Burnt by lowsec

It's been a few weeks since I last recorded my adventures, and while I've been quiet, I certainly haven't been bored. I've been taking on missions from Native Freshfoods and doing a few level 3 missions. Unfortunately, they weren't paying too much, so I decided to change agents and started working for the Republic Fleet; the money from level 2 missions has been equivalent to what I was getting from the previous level 3 missions... Go figure.

Coincidentally, the other few members of my corp were doing the same thing, so now we're working on getting the corp standings up so we can start implementing jump clones.

Some of the missions had been taking me into lowsec space, and while I tried to be careful, I lost two battlecruisers to pirates. As you might guess, this annoyed the hell outta me, so I made a very significant decision.

I've spent most of my career traveling and fighting around lowsec space. But after losing so much to pirates this time around (like, 300 million in ships and fittings over the course of a month - a lot when you only had about 400m to start with), I made the decision to stay out of lowsec systems with any ships I don't want to - or can't afford to - lose.

This is probably something that a lot of people already do, of course, but my time in lowsec made me overconfident, and I've suffered from it as a result. But no more.

Now, the only time I've gone into lowsec is after carefully using the map to check how many pilots are in space in the previous 30 minutes, and how many kills might have happened in the previous hour. If I think it's safe enough, I'll go in with a shuttle and do what I need to do (usually some kind of transport mission).

I've also been training up my cloaking skills, and once I took my Myrmidon for a spin through 5 lowsec systems and back, using my Improved Cloaking Device to keep myself invisible. It worked well! But I'm yet to use the Covert Ops Cloak on my Helios, which I'll have finished training for in just a few days. I'm expecting that to be just awesome. Bring on the cloaky goodness...

Oh, the only other time I'm likely to head into lowsec with my battlecruiser is when I have safety in numbers, like yesterday when I lost my 'gate camp virginity'. For the first time ever, I was a member of a gate camp, and for the first time ever, I was fired upon by sentry guns!

We got ourselves a kill, some poor soul who was flying a Rupture without any modules fitted. He was angry, as you'd expect, and lit up local comms with his smack talk. It was both amusing and sad at the same time. Amusing that he would fly a 'naked' ship into lowsec and expect to get away with it, and sad that he was relatively new to piloting and this was probably a big loss for him.

I still need to work on my 'carebear' feelings for other pilots and their losses... I need to get involved in more piracy/combat actions to eradicate these feelings from my system.

And I will, while I do missions to build up my money and buy bigger and better ships. In the short term, I'm training for a Dominix, which I could actually fly right now - if I had the money. So it'll have to wait. In the longer term, I'm going for the Arazu. The Dominix for missions, and the Arazu for real combat.

The future is looking bright. :)