Exploration

[Yoru]

So I did some exploration tonight. Spend 2 hours dropping gravimet probes, looking for an 'unknown' (read: no specific sensor type needed) signature. I eventually got my sig, dropped a 1AU probe, scanned it down further, dropped an 0.5 AU probe, scanned it down to 0km. A generic deadspace complex.

So I go get my Drake, fit it out for the Guristas rats (discovered by the not-cheesy-at-all tactic of flying in in a shuttle beforehand) and fly in.

A small cluster of 2 cruisers and a half-dozen destroyers/frigs await. I begin blowing them up.

They call in reinforcements. 3 cruisers and 3 destroyers.

More reinforcements. 4 cruisers and 2 destroyers.

More reinforcements. 4 cruisers. I'm starting to sweat.

I blow up the reinforcement-calling ships, then clean up and get.. another wave, with a miniboss. Not too hard. All told, a 15 minute battle.

So I loot 'em, salvage 'em.. takes another hour. Fit back up for Room Two.

Room Two is a giant nightmare.. Two hard-to-destroy structures constantly calling reinforcement waves, a dozen cruisers and four missile batteries blasting away at me.

I spend a while blowing up destroyers and cruisers before realizing the reinforcements are overwhelming my tank. Start firing at the reinforcement structures, but they're too tough. Warp out. Recharge, return.

Warp in, 20% shields gone instantly. Warp out after getting barely one more shot off at the structure.

Refit, toss off the AB, add another invuln field (didn't have any more ballistics on hand), swap out a medium SE for a large.

Back into the breach, down go the reinforcers. I'm now merely tanking an assload of cruisers and destroyers. Start plinking away at them, cap runs out when there's only 10 left, warp out, recharge, reenter, pwnination.

Call up Nix to hold the deadspace open while I refit for salvage... sit around towing wrecks while he arrives. Nothing spectacular, loot wise. An Arbalest rocket launcher was the single most valuable piece of loot.

Salvaging it all yielded about 80 circuit-type salvages, which turned into a nice tidy ~15m or so, plus another 200k in miscellaneous crap.

All in all, about six hours invested for a grand take of around 15m and a lot of anxious sweating on the final room.

I hear gravimetric signatures are usually asteroid belts, so I'm going to try to look for those next time I get it in my mind that this might be even close to decently profitable.

[Viin]

Yah I've heard other folks complaining about the time/effort needed for find the hidden complexes for such little reward. Hopefully they will tweak it so you get better loot from them.

How much in bounty do you think you got? 10m?

[Strazos]

what is a Drake?

[Simond]

New Caldari BC - a (not-so-)mini-Raven, basically.

Edit: And it's symmetrical too. Well, nearly.

[Strazos]

OO, I'll need one when I come back eventually then, for general ratting.

[Raging Turtle]

And it looks like a bent piece of paper!

[MahrinSkel]

Drake is probably the best of the new BC's for ratting (lots of mid slots for shield tanking, plus some nice shield resist bonuses).  It's a tossup between the Drake and Hurricane for PvP, both will consistantly beat a Vagabond or Zealot, the previous raider hotrods (and 5 times the price).  A Hurricane with all nano and inertials in the lows maneuvers like an interceptor.

--Dave

[Yoru]

Yah I've heard other folks complaining about the time/effort needed for find the hidden complexes for such little reward. Hopefully they will tweak it so you get better loot from them.

How much in bounty do you think you got? 10m?

3m, maybe. There were a lot of rats, but most were in the 10-25k for the frig-sizers and averaging 50k for the cruisers. Turrets don't give out bounties, I think.

The server was going down by the time I managed to run to Jita and speed-unload the salvage parts (they're depreciating fast - gotta dump 'em), so I didn't get a chance to peek over my journal and see.

And yes, I love my drake. One nanofiber in the lows and I do a little over 200m/s, so I can still outrun most rat cruisers/BCs, seven Heavy Missile Launcher IIs in the highs, plus a tractor in the last slot. Two mediocre named shield extenders (one large, one medium), 2 hardeners (1 Invuln, 1 racial, usually), and a shield booster for that "oh shit" button, some PDS Is and a BCS. Makes for a hell of a ship, and that's a catchall setup. It'll be even nicer if I ever get around to raising BC to 4 (additional 10% base shield resists).

