The Adventures of the Cynabal

I joined in on a nullsec bubble camp with some corp mates the other day. I asked them about the neutrals in local, and they said they weren't sure about them, but they hadn't seen anything. I was hesitant to join in on the camp without adequate intel, but the corpmates were flying frigates and cruisers, so I figured it was ok.

So there I was, at a tactical bookmark a few hundred km from the gate and bubble, aligned so that I could quickly go to warp and arrive at the bubble to join in any attack against someone who might get stuck in it. Suddenly, 5 ships appeared (my fleet members don't show in the overview) and they were all within 20km of me while I was still 200+km from the gate and bubble.

Whoah! I said to myself. An ambush! They were all stealth bombers, and they all released their bombs. Explosions lit up the darkness, and I was happy I was aligned and moving, otherwise the damage would have been far more extensive than just 60% of my shields! I tried going to warp, but nothing happened, so I quickly activated my MWD and burned away from them at 2.7km per second. Their next volley of bombs was unable to catch up to me, and once I got out of their point range, I then activated my warp drive and got away.

Cursing to myself about my corp mates lack of intel, I told them what happened and said something like "Screw you guys, I'm going home!" But politely, of course. :) I wasn't going to sit on a bubble camp with my Cynabal and wait for more stealth bombers to sneak up on me.

So I was heading back home and jumped into a nullsec system, only 1 jump from my lowsec destination and discovered a small fleet of ships gathered around me on the gate. There was probably about 8 to 10 of them, including some interceptors, some battlecruisers, and some miscellaneous T2 ships.

Immediately my heart rate went up, and I was saying to myself "shitshitshitshit..." My brand new Cynabal hadn't even been blooded yed, and now here I was in the middle of a gate camp. I'm sure they were eagerly waiting for me to decloak from the gate, because you don't gatecamp in nullsec without having a scout on the other side. They knew what I was flying, and they wanted it on their killboard...

I took stock of the situation. No warp bubble - thank the Gods for small mercies. Every single one of them was within 12km of me. Hmmm... it was going to be hairy.

I aligned for the lowsec system and then quickly pressed F1 for the cloak, quickly followed by F2 for the Microwarp Drive. It did exactly as I hoped, and made the ship invulnerable while both modules were active, each of them struggling for dominance and preventing the surrounding ships from being able to get a lock on me.

All they could do was watch me cruise through their midst until the MWD completed its cycle and I quickly deactivated the cloak and then clicked on 'Warp to'. The Cynabal immediately went to warp and escaped the gate camp. I could imagine them all screaming at each other on their voice comms as I warped away from them. "He used the cloak+MWD trick - he's obviously gay! He's super gay! Why couldn't he have let us kill him! What a loser!"

I exited the system and docked up in lowsec... I can tell you that my hands were shaking from the adrenaline rush. I had to hold my hot cup of tea with both hands as I waited to calm down!

But then there was the next threat....

When I left highsec and entered lowsec earlier, on my way to the nullsec bubble camp, about 10 'reds' (known hostiles) saw me flying across the lowsec system. As I arrived at the gate to jump into the next lowsec system, 4 of their battleships arrived with me. As I jumped through, I could see maybe 5 more arriving at the gate. On the other side, once my screen cleared, I could see 4 or 5 of these 'reds' appearing in local, and I quickly activated my warp drive to flee the gate's proximity and make my way to the station where I docked and waited for them to leave.

They eventually left, and when they did I made my way into nullsec. But now I was back, and their scout obviously alerted them of my presence, because local began to spike with 4 of them jumping in. I suspected that they might have had a couple camping outside the station, with the rest of them waiting near the gate that went back towards highsec. That's what I would have done... There was no way I was undocking right now.

As it was, with a corp mate acting as a scout of my own, I determined that even though they eventually left the system (leaving behind a scout), and left the next system (leaving behind another scout), that it was probably a trap.

So I undocked in my pod and made my way back to highsec safely, where I got myself another cup of tea and relaxed, thinking about my day's adventure.

I've come to understand that the Cynabal is a shit magnet, and it attracts all manner of shit wherever it goes. People go to great lengths to try and kill a Cynabal, so to say that I was happy to have survived my day's adventure is probably an understatement. I was ecstatic!

See you in space.

Wars, POS bashings, and PVP action!

OUCH has been busy!

