I flew around some other systems a bit but didn’t catch anything. I went back to the system with the ice miners and warped to the miners belt with my warpin bookmarks. The miners where already gone but a manticore decloaked at around 40km away from me. I was flying my taranis, and being a bit wary about bombs I kept a bit of range at first. However the manticore just started firing torpedoes at me, so I decided to go for it. Hit the approach and scram + web the manticore. He went down quickly. When he exploded his friends started landing in the belt so it was to to get out of there.

http://www.dutchvipersquadron.org/viperfleet/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1498

Later that evening when we had some more people online, we camped a system near our wormhole exit. I had swapped for a rapier and flew around the systems near our camp to try and draw targets in. I found a rupture traveling away from us. I followed him a couple of jumps until I managed to catch him at a gate. While I was shooting him he was asking in local for help. His friends never showed up though.

http://www.dutchvipersquadron.org/viperfleet/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1496

The last event of the evening was a group that had a bit too much firepower for us: 2 machariels, a tempest, 2 drakes a flycatcher among them. They were around 10 people. Our fc was keeping our gang out of their way, while I was scouting cloaked at one of the gates. Their flycatcher landed on the gate alone. I decided to go for him. When I decloaked he dropped a bubble. I double webbed  him fast and started shooting him. Thanks to his own bubble and my webs he couldn’t warp off. His friends landed soon after him. I wanted the kill, so I stayed around a little bit longer with hostile group punching holes in my shields. I managed to kill flycather while mwd’ing away. I warped off with low shields. After this we decided to call it a day and went back to our wormhole.

http://www.dutchvipersquadron.org/viperfleet/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1497

While in empire I got talking again with some old friends from Samhain. Samhain is a Dutch speaking corporation in a Dutch speaking alliance, like Black-Sun was (Samhain was in Pitch Black Legion with Black-Sun). I knew a lot of people in Samhain / viperfleet. So I decided to join them to see if the interest in eve would come back.

Viperfleet lives in a Class 5 wormhole, so this situation is pretty familiar to me: basically the same concept as Pitch Black Legion had before. I’ve just moved in some of my stuff in the wormhole, but still have lot’s more to do. I did manage to join in on a few kills and roams here an there which was fun. From here on I’m just gonna see where this leads. As long as I’m enjoying myself I’ll keep playing.

You can see my kills / losses in Samhain on my killboard.

Well… I think you should just listen to it

Download audio file (A2thaK_feat_J_Lins_-_Clik_Lok.mp3)

The taranis is a bit different than a lot of the other interceptors. It is quite slow: about 3.500 m/s, but it can pack a hell of a punch while having a fairly large hp buffer (for an interceptor).

First I’ll give you the fitting I mostly use:

[Taranis, Riot]
Internal Force Field Array I
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

1MN MicroWarpdrive II
Faint Epsilon Warp Scrambler I
Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I

Light Ion Blaster II, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Light Ion Blaster II, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S
Salvager I
Light Ion Blaster II, Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge S

Small Hybrid Metastasis Adjuster I
Small Hybrid Collision Accelerator II

Hobgoblin II x2

The salvager in the hi-slots is offline, and functions only as a heat sink. Set-up this way the taranis can deal 320 dps with overloaded guns. Add a few cheap hardwirings and you’re well over 340 dps. The guns can be overloaded for about a minute-and-a-half, which is more than enough for any interceptor fight. The effective hitpoints on this ship is 3.752 hp. With the largest chunk of it being it’s hull! So don’t get scared when you’re out of armor.

Basically the way to fly this ship is approach the target as fast as you can with mwd on. Zig-zag a bit if your afraid the target will hit you hard on approach. Once you get close turn off your mwd and start orbitting at 500m. Be careful no to overshoot your target. This will take a bit of practice to get right. As soon as you are in web/scram range turn on your scrambler and webber. This will turn off your targets mwd and slow him down with the web.

