Day 85 : Death of a Thousand Cuts

I start Saturday with some mining as per usual, I’m out mining in the new Procurer. It feels nimble compared to the Retriever and for a while it is more fun. While the ore hold is half the size it does make you feel as if you are doing less of “just sitting there”. Not that I do that, I’m always looking at something, but you know that in all likelihood you’ll be out there for just twenty minutes instead of forty. I’ll have to revise my cheap tank fit on the Retriever to make its yield rise, it just feels like AFK mining when I am out in it now, and I’m out for longer just to fill the hold. I chat to Dave from the corp who is up and about early due to RL duties. It makes mining more interesting but he is off doing the epic arc stuff and this makes me want to be doing more than just mining.

I call a halt to the mining and for want of other inspiration fly my Incursus down to low sec. I’m basically spoiling for a scrap but it’s quiet out. I start to down rats while I wait for something to show up. The problem here is that when something finally does I’ve inevitably got zero shields from dealing with the cruisers surrounding a rat battleship. My shields are my buffer during getting to PVP scrap range. As an armour tanker I don’t care about them that much but they count in the run in. Instead when an obvious scrap turns up I have to abort and warp to a prepared safe point. It’s a shame, it was a faction frigate and I reckon I could have given him a run for his money. After that I feel jumpy and I can’t get in a comfortable position for a fight. I blame the rats rather than my mood and spend twenty minutes inflicting the death of a thousand cuts on a rat Battleship. It reminds me of what the skill queue does to me, checking it every so often even though I know exactly how long is left. 

The battleships just can’t hit you at close range. In the early mornings for the UK there are plenty of low sec systems where a ten minute orbit can gain you a battleship bounty plus whatever it drops. Battleships will drop smart bombs in their wrecks. Cruisers will occasionally drop drones. If they had used these then it would have made my life a lot harder, though I think I could deal with both. I think these rats are bad pilots. If you can’t down a 500K bounty battleship in T1 assault frigate then you are either too young a player, need to look at your skill queue, not as boring as I am, or just bad at playing. Its probably the boring thing. Half the fight with the battleship was just spent in orbit while swearing at Google Docs spreadsheets.

Later in the day I finally get to try out the in built voice chat feature while running a site with Jax.  I’m stunned by its quality compared with the Warcraft built in. Back in warcraft we used a Ventrilo server instead because the in built one was so poor. The EVE one would easily support anything our small corp would get up to. It’s good to put my abandoned headset with microphone back to use. Well it is good for me. I don’t think it’s so good for Jax who now has to put up with my bizzaro real world voice.

After we run the site I decide to go back and salvage the area. I’ve had a tractor beam for a while and never got around to using it. After a minute I’m already purchasing a second. These things are amazing for salvaging. I’m now out in a Vexor with 3 salvagers and two tractor beams. A destroyer might be better but I feel safer with the drone flight in the Vexor. I clear the area of wrecks in about ten percent of the time it would have taken me flying around salvaging individually. I’m not above noobishly admiring the green beam of the tractor either.

While back playing solo my mind drifts back to setting up a POS. I’ve been wondering about the cost of running a small POS. I’d need high standings to do this in hisec so it would be a long term plan. I’d rather try it in hisec before risking an installation in lowsec. I think the running costs would around two million a day in hisec. I could shut the thing down when not using it though, as I’ve found other people do. All I need at the moment is a small control tower and a mobile lab. I’m getting sick of watching the pending research jobs crawl to completion and it would be an interesting thing to burn some cash on. If I lose it to stupidity of some form, more than likely in my case, then who cares? I can almost afford a mistake costing a couple of hundred million now. Almost.

Hmmm, this whole post has been like the death of a thousand cuts.