Dying, Tacticals, and Lacking Skillpoints.

Entry: Day four hundred and three.


My new and current group of null sec combat pilots is rather competitive. It's definitely a different bunch than I'm used to, something that will take a little time to acclimate to no doubt. Your typical bunch is nice and helpful at the start, eventually getting you into the jokes and jibes on each other as you get to know eachother. The group I joined pretty much skipped all that nice stuff and went straight to the jibes.


It's also a little unsettling when you sign into a combat corp that prides itself on efficiency, and your third day in the corp the headman says to you, "Hey True, stop fucking dying! GAWD!"


I could sense the joke, but it's unsettling in that way. I felt a little better however when the next day the bossman told someone else to stop dying.


That third day in the corp, I'd lost two ships. The first was a Wolf, the second a Scimitar. I'd lost the Wolf tracking a Morsus Mihi band, attempting to catch stragglers. I had the bad luck of warping to the wrong gate, and stupid decision to warp to zero on it. There was a bubble, and a Dramiel to catch me, and an AHAC fleet to melt me. My egg was crushed too, they were too fast.


The Scimitar I'd lost a little later. We were roaming about, managed to kill a few targets, then went in after another enemy fleet with half of a previously battled fleet behind us on the other side of the gate. My fleet primaried their one Scimitar, and then after our FC went down I got tackled and was done for. At least I got my pod out that time.


Thankfully, I'm on a Pilgrim killmail from the previous day on a roam, on the first ship I'd brought into friendly space (the Wolf of course). Given that, I'm at least pretty close to even on ISK. Definitely need to be more on the winning side of that equation though.


Since those last combats, I've mostly avoided combat, and stuck to the task of moving more ships in. Deployment starts in two days, and I need to get all my tactical bookmarks set up for the immediate region. I'm thinking seven for each gate: six tacticals approximately two hundred kilometers along each major axis direction plus one spot offgrid also just off dscan from the gate. Since safe spots also need to be made, I'm thinking of combining the offgrid staging points with the safes, so that I don't need to make thirty bookmarks in every system.


The concept behind the seven tacticals per gate seems sound to me. Using the tacticals in this fashion, they function as rolling safes, where you warp, land, fire, immediate rewarp. That in itself will be invaluable to bombers. In this fashion, normal fleets can also control range on the gate in question. Being two hundred away from the gate at any bookmark, a pilot can warp to the gate at any range within a hundred kilometers of it, and can warp to any other bookmark as far as a hundred from it.


Thinking on it however, I've decided that two hundred kilometers may be too far. I'll have to include two additional bookmarks along each major axis direction: one hundred fifty and one hundred. The one fifty can land a pilot within fifty of the gate from many bookmarks, and the one hundred can be used to fine tune the range to thirty or forty kilometers, even ten to twenty if a scram-web tackler can prevent the target from reaching the gate, but I would think a Hugginn could accomplish this at great range. It won't be much additional trouble to install these, as I won't need to stop to make the bookmarks. So that brings the total to nineteen bookmarks per gate.


In other things, it's come to my attention that even with twenty two million skillpoints, there are some fits I still cannot fit even for the Minmtar. In particular, I'm talking about a shield buffered artillery cane. I can come within two powergrid of it by switching from an LSE II to a meta four LSE, but I can't cut powergrid anywhere else, and a tech one reactor control unit doesn't provide enough powergrid to accomplish this. I do need an RCU II, or Advanced Weapon Upgrades IV or V, I'm not sure which would be better either to be honest. In the end, I'll have to get both, but after this large tech two guns need training, followed closely by a Guardian, some capacitor skills that I've never gotten up, and then finally to Amarr Battleship.


Anjali is pissed. She was getting pretty close to being able to fly that Cruor of hers too for Dramiel hunting. I have a feeling I'm not going to be getting any anytime soon. I'll make it up to her though when I've got all the necessaries trained, as I won't need to train anything for a while after that. Still, that's two or three months down the road.


Computer: Terminate recording.