New Turn of Events

Ok, so I know I said I wasnt going to post for a couple weeks, but I felt this was a good time of the day to update on things.

First, Ive moved out to Delve. Blood Raider territory, woohoo! Ive wanted to come down here for quite awhile, but the high activity has put me off of going solo in this area. Which brings me to point number two;

Ive joined Militaris Industries, part of the Cascade Imminent alliance. I know looking at my corp history, it seems to show I jump from one corp to another, however, this was an oppurtunity I couldnt pass by. These guys have an extremely high efficiency ratio as well as having alot of competent pilots I can learn from. They also have a similar personality to me and so far from watching their chat and lurking their forums, I feel I will fit pretty well with these guys.

Now the downside to this, which is my own doing. They asked if I was ready to move out to Delve and I jumped at the chance to do so without fully thinking this process through. I switched to an empty clone. I used my bookmarking fit Rifter for this 33 jump travel. Warp stabs, mwd, cloak. I even had it rigged with the duration increases for mwd to get a bit further out when cloak/mwd tricking. So I start my journey from my former home.

Pretty uneventful through my high sec jumps. I get to the last high sec system and update my clone facility, just in case I get podded, I dont want to make the last 19 jumps again. At this point, my app gets processed and I start the low/null sec portions of my journey. I see something about some other corp/alliance, Black something. I dont remember tbh, but they had the 1dh station bubbled hardcore most of my trip, so docking at this time was not an option; once I got into system that is.

Well, my trip was going pretty well so far. I had made it seven or eight jumps through really low sec space, and into a pocket of two .5 systems. Neither of which have medical facilities, mind you. So I continue towards 1DH. Two or three jumps more, and I see a Rohk on dscan in the direction of the gate I need to pass through. Well, Ill just warp to zero and jump through, he wont be able to target me that quick. Riiiggghhhttt.....Did you know there is no reason to target when you have smartbombs? Before I had even finished warping to the station, I was in my pod. There was no lag, there was no delay in my hitting the jump to the next system command. Smartbombs are stupidly dumb imo. I knew that the Rohk was there, and I didnt account for the chance he would have smartbombs, resulting in me losing my ship before I could even land on grid and react. This loss is one that I feel is stupid and cheap. I convo'd the pilot and asked let him know how I felt too, and gave him a sarcastic "good job".

Smartbombed Rifter

This all happened within about 5 or less minutes of joining Militaris Industries, but the killmail doesnt reflect this for some reason. After my amazingly stupid loss, I continued towards 1dh in my pod, with the knowledge they were heading home. Well, they (Black somethings)werent moving too quick to get home. As I warped to the 1DH gate, I jumped through into a sea of reds and yellows. Thankfully, I was out about 12km cloaked up. I did nothing, not because I froze or got scared, more because I would have been too pissed off to make into the system just to get podded and sent back to the high sec med bay. With just about 10 seconds left on my cloaky timer (session change had expired by now) their entire fleet jumped through the gate and I was home free!

Docking up, I relocated my clone services and setup all the stuff required by alliance and corp. Ill be out of commission most of this weekend due to it being my birthday on the 4th, but having the party over this weekend, so later today, Ill jump back into my +5 clone and get a bit faster skillpoint gain until I jump back into Delve.

Thats about the extent of action I have experience so far. My plans for ships are shifting though to accomodate the corp needs. I am 30 days total from getting into an alliance standard guardian, excluding logistics 5. That adds another 25 or so days. Im going to add roughly 10 days to that plan though to finish out getting into my Vengeance and its fits. Doing this will also allow me to get into a Purifier, with roughly 4 days of additional training to get cloak 4 and torpedos. They dont seem to like the Sacrilege that much, choosing to go with the Zealot instead, so I may or may not train up my lasers to go that route. I have a feeling though that once I am in a shiny Guardian and eventually Scimitar, I wont be allowed to use another ship in fleet ops =P

And Im out for the weekend!

