Explosion due to stupidity once more

I lost another ship this weekend. This time it happened due to another person blowing me up, and my own stupidity. Well, just my lack of common sense and staying somewhere for a bit too long while not cloaked.

I’m planning on joining a friend’s corporation in a few days, said friend is setting up a WH corporation with a few other people he knows. Seeing as I have no idea how to scan down signatures, or even use d-scan, I decided to train myself a bit.

So I shipped up in a cheetah, set out to low sec and started to scan down the different sites and signatures in a system in order to train myself some more on the “how does this work” part of it all.

While doing so I found a relic site, and as it turned out, I had a relic analyzer in my Cheetah. So I decided to go and have a look, maybe even get lucky in “hacking” the site.

Not only do I know nothing about scanning, I also have no idea how hacking works… Zero clue whatsoever. So while I was staring at the screen wondering what all those things that I could click meant and why some would lock up after clicking five times, someone found me.

I suddenly saw a manticore pop up on my screen and immediately got locked and scrambled. One volley of torpedoes later and I was warping away in my capsule to the nearest gate.

I learned that I should pay more attention, and definately should not be trying out hacking if I have no idea what it’s all about. Using D-scan would probably not have helped in this case seeing as the manticore was cloaked, but still, it wasn’t even opened.

The person shooting me convoed me afterwards, thanking me for getting myself blown up, he had been in the system for a few days waiting for a kill to happen and told me that I was his first ever solo kill. He was even kind enough to offer me to pay for half of my loss.

I declined this of course, I have plenty of ISK and congratulated him on his first solo kill and patience. I would not be able to just wait for days until something happens.

After doing a few jumps, I got back to Jita and shipped up in a new cheetah. Ready to continue my training.

I need to be ready in a few days, need to be able to hold my own in W-space. Because if nobody’s there to get me an exit, I’ll have to do it myself.

What you get when not paying attention

I decided to run some missions in my Machariel while deciding which corporation to join. I’ve been running them for ages and mostly enjoy the cleaning up afterwards in my Industrial character’s Noctis. Which I lost, due to forgetting about a certain trigger.

Imagine if you will, being told that you have to rescue a certain Damsel in Distress. She needs to be rescued from a warlord’s “pleasure garden” and you’ve been tasked with doing so.
You jump in your pod and attach to your trusty vessel, ready to kick some pirate ass.

As you warp in you get trash talked a bit by some cronies and you make them explode into the vacuum that we call space. After that, their boss shows up and you do the same thing. Everyone’s dead, so you call in your little helper that everything’s safe, after which you remember that you actually needed to rescue someone and not just shoot everything that moves in the face (woops).

At this point your little helper is already collecting the lovely loot and stripping your enemies’ wrecks for their mods and anything else that’s worth something, even poking a few corpses.
You lock up the pleasure garden and demand them to hand over their captive. Which of course, they do not. So you shoot them in the face too.

Which, in retrospect isn’t really helpful if you shoot the place where the hostage is captive into oblivion. As it turns out, as soon as that started, something was triggered.

Namely a little alarm for the pirates and all of a sudden 5 battleships are shooting my little helper and a few spider drones are webbing her and the frigates are scrambling her so she is unable to warp out or run away. Cue a nice little explosion and the loss of her Noctis.

Not only that, but due to the fact that I was already reveling in my victory, I did not notice that I was out of drones. I could destroy my enemies.. Except for those nasty little frigates and drones. So I had to sit there, laugh as they try to penetrate my shield, while my little helper shipped into another ship to come shoot their faces for me.

A nice little lesson for me here, despite being pretty much unkillable by the NPC’s in the missions, my little helper is not. She’s extremely squishy in fact.

Good thing the insurance pay out for the Noctis was more than what I paid for a new one and the old one was already a few years old, way best it’s fly date anyhow.

Loot and mission bonusses made up for the rest of the losses.

As for my industry, still chugging along, creating and inventing things that pay the bills.

I also bought myself a few dozen frigates I’m excited to go and get blown up.

Stay tuned o7

Learn by doing

The best way to learn new things, is by doing them. You will not learn how to draw by reading about it, nor will you learn how to set up a Hyper-V server environment with multiple Virtual Machines in it and a full Active Directory structure by reading about it either.

But it helps.

Seeing that my corps is at war, and my first plan on taking out my Machariel and Noctis team went down the drain. I decided to go out to Low and Null sec with my Nemesis, in search of prey.

Let’s just say that I would not be a very good predator. The most I saw in local was 10 people, and I couldn’t find them anywhere. When I jumped to null I came across a few people talking in chat, and after a few jumps I found them parked outside a bubble in between two gates, but three against one isn’t what I would call good odds, nor would my bomb do more than maybe, just maybe scratch their paint.
So I decided that would not be a good idea to try.
Oh hello there, what are you doing?
But I never shot a bomb, and I wanted to learn how they work, so I needed to find a spot to try it out on. After a few more jumps I came into a system with an ice belt. People love ice!
After jumping there, I saw a Skiff warp away, he must have seen me in local and figured I would be there to kill him, must be.. But I was in the belt, and I desperately wanted to shoot a bomb. So I lined up with one of the ice rocks, uncloaked, and watched my pretty bomb fly there.
Oh shit oh shit, get out!

Which, according to most people, was more than likely my fifth mistake of the day.

After reading so much about bombing, I decided to forget everything in the “heat of the moment”. Due to me being impatient I just dropped it and kept looking. It will come to no surprise then, that I got hit by my own bomb, luckily, I survived. But only barely, it was right around the time that it exploded that I had decided to warp away. Leaving me there with my hull barely intact.

At least I learned something, and I did it by doing.

Later that evening I was told about the corp’s wormhole about to close. Having never seen a wormhole close, I decided that I wanted to see it happen, so I took the jumps to the high sec static, went inside and waited on the other side. Snuggling up in my pod and looking at the hole with my cloak on.
If I were high, I would have been staring at this for ages

While waiting for the high sec static to close, we were talking in corporation chat. A call went out for having the “balls” to go out to high and get back in. Seeing that the hole were to collapse any minute, and a bet was made.

I’m still not sure why, but said bet unleashed a little game of double your ISK. We hyper multiplied it, starting with 1isk, and then going 2,4,8,16,… unfortunately I had to call it at 128. I did not have the 402m that I could send to my fellow corps member. Probably a good thing because I doubt that he was able to go to 103billion.

It was a pretty fun Sunday, not only did I fly out in low, I hung out in a wormhole, watching it shimmer and everything. I do think we scared a newbie though. As we were talking there was a flash of the wormhole. And before I knew it there was a bubble up.
Oh gods! Something just blew up in my face!
That even made me jump for a bit because I did not see that coming. Said Cormorant had de-cloaked and probably did not think that would happen either because before you could say “Booh!” the wormhole flashed again.

Then again, if I see a Nemesis, Legion and an Onyx suddenly pop up, I’d be getting out too.
After the Cormorant left, one of us came back in a Myrmidon, you know, just in case. And I said something about not knowing how to bomb, so they told me how to do a run, and try it out on the Myrmidon

I didn’t even scratch the paint

I learned quite a bit today, and it was fun.

I didn’t see the wormhole close though, as I had to work in the morning, I decided to head back out to my high sec HQ. As soon as I docked there, I heard about the hole closing, and it was wonderful.

Oh well, there will always be a next time. 

Stay tuned o7