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Another night of pvp with bombers bar

As most of you who read my stuff on a more regular basis might know, I enjoy joining the occasional Bomber Bar fleet. Not only because of the fact that it gives me something to do, but also because I just love stealthy ops. I adore my bombers.

Yesterday, we (corp mate and I) didn’t have much action in our womrhole so we decided to join a Bomber’s Bar Wolf Pack operation. We met up a few jumps from Jita, and waited for a staging system in which we’d basically be doing a few bombing runs etc.

This system was 93PI-4, also known as Goonswarm Territory. We got a cyno bridge into it from high-sec and got started on getting ping spots etc.
I personally have nothing against the guys, but a lot of people have a “Grrr Goons” mentality that seems to fuel quite a bit of story on their part, which is nice.
Every game needs their “bad guys”, I for one don’t really care, as long as I can throw a bomb or two I’m happy.

The evening started of fairly well, we got our bombing pings, waited for an opportunity, and were given one when someone in the fleet sacrificed himself to get us kills.

De-cloaking when your squadron is called and firing your bomb along with 8 others is quite a sight. I was a bit entranced by it and instead of warping off immediately I stuck around a bit to see them blow up before warping off to a celestial and bouncing back.

Those first few waves gave us a few kills and became the start of an evening of staying around a gate, killing stragglers and getting a response fleet on our asses.

We were camping the gate, having a bubble on it. Killing people that got stuck in it. And one little Goon was quite persistent in trying to get to the next system. Coming back over and over again in her pod.
It was quite amusing to see a bunch of us de-cloak to kill the pod every single time. “The little Goon that tried” we actually voted on letting her through after the fourth time because, if you really want it that bad, we shouldn’t stop that.

After a while we heard that one of our hunters got us something, and we dropped on a Chimera, which was obviously bait. But no worries there, we got out safely after a few shots and started to go back to the staging system.

Turns out that us being gone for a while, gave them the perfect opportunity to muster a response fleet and get on the in gate. Meaning that half our fleet jumped into the staging system only to see a LOT of goons warping in on the gate. Most of them got out safely, and those of us on the other side waited for a cyno to be lit so we didn’t have to use the gate. Once we had eyes on the correct side again we decided to wait a bit longer and try for another few kills. Turns out that’s what they were waiting on, because the moment we de-cloaked, we had a Titan and a bunch of carriers on our asses. They brought in a Ragnarok.

Close enough to almost touch it

Close enough to almost touch it

It was a bit overkill but this was only the second time I’ve seen a Titan up close, and it was the first time in response to a fleet that I was in. So I was a bit proud of myself there. Despite it being mostly because of how well the BB FC did his job, but still.

Despite their camp on the gate we did still get a Vagabond, Cynabal and a bait Sigil.

So all in all it was a good night, I got kills and made it out alive, docking back up in Jita with a smile on my face.

I love Bomber’s Bar for bringing us content like that.

Stay tuned

 

Bomber’s bar, revisited

Yesterday was a good day. After chatting a bit with people on IRC (yes I still use IRC) I felt like joining a Bomber’s Bar op again. And I’m glad that I did.

The last time I joined a BB roam was in March, when I joined in the downing of a 3b Nidhoggur on my alt. That was also one of the last time I was still active in EvE, with that I mean logging in a few times a day instead of once a week, so a long time ago.

I’ve said it in previous blogs, and I’ll say it again, I LOVE NPSI ops. I’m afraid of going out to PvP solo but the fun thing about Bomber’s Bar is that I don’t need to hunt the whole time, they do it for us.

We were waiting in Thera for a target, there weren’t many people around last night so we decided to go for smaller ones instead of “whale” hunting. After jumping through the wormhole and waiting for a few more minute on the redeemer, cloaked of course. We were told in coms that a Charon was found, slowly tugging along to a gate. So, as soon as he jumped the gate, our hunter scrammed him. It took less than 5 minutes to go from no kills, to a 2.8b Charon.

After that we stuck around the gate for a bit, an Impel came through, after that a procurer. Turns out these guys don’t really listen to their own coms since yesterday evening I got on 4 kills from the same alliance, and a killing blow on a sabre. Spicing up my zKillboard with 3.5b ISK in kills.

Glad I decided that last night was a good night to be a bit more active again.

