All posts by Ajaqa

Things That Happen Late at Night

2022-09-25 Ajaqa Leave a comment

So, it was late last night 🥱 and I was just getting ready for bed. I had just finished three Havens in a row and the ESS was about to burst, like, within a minute. A neut had entered the system while I was in warp to the station and I wanted to wait them out before starting to loot and salvage the sites but that was cut short when an ESS intrusion was announced.

Shit! FC, what do? 😱

As I usually don’t PVP (except for in fleets for home defense) I had nothing really suitable on hand. However, the objective was not really to win a fight against a Tengu (saw it on dscan earlier so I knew what it was), the objective was to get them to sever the link from the ESS so the payout could commence normally because, as said, it was only a minute away. And as my ratting Vexor costs about a third of the ESS payout I figured it was totally worth trying to simply bump them off, then maybe let them finish me 🤷‍♀️ but, most importantly, get the ESS payout.

So I jumped into the ESS, lit them up with my target painter and put my drones on them. The counter on the intrusion had meanwhile already gone down to less than two minutes so I activated my oversized afterburner and went straight for them. I watched their shield booster activate to negate all my damage but oh well, the goal was not necessarily to kill them, moving them would be enough. My armor repairer was able to tank the incoming damage quite well — as a ratting ship in Gurista space I may be slightly over-tanked against kinetic damage — and that is what they chose to hurl at me because that’s what they’re good at. Literally anything else would probably have vapourized me… 😄

Anyway, this went on for a about a minute and then two things happened: they lost their link with the ESS and I noticed they are in 50% armor. I hadn’t even seen that happening! 😮

20 seconds later I got the ESS payout. Objective achieved! 💰

So now I thought, eh, why not? 🤔 I started to orbit them because there was no reason to push them anymore and they didn’t seem to move very fast on their own… I watched my drones slowly chew through their armor and their hull, occasionally seeing the shield booster activate for a small breath of fresh air but ultimately they succumbed to my drones, even though they managed to finish off one of the drones before the battle was over. It’s already replaced!

New Things Are Awesome!

2022-08-24 Ajaqa Leave a comment

So, yes, I seem to have firmly settled in with an alliance in the northern part of New Eden’s nullsec area, right into an active war zone!

And it’s quite exciting here. CONCORD also offers bounties for the pirates that are active in here so one of my favourite pastimes can still be used as a viable income source which suits me perfectly. And if I’m bored I can team up with a couple of corp mates and have a skirmish with whoever is showing up and as we’re quite close to low- and highsec there’s always people showing up, looking for a fight!

However, my mining has taken quite a backseat over all the flurries of other activities that are going on all the time… which is probably mostly due to the fact that all my blueprints have only recently gotten out of Asset Safety and now need to find their way back to me and I personally cannot be arsed to shuttle them around myself so I’m paying somebody else to do it and well, that does take its time. Totally worth it, though because of all the things in New Eden I probably enjoy hauling the least.

Trying New Things

2022-06-12 Ajaqa Leave a comment

I have recently started to diversify my undertakings a bit, to catch more of the beauty New Eden has to offer. And what I currently feel drawn to quite a bit is nullsec, the lawless wild-west style area of New Eden that comprises an estimated 75% of the known star systems (too lazy to do real math now).

I have always enjoyed hunting pirates in empire space but here in nullsec the bloody pirates are everywhere! It’s quite impossible to take a turn somewhere and not stumble upon a huge number of pirate installations that are just begging to be taken down! And with the nicely increased Bounty Risk Modifier set up by CONCORD I am more than happy to oblige!

And the loot all these battleships drop is amazing. Sometimes it’s so much that I can’t scoop up all the loot and my MTU at the same time!

I just need a way to chew through all those battleships a little bit faster because my drones sometimes take their sweet while but I already do have a plan for that…

Watching Things Die

2022-06-11 Ajaqa Leave a comment

I’m not sure I like what New Eden is doing to me.

So, there I was, yesterday, sitting in my Orca somewhere in Caldari space, munching on a couple of rocks when this Stratios warped in. It cleared a couple of pirates that had been orbiting me for a while without actually attacking me (in which case my drones would have shredded them). And then it just sat there.