I've been busy running OUCH and the Art of War Alliance (AWA) and even playing the game as well (shocking!), so doing blog posts has been a distant second place in terms of priority. But I'm back. Not sure how long it will be before the next post, but I'll try to make it more often than I have been!

We've been busy lately. Every day there's been training operations that include corp members playfully dueling in highsec to learn all about ship fittings, PVP roams or bubble camps in nullsec for the action and extra training, and just a couple days ago a highsec war to allow us to clean up an abandoned POS.

Our first lowsec POS bash!

On Saturday we had a test run into lowsec to destroy the tower of an abandoned POS and clean up the nearby modules. Over 14 hours we had quite a few alliance members turn out for the fun of it all, but it took so long because the turnout was sporadic at best. But it was eventually destroyed.

The fun part of that was doing it in lowsec... Everyone had to have cloaks on their ships so that they could hide if hostiles entered the system, which didn't happen too often, thankfully. It was important to have scouts watching the entry points, but we didn't have enough for that AND the battleships/stealth bombers, so we had the 2 most dangerous entry points covered and had scan probes on the other 2 gates.

Between 4-15 pilots in in a single lowsec system over 14 hours - without incident. Phew! And right next door to us was a hotzone, but none of the regular pirates and pvp'ers in that system ventured next door, so they never noticed the bunch of trainees in battleships. :)

Our first war!

Well, not our first war, but the first war we declared against someone else...

The feedback about the POS bash was so positive that I decided to go find an abandoned POS in highsec, and research the corp to determine their activity. I found a large abandoned tower with about 240 million worth of modules and did some research to find that the owning corp was last active in February and the POS in question had been taken offline by a single pilot in August.

I immediately had the alliance declare war on them, sent the alliance and evemail to announce what was going on and provided instructions to the alliance on where it was and what was needed to attack it.

The war became active yesterday, and I got home from work about 2 hours after. There was already an alliance fleet in place that had been hammering it as soon as they were able to, and I (as Alexia Morgan, since Black Claw can't go into highsec in ships...) joined in with my own Armageddon battleship. It took about 7 hours for the fleet to destroy this large tower, and then I went to get the hauler to pick up the modules.

Lots of fun for all! I was excited that every alliance pilot who came online joined in on the POS bash. Very cool!

And another corp joined the alliance after seeing what we were doing in local... I think they got excited about being able to bash POS's too, and wanted a part of the action.

Do you want a part of the action too?

If you're an individual that's looking for an exciting place to learn PVP and nullsec survival, join OUCH. The corp is full of great, laid-back guys that you can sit back and have some fun with and learn how to be a whole lot better at Eve than you are. Join the channel 'OUCH-UNI' in-game and have a chat to me or some of the guys that hang out in there.

If you're the CEO of a corp and you're sick of having griefers declare war against you and you want some alliance protection, we can't guarantee to protect you, but we CAN guarantee that you'll learn how to operate effectively during war. The Art of War Alliance teaches member corps how to operate effectively if wardec'd, allowing you to continue PVE operations even while at war, and how to deprive an experienced enemy of kills without having to sit in station all day!

If that interests you, then add me to your watch list and chat to me about it when you see me online next, or send me an evemail and I'll get back to you.

Ships. Lots of ships!

Over the past few months I've been continuing the training plans for Alexia Morgan and Black Claw so that they can fly bigger and better ships. I'm currently cross-training them both for Heavy Assault Cruisers and Recons for all races. That's a lot of ships....

Alexia can now fly all HAC's and Recons for all races except Caldari, but I'll wait for a while before working on getting the Falcon.

I recently got excited about Hurricanes, so after Alexia's current training finishes for a Broadsword (Heavy Interdictor for nullsec operations) I'll be training her up to achieve Elite status for all the Hurricane certificates and using that as much as I can. It feels like a cruiser to fly, but is more powerful. And I like how it looks like an Empirial Star Destroyer...

Ships that go boom!

Black Claw has been doing a lot of station camping. Those cyno alts, they keep getting in the way! They're like tempting hors d'euvres, just sitting there waiting to be eaten. And so Black eats them. With extreme violence. He just can't help it. While camping a station waiting for a juicy frigate or industrial, the cyno alts just sit there. And so they pop.

It's funny. I had Atlas Alliance form a fleet to hunt Black Claw (and failed) because I was bothering their cyno alts. Even though they had 60+ kills against OUCH, compared to OUCH having killed 15 of their pilots, they still got offended...

See you next time!