The Cranky Sysadmin

Today, I finally finished out the skills needed to fly the Ishtar. I am working on Recons next, but that’s a whole other story. I am curious how well the Ishtar does in level 4 missions.
Read about my carebear Ishtar fit

After a few days away from EVE, I came back today to see what was up. Before logging in, I went to do some information gathering to make sure the space I was in is still safe.
Read on about my interesting day traveling through hostile space

After a 5 day vacation to Bermuda with no good access to the internet (my wife demands that I be unplugged on our get-aways), I spent a little time finding an ok place to rat for cash. So now I have my ratting ship in Fade region and my pile of PvP ships in Pure Blind.
Read on

Yesterday evening, I finally managed to get into a passing fleet which was on its way to do battle with the alliance, Sons of Tangra. There were about 50-60 ships at any time in the fleet. Most of them were battleships.
More on Fleet Fun

On Saturday, MH had a fleet op. The objective was to go smash POS’es (Player Owned space Stations). I was to be part of support flying an interceptor. I didn’t hear about the op until about 30 minutes before it was to start, so I had to rush out there. I learned a valuable lesson on the way there. Auto-target is bad in 0.0. I warped to 0 on a gate and was targeted before I could jump. The auto-targeting caused me to agress and I couldn’t jump through. I tried twice thinking I had made some mistake, and that was enough time for my opponent to target me and scramble. An interceptor (an ares at that) without a micro-warp drive is a sitting duck. I died pretty quickly.

Happily, I escaped to a planet in my pod, but I had to go back to Torrinos and buy a new interceptor and fit it. By the time I refitted and made it back to the objective, the fleet had changed plans and moved to another target. I never caught up. So now I have autotarget turned off. I never had any use for it, so it won’t be missed. I wonder what other noob mistakes I’m likely to make. I guess when I read articles on 0.0 living, I should pay more attention.

I’ve been doing a lot of fleets and gate camps (relative to what I’m used to) in EC-P8R and the surrounding area. I even made it onto the top 10 scorers on our kill board. I fly an interceptor most of the time, so it’s not really due to any skill. Interceptors are usually the first to the target tackling, so they end up on all of the kill mails.
Read about my adventures in Pure Blind

A lot has changed recently. We disolved the old alliance and built a combat corp to join one of the Northern Coalition alliances. Our base, such as it is, is in pureblind. The most popular gate is in Torinos. We have had a lot of loss mails passing through that gate into EC-P8R. Intel seems to become stale pretty quickly. There is about a 50/50 chance that the camp in EC, on the gate, is hostile. Once inside Pureblind proper though, things quiet down a bit.

I’m looking forward to a lot of ratting, mission running for Sisters of EVE, and some nice big fleets.

Our alliance has decided to leave Syndicate space. It’s probably the best move for the alliance. The politics in the area are really convoluted which makes it hard to keep track of who is friends with who. We’ve been asked to fleet up with people who are red (hostile) to us to go chase a neutral gang. It’s all a little strange. I’ve learned a lot about living in a 0.0 space and I’ve made a bit of money ratting and exploring, so it was a worthwhile excursion for me.
Continue reading about the move out of Syndicate