Exploration

I have played Eve for a while now, occassionally letting it slide when life gets busy but always coming back to it. Most of this time I have spent in Gallente highsec missioning slowly building up a few ships and skilsl to fly them. I then shifted to wh space and spent a few months there before getting bored of waiting for guild members to log on. This time in WH space did cause me to buy a second account that spawned a fully capable miner and now orca pilot. I then wandered of to Red v Blue to pvp some before joining SiRadio for some 0,0 shenanigans. unfortunately they were turfed out of Providence shorlty after I arrived. After a while in the Great Wildlands I returned to high sec to try out exploration.

I immediatly got lucky as the first site turned into an escalation, it wandered through Gallente space and eventually out into low sec. I managed bought myself a lowly cruiser so not as to risk my shiny Ishtar and pulled it off for some nice shiny loot that sold for enough to cover an unfortunate foray into WH space where I lost my Ishatar. Haven't managed to get to lucky since.

In an effort to up my success rate I decided to have a look at Placid, Gallente low sec with a high sec island in it. Like many explorers before me I came across a few problems. To scan I use my rigged Helios with Sister Launcher and probes, this with the recent skillpoint re-imbursement due to the learning skills being removed has me scanning things down quite easily. Once promising sites have been bookmarked I then return to a local station to pick up a combat/ exploration ship...

For high-sec my combat ship was passive shield Ishtar which was over tanked for anything it came up against. But an Ishtar is quite expensive to be flying through low sec so I began to look round for something else and came across the ship that cannot be scanned out with probes, the unprobe-able ship. Whatever is chosen it must be able to fight battleships spawns not unlike L4 missions, this rules out T1 cruisers. On the list is:

Myrmidon BC: dual rep set up with codebreaker, analyzer, salvager, drones and blasters - to hell with the signature radius, cheap
Ishtar HAC: high armour resists, single MAR, exchangeable mid slot, 3 rails - medium expense, not probe-able, drones a risk
Proteus T3C: high armour resists, single MAR, exchangeable mid slot, 5 heavy neutrons, not probe-able, no drones, v.expensive

Exploration: Serpentis Phi Outpost

Well the exploration game continues with mixed results. Needless to say the first rush of success has not been followed up, it turns out that escalations are not common. however I have got much better at the scanning.
Yesterday I logged on to discover that Carriag had come first in Aelius' lottery that he held to celebrate playing the game so long. 600million ISK! I have never even had half of that in one place before :) So with my new found wealth I went back to doing exactly what I did before - exploration.
Serpentis Phi Outpost had a nice juicy battleship that dropped Overseerer Effects - a type of tag that local NCP bought for 1.2m which on-top of the 2.5m bounty for the ship made it a very juicy BS indeed! He also dropped a Corelum medium remote armour repairer, seems that remote repairers are a trend.
Today I found a Magnometric Site - needed to get down to 0.25AU with my Sister Probes to find it - nothing remarkable except for the whole idea that developers will hide aspects of their game and make it hard to discover back story. 5 containers to salvage, 4 contained tech 1 salvage, no hostiles.

Exploration: Booster R&D

High sec
Escalation
Serpentis

Wave 1
1 x Shadow dude - dropped Shadow ammo and 
4 x Harvesters (Frigates)
7 x cruiser class
2 x Core Lord Admirable (BS)

Wave 2
Various frigates and cruisers
2 x Core Grand Admiral

1 x Amber cytosin cloud that can't be harvested because it is inside an asteroid with a radius of 3000m and the range of gas harvesters are 1500m!
4 x Gas storage units that cant be blown up

Escalated to  Booster R&D
Again your radio comes alive with the voice of this femme serpentia "This is an important security announcement, all ships in G5, G6, G8 and G9: evacuate immediately to a new location and wait for security forces to escort you back to base." It seems like your little enterprise has made the local division of the Serpentis organization a bit confused, perhaps they are not used to be the hunted. This message was a bit troubling though... you can expect two whole gas mining teams and a security team of an undisclosed size. You need to be more careful here... 

The mighty Orca

Well Carraig naTairbhe is the proud owner of a space brick - the Mighty Orca. It is full of stuff, some of it useful, some of it less so. So lets start positive:

• It is big. Really big. As long as you plan to fly smaller ships then it acts as a nice carrier;
• It has a nice buffer tank - I think it has 102k EFT before I switch on any modules (242k with modules);
• It can sport three full loads of light drones (armour, shields and ECM);
• It CAN use warfare links, three of them.

The down side:

• You can't use the Orca as a taxi, ie, you can't park one player inside it while another flies it;
• The Corporate Hangars are different when characters in different corporations look at them, this stops you being able to use it as a base for characters when they are from different corps;
• You can always jettison the load though, have the other character pick it up and use the fitting service;
• When you launch a ship from the ship maintenance bay, it comes out with 35%? shields.

I have the Ship maintenace bay filled with:

• A Catalsyt Salvaging Destroyer
• A Helios cov ops
• The Echelon frigate for hacking
• An atron fit for speed
• Space for an Ishtar
• I need to find another cruiser for gas mining after a missed opportunity in exploration

Exploration!

