under attack by our bombers.
And the incredible thing happened: we really did it! We managed to get a TCU up in a system and put up our alliances “flag” on the map for a second time! To be honest we were quite fortunate insofar as the alliance to which the region was belonging to (IT alliance) was at that moment not faring too well. Otherwise this undertaking would not have been successful. But without having tried it out, we wouldn’t have seen if we could do it at all.
Most of the actual sov-warfare (like shooting i-hubs and SBUs) was done in small gangs of Stealth Bombers which proved ideal for hitting those structures and dispersing when larger hostile gangs showed up.
Stealthies for the win!
For pilots first exploring 0.0 I can therefore strongly recommend using a Stealth Bomber as your first craft of choice as it is also much easier getting to the systems in question. They also help you to stay alive when larger gangs do show up while still packing quite a punch.
Infrastructure Hubs do take a long time to bring down so we really where happy that we didn’t have to count exclusively on bombers for our sov structure warfare. The picture below shows a Firbolg Fighter launched by a helpful carrier helping us take down a TCU.
Of course we also had to defend our claim. That we did with stealth bombers as well (frustrating our attackes by denying them fights).
SBU on fire
Sadly there started to be infighting in the coalition and it did break up. But for the time it did last (nearly half a year) it offered ample opportunities for those of our pilots interested in sampling those (and that is what the corp I am in is trying to be all about anyway). I even got to participate in a battle reported in evenews24 0:-) We did also forge nice friendships! (Which in my opinion was the best part – aside from being able to make nice screenshots and having stories to tell 0:-) )
After the breaking up of the coalition we did return to my corp’s ancestral home to rest and start thinking about a possible next step. It was clear that we would have to try to get more pilots interested in participating and starting their own fleets, so we decided to try that from a region that is more accessible for the bulk of our members. So at the moment we are looking more into neighboring Syndicate.
In more quiet days than those we are having now, some industries corp mates did set up a huge mining op which was open for all alliance members. Like in all of our mining ops all miners/haulers/booster do get equal shares no matter what ship they are in. This is especially to help pilots new in New Eden who are invited as well even should they just fly a Bantam! The nice part about mining is more the social aspect anyway and the chatter in fleet chat as well as in voice was quite nice too and also a nice opportunity for new members to get to know the other corp mates.
I can only recommend such ops to any corp with industry activities.
I better don’t contemplate too much an all the heat of the above lasers and how dangerous it was for our mining vessels to navigate through all of them!
I wouldn’t like to be one of those roids there …
Our hero hauling Orcas! 🙂
Finally not too long ago I did manage to finish the Angel Pirate Arc line of missions. For me that is quite some achievement, as I have started those missions a year ago and only now did complete them.
So it was some time ago that this Scholar was talking to Aton Hordner via direct link to his Tempest. I am no Angel pirate sympathizer, but I do wanted to help my people and judging from the info Aton was giving me, helping the Angels was helping the lesser of two evils.
The missions went quite ok up until I was sent against Demense who destroyed my trusty Stiletto. Not one to give up soon a week later I tried again in a Wolf. But when that got destroyed as well I didn’t return the week after that. And weeks became months and that month became a year when I finally tried again. My trying again was mostly due to Wensely mentioning that he had flown through these missions without much trouble. That got me to try them again and finally (this time in a Dramiel) I did it!
It was the first time ever I tried a faction ship as well and it was quite some experience.
With it I did manage to get that pilot down and could enjoy scouting out interesting research sites like the one below.
I can only recommend these mission arks as they at least from nearly all missions do tell a bit of a story.
Before embarking on it just don’t forget to read one of the nice guides like the EVE Uni one!
Zargyl - A Sebiestor Scholar 