Now in Dal, I warped to a safe spot and spied 2 Rifters and a Wolf on D-scan, all in the direction of the same asteroid belt. Thinking this could be a good test for me, and thinking they would fancy the 3:1 odds, I warped in to them. With the nearest being 23km away, I wasn’t close enough to snag even one, and they all warped off. Luckily, I saw which direction they went, so I warped to another safe I had over that way. Sure enough, one of the Rifters and the Wolf were sitting at a planet, although the second Rifter was no-where to be seen. Still, I warped to the planet at zero, hoping they hadn’t gone far yet. Unfortunetly, the Wolf was 80km away, while the Rifter was 40km off. Despite thinking they would once again warp off, I pointed my Rupture in their general direction and fired up the MWD. I knew I wouldn’t be able to catch either of them, but on the off chance they had help coming in, I didn’t want to be on the warp in.

After about a minute, I noticed the distance between me an the Wolf was decreasing. He was actually moving towards me! Switching off my MWD to give my capacitor chance to recharge, I waited until he was 30km away before activating it again, to give me a quick boost so I could get inside my range. It worked. As soon as he was in range I fired up everything and let him have it. With a scram, web and dual-neuts on him, he wasn’t going anywhere. It was at this time when I noticed that not only was the Rifter also getting closer, but a Hawk and a Harpy had warped in as well, with the Hawk warping to his friends, but the Harpy opting to warp in at range. Releasing my drones and setting them against the Wolf, I dug myself in for a the fight. My shields disappear pretty quick, but being armor tanked, I’m not too worried. The Wolf takes a bit of encouraging, but eventually he agreed that dying was a good idea. Immediately, I switch everything over to the Hawk. Being a flyer of Assault Frigates myself, I know what they are capable of, so I want to kill them before I focus on the Rifter. Luckily, the Hawk drops faster than the Wolf did, and is soon floating in space dying in a fire. It’s at this point that the Harpy finally seems to makle a decision about what to do, and warps out before I can get close enough. I offer up a ‘gf’ in local, but it isn’t returned. Strange, that.

I think I’m going to be sticking with the Rupture for some time yet, as it’s proving to be a damn good ship. All I need to do is start adding pictures to these walls of text to make it more interesting for you people to read. :p

I did almost snag me some good kills, though. I jumped through a gate and appeared on the other side just as a Viator jumped back through. I burned back to the gate as fast as I could and jumped, but he was long gone by the time I reappeared. Annoyingly, a similar thing happened with a Nemesis, whose pilot didn’t seem to understand the concept behind a ‘stealth’ bomber. I chased him to a gate – uncloaked all the way – and he jumped through, so I followed. By the time I loaded the other side of the gate, he had burned back to the gate and jumped back through. Again, I followed, but once again he had already warped off, uncloaked.

A few jumps later, I saw a Jaguar in a plex. Only problem was, the warp in point landed me 80km away from him. Shit. Praying that he hadn’t seen me, I burned to him as fast as I could… but he warped off to a station. For the third time tonight, I followed my target, warping to the station at zero. He had warped at 20km, but immediately warped to a gate when I landed. It was at this point that I was starting to get pretty fucking annoyed with my inability to hold anything down in order to shoot them. Don’t they realise they’re denying me my happiness? Bastards! The lot of them!

Anyway, with only 2 jumps to go before I reach my destination, I’m not holding out much hope of me shooting at anything. But then, as I approach the next stargate, it flashes, and local goes up by two. This could be interesting. Then two Republic Fleet Firetails decloak. This could be VERY interesting. Then they approach me. Oh, it’s on. So I lock one up and activate my scrambler and both neuts on him, but I keep my drones in their bay because I don’t want to lose them to the gate guns. I start blasting away at him, and he’s soon in armor. Knowing I can’t tank these gate guns for long, I overheat my guns and give it everything I’ve got. He starts moving away from me and manages to get out of my neut range, but just as he does, he explodes. Excellent. I start trying to target the second one, but he warps off because I can lock him.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. “Ulystar, why didn’t you lock them BOTH up at the start of the fight?! You could have just moved the warp scrambler over as soon as the first one died! You n00b!” And you would be right. Usually. However, as it turns out, my tank would have failed within a few seconds, and that would have been very bad. So, in essence, me being a n00b saved my life! Hah!

Tomorrow, I think I’ll make the journey back home and see what happens.

