Online

It was one of those rare Eve weekends where I find myself with multiple hours to play. It seems to happen once a month or so when the Mother In Law comes up to visit and I am free to scuttle away.

So beyond the "excitement" of Cap'n Sandi coming to smack me in local and decline to actually, you know, engage, there was some other goings ons.

On Friday night I felt eager for a fight and found out as I settled in that the alliance had just finished a big battle with Atlas Alliance in which apparently one of their carrier pilots was quitting Eve and wanted to go down shooting so he and several friends took his Nidhoggur and parked it in one of our belts with several ships for support. And proceeded to taunt us.

Well, our alliance and friends rose to the challenge and took that carrier and support fleet down. And all the action was done just before I logged in. My PvP curse is back on folks; all the action happens when I'm not around.

I patrolled the constellation to see if any stragglers could be engaged but it was quiet. I spent the rest of my evening moving more combat ships to the corporate head quarters and preparing a ship to go to 0.0 with.

Saturday night I logged in determined to get into 0.0 so I could rat some ISK back. The low wallet was really stinging and if I didn't rat I would have to start considering selling some stuff. *GASP* So with Derranna using her new Cheetah Covert Ops to scout for me I prepared to jump into low sec on my way to the show.

Except... there is an Abaddon on the low sec jump. Waiting.

Hmmm. The tier III Amarr battleship is a nasty piece of work and with the right setup can deal damage equivalent or better than a good Blaster Mega. My Cerberus wouldn't stand a chance if tackled and I felt risking the jump was not prudent. Fortunately a couple jumps through high sec could get my into the low sec system through another gate and I decided to try that.

Jump clear on both side and I was in low sec heading to the next gate.

Uh oh. My Abaddon pilot is in local and he's with a corp mate also in an Abaddon. In the next system I decide to cloak and move off the gate instead of warping. The two Abaddon hostiles jump in and spend the next few minutes patrolling the system I was in, the one I came from, and the next one on my route. These guys are looking for kills and I had no intention of adding myself to their killboards.

I docked up and jump cloned back to base to wait for quieter times to sneak myself into null sec. Checking corp comms I found a friend was going to run some missions so I offered to help out. It was my first time with a new setup on the Rokh, trading the two Power Diagnostic Units for a Tracking Enhancer and Signal Amplifer for more locking range and more optimal range. The idea is to use Antimatter ammo more and use lead ammo for those 120km + engagements.

The ship performed adequately although I did feel the loss of the extra cap from the PDUs, but with the cap booster I never felt worried. We were halfway through the second mission when Cap'n Sandi showed up and started jabbering. All in all I earned a good chunk of ISK from the bounties and I will probably use that to start some manufacturing again to get the wallet growing more from that direction as well.

EDIT: I forgot that before we started that second mission an alliance member in a Dominix was engaged in a belt by an Astarte command ship. We (and several others) rushed to engage and the Astarte was quickly reduced to rubble. I failed to get in on the kill mail as I mis-warped to the first belt of the eighth planet instead of the seventh. Sigh.

Next time!