I'm Stealthy

On the weekend as planned I achieved Electronics V and then three levels of Cloaking. I proceeded to throw on a cloaking device and speed around outside the station all invisible-like great fun. This week I'll try to do some low sec exploring and see if anything pops up.

I had planned to only do Cloaking to level III but decided to add level IV in there so I can get the Covert Ops cloak and use it on the Buzzard I have in the hanger. No point in flying a Covert Ops ship without being able to warp while cloaked, right? Small detour and will be done in four days.

I was running missions on the weekend and made some really stupid mistakes. First off I had a mission that warped me into a swarm of drones that all aggressed along with a battleship drone and sentry drone and ACK! I wasn't facing a celestial object for warp and I waited too long and was into structure before getting out. But that wasn't my mistake. I got my ship repaired at a station for 8 million isk. Then I refitted with frigate killing smartbombs and a massive shield tank and went back and taught those drones some serious lessons.

Then in the last room of the mission I was facing like 8 nasty sentry drone towers and again got put into deep armour and again went to a station and got repaired, this time for 7 million isk and change. Later while I was complaining about how this mission cost me a corpmate speaks up and says why didn't I just armour rep it?

Well, it never occurred to me. I guess my brain was stuck in the "can't fit it with current skills and ship so no use to me". But a five second reconsideration showed that the skill required was 30K isk and 6 minutes to train and the mod could be put on the ship, I could undock, fix the damage, and redock and save myself, I dunno, 15 million isk! DOH! So seven minutes later I was ready to do that the next time. Sigh. Newb.

My second costly mistake was rooted more in greed than anything else. I was doing the Mordus Headhunter mission which was easy but long with the massive number of ships in each stage. Fortunately they came in waves that didn't automatically aggress at the same time. So I was able to knock out one wave before taking on the next.

Well, I was halfway through the room and the first wave was gone and the second wave was just sitting there ignoring me. I was running low on time so thought I would be clever and go get the salvager and clean up and do the rest of the rats later in the evening. So there I was picking clean the bones of the first wave and getting lots of loot and salvage parts when I guess I turned on a tractor beam just a little to close for comfort for the second wave.

"What was that?" I asked as a boom rolled out. "Hey my shields! Oh CRAP! Warp, warp!" Two cruise missiles later, I was a pod and my salvager with its very expensive cargo expanders was a wreck. I was not happy.

Side Note: As I built the Medusa II salvage destroyer, I was struck by how expensive tractor beams were.

All in all a costly weekend. I did recoup some of my losses from the very profitable Mordus Headhunters mission, and I learned some very valuable lessons. All of Eve is a learning curve.