Future Plans and "Structure Stuff"

To date, Ive had a few sidetracks; with the biggest being that I sold my main character for a nice chunk of change and got a new one with not as many skills as I should have waited for. I need a plan and I need to stick to it. Its easy to say Im going to do this and this in this amount of time, but until you actually sit down and write an outline of what you want to accomplish, your plan will never come to fruition. This will be my outline. Also, this is my post for Monday, which Im going to be extremely busy doing stuff resulting in my being unable to post an update. Not that Ive been consistent anyways.

So here's the game plan:

Step one involves getting back into my Vengeance with the rocket skills needed that I previously held. This will be accomplished in 7 days 12 hours (or so).

Step two focuses more on my missile skills to get into t2 rocket launchers and upgrading the support skills from 3's to mostly 4's and 5's. This will also include training up my Heavy Missile and Heavy Assault missile skills to be able to use these weapons when I complete step 3.

Step three has me getting the ship skills needed to sit in a Sacrilege. I flew the Zealot with my previous character and I enjoyed it, however, with my Vengeance focus and background, I feel the Sacrilege will be a better fit when the time comes.

Step four is mixed in with prior steps. This one is mixed in with all prior steps, getting any skill that takes less than 24 hours on my queue and trained. At this point in time, this applies to roughly 5-10 skills that are currently injected. I will also be training all my Probing skills to 4 or 5 as needed in this step.

Step 5 puts me where I have a nice setup of ships that I hope to enjoy flying (Vengeance for sure, Sacrilege seems to be similar). At this point, I want to be more than just another combat pilot for my corp (If I have one when this step arrives). So I will be training into a freighter and jump freighter; getting the required skills to 4s and 5s as needed or required. Most likely it will be the Providence and its brother the Ark, but I really like the Nomad for the simple reason it reminds me of the Jawa tank thing in "Star Wars".

These steps will put me at a point in the game where I want to be; able to expand out to more general areas but with a strong center of gravity and focus. As for my plans with my blog, I am going to take maybe 2 weeks off from writing anything and in the mean time, take notes instead. Doing this will give me a supply of posts that I normally would post immediately having little to no content and remains un-interesting; as Ive found myself thinking "this blog sucks" while re-reading my latest updates. As a side effect, this will allow me to edit my posts and merge a couple of them while extending or shortening others. This consistent posting process seems to work much better for other bloggers that I read and I am willing to try their method rather than my inconsistent one.

Speaking of inconsistency, I have recently become unemployed by Ubuntu Inc. From my viewpoint, there are no hard feelings towards anyone in the corp, and I enjoyed my time there helping the newbies and meeting new people (that whole social thing). I left because my long term goals of going into low sec and looking for trouble does not coincide with their long term goals. I also have no interest in the politics of high sec wars and the fickleness of the people who declare war on me or my corp.

Either youre in or youre out. Not "oh my gosh, youre blowing up our PoS so we're ending the war before you can finish, but after we relocate it, we'll re-dec you" No, it shouldnt work like that; yet it does. So Im moving to space where that option doesnt exist: Low sec. My actions here in the near future will not be supported by the CVA Alliance that Ubuntu is currently in (and possibly the corp itself), and I dont want to create trouble with them in the Alliance and the null politics Zealot and Iron are working towards. And about politics, Zealot, you still never gave me any juicy infoz to post about! =P

Anyhow, this will be my last post for possiblely two weeks, maybe three depending on how much trouble I find myself in. Safe and wealthy journies to all my readers!

Totally Been Slacking

Well, I havent posted since last week, and really, the reason why is that I havent had anything too exciting happen. With my new character, as most of my corpmates know, I hate him. Eh, "hate" is such a strong word, more like dislike my character. Ill be the first to admit that Im a pretty racist person (in New Eden). I really do hate the Minmatar. I hate their ships and I hate that in my CONCORDE profile, it reads "Race: Minmatar". Nothing I can do about that last part, but theres plenty I can do about flying their ships.