[Viin]

I have BC V, so I should really get that ship...

[Yoru]

So.. I'm guessing no one else around here has even bothered to touch this bit of new shiney?

[Viin]

Exploration or Drakes?

[MahrinSkel]

A guy in my corp is doing it, but the Blood Raider stuff is bugged (loot drops really swing all over the place, but very little Faction stuff which is the jackpot).  Generally, most of it isn't really feasible to exploit solo, you need some friends along to actually roll the stuff up.  Since they seem to have a despawn timer that's triggered the first time you warp to them, and you can't try to figure out what they are by ship scanner without entering them anymore, it's a problem.

--Dave

[Yoru]

Yeah, I got nothing Faction, which was kind of a bummer given how hard it was to solo. Hell, even with friends, tanking all that crap wouldn't've been easy. The boss wreck was empty.

It'll probably be a while before I do more; to make it not an exercise in wrist-slitting, you really need the relevant skills to 4, as well as a covops (best scantime bonus). Waiting 8m for a scan sucks; 2m is still bad, for such a chance-based system, but it's approaching tolerable.

[Strazos]

I'm actually looking to come back really soon. I still have my Raven, and I'll have Caldari BS V. I think I had At Least Caldari BC III when I left, possibly IV or even V.

How much would it cost to get ahold of a new Drake? When I last played, I didn't have a whole lot of cash on hand, but that only takes a few hours (at most) to remedy.

[Yoru]

I'm actually looking to come back really soon. I still have my Raven, and I'll have Caldari BS V. I think I had At Least Caldari BC III when I left, possibly IV or even V.

How much would it cost to get ahold of a new Drake? When I last played, I didn't have a whole lot of cash on hand, but that only takes a few hours (at most) to remedy.

A new Drake, when I bought it last week, was about 50m. The price has probably dropped by a few mil, but not a whole lot as 50m is pretty close to the mineral cost (at sell-order mineral prices).

[dwindlehop]

If they ever update the damn item database I'll figure out what the corp price is for Drakes and Hurricanes. Eventually the BPCs will be sanely priced.

[MahrinSkel]

New BC's are T1, so they came down rapidly.  Roughly 50M for the ship, and another 25M to fit it decently (probably 50M to fit it T2).  Drake is BC 2, although you really want 4 to take full advantage of it's bonuses.  Hurricane isn't as dependant on its bonus so much as the really good grid and CPU it starts with.  My "TankCeptor"  Hurricane build is 5 Scout 420's and 3 Arbalest Assault Launchers in the highs (I'll probably switch to HAM's once I have the skills), and an XL shield booster with cap injector loaded with 800's in the mids (the other two slots are a web scrambler and MWD, this is a PvP setup), and lows completely crammed with agility mods.  Scary fast, reaches warp faster than a stock interceptor, does 2400mps on MWD, and with T2 guns and HAM's would have 75% of the damage output of a similarly fit Typhoon, for half the price and way lower skill requirements.  And the XL booster is essentially a "reset" button on any fight, they think they're through your shield and suddenly it goes from empty to full in 30 seconds (lose all your cap, but except for the MWD you aren't needing it anyway).

If you have Caldari BS 5, you're more than halfway to being effective in a Phoenix, not the best Dread but a nearly guaranteed ticket into the 0.0 alliance of your choice.

--Dave

[Strazos]

Holy crap, 50m for a BC? Isn't that more than 2x the price of a Ferox?

Oh well, I still want one.


Also, I'll prolly never have a Dreadnaught...I simply don't have the desire the play the way any of the really viable 0.0 alliances would want me to play. Namely, I don't camp.


....would still be pretty sweet to have a F13 Dreadnaught. But why only a couple of weapon slots on these things? Are they pretty much Only for taking out installations and stuff like carriers, titans, and other dreads?

[Polysorbate80]

Does it really matter?  I'm putting together pieces for a Carrier that's almost certainly just going to spend its entire life sitting in some low-sec system where I only take it out and drive it around on Sundays.  But goddamn it, it's still gonna be cool :)

[Viin]

Holy crap, 50m for a BC? Isn't that more than 2x the price of a Ferox?

Yah, but half the price of a Raven. So at least there's a middle ground now. I think it goes:

25m - Ferox
50m - Drake
75m - Scorp
100m - Raven

Or so.

