AUMIN heads into Low Sec.

Today, AUMIN had it's first roam into low security space.
The reason is quite simple, we want our pilots to get used to low sec, get used to fighting, used to operating as a fleet and used to dieing.  This is in the event of future war decs against our alliance, it pays to have pilots with basic grasp and some experience under they're belt.  Fun factor plays another role in this, it IS fun to go on a suicide OP into low sec every now and then, and who knows, you might learn something along the way.

The fleet started out pretty quiet, it was the first time I've FC'ed for the corp, second time I've FC'ed in my entire EVE career, so I opted for cheap T1 cruisers.  They're insurable, easy to replace, gives you great mobility and still offers a great bang for the buck damage wise.
Our little gang consisted of some Thorax'es, Caracal and a Blackbird for ECM support.

We roamed around abit in the low sec pockets near our home, but did'nt find much of interest, we also let several neutral targets go as we're not into pirating.  There was  few moments where a neutral Harb seemed to bait us into attacking, we did however not take the bait and headed on.  We also nearly jumped into a gatecamp out in the FW territory, but thanks to the scout we avoided any losses on said camp.

The we jumped into a system with several low sec status pilots.
We headed through they're system and was followed to the gate by a flashy Megathron.
We jumped though and decided to hold on the other side and fight no matter what came through.
Gate fires, Falcon de cloaks and heads back to the gate as he's locked, we don't get him bumped off and he gets through gate.  Gate fires again and a Myrm de cloaks, as we've decided to fight no matter what I gave the order to fire, fully aware that it was a trap.
Long story short, we hit the Myrm, get him to low armor and get popped as the trap springs on us, the point was to kill the Myrm before backup arrived, but unfortunatly we were unsuccessfull.

Still, it was a good fight, it was valuable experience for our gang and for me as FC, and when it was all said and done we got our pods out.  GF was exchanged in local and we headed back to our home system.

I can only encourage other industrial outfits to do this aswell, it's alot of fun and valuable experience that will come in handy several times in your EVE career.  You might even like it :)

Fly safe.

HULKAGEDDON Ends!!

And so, Hulkageddon ends.
I've played it smart during the event, like I usually do, and kept my expensive and easy to catch industrial ships docked.  Now Hulkageddon doesn't really hamper your way to make money, you just gotta look elsewhere.
I've mostly been doing missions, scanning various sites and traded, it's not to hard to get around safely in a Blockade Runner after all.
I don't mine that much these days anyway, rather relying on the market for my minerals, it just took a little more time then usuall to round it all up (blocade runners are great, but low on cargo space).

Been plenty of outlaws in my local though, so I expect a fair few people got caught out there, more money for the rest of us I guess.

Fly safe.

Alliance/Corp agression mechanics in high sec

Can flippers, suicide gankers and other thieves.
If someone steals from your can, it's theft and they open themselves up to fire from you and your entire corp for 15 minutes.  The rule applies to all forms of in-space theft, you steal, turn flashy to the corporation you stole from and risk getting shot for 15 min.
This is all well and good, CONCORD does not interfere with small scale theft, but you expose yourself to the risk of combat instead by doing it.  Now, we all know that most of the "thieves" are not very interested in the theft itself, but rather in baiting others into firing and thereby get the rights to fire back
Most of the "thieves" pick targets that can't beat them, in ships that can't even fight and fly something that can run if the opposition is harder then expected.  There's nothing really wrong with that I guess, not a fan of it myself, but it's allowed so it's fair game.

The problem I have here is the agression mechanics for alliances.
By attacking a person in an alliance, only the persons corp gets to fight, not the alliance as a whole.
This causes certain problems for alliances in high sec figthing off random people like canflippers.
We had a specifc incident a few nights ago, a can flipper went after a miner in the alliance, his corp was rather bled for people at that timezone however and he had little means of fighting back.
There were several alliance members in local eager to help though, I was out there with a few others trying to bait the flipper into agressing one of us, but to no avail.  The "thief" holds all the cards in that particular game, he can choose who, when and how to fight and by constantly harrasing one person, he's immune to harm from his alliance friends.