Now if you have your target webbed and scrambled it’s basically a slugfest. Most interceptors will die easily, because they cannot even come close to handling the 340dps. Targets like trashers and sabres can be overcome easily if they have artillery. You’ll probably get hit hard on the approach, but they won’t hit you once you’re in orbit. Autocannons are a different beast. They will hit you if they know what they’re doing. This might turn either way, depending on the buffer hp the target has. For example sabres with dual shield extenders will cause you a lot of trouble, but if they have one shield extender you can usually kill them before they kill you.

With larger targets you can usually fly under their tracking. But you have to be careful with short-range medium weapons, like medium autocannons or medium blasters. Also be careful with energy neutralizers and small drones.

If you get used to flying the taranis with setup. It will be a lot of fun roaming through null-sec solo or with a few other interceptors. Just remember this fit is a do or die fit. Fly it aggressively and you will kill a lot. The drawback once you get in close, usually there is no way to bail out. So either of you is gonna explode, let’s hope it’s not you

Most of the loot I had been gathering in the week before got lost. I did manage to get my legion out safe though.

Probing showed it had 2 magnetometric and 2 radar sites. These are known to be the hardest sleeper sites in eve. That evening we assembled a gang of 10 battleships, a damnation, an oneiros and a few hackers/analyzers/salvagers. Off we went to this class 6 wormhole. On the way we passed a few wormholes with posses.

Entering the class 6 wormhole

We started off in a magnetometric site “Forgotten Core Assembly Hall”. This site had 4 waves with quite a few battleships. Nothing we couldn’t handle though. We finished the site without too much problems and off we went to the second magnetometric site “Forgotten Core Circuitry Disassembler”. This is one of the hardest sleeper sites in game. The first wave had a huge blob of frigates. This was kind of annoying, because they are a bit hard to hit with the battleship guns, and they kill of drones fairly fast. But we managed to kill them all. The second wave wasn’t too hard, mostly cruisers and a few frigs. Some people in gang started asking:  ‘This is the hardest site? The previous one was harder.” But they didn’t know about the 3rd and 4th wave yet Wave 3 had 10 advanced battleships with a few smaller ships, wave 4 had 9 advanced battleships and a few support. Let me tell you those battleships deal a lot of damage! You really have to start repping the targetted ship fast. The alpha-strike of those 10 bs  takes a standard fit remote rep battleship into half armor. It has to be repped up before the second strike. We managed to kill them off get all the loot without losses.

Since these sites take quite some time to clear, it was getting a bit later. Some people wanted to go back to go to bed. We decided to do one more site, then call it a night. Two of our pilots did have to go back. One of them left his abaddon behind so one of the salvagers could take his place. The other one went back in his battleship. So 9 bs for the next site.

This site was a radar site “Unsecured Core Emergence”. This site had the same spawns as the last magnetometric site. We we’re going at it just fine. About halfway through the site we spotted some combat probes on scanner. Since the sleepers scramble there was no way to get out. Not too much of a problem, since they couldn’t drop a huge gang on us, because of mass limitations in the wormhole. Maximum amount they could get in, was about the same gang size we had (since we calculated what could go through the wormhole 2-ways). So we continued working on the site. One of our salvagers sat cloaked near the entrance wormhole. Then the most annoying thing they could do happened. A fenrir class freighter jumped in…. Immediately after it had jumped in, it jumped back to their pos system. And yes…. this caused the wormhole to collapse. So we were trapped since that was our way home.

We finished the site, and started looking for a way out. We went into a neighbouring class 5 wormhole. This had a 0.0 exit to catch, where it was really busy, so we decided to keep looking. This wormhole also had 2 wormholes to class 5 systems. Unfortunately those were both at end-of-life while we where still salvaging the last radar site and had both collapsed before we got there.

The only wormhole left was to a class 3. This was a 1 billion kg wormhole, so it could barely fit our gang, if it was fresh. We had previously probed this wormhole, and it had an exit to 0.0 in tenal, a long way from empire, and a wormhole to a class 1 system. This last one couldn’t fit battleships, so this was no go as well.

