Day 86 : Music To Mine By

It turns out that I like the same books as The Mittani! I’ve been reading themittani.com, trying to preserve a healthy equalising bias in my mind as I do so, it is a CFC sourced operation after all. That doesn’t stop it being a good read though. I admit that, at first, I thought it was somewhere between a scam, a joke, and a CFC loudhailer. Generally well written, entertaining, and, importantly, has moderated comments. It is still my go to source for the stories pouring out of the war in the north. Anyway, the book, http://themittani.com/books/bone-wires, reminds me of Richard Morgans Altered Carbon. I’ll have to try this one out. I might have to start putting a reading list page together of all the stuff I’ve read that led me down the geeky road to MMOs, through Warcraft, and on to EVE. I’ve done a little bit of this before and got into a good discussion of Neal Stephenson books. It’ll be interesting to see if anyone has more suggestions and opinions. I’ll have to clear the backlog of entries for the blog first but lets face it, there are plenty of opportunities for reading a book while playing so I should do it.

In game I find an email from Jax. A Serpentis site he ran escalated to the equivalent of a  5/10 site. We’ll get beaten bloody in there with no chance of victory. As usual I am well up for this. I’ve chosen a Vexor that I nickname the Failboat. We warp into the first room and it doesn’t go well for me at first but then I get the distance/cap/repair balance right and manage to get some fighting done while hovering in mid armour. Near the end of clearing the room I over aggro a battleship and end up having to warp out on half hull but I get back for the finale when Jax and his Myrm finish them off. The second room would be a stretch to say the least but Jax has to log off anyway. I go back and use the tractor beam salvaging techniques that I worked on earlier in the week to clear up. I dump the result into the corp hangars. Even though I now know that all this stuff is used in manufacturing I can’t stop thinking of it as the EVE equivalent of “vendor trash” or “greys”, the stuff that in other MMO’s you routinely sold to NPC vendors.  

Later I look into some more mining missions. I’m going to run some Level IIIs to boost my standings and see what kind of loot the level III’s reward. The procurer is perfect for these missions apart from the fact that I can’t stretch its power grid to support a suitably sized Afterburner or MicroWarp Drive. I faff with the tank and get a small MWD fitted to it, almost doubling the top speed and making the run in towards mission ore a little shorter. The tank is still way too high for rats to make much of a dent in it and there is nothing that a flight of five drones can’t handle. I suspect I wouldn’t even have to attack the rats to finish the mission. I quickly learn to time the single Strip Miner against the amount of ore in a particular rock. There is no point running it for a three minute cycle when one of the rocks takes it less than ten seconds to mine.

It’s all too easy so I head to low sec to compare the result. I’m surprised that the mission reward isn’t much higher. I guess that 0.4 isn’t that much different from 0.6 systems. I’ll try some lower security status ones in future. Despite in system traffic no pilots come and bother me. Either they are busy finding good fights, fighting Factional Warfare, or can’t be bothered with a Procurer which might have a 45K tank on it.

There was a moment where I thought the mission might get a little busy. Some rats spawned far out from the rocks and one of them was a battleship. The Procurer is big enough and slow enough to allow stupid rat battleship commanders able to hit it. As it turns out stupid rat battleship commanders would rather concentrate on five drones zooming round them, drones they have no chance of hitting. So aside from an amusing firework show and something for the lads to play with the battleship adds nothing to the mission. It’s a shame my T1 drones don’t have the power to break its armour tank. I’ll have to get that sorted out. I recalled my drones, docked, grabbed my million in ISK reward and the 1000+ LP reward. I think the LP rewards may be raised due to low sec after all. I’ll have to run a proper comparison at some point. More things to add to the todo list.

Somewhere during these missions I started referring to my own drones as “the lads”. Disturbing.

I’m feeling oddly low by the evening, no doubt incoming salvos by Monday which has extra tracking speed mods on this week. I cheer myself up by listening to classical music while rolling through space. It’s an end of Sunday thing. Moonlight Sonata fits mining, Sarabande reminds me of watching the Goonies (which always cheers me up of a blue Sunday), and Ave Maria, well, because there is something sacrilegiously soothing about listening to it while blowing shit up. Lets not even talk about flying around New Eden to The Blue Danube or Also Sprach Zarathustra which are in the Spotify playlist somewhere.



EDIT: Todays entry is for the 9th September. Struggling with the backlog as usual, I was editing it on the 12th September. As I started this and caught up with various new sources I saw the news about the CFC pilot, and ex CSM member, Vile Rat being a casualty of the attack on the US embassy in Benghazi. I never knew the guy, I’m new to the game and the greatest players are far from this Noobs country. Nevertheless it hit me harder than I expected, even harder when I saw all the tributes as the EVE community rallied to remember its own, instantly forgetting any mutual in game animosity, commiserating with those who knew him. I’m proud to be making my way into a community like this. To Sean Smiths family, to all Vile Rats friends and colleagues in the EVE community and out of it, my condolences, such as they are worth. It sounds like he was a well loved guy who was great at what he did. RIP Sean Smith. I wish I’d got to mail you after an “accident” with a blue. o7.

http://themittani.com/news/rip-vile-rat