Im going back to the old Vengeance. I love this ship and I love Amarrian ships. The Rifter may be one of the best pvp ships around for frigate fights, but I simply dont like flying it. It reminds me too much of a podracer from Star Wars. Dont get me wrong, I love Star Wars, even bits of the newer trilogy. I just dont want to fly a podracer in space.

Ive setup a focused plan that I will be refusing to deviate from. 165 days to max out my skills for a Vengeance. 12 days until I can get into one again with level 3 missile skills. Half of that time is just training back into Amarr Frigates. Ive got Minmatar cruiser injected, but not trained. Same for Amarr cruisers. I decided before to focus into medium sized ships, such as the Ashimmu and Legion, but with my new character and lack of ability to run level 4s anymore, I just cant afford those kinds of losses right now. So now, I decided to go with my Vengeances (I have a nice stockpile of them). I figure 165 days to max it out will be plenty of time to get into some fights. My corp may not like this, as they want some cruiser and BS pilots, but meh. The highest Ill be going is the Zealot/Sacrilege and Harbinger.

Now, when I say I wont deviate from my strict skillplan, I mean I maybe wont. Things that Im not sure of, like probing skills to probe out some people in their safes. I could spend a month or so training those up to 4s and have pretty good scanning skills that would help immensely. I dont know for sure because Im not too keen on scanning, docking and switching ships, and finally undocking with my combat ship to go kill who I scanned down. Ive never been too good at scanning and probing either, but maybe I will get the hang of it if I have higher skills.

And if you've read through all this, I will leave you with a small story of the only excitement I had over the last week while training skills.

I got myself a lowsec pocket in highsec, assuming maybe there will be some low skilled pirates. While warping and jumping to it, I came one jump before my target location with a few retrievers mining away, obviously afk. Getting their location with my amazing dscan skills (Ive gotten much better with dscan lately), I warped in to the lone retriever I had targeted. Luckily, he only had Warrior 1s, but five of them. Ok, so hes low skilled miner. Upon warpin, I was 20km from him. I aligned to him and OH'd my afterburner to close the distance quickly. By quick, I mean quick. Rifters are fast little buggers when they want to be. Anyhow, upon getting into scram range, I set my close up orbit to begin, slowing my speed to not overshoot. Next came the scram. Just gotta hit it and I will have my first solo miner gank.

Yeah, about that. I hadnt paid any attention at all to the security level of the system and as soon as I hit my scram key, I got a popup asking if I really did want to do this. I was like omg, wtf. Seriously, thats what ran through my head while I was full blown high on the adrenaline released during my time scanning him down and slowboating into range with my ab on overheat. I quickly looked at the top left of my screen and sure enough, there it was: Sec Status = 0.5. I had stopped warping one jump short of lowsec. Well, I was now saddened and continued on my trip into my target area to setup bookmarks and such.

Luckily, I had that popup reminder turned on or else my little excursion could have ended up kinda bad!

Buyers Regret

Yeah, Ive got a small bit of it. I sold my old main for a character that is focused mostly on Electronics and Engineering. Only one frigate ship skill, no gunnery, no drones, no rigging skills except for Jury Rigging 4. It came with 12 million SP, only a million or so less than my old main. What exactly did I give up that Im wishing I had now though??

For starters, my Orca. That ship makes moving around with almost all my assets easy and quick for the amount I move. Trade skills, something most people may think arent essential, but for making contracts to other people, being limited to one is annoying. Social skills. When running missions, Im not getting the standings or LP I could if I had my old social skills. Bringing to the level 1 missions again, I miss my level 4's. Jump clones. Cruisers, Battlecruisers, Battleships, Strategic Cruiser. The pew pew of my lasers were traded for the zing zing of autocannons.

The lack of gunnery and ship skills didnt seem that big of a hurdle when I looked at all the 5 skills in Electronics, Engineering, and Mechanic. All of those skills provide perfect armor tanking, both passive and active. The capacitor upgrades though are somewhat negated due to the lack of reduction in cap used by modules, such as afterburners, web, scram, ecm, ect...

