Day 437: Sounds of Revival

Finally I find an entire day where I can pretty much just roll through EVE. Monday was a Bank Holiday here in the UK, meaning a three day weekend. Despite the lure of London calling I dedicated myself to the Importance of Being Idle. One of the tasks this magnificent aim required was to spend a day exploring my new space home, the low sec system of Barleguet. It's a well connected system. It's rich in resources, pirates, gankers, newbies, and some bloke called Gray Arachnid shouting a lot. Commonly referred to as Barle, Barley, Le Baguette or variants of the same.

 http://evemaps.dotlan.net/system/Barleguet

I put aside my desire to go and waste as many Talwars as possible without a single kill. That task can wait for a post work evening. Wary of jumping straight to voice comms before I had a handle on the community I kept my eye Alliance chat and jumped in if I could offer advice or random nonsense. While I did this I fired up my Nemesis and used its CovOps cloak facilities as a way to fly around making bookmarks and observing what went on in system. Then I tested the pipe to hi sec several times trying to get a handle on the number of enemy pilots and gate activity while stacking up some gate observation perches as I went.

Today I Learned

1. At one point I got bored of flying at cloak speed to a perch location near a belt. I switched off the cloak and turned on the MWD. Within 30 seconds an enemy fleet of around 8 ships dropped into the belt. No ratting in Barle unless it's Alpha and Away style tactics then. I warped off safe and shaky.

2. The process of grabbing your own set of bookmarks familiarises yourself with the system and the way it gets used. For me it removed nervousness about flying around while preserving wariness of that associated contempt thing.

3. Using a CovOps ship improves your DSCAN skills. Mine had got a little rusty. A CovOps ship in a safe point of your own making is virtually unassailable. It gives you time to relax and to experiment, getting dscan operation and interpretation back to the levels of second nature. Sure you can try this in hi sec but nothing is going on there, nothing potentially threatening anyway. CovOps takes about a month of skilling from scratch and all of it will come in handy elsewhere bar the 4-5 days of cloak training. I'm not talking about probing here. Just the ability to fly a ship that can cloak under warp.

4. Flying around cloaked means you'll get chance to observe fights from the outside. This is worth doing once or twice just to double check your overview settings which you should have followed a guide on. I recently updated my overview to Sarahs Overview Pack so I had new tab settings to get used to in addition to setting up the orders and colours. It was easier to do the latter when something was actually going on that I could watch and interpret.

5. EVE has sound. Following the earlier MWD incident I wanted to try and see what happened with MWD from a safe spot. Combat probes were out in system so I knew someone was looking around but was probably swamped in signatures. I thought I'd crack on the MWD and run uncloaked for a while and see if anyone warped in. No one warped in during the admittedly short amount of time I dared fly uncloaked but I discovered something else. I was zoomed in on my ship at the time and as I turned on the MWD heard sounds changed. I ramped up the volume and spent a minute listening to the entertainingly industrial hum that now accompanies Microwarp Drives. A quick mention on Twitter reveals a) it's fairly recent - I haven't been ignoring it for over a year and b) I didn't know TIL meant Today I Learned, prompting a joke exclamation to hide my irony driven embarrassment (sorry).

6. Barle Is Busy. I took a few side trips and the surrounding systems are massively more quiet. I don't think much will actually get done outside of fighting in Barle itself. The day to day subsistence, exploration and general mucking around will get done elsewhere. The pipe out to hisec is busier than most of the surrounding systems but it isn't so busy that you can run it in relative safety if you pay attention. It's good to realise you aren't trapped in a thunderdome. I took to flying out in shuttles I was building in Barle, breaking them down and flying the Tritanium back with me in one of the pre-rigged ships I've got stashed in hisec. I'm too cheap to lose the rigs by repacking the ship and having BLT freight all my stuff into Barley.


Next up : Less: recce. More: fleets, voice chat, and probably ship loss.

EVE Track of the Day

The Importance of Being Idle - Oasis