Yes, there's ways of fighting back, but they're limited, very cumbersome and sometimes costs too much (sec status etc)
The alliance can wardec the "flippers" corp, it only takes several days to do so and costs money, this flipper was in an NPC corp so it dont' work at all on him.
Suicide gank, possible, but you pay with your ship and your sec status, something that means little to some people and more to others.

It's EVE, I'm ranting, I know.
I just dislike a situation where several people who are "allied", officially, by game mechanic rules have to stand practically helpless in defending what is rightfully theirs.

End of rant.
Fly safe.

AUMIN sorta wins and joins an alliance.

War's over, lasted two weeks and there wasn't alot of fighting.
We had decided to fight this one out, but it seems the "enemy" hadn't, they stayed docked for most of the time and logged on less and less.  There were some fights, as described earlier, in the first week where we lost some BC's and cruisers, but traded it for "high value" targets and then it was over.
The motivations of the war decc puzzled most of us, they did'nt fight, the did'nt undock and then they did'nt log on anymore.  We all expected the war to drop as the first week ended, but to our surprise it was renewed.
We prepared ourselves for a new initiative from our enemy, but none came, their corp was pretty much dead for the enitre time.  People started dropping out as we progressed into the second week and at the end there was only two members left, neither logged on.
War dropped after two weeks and we were pretty happy with the outcome to be honest, we stood our ground and sorta came out winning.

The corp has now joined an alliance aswell and we shall see what the future has in store for us, hopefully good things, but it's EVE after all.

Fly safe.

War, again!! We killed someone though.

War has again been declared on the corpopration.
This time we decided to fight or at least try to fight off the Decc. I don't claim to be a very seasoned PvP'er, because I'm really not, but I know how to lock and shoot.

We had wartargets docked in Dodixie and several of us set up outside the station.  We waited around for a bit wondering if there was going to be any fighting, when suddenly 3 Battleships undocked.  We were a little surprised at first and our own force consisted mostly of BC's and cruisers, some Ewar and Logistics.  Scorpion, Apoc and Mael drifted down the undock pipe and we opened fire on the Apoc.  I know, Scorp should be primary, but hindsight is 20/20 and I was only jammed once from the Scorp.  Whether down to Scorp pilot or our own Blackbird I don't know.

Apoc was however steadily going down, but as he dipped into low armor he started suddenly shooting back up.  Neutral Guardian had undocked and started repping him.  I don't know if they used the neutral repper or if they just wanted someone to agress them randomly, but the guardian was fired upon and a Machariel undocked right behind it.  At that point we did'nt stand much of a chance.  The Mach chewed through my Prophecy rather quickly and he pounded the rest shortly thereafter.
We did kill the Apoc though, before the Mach could pop our small fleet.

I'm not sure if the Mach pilot was working with our wardecc'ers or not, as I said, the corp could just be looking for people agressing.  The Mach pilot did score a killmail on our WT's Mael which is why I'm wondering what actually happened.

Regardless, we learned a lesson and had a good fight, we also got a bit of PvP experience under our belt.
While we did loose most of our fleet to that Mach pilot we did bring down a WT Apoc so we did'nt exactly consider it a complete loss.  Fleet chat was full of reflection after the fight and very little resignation, instead of bad moods, whining and accusations we were examining the fight and what we'd done.  I don't think any of us have a lot of experience with PvP, but I'm still proud to fly with my corp and of their attitude after the fight.

Ninja mining wormhole space.