Anyway, Ruptures.

I took one out for a solo roam, and plotted a course of 10 jumps in an attempt to find something to shoot at. I had already decided before I left that I wouldn’t attempt fighting against anything bigger than a cruiser until I had gotten a few kills under my belt, mainly because I just didn’t feel confident engaging them in a ship that I have never flown before. It just seems to make sense that way.

So, I go about 7 jumps without finding anything (*grumble grumble*), when I spot this lone Kestrel at a Planet. Thinking that this would be a good target to test the Rupture on, I warp in, target, scram, neut and start shooting. It’s at this point when I notice Local suddenly spike from 4 to 16. Instinctively, I choose a safe spot and press warp, even though I know I’m already screwed because this Kestrel is bound to have a point on me. I mean, that’s the whole point of a bait ship, isn’t it? To not die and to get a point on something. So naturally, when I warp off the field STILL in my ship before any others land on grid, I immediately think that it wasn’t a bait ship, and the local spike was just an amazingly timed coincidence. However, when I open the d-scanner and point it towards where I had just come from, I discover 10 ships of varying kinds, all of which wanted to come and say hi, in a very destructive way. Realising that the most likely scenario was that my Rupture had capped out the Kestrel, so he COULDN’T put a point on me, I instantly had a new-found respect for this ship, and started flying him home. Only to be killed by two Sensor boosting Hurricanes in a gate-camp 3 jumps later. Shit.

Still, 9 more to go, eh?

I’m about to call it a night because it’s getting late and my eyes are starting to act up again (I should really get that checked out), when von Diel says he’s going on a roam to Tama, and did anyone want to tag along? Hell yea! I haven’t been to Tama for nearly 4 months now, and I KNOW I’ll get to shoot as something there. All told there turns out to be 5 of us – 4 HellFleet members, all in Assault Frigates and a possible recruit in an Arbitrator – all heading off to Tama to either seperate some pods from ships… or die in a fire. Most likely the latter.

We get to Old Man Star, and we opt to hang around here for a few minutes to see if we can catch anything on our way through. Within 5 minutes, we downed a Harpy. It’s at this point that the call is made to forget Tama and stay here to shoot stuff, which suits us just fine (I’ll see you soon Tama, don’t worry).

And shoot stuff we did. Also; explosions happened. Kaal joined us just before we mightily decimated a Tristan and things kept rolling from there. We did, however, have a small incident when someone who is blue to us warped into the belt… and proceeded to shoot at our potential recruit, Helios. It took us a few seconds to work out that because Helios wasn’t in Hellhounds yet, he wouldn’t have shown up as blue on Atarres overview. Whoops. Luckily, von Diel convo’d him in time, and told him the situation. Apologies were shared, and Atarre joined us for a while, helping us to bring down 3 more ships – a Vexor, Brutix, and Myrm. Atarre was amazingly intrumental for the last two – managing to land points on both ships when they were too far away from the rest of us. I think secretly, we all love the Cynabal a little bit more now.

After this, Atarre decided to move on and leave us to it, which proved to be a wise move, as the next thing we heard over vent was “Warp to me, warp to me. NO, WAIT, DON’T WARP TO ME, do not warp to me, or you will die in a fire”. Luckily, none of us had engaged our warp drives, so only von Diels Vengence was lost, which, ultimately, put an end to the night. Still, 5 kills for 1 loss is a decent return, I’d say.

First up, the fit I posted last time:

Catalyst: – Suicide Gank
Lows:
Magnetic Field Stabilizer I x3

Highs:
Light Neutron Blaster I x8

Ammo:
Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S (about 56 charges, 7 for each gun)

DPS – 233
DPS(overheated) – 268

This is pretty much the cookie cutter Catalyst fit that I used last time (and will more than likely use this time, as well). The only thing with this fit is that you do need to be decently skilled to use it. If you’re going to be using a new character for Hulkageddon, then you’re going to run into CPU and PG issues (you’re also going to have less DPS). There are a number of things you can do, however, depending on your situation.

———————-
Option 1)
If you’re using too much CPU AND Powergrid, you can replace all of the Light Neutron Blasters with Light Ion Blaster Is. This will instantly solve both problems, at the expense of DPS. On a low skilled alt of mine, this gives 183DPS.