And continued to sit there.

I tried contacting them to offer any assistance that I might be able to give them but received no reply.

The Stratios just kept on sitting there.

A good while later the inevitable thing happened and more pirates showed up. They decided a Stratios would be a way better target than my Orca and went right to work on it.

Some minutes later I noticed that the shields of the Stratios were gone. Now, it might have had some armor tank but there was no way I could know.

I decided to keep watching. As long as the pirates weren’t attacking me, my drones wouldn’t touch them. Sure, I could set them on the pirates manually…

…but for some reason I decided that I wanted to find out whether I could actually let the Stratios die to a couple of belt pirates. I was also debating with myself whether I wanted to make my attention known to the Stratios by locking it up and I quickly decided that I would do so because otherwise I would have no way of knowing how long to wait to step in to prevent the Stratios from dying.

So, instead of simply dispatching my drones I also just sat there, watching the Stratious lose all of its armor and more than half of its hull. And at that point the pirates decided to stray from their almost dead target and go up against me – which ended them quickly and saved the Stratios.

I am a bit scared that there is the very real possibility that I would simply have let the Stratios die when it would have been more than easy to help the pilot in question. A part of me is saying stuff like, “well, that pilot shouldn’t simply have taken a nap in space” and “it wouldn’t have been my fault, I didn’t shoot” and while that part would be technically correct (the best kind of correct?) the bigger part of me would have hated me for not helping out a pilot in need.

In the end I’m quite relieved that nothing bad happened to the Stratios (even though I’m sure the pilot was a bit surprised when waking up and finding their ships almost in shreds). I do need to spend some time thinking about myself and what principles I want to live by in this world, though…

Message from the Wormhole

2022-04-22 Ajaqa Leave a comment

I mentioned my friend Remy the other day when I talked about the strange sites that have been popping up all over, right? I recently got another message from her:

hey lissy! you remember that wormhole we went exploring in back in yc111? you can actually live in them! how crazy is that? i found a crew of people who offered me a home in their wormhole and a couple of days in i must say that i am still super-stoaked about the whole thing!

I’m happy for you, Remy! For me wormholes are still too much of a thrill to actually do much with them, apart from the occasional ore procurement… I have to admit, though, that it’s very different from mining in other places in New Eden because you have no idea whether there is anyone in there with you and that’s just not the thrill I’m looking for.

Mining & Industry Changes

2022-01-10 Ajaqa Leave a comment

So, New Eden recently underwent a couple of changes when it comes to one of my favourite pastimes: mining! In more specific (and relevant to me) terms, the drones of an Orca have lost some of their mining bonus but the Orca has gained the Large Industrial Core which technically is a Siege Module which boosts many of the Orca’s defining traits but in turn make it immobile for quite some time and additionally uses fuel. All in all this again reinforces the Orca’s primary purpose; many people are seeing the Orca as a mining ship but it’s actually not, it’s a mining support ship! You’re supposed to have a hord of real mining ships around, like Mining Barges and Exhumers!

This past weekend I have for the first time tried to use one of the new Industrial Cores and I have to say, they do take some getting used to. First of all, you need to be really slow when you activate it. Optimally, you are at a complete standstill because once you activate the Core, your ship will coast at its current velocity until you either deactivate the Core (only possible after a complete cycle which takes two and a half minutes) or you bump something or something bumps you. Have you ever spooled up a Micro Jump Drive and somebody got too close, sending you 100 km in a random direction and you could neither steer nor brake? Exactly that can now happen with the Orca.

And then it doesn’t have an immediate effect on currently running boosts but its changes will only take effect on the next boost. That your boost range switches from 90 km back to 45 km only because you planning to unload is something that needs to be communicated to your mining fleet as long as they don’t really know how this Core thing works.

Other than that, this new module is really fine! With one Covetor, three Procurers, one Retriever, and one Venture it takes about 30 minutes to fill up an Orca — which in turn uses about 20% of the Heavy Water in the new fuel bay… one more thing to pay attention to!

Another thing that has changed as a part of this patch are the mining crystals. While before you needed a specialized crystal for each and every type of ore there was (except moon ores) you now only have six broad categories of crystals, reducing the amount of crystals you have to pack for certain endeavors. I really like that!