Other than that, I’ve been approached by someone who read the blog (yay readers!) to check out W-space again. To form a corporation and set up in a C3. My previous adventures in W-space didn’t work out so well, because of me not being active in a wh corp. And the other one because we were naïve enough to think we could duo a C4.

So I’m currently considering it, but I’m only going to try out another W-space adventure if we can find more people to join us. I know for a fact that two people in a hole can get lonely and usually means someone is doing more work that the other. And I know for a fact that I tend to get bored scanning solo after a while and the other guy might be working harder than me. I’d rather not get an EvE burn out again.

I should probably think about making a channel, so we can have a place to chat

Stay tuned o7

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NPSI, Bombers Bar joint op on Saturday

NPSI, the abbreviation for “Not Purple, Shoot It”. A mindset that communities such as Bombers Bar/Spectre Fleet use, you join a fleet of likeminded people and just shoot at whatever’s not in fleet, both allies and enemies alike.

I’ve joined in a few Bombers Bar roams now, and as those of you who’ve read my previous blog posts know, I love joining them. Not only do I get a bit more experience shooting things, I also do more than just spin my ship because of it. 

The past few hours of my Saturday evening were spent in a fleet set up by the Bombers Bar and WTM community. When I joined we were told that we’d go and try to get a few carrier kills and afterwards have a ‘Free for all’ with the people in bombers/cloakies that wanted to.

Previous Bombers Bar fleets, the amount of people joining was usually around 50 to 60. Today there were 145 people in Bombers, ready to shoot.

Let’s just say that it was fun, despite the traffic control.

During the fleet there were a few giveaways, one of which was a bomber for the person with the best cat.gif picture linked. The guys judging the pictures had a lot of work to do, about 100 people posting gifs is a lot of links to click.

Once a carrier was spotted the next giveaway got announced, the first people to get point on it (other than the hunters) would be getting a few goodies.Not only are the people who take care of the fleets giving us nice kills, they were also going to be giving us ships, and other goodies for doing things in the fleet.
We killed an Archon, there were 108 pilots involved in the kill, the amount of torpedoes shot was such a pretty sight.

“Look at them go”

After the Archon kill we waited a bit, changed region and waited for another target. 
“Ready to jump oh captain my captain”
We got another cyno & bridge a bit later, but unfortunately, due to so many people jumping at one, traffic control decided to not let us through immediately so the target was able to escape. 
“Follow the leader, he’ll be your bridge for today”
After this the fleet was going to stand down due to the fact that our Jump Fatigue timer was getting a bit too high, those who wanted to kill their team mates, were told to get ready for a little Free for All.

Instead of NPSI, the new rule was going to be NCSI (Not Cloaked, Shoot It). Every purple on grid was a target.

I didn’t last until the end, but I got my first last hit on a bomber with a bomb during the FFA. So next to the Archon kill, I’d call that an OP success.

“Tengu on grid? Kill it!”

My Bomber alt is slowly starting to get an extremely nice Killboard, and I’m pretty certain that I’ll be getting a whole lot more kills by joining them. 
Content creation at its best.

Those of you who haven’t tried it yet, I can do nothing else than tell you to try and join the Bombers Bar channel in game. There’s fleets almost every night and they’re definitely worth joining. They even set up a Reddit, Facebook and Twitter account. Check it out.

Stay tuned o7
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End of chapter one

On Saturday we decided to leave the wormhole that we moved to a few weeks ago. This due to multiple reasons, the one that made the decision the easiest was the fact that it was turning into a huge ISK-sink. And only two people trying to make it work, isn’t easy in a C4.

