A New Direction: a passive shield Celestis

Well, a Tristan is well and good but level 1 missions aren't going to get Carraig's reputation with Duvolle Labs to the dizzy heights required to use level 4 research & development agents. A New Approach was needed.


Enter the passive shield Celestis, a Gallente Cruiser with 5 mid slots. First thing I found is that you can use the level of shield extenders 'above' what you think you might use, so a frigate can use medium shield extenders and a cruiser can use large shield extenders - shield upgrade skill is your friend here (the skill reduces the amount of powergrid required to mount a shield extender). Along with an invulnerability field (shield equivilant of the EANM) you get a nice large shield. The draw back of the extenders is that the signature radius of your ship gets larger - but not by much.

With Core Defense Field Rig being about 3m in Dodixie I popped one of them onto the ship, it makes a difference, after putting this baby on the shield hardly went beneath 80% in level 2 missions.

In the lows I have the ubiqitous Damage Control II and Power Shield Relays. As an old active armour tanker I found this module hard to stomach, it's draw back is to reduce capacitor regen time while increasing shield regen. However the idea of the passive tank is that you don't need capacitor, that your shield natural regen rate is sufficient to keep your tank up. The other good side of this module is that they don't appear to have a stacking penalty. Indeed there are battleclinic loadouts with 6 of these babies on the low rack.

Most damage in the level 2 missions has been from the drones rather than the missiles. So I plan to skill up to get hobgoblin and hammerhead tech 2 drones. Then it is a matter of trust and being able to walkaway from the computer while the drones do their business!

[Celestis, Passive Shield Celestis]

Shield Power Relay II
Shield Power Relay II
Damage Control II

Large Shield Extender I
Large Shield Extender I
Large Shield Extender I
Large Shield Extender I
Invulnerability Field I

'Malkuth' Assault Missile Launcher I, Sabretooth Light Missile
'Malkuth' Assault Missile Launcher I, Sabretooth Light Missile
Dual 150mm Carbide Railgun I, Thorium Charge M
Dual 150mm Carbide Railgun I, Thorium Charge M

Core Defence Field Purger I
[empty rig slot]
[empty rig slot]

Hammerhead I x3
Hobgoblin I x2

Effective hit points: 27.8k, defense: 108dps. Carraig needs to get shield upgrade V to fit this lot, until then she off-lines one of the railguns.

A New Direction: a passive shield Tristan

For a while now I have been comfortably as a Gallente Nationalist supporting Duvolle and Roden in their efforts to keep the fires of freedom burning. Both Slayfoe and Carraig fly Gallente ships, use combat drones and use hybrid guns to give the drones a sense of direction.

In an effort to understand the enemy Carraig has decided to learn to use shields and missiles and run some missions, shoot some pirates and get comfortable with another way of flying. Here is my first effort, the Tristan, the pinacle of Gallente frigates set up as a passive tank with rockets, hybrid blasters and a hobgoblin for good measure. She is called Petals and has close on 6k effective hit points.

She is a bit of a camel (as in the horse designed by comittee). To kill things she must get close but doesn't have the means of doing so. She therefore falls into the PVE category but with the hope that someone will warp into her missions and try to blow her away from close range...

[Tristan, Tristan passive shield]
Damage Control I
Co-Processor I
Shield Power Relay I
Small Shield Extender II
Small Shield Extender II
Invulnerability Field I
'Malkuth' Rocket Launcher I, Gremlin Rocket
'Malkuth' Rocket Launcher I, Gremlin Rocket
Regulated Light Electron Phase Cannon I, Tungsten Charge S
Regulated Light Electron Phase Cannon I, Tungsten Charge S
[empty rig slot][empty rig slot][empty rig slot]
Hobgoblin I x1

As Carraig's combat skills become more and more capable I hope to drop the Co-processor for a ballistic control. It turns out that shields and missiles are cpu hogs. First up is: weapons upgrades (which reduces the CPU requirement of weapons). It turns out that rigs ARE cheaper than they were, but that doesn't make them cheap, in Dodixie Small core defense field purgers still cost 1m and Small core defense field extenders about 1.7m.

Ships I have flown and ships I have loved

I haven’t had much access to a good connection recently to indulge in my favourite pastime of flying internet spaceships in Eve Online. I do think about it a lot and catch up on the eve Blog-pack every morning before work which keeps the imaginative part of my brain mulling over possibilities through-out the day.