And there’s at least one more thing in the works to look forward to: at some point the Orca will gain in-space ore compression using this new Core! I totally can’t wait for that to happen!

Doctor Who Crossover

2022-01-10 Ajaqa Leave a comment

Some days ago CCP announced a Doctor Who crossover event that is going to start this week. And for some reason many people on many Discord servers, forums, and other platforms are complaining.

Because apparently it is not allowed to like both a TV show and a video game. And of course there cannot actually be an overlap between people liking a sci-fi TV show and a sci-fi video game. Whatever these people are smoking, can I have some of that?

One of the most ludicrous “arguments” (if it can be called that) was that a Doctor Who crossover would somehow “break the immersion.” Are you bloody kidding me?! You are playing a space-based video game where ships move like they’re under water, top speed has nothing to do with acceleration, energy is basically free, asteroids respawn like clockwork (and their distribution depends on the social construct “security status”), you can be cloned, your consciousness can be transferred over many lightyears within fractions of a second, assembling a ship that is 15 km in length takes literally 0 time — but a Doctor Who crossover breaks the immersion? Get the fuck out of here.

Apart from that I can understand the reluctance in accepting mixing intellectual properties (or fandoms, if you prefer) like that. What has worked for others (LEGO vs. pretty much everything comes to mind as something that’s both fun and incredibly successful) doesn’t necessarily have to work for EVE and/or Doctor Who. I do have the feeling that EVE players will have more problems accepting this crossover than Doctor Who fans; Doctor Who is a show that thrives on change and the inherent challenges whereas while you could say that EVE is also a lot about adaptation to changing circumstances usually the first reaction of reddit and other forums frequented by EVE players is to throw hissy fits left and right as soon as one value changes from 0.123512 to 0.123511. In an environment like this CCP can only lose, no matter how awesome the event turns out to be…

Anyway, while it is totally possible that New Eden exists somewhere in the Doctor Who universe we all know that the Doctor usually hangs around near Cardiff, Wales because apparently that’s where all the alien action happens! I am for my part looking forward to see what events there will be and how much of the Doctor Who feeling they will actually have. And when it’s over I’m sure New Eden will be back to its usual old self…

Killmark!

2022-01-03 Ajaqa Leave a comment

Do you know what else there is in wormholes, except valuable ores and gases? Right. Other people who also want a piece of that!

So there I was, sitting in an Ordinary Perimeter Deposit, nibbling away on a piece of Arkonor when I spot this Venture on D-scan. I immediately cloak up and prepare to wait for what is going to happen now. Only seconds later, the Venture lands on the beacon of the Deposit and starts burning to the rock right next to me! I put a bit of distance between me and the rock they’re going for so they don’t accidently uncloak me when they overshoot. They start mining without a care in the world and so I decide that maybe I could try to take them down? I knew that at least on the first try I was very unlikely to succeed because they were in a Venture which has built-in warp core stabilization and I didn’t even have any warp scrambling equipment so the chance of them warping off before they took serious damage was very high…

So, I moved closer to them, uncloaked right on top of them and set my drones on them. After a few seconds they responded by launching their drones (but not sending them towards me because I never took any damage) and after a few more seconds they warped off, leaving their drones behind!

That went slightly better than expected. I collected their drones and as they were still visible on D-scan, I cloaked up again. And guess what? Only a few seconds later they warped back in and approached the same rock as before! How… what… WHY?!

Anyway, I repeated the little dance: uncloaked on top of them and set my drones on them, only this time they didn’t have any drones to respond with so they warped off again.

At this point I must shamefully admit that I got a bit blood-thirsty. I went back to high-sec and my corp’s HQ which was only two jumps away and has a corp hangar full of useful stuff. I switched my Shield Extenders for two Warp Scramblers and made my way back into the wormhole system. And behold, the Venture was still in there!

Only now they apparently switched to gas huffing so they did refit somewhere which probably also meant they re-equipped some drones (or at least one would hope so). Anyway, I warped in to the Reservoir they were at and imagine my surprise when I found them sitting directly on the beacon! That couldn’t have been easier!

