653: Nails In The Coffin Of Space

Cool title eh? This was meant to be called "Failing to Relax by Moonlight" and then things escalated.

Well. I needed to calm down a bit obviously. In keeping with by inner 'bear character I abandoned my pursuit of flight status (don't fly angry, remember?) and went back to wandering around high sec, doing some aimless clicking, listening to the football on the radio, mining and "interacting with the meta" (reading Twitter).

My main achievement for the weekend - figuring out how to look up to the sides and ceiling in the docking hangar.

Eventually I tired of mining. I thought about seeing how far I could get a Venture. I'd get the relaxing clank of the mining lasers and the adrenaline laden nerves of low sec at the same time. Given my mood I'll save that lark for another day.

There was something I'd been meaning to do and that was to continue my aborted investigation into the Sisters of EVE ships from Day 584. Was it really that long ago when I went mildly RP and discovered not only no trace of Valsas en Dilat but also a Randian quote on Ripard Tegs biography?

Time needs making up. I leap into the newly assembled White Witch.

My initial intention is to compare the output from the cylindrical structures. I duly go about this task.

I quickly reach the conclusion that I'm missing something. Possibly interest. I can't tell anything purely from the output and I feel I'm missing some vital clue in the structure or markings on the hull. I'm no lore master either. Again I should call on Rhavas or Mark726. The latter is too busy trashing up space elsewhere presumably. So much for science, though I guess that's how Penicillin got discovered.

@EVE_Rhavas we all like to litter vOv ::throws a wrapper out the space window:: #tweetfleet

— CCP's Lapdog (@webspaceships) March 31, 2014

I decide to fly the Astero on a tour of the systems moons. Nosing around and using its ability to use a Cov Ops cloak should prove a good field test. I quickly find a new use for the Covert Ops cloak. I can warp around and not see the ship. Here's the thing. The Astero gives me the willies. It scares me. Something about it does not like the exploration fit I've given it. At first I thought it was just the hygienic, almost acerbic, hull paint scheme but realised it wasn't. The hull gives off subtle hints of aggression. Alien aggression. At one point I couldn't shake the medical bay scene from Aliens from my mind. There is an element of almost unstoppable biological aggression radiating from the Astero hull. I'd delve into it a little deeper but I have the fear and concentrate on our tour of the local moons.

I catch sight of these two sunbathers along the way

Travelling from moon to moon, or actually stopping at planets and practising my dscan techniques, I come to three conclusions

1. It annoys me that Overview tabs share sort order. Let me keep the sort order along with the selection.
2. It annoys me that moon numbers aren't zero padded for sorting (Moon 2 comes after Moon 19)
3. There are dead sticks everywhere

Somewhere in the space around virtually 80% of moons there is a POS. A Player Owned Starbase. I'd say at least 50% of these were inactive. They were still anchored and so, in hisec, untouchable without a wardec to hand. They simply didn't have any force field, meaning that they had abandoned or deliberately unfueled and left to hold the space for future use. Once anchored it requires no further effort to claim that space. An incoming war declaration would warn you to go and sort stuff out. So basically in the meantime you have to do nothing. I took offence at this for a second until I realised I'd done the same. I'll go and take that thing down. Then avarice took over and explained in patient terms to my role playing head (which I appear to have put on today) that it it was unfair that this space should be so statically claimed so easily. How unlike EVE that you can so easily claim something and have it made so difficult that it can be taken from you. If you aren't putting any effort into keeping it then it should be easy to take it. War Dec? Don't make me laugh. The wardec cost is cheap at the price for harassing care bear corps and uneconomical for effort and the potential gain involved in taking one of these things down.

Once my tour was complete I realised something else. At several offline starbases I saw defence and offence modules, at one of them I saw quite a few. At none of them did I see an industrial module. None. That means the towers production power, the central reason for it being in hisec in the first place, has been taken down on purpose and stashed away. These towers aren't abandoned, they are rock solid claim notes on moon space that take no effort to maintain. Presumably some low, or probably null, sec corp likes to make things safely every now and again. Just leave the tower there. Doing nothing for nothing. Like a nail in the coffin of space.

This gets me riled and sends me to Twitter to see what people think. This rapidly gets out of control because in WH space this thing is a bit of a bigger deal than my latent avaricious trashman role. See Rhavas feed for an example, and for a non WH perspective also read this and follow Sugar Kyle . Trust a Noob to put his foot in it. Or his Astero.

What could CCP do about these dead sticks? They've admitted the POS code is scary and that deployables are the iterating means to replace them. That means complicated solutions are out. My favourite, using Hacking, preferably where the POS owner had designed the defence matrix themselves, is right out. Timers seems to be the order of the day since, as Morwen Lagann pointed out, there is a difference between offline and abandoned. In W-space I can understand that. In K-space, particularly Hisec, though these things have been abandoned on purpose.  There has to be some timer that can't be confused with the Strontium timer that has to be easily implemented. A week without shields? Abandoned. Maybe. Like maybe I'll get my dirty, greedy mitts on what's inside anytime soon. I'll have to have a think about it after I've stopped thinking about another random thought that's been bugging me in one way or another. So if you don't like the thought of dead stick removal then think about this and let me know what you think

"What would you do with a hi sec alliance of a hundred corporations that only had one member each". Who would form such a rag tag bunch of individualists and to what purpose?

It's at this point I realise that the fever I have isn't a scotch hangover and that I had better stop thinking. I'm off to read Dark Eden which I've been putting off.

EVE Track of the Day

Too Late - Larry Williams and Johnny Watson

(originally dedicated via EVE Radio to all those who fled EVE simply because they heard about the Bonus Room)