Day 92 : Grindstanding

Saturday morning, I’m still in an odd mood. More fun flying The Sweeney is required. Notification of when my MRI scan is has come through. Laughing at Serpentis is way more amusing than idle speculation about what would happen if I ate a bag of nails before going in the machine. Well, sort of. I think my explosion would be better.

I think I’ve done all the level 2 COSMOS missions I can get my hands on. Time to fly the level 3 ones. I’m a bit wary as these might be a smidgen too tough in just a frigate. This isn’t any old frigate though. While it isn’t a tier 2 frigate, it is the frigate that the tier 2 frigates are looking over their shoulders at.

Fast, armed with two guns and a nosferatu energy drainer, it roars up to enemy battlecruisers as they hang around in their filthy dives doing nothing (seriously - what are they doing?), and snaps out the internet spaceship version of “put yer trousers on sonny, you’re nicked”. When I fly away, leaving a trail of Serpentis wrecks behind me I imagine calls of “who the hell are you?”. “We’re the Sweeney, and we haven’t had any dinner” I mutter.

I knew I shouldn’t have named the ship that. I definitely shouldn’t be flying it in an odd mood like this. Readers from the UK of a certain age might have a clue what I’m on about. For everyone else this is the reason a film has just been released starring Ray Winston and PlanB called “The Sweeney”. Well, the original 70s TV series is the reason - not my flying around easy PVE content in a frigate. They wouldn’t make a film about me running up to some Serpentis, kicking them in the knackers and then legging it with the loot before they were any the wiser. I’d watch that film but I doubt anyone else would be interested.

So basically, I’m in an odd mood. I have not gone mad. Well, I might have, just not as badly as it sounds as if I have. Enough ranting about my bizarre mood and daft name association games with the ships I fly. I’ll be back to those games next week when I plan to name a basic industrial ship “Mission Impossible” and see how far out of hisec I can get in it.  

Back to the PVE content. It’s actually quite an entertaining fight. There are several Brutix style battlecruisers in the field, some normal cruisers, a handful of frigates and a couple of missile batteries. I have to leave a couple of times when I mess up the speed tanking but more use of the tactical view tends to sort this out. I’d planned for one exit and repair per set of missile launchers. I hate these things and I can’t just leave them to the lads. I tend to plan to dive bomb them and get the hell out as long as they aren’t going to cause more waves of rats to appear.

I grind down the mission until I’m left with a handful of cruisers and a couple of the battlecruisers. I can set drones on one, lock the vampire on it if it is nearby, orbit and gun down one BC while being fast enough to avoid a lot of the incoming damage. Thanks to the state of the capacitor I can tank the rest of the damage. I need to look up some aggro rules. I wonder if I can distract more rats by splitting my drones into three groups. I can carry six so I could have three in a single group and then three acting as individual annoying flies keeping stuff off my back.

Finishing the first set of level 3 COSMOS missions is enough to tip my Gallente standings over 5.0. This activates level 4 agents. I’m not sure what the whole 5 activating level 4 thing is about, I should read up on it but the standing system has already irritated me enough. I’ll find out more when I go back and try and restore some Caldari standings without trashing my Gallente standings. I get the feeling that this isn’t possible and I’m going to be relying on alts to trade at Jita come the end.

On my way out, collecting yet more mission litter, I see my first plasma planet. I’m not sure why I haven’t seen one before. This one is in the Jel system. Part of me knows it is very similar to a lava planet, only with a different colour scheme. The enthusiast in me thinks that blue glowing planets are pretty good on the eye.

I’ve now got the standings to try a level 4 mission. I opt, surprisingly enough, for a mining mission. That’s why I spend the next hour being bored. I don’t have to shoot anything and in a Procurer I have to go back to the station three or four times. I think these things were designed with other ships or setups in mind. I don’t have the ships or skills to run a level 4 combat based mission as far as I can tell. Let’s hope I don’t get bored in the week and try one before I’m ready. Earnings from the mission, including LP, are still theoretically half what I could earn doing regular mining but even I can’t do that all the time.

In the evening I take a break and log off. It’s only later that I curse myself for forgetting, and so missing, the RvB Ganked run that I’d intended to join. I doubt I’ll be online at all next Saturday evening which means it’ll be at least two weeks before I can try and join another. At least it was ECM themed which is probably the class of mod that I know least about. I’ve used webs, scrams and even painters, but are they classed as ECM? Surely ECM is just target jammers?

As a note mainly to myself some random browsing (as in I can’t remember how the hell I got there - I was just clicking things) leads me to this http://thissortofthing.com/. Another one for the upcoming new Kindle list I think. If you’ve see the picture of the ticket on the screenshots page (http://diaries-of-a-space-noob.blogspot.co.uk/p/screenshots.html), you know what I mean.