A while back I found a wormhole, I was out scanning with a friend, the system was quiet and the scan on the inside showed nothing, so we thought "What the hell, let's try".
We hopped inside and scanned for sites, plenty of sites showed on the initial one and we went for the gravimetric sites right away (or whatever they're called inside the WH's).
After narrowing one down we bookmarked the WH on both sides and went in for some cheap ships.
I opted for a Covetor, fully insured off course and my friend went in with a Prophecy Battlecruiser, we figured we'd play it cheap and safe since we really hadn't done this before and if nothing else the Prophecy has a good tank.

It was a fairly uneventful endeavour, which was just what we wanted really, a couple of sleepers spawned once in the belt and the Prophecy had no issues dealing with them.  We had a couple of safespots set up so we could warp between them if we needed to and we kept the scanner running the whole time.  My friend also warped around a bit and found nothing even resembling a PoS or any sign of humans, I stayed in the belt and mined Arkonor and Bistot frothing at the mouth from the mere sight of it.
I've not been to 0.0 for a long time and even back then I didn't stay long, didn't get involved much out there, I've spent most of my days in highsec empire regions and the sight of all this ABC ore was just to much.

The ABC ore presented a problem though, there was so much of it and it takes up a lot of space, I also wanted to grab as much as possible of it while we were out there.  I kept jetcanning and after a while I'd filled 4 full can's and we were starting to plan the logistics part of it.
My friend warped out and fetched an Itty 5 for the hauling, I Stayed in the belt with the scanner running and provided the "mobile" warp in point for the Iteron.
The station I was basing out of back then was in the same system as our WH so it wasn't a long trip, it did still take a little while to get it all out however and we weren't quite sure on how the collapsing wormhole thing worked either.  I've rarely felt so lonely in EVE as I did sitting in there, thinking about all the horrible things that would happen to my poor Covetor if someone jumped me or if the WH collapsed as my friend went out.  In the end though, no one jumped me, we got all the ore out and the WH didn't collapse until I got my non probe fitted barge out of there.  We did get quite a few hauls of ABC ore out of there which promptly went in to producing several Drakes.  Money was made and pats on the back was had for braving the dangers of unknown space, we felt pretty good about the whole thing to be honest.

Our little expedition back then has kept returning to my mind though, how viable is it to jump in, mine like hell and get it all out.  I have to say I'm not to fond of the idea of living in a WH, I like empire, it may be safe and cozy, but it's also very convenient.
WH has the ore though, the ABC ore, the same ore I really need for production and it's all there waiting to be mined.  So disregarding the idea of living in there and struggling with the logistical nightmare of PoS'es, manually collapsing WH's into other systems before someone else finds them and hauling everything back to empire from God knows what exit you'll find.  I've kept thinking about wether it's viable to just go in and grab what you can.

I'll need a fresh entry WH's that can take the mass of several hauler trips, I'll also need a quiet entry system to reduce the risk of others scanning for the WH's as well. I'm assuming populated WH's will have very few sites to mine and also be somewhat hostile, understandably, to someone coming in to mine or run sites.  Ideally there would also be a station in the entry system to reduce the travel time of haulers running the ore.

The operation would ideally consist of T1 ships, inferior to Hulk's in every way, they do have the massive advantage of being throw away ships and fully insurable.  The loss would be acceptable when/if something went horribly wrong.
A battlecruiser of something similar would be required for dealing with any spawns, again keeping it cheap and preferably a prober with a cloak scouting the system while the miners did their thing and in the event we'd need a new way out.

It seems like a possible operation, I'm not sure how viable it is though as I've not tried it with more then two people.  I'd also need to convince the other participants that it's a good idea, in the event of total failure however the ships involved would not represent a horrendous loss.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.  Braving new space is after all what EVE is about.
That and money off course.

Fly safe.

Eve Tribune Invention and T2 Production guide

Excellent read from the Tribune this week, if you're looking to get into T2 production you may want to give this one a try.
I'm considering taking the step into T2 myself, if nothing else just to try it a little and see if I can turn a profit on it, and I'll be sure to keep this guide close at hand.

Eve Tribune #17, Year 5 - An Industrial Guide to Invention and T2 Production