I hadnt realized before how much I relied on my wide variety of skills until I didnt have them. Being focused is great, it makes me superior compared to other pilots in that area. However, it also leaves wide open holes in both defense and offense. For now, Im flying the Rifter. I tossed in all 3 of the other races frigate skills, as they are short timeto train. Im slowly working on rebuilding my gunnery skills to a level that I want, making t2 small guns (both lasers and autocannons) a priority with support skills leveling in there also. With all these skills being trained, I need to focus on something long term. Im looking towards the Wolf and maybe the Hound. I would prefer going towards Vengeance and Purifier though, although Im going to give the Minmatar are fair chance away from my "its not lasers and and rockets" syndrome.

Its not really a clear plan of action at this point because I have to train up my ship and support skills again, but alot of the support skills I wanted before are done. Which is where the buyers remorse kicks in. By the time I finish training up my small ship and support skills for combat, I would have been able to train up the skills I was missing in the same amount of time. So really, I did nothing progressive except get a new name and body.

Well, shit!

Old History, Best History

I was clearing out some of my archived bookmarks and I ran across this gem. Relative to the recent 1 trillion ISK scam, this one was an orginal. One scammer figures out theres another equally large scammer.

Really long, well worth it reading

Also, to add a bit to it for the people who finish reading and dont want to look for the 16 minute long confession, Ive embedded it below; just for you.

Sabotage!

Those damned Jove! Anytime anybody gets closer to them with new technology, they always interfere. Why is it not ok for us to have their knowledge of cloning or genetics? We'd be able to get stronger, smarter, faster  than we can now. What do you mean, what am I talking about? Dont you know? No, of course you wouldnt. Not that it matters now, the secrecy; so Ill let you in.

It all started when I was on Amarr, in the empirial medical bay. Yes, yes, the one where the Empress and previous rulers go to get their "royal" implants. I dont look it anymore, but I am of Amarrian descent. I was tapped to join a small group of capsuleers for an experimental jump clone procedure. One that would allow you to jump into a clone not of your own dna. Can you imagine the possibilities? The Jovians with their ancient knowledge of genetics have mastered this ability; proven by the countless spies they've implanted throughout the different Empires.

Getting prepped, Im given a dossier with the requirements of this newly "perfected" science. No current jump clones allowed. They can cause interferrence when your capsule flashes your neural activity upon death, resulting in an incomplete clone. Possibility of permanently becoming deceased. Well, I became a capsuleer to avoid that one. Rule 1 completed, all jump clones destroyed. Rule number two? Pray to your Gods because this hasnt been proven to work yet....with anything. This reminds me of the history of the capsule and its experiments, and the results of having a faulty flash upon capsule explosion. You basically become a vegetable. Well, that explains rule 1, youre either all in or youre out; theres no coming back from this one.

Finally, I sit in a room similar to the one when I first became a capsuleer. All steel. One door, locked. Medical equipment, mostly for installing implants needed for the first jump into a pod. Next to them, on the table beside me, my new clone. Apparently this wasnt a multigender experiment; I was the only female selected while my replacement was male. Well, this should be interesting. If it works, I should be able to jump back into a female body once this process is complete. Should be able to, that is.

I hear a click, snapping me out my trance on my replacement body, the medical officer orders me to lay back down on my table as he enters. As I do, I notice more staff entering. These dont look to be normal doctors, but in my distraction, I feel a sharp, quick pain in my arm. They're injecting me with something now, my muscles feeling weaker. As I lay here, paralyzed, I am wishing I would have used more boosters to build an immunity to this kind of thing. I watch as they hook me up to some wires, using the same plugs as my pod. Doing the same to the lifeless body next to me, I get ready to feel the agonized seconds of death as I switch clone bodies. This feeling never comes though, as the locked door explodes off the hinges and into the room; knocking out one of the medical staff.