Ships I have flown and ships I have loved.
Being a Gallente patriot, Slay supported Roden and Duvolle from the beginning flying the Atron and Tristan before graduating briefly to a Catalyst destroyer on the way through to cruisers. Rushing through the tutorial in Eve is a mistake, I hadn’t even realised I had been given a ship as a reward but money is easily come by at the beginning and Slay was flying a sturdy Tristan until he could afford the tough Gallente Thorax cruiser.
Unusually for a special forces Gallente (Drone specialist) I didn’t see the attraction of the Vexor, after all, the Thorax also could put out 5xHammerhead II AND have a kick-ass tank. It was in my Thorax that I first got PVPed. I won’t even pretend it was consensual, an Azaru warped into my mission in low-sec and left my Thorax as space dust slowly drifting in the light of Sharuveil’s sun. Picking on beginners is not something pirates seem to shirk from in padding out their kill boards.
In the way that I jumped into a Thorax, I jumped into the Myrmidon. The Brutix never even got looked at, it must have been covered in dust sheets in the battlecruiser showroom that day. How I love my Myrmidons! Tougher than the Thorax, able to store more drones and with it’s bigger power-grid I could fit more on. It also looks like a creature of space, this ship could never land on a planet.
I had joined MNEE by this point and everyone else was running level 4 missions making more money that I could even dream about. So I had to join in and as such fitted out a Dominix battleship as soon as I could. Three missions later that ship was also slowly spreading out through the void as I got caught by warp scrambling frigates in a level 4 mission when someone else warped out. The person very kindly gifted me a new Dominix that was carefully bubble wrapped and put away for when my skills caught up with my ambition.
The workhorse of wormhole space is the battleship and in our case, the Dominix. So it was back into this battleship that I went to reap the rewards of exploring the domain of the Sleepers. Generally it serves as part of a remote armour repairer gang with sentry drones providing the dps. She also has a PVP role where she can suck the cap out of anything within 20klicks of her while laying down the hurt with a collection of drones.
Though the Dominix does the heavy lifting in Sleeper space, Slay spends most of his time behind the controls of the Helios, the Gallente Covert Ops tier 2 frigate. This machine is the invisible scanning eye of the gods, where anomalies are found and wormholes tracked down.
Not forgotten is the Myrmidon though. She still serves me as a very able gas mining ships complete with a tank in her lows, dps with her drones and 5 gas miners II in her highs. She can engage the defenders of a class 4 ladar site and be round to mine the gas after.
Who knows what the future will bring, Slay has the skills but not the money to fly an Ishtar, he loves his Iskur appropriately named Slay’s baby which carved it’s merry way through the first epic arc that came out with Apocrapha. He has 2 Brutix that he uses in the same way as he uses Thoraxes, up close and personal with heavy neutron blasters and drones laying down the law. The Nemesis requires missile skills which in the interest of improving his current skills Slay is ignoring but certainly plans to invest in the future.
The immediate plans call for maximising his drone and sub battle-ship skills: Drone interfacing 5, combat drone 5 being the top of the list with various guns skills immediately after.

Gang PVP

We move into out new home, meet the neighbours and declare war. We camp a WH waiting for them to come out, it turns out that there are rather more of them than we anticipated and we need to stage a 'strategic withdrawal', at least I assume that is what it was called as I hadn't any comms so I was watching the others VERY carefully. As it turns out, the WH collapses behind the last one of us out leaving two of them with no where to run to and a fight against 4 domis.

The picture is of the domis greiving the loss of there new Abadon mate that was left behind next door. Not sure of the final tally at the moment though I do note that it was the trusty tier 1 domis that survived!

First dive into solo PVP

Following on from the last post I put my plan into action. After some shopping Carraig was in an asteroid belt in Arraron with Slay off-grid. Before long a flipper turns up and transfers Carraig’s Ore into his own jet can. Now, he was already red and didn’t start flashing as I expected him to. Apparently flashy doesn’t exist anymore, so after a little dependent time (baby needed consoling, feeding and burbing) I was back in belt and the same flipper comes along in an Iskur.
He flips the can (belonging to Slay) and Carraig scrams him. He starts shooting Carraig and Slay warps in. He destroys Carraigs cruiser and escapes when Slay runs out of cap to keep the webifier going.
Lessons learnt:
1. Carraig cannot shoot first. If he had been persuaded to shoot Carraig Concord would have arrived.
2. The Brutix needs less blasters and an energy vampire to keep the capacitor from emptying
3. Hammerheads are not as effective against assault frigates as I hoped, next time use Hobgoblins or Warriors.
4. Chasing an AF using MWD uses up Slay’s cap very quickly.
I must say I am looking forwards to doing it again. It isn’t that easy keeping both characters going. So next time I will put a regenerating tank on Carraig’s ship rather than a pure buffer tank.

Time-out from Wormhole Space

I have been a bit busy in RL recently and haven’t been able to endulge in flying space ships round as much. I do have blog pack on my iGoogle though and catch up with various blogs as much as I can.
Today my favorite was http://evewarrior.com/archives/irritation. He started me thinking. At the moment MNEE has just folded up camp in the class 4 that kept us in sleeper loot for the last two months with the intention of moving to a deeper class 5 with a static class 6 connection. As a result we are in high sec with some time on our hands.
The word in Eve Warriors blog that got me thinking was ‘passive targeting’. I wouldn’t mind picking some fights with some can flippers. This is my plan.
Carraig sits in a belt in a retriever kitted out with a warp scrambler, passive targeting and mining strip. She jet mines into a can dropped by Slay who sits in a Brutix off grid. As soon as some one bites Carraig scrambles and Slay warps in. If a flipper shoots Carraig then Concord should arrive to help as Carraig has rights over the flipper but the flipper has no rights over Carraig.
Hmm, this might be a bit of fun. Carriag needs to learn about Propulsion Jamming then it is a matter of fitting out a retriever with warp scrambler and plates or maybe better, an Exequror as it can fit plates, 4 mining lasers, passive targeting, warp scrambler and afterburner for when they try to run away. I think I’ll take some ECM drones with me should the flipper try to shoot me.
Slay’s Brutix will be set up as a glass cannon, what other way would you fly it? Only thing missing now is a border system near some low sec pirate haven with some roids to shoot at.