Lows:
Magnetic Field Stabilizer I x3

Highs:
Light Ion Blaster I x8

————————-
Option 1a)
Conversely, If you want to keep using the Neutron Blasters, you can drop 2 Magnetic Field Stabilizers, and use 1 Reactor Control Unit. On the same alt, this gives me 158DPS.

Lows:
Magnetic Field Stabilizer I
Reactor Control Unit I

Highs:
Light Neutron Blaster I x8

——————————-
Option 2)
If you’re only over on your Powergrid, you can drop only 1 Magnetic Field Stabalizer, and instead use a Reactor Control Unit I (180DPS).

Lows:
Magnetic Field Stabilizer I x2
Reactor Control Unit I

Highs:
Light Neutron Blaster I x8

———————————
It’s worth noting that no matter what route you go down, as long as there are about 4 – 5 of you (and typically, there will be), you should bring a hulk down no problem before Concord pops you.

Man, if only he was writing this. It would be awesome.

ANYWAY.

The whole point of this post is to highlight a problem that I’ve seen far too many of you newer pilots doing lately. You can probably guess what that is from the post title – AFKing, or Away From Keyboard for the four people who don’t yet know what that acronym means. But more specifically, going AFK when you’re in low security space. If you’re docked in a station, fine, go AFK for as long as you want to grab a drink, make a sandwich, whatever. Being docked in a station is the ONLY truly safe place in the game, period. Anywhere else, you risk being shot. Shit, in low-sec space, that’s pretty much a guarentee.

Just take these two pilots for example. In both cases, they entered Lisbaetanne through the Aere gate… and then just sat there. In both cases, I was circling them for about 3 minutes in my Harpy trying to get them to shoot at me first. In both cases, I got bored and warped to a station to get my Drake – a process that took at least another minute. In both cases, I warped back and they were still there, and in both cases they died. Please, do not be like them!

Seriously, if you’re entering low-sec for any reason at all, even if it’s just one jump, DO NOT GO AFK. Even if you’re in a safe spot, DO NOT GO AFK – there’s always a chance someone will probe you out. Dock up in a station first or log off, whatever. Just be smart about it.

First up, my Vagabond.
I had just logged on, and almost immediately I heard that there was a Tengu in system. I didn’t pay too much attention to it as I was sorting out my skill queue, but then I read in alliance chat that it had been tackled in a belt. It screamed ‘bait ship’, but I undocked and warped to it to help with DPS. There was about 5 of us, and when we had the Tengu down to 10% shields, he asked for a ransom in local of 500m. Here is where we made the first mistake – we delayed. Two counter-offers from us were also put in local, one of 600m, another of 1bn (at the same time, from two seperate pilots). While we were waiting for the Tengu pilots response – a good 10 seconds or so – a Falcon landed on grid, 70k off. Here is where I made the second mistake – I didn’t warp out immediately. Another 10 seconds later, 4 more ships enter grid. It’s at this point I tell everyone to gtfo, and start warping myself… but too late. Webbed and scrammed, I’m going nowhere. Then the rest of their gang comes in and jams me to high heaven. All I can do is sit and wait… and wait… and wait. Turns out I put a hell of a tank on that ship, so it takes a good 2 minutes to blow up. I manage to get my pod out and back to a station to reship.

A good number of lessons learned here, I think.
1) If a suspected bait ship offers to pay a ransom, take it. My guess is, he didn’t expect his shields to drop so fast, or the fleet was further away than first thought, so offered up a ransom to save his ship. If we had taken the initial offer, there’s a good chance we all would have been 100mil richer. There’s also a chance he was just stalling us, though.

2) Have one person designated to handle ransoms. With two people giving counter-offers, it only delayed us further.

3) When an E-war ship lands on grid, and it’s not friendly, run.

So, my GCC runs down, the trap guys have left system, so I undock in my Rokh, with a mind to do some station camping. About 20 minutes go by, and nothing is happening. I get word that a cruiser is about to come through a stargate, and it’s on autopilot. I start warping to the gate, and halfway there I hear that it’s been tackled. Good. I land, turn on my sensor boosters, and start shooting at it. It’s at this point, that we’re told that a fleet has just warped to the other side of this gate, and that we should run. Unfortunetly, a Rokh has the grace and finesse of an oil tanker, so it’s not long before I’m again tackled and killed… by the same people. This time they podded me, too. It was at this point I figured that two seperatre 100mil+ losses was enough, and logged for the night. Although there were some lessons to be learned here, too.