Being a bit out of options we decided to try collapsing this class 3 wormhole, since it appeared to be the static wormhole for this system. Luckily this went well and a fresh class 3 wormhole appeared. After probing it out this didn’t have a suitable exit. So back to the collapse game.

The new class 3 system seemed to be an untouched class 3 system: 20+ anomolies and 20+ signatures. We started probing this system and found an exit to A-ELE2 in delve. We knew this region well, since we have lived a few jumps away from there (in 319-3D). A-ELE2 is only a few jumps away from low-sec (aridia) and it seemed to be pretty quiet there at the moment. We decided to go for it. And made our way to Zinkon, the nearest hi-sec. We didn’t meet any resistance, and everybody made it safe and sound to hi-sec. Now it was really late so everybody rushed to bed. The only thing left to do is find our way back to our wormhole. No problem, since there are enough people still in there.

]]> http://www.schippersnet.nl/2009/11/23/class-6-expedition/feed/ 2 http://www.schippersnet.nl/2009/10/15/paranoia-is-good-mmmkay/ http://www.schippersnet.nl/2009/10/15/paranoia-is-good-mmmkay/#comments Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:48:27 +0000 RiotRick http://www.schippersnet.nl/?p=252 A couple of days ago I encountered the first serious attempt to gank my shiny legion. I was happilly flying around killing sleepers in a class 3 wormhole close to where we live. This wormhole had one exit to another wormhole which lead the way back home. It also had two wormholes leading into low-sec. Because of this I paid extra attention to my directional scanner. This turned out to be a good thing.

After a couple of hours of killing sleepers I noticed a cheetah. I asked on ventrilo and in alliance chat if it was one of ours, since I didn’t recognize the ship name. Noone responded so I assumed it was a hostile. A few minutes later combat scanner probes popped up on my scanner. Ok this was definately a hostile. I was still working on the sleeper site and decided to continue doing that for now. However the paranoia level was raised to level 5, so I made scans every few seconds to see if more poeple showed up.

About 30-45 minutes later suddenly quite a few ships popped up on my scanner, a t3 cruiser, absolution, zealot, arazu and a couple more. Click warp, I’m outta here! Made a funny comment in local about me leaving Turns out they knew me a bit from my blog. So shout-out to you guys (can’t remember the corp name, sorry). It was a good attempt, lucky for me my paranoia saved me this time.

Yesterday the tables were turned. On ventrilo an alliance mate said he had scanned an abaddon and tengu in a class 2 wormhole close by. There were no posses on scan, so they were in space somewhere. We quickly assembled a few pilots and decided we’d try to gank them. I logged in my prober alt and jumped in the class 2 wormhole in a covert ops. They were still here. I launched the combat probes and cloaked up. A few minutes of probing and I found the abaddon. Meanwhile the rest of our gang was waiting in the wormhole next door at the entrance. I warped to the abaddon at 10km. When I arrived I was in the middle of nowhere and the abaddon was gone. A quick check on the scanner reveiled they where still in the system. And now they had drones out. So they were running some site.

Back to the probing then a couple of minutes later I found the abaddon again. This time I warped to him at 100km, because he was almost certainly in a sleeper site. When I warped I got a message of a Perimeter Hangar anomoly, so definately in a sleeper site.  I came out of warp and saw both the abaddon and tengu busy working on the sleepers. I bookmarked a closeby wreck, warped to a planet and back to the bookmark at 10km. I ordered the rest of the fleet to jump in and stay cloaked. I landed about 12km of the tengu  and ordered the gang to warp to me at 0. When everyone was in warp the covert ops warped out to  a safespot.

Our fleet arrived on top of both the abaddon and tengu. Quickly a heavy interdictor bubble was put up. Points went on the tengu, while the abaddon got primaried. This ship melted in a few seconds. Then we started on the tengu. This went down nicely too. After they went down we still had a couple of sleepers in the site. So we finished the site as well. The loot we got wasn’t great, but still a nice Caldari Navy Large Shield Booster and a Caldari Navy Explosion Dampening Field.

So now you know: paranoia is good, mmmkay?

Killboard battlereport