Day 27 : Low Sec Speeding

After a night with hardly any sleep thanks to yesterdays dental work it's a surprise I log on today at all. Actually it isn't. I can't keep my hands off this game.

Industry and mining are all very well but trying to stay alert while doing something that dull isn't for me today. I have to do something else, something little riskier than my activities of late. In EVE risk is constant and yet that is the thrill. Death here isn't a momentary inconvenience as in many other MMOs. Ship loss, even clone loss in PVP, can be a costly incident. Even in the highest of high sec someone might be out suicide ganking. I've been more aware of it recently while out mining in the tub of a Retriever that I call The Diceman. It's why I've chosen the slow route into EVE, building up an initial buffer against being blown back to square one. Time to spice it up take a run into low sec and see what happens. No police there. Chances are, from what I've heard, that I won't last much longer than a few minutes.

Some kind of EVE instinct kicks in at this point. A little nagging voice asking me if I really want to take an expensive ship down there for a few minutes fun and wake up tomorrow and feel the pinch. It wouldn't be that bad surely? I could take a destroyer. I can almost afford to lose those now? They are slowish though and I do have a fondness for speed. I check out my Atron from the local station. The class of ships I've decided, embarrassingly enough, to name after call signs from Top Gun. Today, Maverick might bite the dust. I should have called this one Goose. I do have that need for speed though....

Warping into the system I slam down on the afterburner and zoom off into space. Damn but the place is bright. All around me are the starlit arcs of a massive nebula. The place is gorgeous for all that it's dangerous. It's also dead as a doornail. Seriously, there is no one here. I click the controls to swing round and  approach the gate I just came in from, and then hit full stop. It's about the closest thing I can do to an indignant handbrake turn. I bob quietly for a second in my puny fighter, admiring the scenery. Four people in system and no one to be seen. Maybe there are some rats in the belts. I head out.

Third belt out, I find one. Until now the most interesting thing has been the pristine state of the belts and the fact that they contain a type of ore I've never mined before. This belt though, I'm in luck. A single rat, flying the same class of ship as me. An even contest for a noob in his first low sec trip. I zoom in high overhead and chase down to a close orbit. He is emplying similar tactics. It becomes a war of attrition that he is slowly winning. Our weapons are puny low weight, low damage things. Our relative velocities are so high it makes tracking hard and shots are missing constantly. I try blipping the afterburner and racing straight at him for a second before pulling out into an orbiting pattern again. It seems to work a bit but I'm still beginning to lose. Thats when I notice I've got the orbit set to 500m. I don't need to be in that close and my railguns (perhaps I should be packing short range blasters) could be further out. I warp out and get repaired and the single local Gallente station. This is where I find the populace of the system hiding away. Does it have a good bar or something? I'm back out to try new tactics.

With the orbit distance set to something a bit more suited to my ill equipped weaponry, the little scrap with my evil NPC twin goes better. It's still very long for a fight with an NPC rat but it's also lots of time to practice movement and balencing the energy needs of shield boosters, afterburners and damage control systems. Even against an NPC rat it is good practice for later in my EVE life when I actually start to figure out what the hell is going on. It certainly beats mining where the excitement is the dread of being a sitting duck. Well, it beats mining when I'm feeling like this anyway. I still like mining and I still have plans for it.

Other than that my time today is limited. I'm coming up on the months end too, I should be going for gold. I think I realise I'm in for the long haul and going for gold is just about the most pointless thing I could do. Better to sit back, relax and learn Electronics to boost my CPU capacity. While I do this, I do a little research into other EVE blogs. I've been holding off a bit because I want to learn EVE with as little outside help as possible. Even so I've been looking at the odd website or ten when I've had trouble grasping something in game. Denying myself blogs is pointless, in the sandbox world of EVE human drama is being played out via the medium of space. These other bloggers are seeing it, reporting it and shaping it. The best of the ones I find I'll add to the blog list on the side of mine. Be warned. These guys are NOT noobs but if you can bypass the EVE jargon then there are golden stories in here. With a little bit of archaeology a whole story about an event months back begins to appear. I'll try and cover it later in the blog when I'm a little more sure of myself. Till then try out http://fiddlersedge.blogspot.co.uk and http://mabricksmumblings.blogspot.co.uk

(embarrassing Top Gun reference) EVE track of the day

Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins