CHA-CHING!

That my friends, is the sound of a cash register. But we'll do things in chronological order.

On Friday evening I got in on a roaming gang operation into 0.0 space with four other corp mates. We decided on a mix of ships: Pilgrim Force Recon for scouting and initial tackle, Blackbird for damage suppression, Vexor for DPS, Purifier Stealth Bomber for DPS and secondary scouting, and I got to take my Onyx out finally in the role of super tackler and DPS.

We toured through Pure Blind and once ran into a Deimos Heavy Assault Ship. I popped out the Warp Disruption Field bubble after he jumped through a gate into our waiting fleet, but he was 20 km away and warped off. What the hell? I thought my bubble was 28.8 km? Well, it turns out that the focused beam of the module is 28.8 km at Heavy Interdictor level IV, but the unscripted bubble mode is only 19.1 km. I guess it makes sense: scramble everything within 19 km or one ship within 29km. I can live with that.

We almost tangled with a Slepnir Command Ship later on but we had to warp from a gate where a couple gate rats were shooting on us and he slipped by in the process.

It was looking like my curse was going to hold (i.e. any op I am on sees no successful action) when our scout locked down a Raven ratting in a belt. We warped in and pounded it to smithereens before it knew what was happening to it. A nice kill and we suffered no losses on the operation.

* * * * *
On Saturday I had someone offer to buy Optivus at the buyout price of 3 billion which I immediately accepted. It took a day to work out the logistics (Optivus into NPC starter corp, buyer freeing up a character slot and sending ISK, me transferring character) but by Sunday morning I had myself 3 billion ISK in my wallet.

Well of course I immediately went on a spending spree.

The first thing I purchased was a Minmatar Fenrir freighter for Derranna. She had skilled up for one last fall but the Widow project didn't pan out into the billions liked I had hoped and I didn't feel like going through the hassle of selling Barak's Obelisk freighter to only turn around and buy a new one. Now that she has the big ship, I can sell the Obelisk at my leisure.

The next thing on my shopping list was some BPOs I wanted for my collection. It was either one big battleship BPO (Raven or Rokh) or a bunch of small ones, so I decided to be practical and buy the Drake, Ferox, Osprey, Badger, and Badger MKII BPOs. This will help the corp once they are researched up and most of them will be useful for invention purposes too.

I still had almost half of my windfall, so I decided to buy a luxury item for Kirith, a faction battleship. Faction battleships are special vessels that do not have BPOs available for them on the market, they can only be found through rat droppings or some can be purchased in Loyalty Stores for massive amounts of loyalty points and some ISK and/or dogtags. They are typically better than regular battleships and very expensive.

So I had some choices. The obvious choice was a Raven Navy Issue (aka the Caldari Navy Raven or CNR) which is considered to be one of the best mission runners available. With more hitpoints and the ability to have 7 launchers over 6 on the Raven, its not hard to understand why. But I really didn't feel the need for a mission running ship.

The next option was the Rattlesnake pirate battleship which has a mean passive tank from what I hear. Its a missile boat with a bonus to Large Hybrid damage as well which makes it attractive to me. Plus its based on the Scorpion hull, always cool. But I really didn't want a missile ship that would make me regret not having Tech II cruise missiles. So I decided to look at the hybrid based ships.

The Megathron Navy Issue (aka Navy Mega) is a popular vessel for Gallente pilots boasting an extra low slot and more hitpoints but no extra turrets for more raw damage although the extra low slot would be good for an additional Magnetic Field Stabilizer. I was going to buy one of these but decided to be even more pimp.

The rare Vindicator pirate battleship caught my eye. Having an extra mid slot instead of extra low slot but similar hitpoints as the Navy Mega, its real attractiveness is the larger capacitor and less capacitor penalty for Micro Warp Drives which means this vessel is built to be a fast hard bitting blaster boat. Sign me up! I bought one even though I don't have the Gallente or Minmatar Battleship skills to fly it (all pirate faction ships require two player races skills to fly as they combine features of both of them) but once I get large rails (and now blasters) I'll begin the trek to the Vindicator.

And I still have a ton of ISK left over. I replaced Derranna's lost Mastadon and I'm going to buy some faction modules for the Vindicator, but I might get that CNR for missions after all.