In a few seconds they were warp-scrambled and my drones were once again at work. They did have a Shield Booster installed so every now and then the red bar shrunk slightly but all in all it kept growing. They launched a drone (and one drone only) and targeted one of my drones but it couldn’t get to work fast enough… after about a minute my drones had chewed through all of the Venture’s defenses and I got the killmark you can see above!

All in all there are quite a number of things that could have and maybe even should have gone differently. I initiated a conversation with them and asked them if they wanted to talk about what happened but I never got a reply. Anyway, here’s a list of things that I would probably do different, had the roles been reversed:

D-scan. D-scan, D-scan, D-scan! When jumping into a wormhole, your D-scan window has to be open and visible all the time! So upon entering the system I would have spotted an Endurance and would have known there’s somebody out there.
If you know somebody is out there, try to find out where they are. Change your D-scan settings to smallest angle (5°) and scan all anomalies to see if they are in one of those. If you do this in your first minute after jumping into the system you have the advantage that you can see them but they cannot see you, due to the cloak of the wormhole. Invaluable!
At this point I would have known exactly where the Endurance was. Great! I would have warped a couple of times around the system and created a small number of safe spots. While doing that I would have noticed that the Endurance is now no longer visible on D-scan. As all known anomalies and celestial were well within D-scan range (it was a small wormhole system) this means that it has either cloaked up or left the system. No way to know for sure.
Alright, so, I want to mine. Where? Definitely not in the same Deposit where I spotted the Endurance earlier! There were two other Deposits in the system and I would have picked a different one.
Okay, I picked a Deposit and started mining. Oh, there it is, right on top of me! Okay, I’m not being scrambled so I know I can run at any time. Drones, do your thing! Shield Boost, do your thing! Cap Boosts, do your thing, too! Dang, their drones are better than mine, plus they have one more. Not fair!
I’m still not being scrambled so I’d grab my drones and head out. See you!
Now the Endurance has disappeared from D-scan again. I know in which Deposit it just was, and it’s either still there, cloaked up again, or it has left the system. Which means I will now pick the third Deposit to mine at.
Wow, another Endurance decloaking on top of me! Weird where they all come from! Anyway, not being scrambled I warp off and everything’s fine.
If it had gone this way with the Endurance chasing me through two Deposits I would at this point probably have ditched the system altogether. Wormhole ore is fine but even losing a Venture over it is not my idea of fun. But let’s assume for a second that I would now decide to still go back but now try getting some gas out of it.
I jump back to high-sec, to a station where I have some gear, equip the gas scoops and go back into the wormhole. Initial D-scanning shows an empty system. Awesome! Off to the Reservoir it is!
There are two Harvestable Clouds, one directly at the beacon and one about 70 km off. I pick the second one so if a hunter is not using Combat Probes (which show up on D-scan) I can see them coming for 70 km.
D-scan shows an Endurance again. Is it the same as before? Oh shit, it has the same ship name! I warp to my safe spot and try to see where they are, watching D-scan all the time to spot Combat Probes. Now, I either spot the Endurance again at some point because they decided to decloak and go about their business and when they are not where I want to be I’ll come out to continue gas mining (always ready to warp off when they arrive) or I will at some point decide that today is just not the day to mine in this particular system and will leave, to probably never see that system again. And good riddance, too, it’s full of Endurances that want to kill me!

So Much Mining

2022-01-01 Ajaqa Leave a comment

Happy new year, everyone! While everybody has been out celebrating New Year’s Eve, I have used the opportunity to mine the more valuable stuff from all those places that are normally a lot more dangerous than my usual mining grounds: low-sec and wormholes.

With just a couple of an Endurance’s cargohold’s worth I have collected almost enough non-high-sec minerals to build a full Combat Battlecruiser. That’s really not too shabby for a few hour’s worth of mining!

Winter Mining

2021-12-16 Ajaqa Leave a comment

So, while Lissy is busy hunting down Sansha’s Nation (as she usually is) I have been clearing the mining sites that follow the ice storms that are currently roaming New Eden. It seems that under certain circumstances the sites disappear from the Probe Scanner window but do remain active and even respawn the asteroids after a while, giving you pretty much uncontested access to as much ice as you can mine. A miner’s dream come true!

Mining with Ajaqa