Well, at last the Orca is bought, fitted and flying round with all my goodies stuffed in it. Eggs all in one basket? Yes! But it has over 200k EFT so it would take quite a gank fleet to take it down in high sec. Anyhow, it is there to serve as mobile base for Slayfoe's Bull with gang links specifically there to help the passive shield rides he is currently using (Shield Harmonizing +% to shield resists and The one that reduces your ship signature radius.)
So last night I took my mini fleet down to the bottom of Sinq Liaison where the number of pilots in the last 24 hours seemed smaller, climbed into the Helios and threw out the probes.
Bollaire: nothing
Ney: First hit - empty cosmic anomoly - I presume someone had already done it - and had forgotten his ogres in the last room.
Ney: Second hit - jackpot! Of course I forgot to mark  down the name... however the relevent points - on about the third wave a named individual pops up - target - shoot! As soon as he goes down up pops another window - I have an escallation. Good thing I hung round to loot thoughw, he dropped some shadow serpentis ammo and a low grade snake implant. His then ship salvaged for some tech 2 salvage - three firsts in one night. The bounties don't come to too much but the place is silly easy in a passive shield Ishtar, might be time to drop some tank for some gank. So of to Brybier Slay trots leaving Carraig to follow up in the Hulk.
Brybier: once I figure that you can just warp to the escalation using the journal Slay pops up in a high sec booster gas cloud. Serpentis Harvester guards are a bit harder and floating among them is another named dude (or was he just Shadow - I can't quite remember). Either way I take him out first and get another escalation to Vylade but not before picking up some more tech2 salvage, a serpentis module and shadow serpentis tag.

Lessons learnt:

• I need some other ships in the Hulk that can Gas Harvest, Hack and Decode;
• People in the same fleet but not in the same corporation cannot web each other without Concord!
• Atrons cannot tank gate guns;
• Atrons can go wickedly fast (over 5k when MWD is overheated!).
• This exploration gig is good fun - or again maybe I got lucky...

The Great Wildlands

Situation as of November 2010.

The Great Wildlands is NPC land with the sovreignety claimed by Thrukker Tribe. The Angel Cartel infect the place like a plague.

Stations:
Being a Nomadic people they have few stations. This region has three stations quite close to each other quite close to the Empire side of the region:

• N-DQ0D
• M-MD3B
• E02-IK

Players:
One of the larger players is Republic (RE-AL) who operate a NRDS policy. They have plenty of opposition in the form of White Noise and the Brick Squad. They are based out of M-M.

The region is DANGEROUS.

Connections:
The GW is in the Western side of the Eve cluster easily accessible from Molten Heath in Minmitar Space. A small trade hub called Teonusude is a good jump off point for the GW being a station with a medical clone bay and easy access to Rens for new ships. From Teon there is a pipe through Egbinger directly to NIH from where a pilot can continue get access to the region's three stations.

Alternatively there are routes from Empire through Derelik. This pilot can only report that the Derelik pipe is supposedly heavily camped by hostiles.

The last direct Empire- GW connection is through Metropolis. I have never taken this pipe and can only speculate. It connects to the very northerly tip of GW and appears to be the main Empire-Cache route. This puts the access far from the GW stations mentioned above.

As for Null Sec conenctions: the GW region connects to Etherium Reach in the North, Curse and Scalding Pass in the South, and Cache and Geminate in the West.

An SI Radio Roam in the Great Wildlands

So Sunday night rolled round and I was fortunate enough to be able to log and play with SI Radio. The first corp roam I had participated with in Null Sec. Nothing is ever simple in Eve. The fleet was split in two with half in Teon the other half in N-D so first order of the day was to regroup. Naturally the half in null sec ran smack into a Brick Squad (Red) gang at the second gate. Some had aggessed, some hadn't. Those that hadn't aggressed managed to jump through up the pipe to Teon leaving the rest on N-D the side.

We spent the rest of the evening playing with the Brick Squad and other reds coming down from Etherium Reach. Result: 1 Republic Firetail (Minie faction frigate) 1 Vagabond (Minie Heavy Assault) and 1 Hurricane (Minie Battlecruiser) on their side to 1 Crusader (Amarr interceptor) and 1 Omen (Amarr cruiser) on our side. Materially we came of the better though for a while it looked like I was going to add my Myrmidon to the loses, after all I still hadn't taken part in a fleet op in GW without losing a ship!

We had a series of fc, Errik did very well, Stryker had a go. We were safe and got our kills in ambushes. We took our loses to another Brick Squad gang in small fast ships that would land and get away before we could target.

We had rolled out in an armour BC fleet with plenty of dps, an Onieros doing armour reps and two cov ops for scouts. The scouts were deployed ahead and behind. They did an excellent job. out forward scout in particular, Lynn, did an excellent job at reporting targets.

The BC was a mixed bag, plenty of drones, short range and medium range guns. vv01r in the Crusader was the fastest ship we had but wasn't enough to catch the small fast ships coming though the gate. We were 14 ships for most of the roam.

In summary: though we were short a method of locking and tackling very fast ships we got some victims and had a very enjoyable evening.