The decision was made after I lost a Raven while rolling one of the statics. I didn’t mind the loss, not at all, it was beautiful and I didn’t see it coming at all.
We were rolling another C4, which at the time seemed inactive, nobody around and we figured it was safe enough to take out our Ravens to roll the hole. What happens is that you use the mass to get the hole to critical mass and after a certain amount of jumps through it, it should pop behind you.
“Bubble up!”
Cue the first jump, it went perfectly, we go in the other C4, MWD’s on (this is to increase our mass) and then go back out. Now once you jump through and back in, you get a timer stopping you from jumping for around 2 minutes, so you wait until it expires before going back through. 
I’m guessing that our first jump alerted the locals to what we were doing, because once I jumped in for the second pass, two Proteus’ uncloaked on me and scrambled me. I wasn’t too worried at first, I could just jump back through, if it wasn’t for the fact that they started to bump me away from the hole. I immediately alerted the other Raven to not jump through and asked if the ones in the hole could help me out. I could tank it for a while but there was only me and my friend, he couldn’t really do anything against two Proteus’ solo and my Raven only had smartbombs and neuts. I did do some damage, but not nearly enough to outlast it.
A few minutes later I lost my Raven, bounced to a planet in pod, exchanged “GF” in local and bounced back to the wormhole and into our POS. 
We talked about our wormhole life, decided to call it quits in the C4 and started moving out a few hours later, when our connections gave us a good highsec system to jump to. I also lost a pod while jumping back and forth, this time to a smart bombing legion (woops) 
The last of our assets got moved out yesterday and shipped to Jita with PushX and Red-Frog (got to love courier services). 
While moving assets I did lose another bomber to a gate camp in Aunenen, a system that’s supposedly known for its gatecamps. I did not know this. But after losing the bomber I went back to the highsec system I had my assets in, this time with a Cheetah, probed a hole, and got lucky with it’s other connections because one hole further there was a highsec connection 2 jumps from Jita. Which made it extremely easy to get the two Tengus I had stored in the system next to Aunenen back to Jita.
Who knew that wormholes could come in handy like that! 
Not only did I move out of the wormhole this weekend, I also joined another two bombers bar runs on my bomber character (Saturday and Sunday) and had a good amount of fun to make up for my losses, got a few more kills out of it too.
“I think they were mad we killed a Thanatos and Proteus”
Despite it being somewhat of an ISK sink I did enjoy my time in a wormhole of our own and am already thinking of going back to one, however, this time there’s got to be a better plan. Either ally with someone and join them in C4 or move into a C2. 
We probably should have seen those problems coming but it’s another lesson learned, and that’s what matters most, people make mistakes and we learn from them. 
Plus I’ve been losing a ton of ships the past couple of weeks so I’m finally learning how to not care too much about losing a ship, yay!
Stay tuned o7

Bombs away

Tuesday night marked the third night that I joined Bombers Bar in an fleet. As you can probably tell, three days right after each other means that I’m enjoying them.

And how… Waiting for a kill can test your patience, but luckily the comms, both on their teamspeak and in fleet chat, are hilarious.
People talking, sending youtube videos, gifs,… It’s all good fun, a bunch of like minded people coming together for blingy kills and a chance to deliver torpedoes and/or bombs.

I like the fact that all of the people joining in fleet, lay down their differences (if there are any) and just kill everything that’s not purple, or at least try to. There were a few Ishtars that were both too fast and too tanky for us to take down.

The night went off to a slow start, we were waiting on a wormhole in Thera for the FC telling us that he had a target so that we could all warp to the wormhole, jump through, and take the black ops cyno that would be lit.

It took about an hour but right when we were planning on packing up, one of the scouts found a Nidhoggur, my third big kill in as many days and my second carrier ever. Which was pretty sweet.

Once we were done hunting ‘whales’ we went on to the system known as HED-GP, little did I know, but there was a pretty big battle on the way. The FC miss-timed it a bit, thinking that we had about 20 minutes for the reinforcement timer to run out, turned out it was more around an hour and 20 minutes.
So we went to a few safes, I grabbed some coffee, something to eat and waited for whatever it was that we were going to be doing, to start.

I was told that HERO (whoever that may be) and PL (I had heard about them before but only had a vague recognition) were going to have a fight over the station and we were going to bomb them.

I had no idea what that meant or who they were exactly but if it meant dropping bombs, I was all for it.
About 20 minutes before the timer went out local went from the 60 odd people (of which most were the BB fleet) to 150, and a bit later spiking even higher to 250.. Which according to the people on voice was only the beginning (yay).

I had turned on a stream on twitch showing the station and there was a fleet on the undock, while watching a bunch of bombers (apparantly goons) unstealthed and dropped bombs on them but I don’t think they hit much. We weren’t moving, we were going to go after the bigger targets.

“Oh look, I think it started!”

Once the fight started I listened to what we were told, listen to squad colors, warp to the leaders, etc etc..

I dropped three bombs in total, of which one hit (woops) .. They were telling us to allign to a certain target but inexperienced as I was I had no idea where it was so I just dropped my first and second bombs wherever and they kind of missed everything. How that even happened, I have no idea since it was pretty damn packed there.