1) If you’ve just been caught in a trap, check the names of the people on the kill mail. If you see one of them again, avoid them.

2) If you’re in a ship that takes an age to warp off, always make sure you’re aligned.

Ultimately, losing those two ships was my fault, as it should be. Am I going to replace them? No, not yet. I’ve been relying on the big ships for ages now, and I need to get better in the smaller ones. I’ve got a handful of Rifters I can fly around in, as well as a Harpy. I still have a Drake in system too if I need to do some station camping, but for the most part, I’ll be trying to catch people in belts.

First up, last Friday my nephew came to visit. I don’t see him anywhere near enough, so I thought it would be best if I ‘unplugged’ for a bit, although I did manage to go on two roams with HellFleet on the Saturday and Sunday. He was content enough playing on my PS3, so he didn’t mind. The rest of the week though, we just chilled, playing games and shit like that.

He went back home today, so I planned to get some Eve time in. Turned my computer on, turned my laptop on… huh. Ok, it’s not booting up. I kick it into Safe Mode, and it boots up fine. I look around and can’t see anything wrong with any set-ups, so I restart it in normal mode. That’s when I notice vertical blue lines on the Vaio startup ‘splash’ screen, followed by a screen full of ááá’s. Weird. On a hunch, I go back into Safe Mode and disable the graphics adaptor, then reboot. I still get the weird screens, but it does boot up into Windows. Nice. The screen looks fine as well. Perfect. So I change the screen resolution from the rediculous 800×600, to a more manageable setting… and notice that I now have vertical blue lines appearing on my screen permanantly, but only on dark parts of the screen. If I open up google reader, that is all in white, then the blue lines disappear.

I initially thought this was a graphics card issue, but I’m beginning to think it’s not. For one, it’s affecting both my main card, and the default one (or whatever it uses when the main one is disabled). And for two, I don’t think a graphics card error would produce a screen full of á’s on startup. So what I’m doing now is backing up everything important, then I’ll probably do a complete system recovery, although that won’t be until tomorrow.

So, to recap;
Main GFX adapter on – Blue lines on startup screen, screen full of á’s, then doesn’t boot after the windows loading screen.
Main GFX adapter off – Same as above, only it boots Windows fine, and the blue lines are there permanently, but only on dark backgrounds.

Does anyone have any idea or advice on this? Would doing a system recovery help, or am I screwed?

Edit: Apparently, when I was backing up my stuff last night, my laptop decided to fix itself. I’m going to give it a week or so to give it chance to settle, but for now, it all looks good.

With the starting point in Vitrauze, we made a quick stop off in Lisbaetanne to pick up a couple of people there before setting our destination for Amamake. That’s right, the system where you’re guarenteed to get a fight one way or another. Knowing full well that we would most likely die in an exploding fireball, Ga’len suggested that we all fly T1 hulls. Once the fleet was fully formed (there was 7 of us), we started on our way. Although there were a few jumps where we had to wait for a few gate-camps to disperse, the journey to Amamake was relatively quiet with all of us getting there intact.

Now in Amamake itself, we warped to a safe spot while Cyber tried looking for something that we could shoot at. After a few fruitless minutes, he warped to a belt and sat there waiting to see if anyone would come say ‘Hello’ to him. Then Ga’len warped to a belt and sat there, as did Lakasha. Nothing. After 20 minutes, no one had felt the need to welcome us.

Needless to say, we eventually turned around and headed back towards Vitrauze, and then on again to Lisbaetanne. And would you believe it? Within about 10 minutes, 4 destroyers had been… well, destroyed. Unbelievable. Ga’len summed it up perfectly when he said “Next time we go on a roam, let’s just go to Lis and shoot stuff.”

After this, Cyber and Ga’len said their goodbyes, and the rest of us eventually made our way to Old Man Star, which is where things started going bad for us. Eviwyn lost two Rifters, Lakasha lost her Merlin, von Diel lost a number of Ishkurs, and I lost my Manticore that I had jumped into to provide a warp-in point to people that may have been sitting 70k off from a belt, or even in a safe spot. Although I did manage to help bring down a Rifter before I lost it.

All in all, it was a fun night, and I’m already looking forward to the next one. Next time though, we’ll probably pick a system closer to home to look for fights in. :P