Moving Again

On Friday our CEO announced that negotiations for a trial period in a new alliance had gone well and we were joining Sylph Alliance on Saturday. Its a medium sized alliance based in the Providence / Catch regions and friendly with CVA, and from what I hear, red to both Goons and BOB.

They also operate under NRDS policy opposed to NBSI. 1 This will be a significant change for most Strife pilots but not as much for me since m3 operated under NRDS for the most part.

With this new organizational change comes logistics of moving the corporation from Molden Heath region to Derelik. Having Barak makes this fairly easy for me, just throw everything into the carrier and freighter and bam, I'm done. My current PvP hanger has the following ships:
Onyx Heavy Interdictor
Falcon Force Recon
Raptor Interceptor
Manticore Stealth Bomber
Buzzard Covert Ops
Harpy Assault Ship

I sold the trusty Thorax as I don't do a lot of solo work in 0.0 and I'm really hooked on the Falcon anyways for now. But I needed a ratting ship so I was faced once again with what to go with. My battleship options were:

Rokh - Powerful and expensive. Raw DPS 501 (with rails, higher if I go with blasters)
Raven - Not as powerful, not as expensive. Raw DPS 467 (Cruise missiles)
Scorpion - Least powerful battleship, cheapest. Raw DPS 297 (Cruise missiles)

The problem with battleships is their speed (slow) and expense (high). So I considered the success I had in Fountain back in the Exuro Mortis days with the Myrmidon and looked at battlecruisers:

Mrymidon - 577 DPS with blasters and a shield tank.
Drake - 460 DPS with Tech II HAMs.

So I went with the Drake. Fully equipped it cost less than the Scorpion ship alone and still gives decent DPS and tank. And while the Myrmidon does the better damage (and no surprise with bigger drone bay and blasters), the Drake has the advantage of one more high slot for a cloaking device, useful for ratting when you need to safe spot from roaming unfriendlies. Downside, I'm still two weeks from using the tech II Heavy Assault Missile Launchers so I'll need to improvise in the meantime.

The goal for ratting will be to get enough ISK to afford a proper Rokh for 0.0 that I will be able to use for sniping in fleet battles and blasting in gang warfare.

In other news...

This sudden exit of Strife from Molden Heath puts on ice any plans Razor had for a low sec POS. I had hoped that Strife would occupy a low sec area and set up a POS so Razor could benefit from the security of blues in local. But now we're on our own again. I'm considering options which include but are not limited to:
1) Stay the current course of inventing/building/selling
2) Approach Sylph for renting a moon in 0.0 and getting access to their outpost2
3) Mothball Razor and move wholesale into Strife

Of course, I'm not taking any immediate action until I see how the 30 day trial for Strife works out in Sylph and whether I think it would be worthwhile for me to do anything. (Note to Shareholders: if Razor does shut down, there will be a share buyback option.)

Finally...

The developers have been announcing several balancing changes coming down the pipe and the biggest news for me has been the long awaited change of adding an extra turret hardpoint to the Moa cruiser, Eagle Heavy Assault Cruiser, Ferox battlecruiser, and Raptor interceptor. As a rail pilot I'm ticked pink as these ships were terribly underpowered compared to their blaster counterparts in the Gallente navy and while these rail ships would never shine as damage dealers, the increase to their bonused DPS is muchly appreciated. It will be interesting to see what setups bubble to the top of the community and how the rolls and use of these ships will evolve.

Footnotes:
1 - NRDS = Not Red Don't Shoot, NBSI = Not Blue Shoot It. In Eve, you can set positive standings or negative standings to other players/corporations/alliances. Those with positive standings are friendlies and show up with blue symbols, while those with negative standings show up with red symbols. The policies above stem from who your alliance allows you to attack.

2 - There are three types of "bases" in space: Station, Outpost, and Player Owned Station (POS).
A Station is a massive structure that you can dock in, cannot be attacked, and usually is owned by a NPC corporation so is accessible by anyone, although there are a number of player conquerable stations. These cannot be built.
An outpost is similar to a conquerable station but are built by player alliances.
A POS is more like a fort owned by a corporation and can be dismantled by the owning players and moved, or attacked and destroyed by enemies.