“Bomb dropped, warp away, warp away!”

That was my third night in a Bombers Bar fleet, the third night in a row that I went to bed way past the hour that I should have gone in seeing as I had to go to work. But it was fun..

I’ll definately be doing a lot more of these, I love me some bombers.

note:
I had my first loss in a bomber last night, out on a roam with 16 people and we got baited. Guess that had to happen eventually, wouldn’t be right if my character kept having a clean killboard. No kills yesterday but did learn that I should make sure that I should just warp away when a fellow member decloaks me by accident.

Stay tuned o7

Industry and Bombers

I’m getting better at scanning down the wormholes that connect our little hole to the rest of space. Which is nice, seeing as I used to hate scanning mainly because of how bad I was at it during the tutorial missions.

Which is really the one and only reason why I never decided to try again, despite knowing that back then my skills were not even close to being good enough for me to scan something “quickly”.. I’m relatively better at it, it only takes me about an hour and a half to get 13 sigs down, so that’s good… Right? Right?!

I’m slowly going through the BPC’s I have left from doing so much copying runs, I think I only have about 400-500 of them that I’ll try and turn into T2 ones. Or at least try to, I have an average succes rate of 75% inventions per 21 runs (I have 2 characters running inventions every day or so). After the invention process is done, I usually manufacture the T2’s, again, two characters so that means that every other day I have around 200-400 T2 items sitting in my headquarters ready to ship over to Jita. Which I do through courier contracts because I’m too lazy to go out there myself and it’s super cheap.

Once I have gone through my surplus of BPC’s I’ll have to check the market to try and figure out what’s needed, because right now I’m still working with a supply that started two years ago. As you can imagine, a lot changes in two years but I want that supply to be relatively gone before moving on to something else.
I do have a plan of what that something else might be, I just have to figure out if it’s a good one first before disclosing anything.

As for the other “adventures” I’m having, I’m enjoying W-space but am still checking for some other options, I currently own 3 combat characters, which gives me quite a few options.

What all three of my characters have in common though, is the fact that they can all fly covert ops ships, specifically bombers. I love bombers, the fact that you can sneak up on someone and drop a bomb or deliver a load of torpedoes on them is pretty awesome.

Which is why I finally did something yesterday that I’ve been meaning to do for quite some time. I joined a bombers bar run. Which I enjoyed, although I have to admit that it was rather boring at first.

I logged into the one character not in w-space only to be told that I needed to go to Thera, luckily I was only 12 jumps out from one of the high sec entrances so I burned towards it and someone in fleet was nice enough to give me a warp in to the wormhole.
After getting into Thera we were told to meet up somewhere and…Wait.

“Thera is pretty though”

Waiting is not something I enjoy, time spent waiting is time lost, while it is a precious commodity. But luckily the voice comms and the books I started reading a few weeks ago made sure that it wasn’t lost entirely, I was laughing along with the others and enjoying a good book until we were giving the go.

Which meant jumping through another wormhole where a black ops vessel was waiting for us to bridge us to our targets. Last night was a good night, I spend an hour or more “waiting” but those few kills that did happen were quite fun.
We first got a bridged right on top of a Legion, I was too late in getting there because the amount of bombers we had along with us meant that dmg was extremely high and it was down before most even knew it.

The second kill was a Legion too, another pilot that had no idea what was happening to him, a better kill too, he was worth a few more ISK and I did get to be on that killmail. After that we were told to ‘burn” back to our staging system. Once again we waited a bit before being dropped onto a Raven and Legion. We got the Raven but the Legion got away, and once more we burned back to the staging system.

During the burn a Paladin was spotted on one of the gates.

We were told to try and catch it, and catch it we did. I had nothing to do with the catch, but it was fun to watch. Burning to a Marauder that’s 100km away equiped with a microwarp drive is not something many people can do but it happened. After the point he was able to jump away again but our tackler had anticipated that move and was already 50km closer to the spot he was going to and was able to snare him immediately after.

The paladin did take a little while longer to kill (aprox 20-30 seconds) but he went down, and my pilot’s killboard went up by 2.8billion isk. Which means that right now, I’m sitting on a killboard of a few billion destroyed against nothing lost.

A good and fun night all in all. Missing those few hours of sleep was worth it, and I’ll definately do more of this.

“Another one today, Thanatos!”

Stay tuned! o7