Monday, November 7, 2016

Changes, changes, changes...

After a very happy time in the Signal Cartel Corporation, a fantastic group of explorers that are great fun, Jack Dancer decided to try something different.  Faction Warfare (aka FW).

I listen to several podcasts and have heard Ashterothi and Kirith Kodachi talk about their FW corporation, Aideron Robotics  on their podcasts Hydrostatic and Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah respectively.  Besides having a nifty name, I thought that Aideron Robotics sounded like something I'd be interested in.  I gathered that it was a mature, smallish, close-knit bunch that enjoyed small fleet activities and the general excitement of FW.

So I joined and everything, so far, has been as advertised.

We have a website (linked above), Discord(tm) for breaking information, and Teamspeak 3(tm) for communications during online activities.  I've been having fun learning about the mechanics of FW - how these sites (both defensive and offensive) work and what there is to do.  As a pirate I always was mystified about why my prey (or more often what turned out to be my doom) were lingering in them...

Last night Kirith Kodachi led his weekly Sunday evening fleet of about 15 (plus and minus one or two on several occasions) on a two hour roam of the neighborhood around our home is Fliet.  Our fleet of destroyers (with some logistic support) picked up a few kills and lost a few of the logis along the way.  I managed to get on only two of the kills (I'm not fast enough with sending out my drones to help with damage from long range...).  The first was a claymore worth about half a billion isk and the second was a gila worth about 300 million isk.  Wow.  After years of fighting rifters, these were eye-openers...

The corporation has at least 3 regularly scheduled fleets in the evenings and I hope to fly with them whenever I can.

Friday, January 1, 2016

Godzilla II

Well, that was interesting.

I took Godzilla II out tonight (Godzilla I was lost last night to a corpmate's Maulus - I apparently stumbled onto some sort of RvB free-for-all and everyone was shooting everyone...), but as I was saying, I took Godzilla II out tonight looking for trouble and found it.

After cruising around Syndicate in null sec and zigging every time I should have zagged when finding other solo pilots (these coming and goings on the gates can be confusing) I finally managed to stumble across a Sabre sitting alone on a gate.  But (of course) I was set to automatically jump through the gate to the other side and when I did I discovered a pair of his mates in a Svipul and Deimos.  I managed to elude them by warping toward a station (but ended up stuck in a warp bubble part way there...).  I decided to turn around (about the time the Svipul and Deimos also arrived in the bubble) and motored my way to the edge before heading back to the gate with the Sabre on the other side.

I jumped through and landed right next to the Sabre.  Excellent!

I set an orbit, turned everything up to 11 (overheat) and hit my damage control.  Things were going reasonably well.  Until the Svipul and Deimos arrived to help the Sabre.  Along with an Astero eventually (to join in on the killmail for my empty pod...).

So Godzilla II accomplished exactly what I wanted it to do - a bit of excitement and fun.