All I can do is watch, try as I might to get up, I just cant. Soon, these tall figures enter, all I can see are shadows; the lighting have been disabled during the intial attack. The medical officer is still alive, and he lunges at the shadows. I hear a smack, a yelp, and a thud as he is flung across the room and into a wall. Suddenly, Im shocked with a bolt of energy, almost instantly flinging my conscience into the netherrealm. Similar to getting sucked into the abyss of space as I get flashed in my capsule. Happens so quick, you dont realize it happened, but you experience the pain a few seconds later as you bust out of your goo filled clone sack at the nearest medical bay. Except this time, I didnt wake up in a goo filled clone sack. I woke up in the same room, the lights outside the room flickering. As I sit up, I feel my muscles contract and release. The normal effects of a new clone never have used them purposefully.

I have no shirt. No pants. Stepping off the table, I raid the nearest body of their clothing. The medical officer. I guess he couldnt stand up to those shadows, a large hole in his chest, the edges cauterized. No one had a weapon like that except the Jove. Ive seen the results of their weaponry first hand; when I journied to the graveyard of Amarrian ships caused by the Jovians naval fleet when we attacked them. Dark times those were, but a story for a different time. Heading out into the hallway, I see more rooms, with the other "specimens" I had met earlier in the day. I think it was a day??

Everywhere I turn as I head for the exit, nothing but death. Is there no one else? How did I survive? Throughout my escape, I notice little things, ignoring them as the effects of the clone jump. Im taller. My footsteps are heavier, more forceful. Soon, I reach the last door I remember coming through, the hangar with my ship. I am stricken with disappointment as I enter... My ship, a Legion of the Empire, lies in peices with several others. I see a Rifter though, in the far corner under the armor repairers. Maybe, just maybe, I can fix her up.

As I quickly cross the hangar, I see the bodies of other pilots trying to escape to no avail. Somehow, I am able to recall where and how to apply the repairing tools to the Rifter. The holes in the armor, revealing the hull structure, are quickly restored to a like new condition. Well, as close to "like new" a Minmatar vessel can get. As soon as that thought enters my mind, I snicker, with a second thought of shooting the next Amarrian ship I see. Shaking off the horrid thought, why would I do that? As I place the final peice of armor plating, I see my reflection in the glossy coating for the first time.

THIS ISNT MY CLONE!! As I allow the flow of events to catche up in my mind, it all is clear. The experimental jump clone process was a success! Sadly, everyone involved appears to be dead or missing. Mostly dead. I have no hope of returning to my Amarrian heritage. Ive been imprisoned inside this slave race! I slowly fall to the floor, leaning up against the ship I just fixed. Why havent reinforcements shown up? Where has everyone gone? The Jove! They're everywhere, even the highest realms of the Empires security. Realizing this, combined with the exhaustion, I collapse hard to the floor. Upon awakening from that death like slumber, I sneak into the capsule docked to the Rifter. With no small amount of difficulty, I get connected to the pod interface. Slowly undocking, I dont see any other ships, not even Concorde. Not even the Empire's elite guard. Getting to warp speed, I direct the destination towards Conoban and set autopilot so I can contemplate the recent activities.

Repairing the Rifter to the state I did, thats something I didnt know I could do before. The neural networks connected to my pod seem to be "improved" somehow. I see things easier, I react quicker, my thoughts flow more easily, my memory is coming back to me more quickly now. I was even a little bit attracted to myself when I saw my reflection. I guess the clone I was given was just a normal one. A quick personal scan shows all Ive experienced is due to my "improved" implants. That explains a bit, but not how I knew exactly where to repair my new ship and how to do it. Further scans show that Ive been uploaded with "Elite" level armor defense and repair skills. Well, these new skills will come in handy, but the clone process was interrupted, resulting in partial amnesia. Looks like Ill have to re-learn a few things, but with the new implants and skills I hadnt had before, it should be a breeze.

So now youre up to date on current goings on. Ill be around in the Amarr region for awhile, looking to earn some respect. I dont think Id fit in as a "real" Minmatar rebel yet, so Ill go slowly in that direction. Im sure I can find a job as a mechanic for some Amarrian corporation, they're always in need of someone to fix their capacitors. I leave you with a current photo, taken upon my arrival to the Conoban station for security reasons. I guess I wasnt even in their systems yet.

  Well, now I am.