[Strazos]

How do you even build a carrier or a dread? Aren't they unable to be docked?

[Yoru]

How do you even build a carrier or a dread? Aren't they unable to be docked?

They have to be assembled at POSes using a special Capital Shipyard, IIRC. I believe that's also how you refit them.

[Strazos]

So, that being said...

Poly - ya got your own POS shipyard?

I wonder how much a dread would take to put together....lol. F13 could go sneak-attack some other small corp's CT.

[hal]

F13 in its glory ( if you call that glory) Not in your lifetime. Thats 200 300 people playing every night. Thats a large organization. In EVE thats something you could do. But F13 is a collection of casual players. And that was then, its seems to be mostly an empty channel now. Having said that I am not currently in corp. but the few times I have logged in recently I haven been able to get so much as a conversation.

[Viin]

F13 in its glory ( if you call that glory) Not in your lifetime. Thats 200 300 people playing every night. Thats a large organization. In EVE thats something you could do. But F13 is a collection of casual players. And that was then, its seems to be mostly an empty channel now. Having said that I am not currently in corp. but the few times I have logged in recently I haven been able to get so much as a conversation.

Apparently you haven't been on the channel lately. 

[MahrinSkel]

Holy crap, 50m for a BC? Isn't that more than 2x the price of a Ferox?

Oh well, I still want one.


Also, I'll prolly never have a Dreadnaught...I simply don't have the desire the play the way any of the really viable 0.0 alliances would want me to play. Namely, I don't camp.


....would still be pretty sweet to have a F13 Dreadnaught. But why only a couple of weapon slots on these things? Are they pretty much Only for taking out installations and stuff like carriers, titans, and other dreads?

Camping is an occasionally neccessary evil, but not all alliances do it full-time.  It depends on the geometry of the area, relative to Empire and deeper 0.0 regions.  Extremely deep 0.0 generally doesn't need to do it much.

The role of Dreadnoughts is changing since Revalations, with their HP buff they're starting to be seen in ordinary fleet ops, the battle in F4R has seen the IAC dreads being fitted with lots of tracking enhancers and target painters and used to swat our fighter-bombing frigates out of the sky.  Since the only way to take down a dread in a hurry is to attack it with more dreads, it's only a matter of time before things escalate and we see dreads routinely on the front lines.

Carriers are quickly becoming the backbone of major 0.0 operations, we had 700+ fighters in F4R yesterday (nearly a hundred capitals total, including LV's Titan and 2 motherships).  They can seriously mess up a T2 sniper BS team, which is why IAC isn't undocking many BS that aren't smart-bomb rigged.

When Constellation Sovereignty goes in, camping will be permanently a thing of the past except in special circumstances, as gate guns will take over routine gate security.

--Dave

[Viin]

When Constellation Sovereignty goes in, camping will be permanently a thing of the past except in special circumstances, as gate guns will take over routine gate security.

I can't *wait* for that .. but then, we aren't in an 0.0 alliance anymore. 

[Strazos]

How can a dread even touch a frigate? The disparity between ship and weapon is boggling. Unless you fit some assault launchers or something, but then what's the point?

[Yoru]

How can a dread even touch a frigate? The disparity between ship and weapon is boggling. Unless you fit some assault launchers or something, but then what's the point?

You didn't read the part about tracking enhancers and target painters very closely, did you?

[Strazos]

Yeah I did, but my mind kind of glazed over it. I don't do guns. I also slightly forgot how imbalanced multiple painters can be - there should really be a hard cap on painter effects.

[Polysorbate80]

How do you even build a carrier or a dread? Aren't they unable to be docked?

They have to be assembled at POSes using a special Capital Shipyard, IIRC. I believe that's also how you refit them.

Unless things have changed (?), Carriers/Dreads are buildable at NPC stations in .4 or lower, and are dockable.  Motherships are not, however.

[Yoru]

How do you even build a carrier or a dread? Aren't they unable to be docked?

They have to be assembled at POSes using a special Capital Shipyard, IIRC. I believe that's also how you refit them.

Unless things have changed (?), Carriers/Dreads are buildable at NPC stations in .4 or lower, and are dockable.  Motherships are not, however.

You're probably right. I don't rightly remember which capitals are dockable and which aren't. I thought it was only dreads.