After leaving my agent the previous day, I made use of the time jumping back to TDE, getting my carrier, getting a cyno lit in lowsec empire, jumping back, docking, getting in an Transport Ship and going to everyone’s favourite place- Jita. Although it’s really busy, there’s queues for everything, undocking takes ages, it’s still the easiest place to shop. Everything in one station.

I purchased a Hound Stealth Bomber, a Stiletto Interceptor and Thrasher Destroyer- all good quality Minmatar products. Including modules and ammunition, it didn’t set me back too much, although the Improved Cloak was about the same price as the Hound is was going on.

Uneventful journey back to my carrier system, I used a friendly local to scout me in, docked, got the carrier loaded up with my ships, and jumped back to Geminate. I had to use a slightly indirect route as TDE was now cyno-jammed, preventing cynosaural fields from being created (and thus disabling Cyno Generators also). I jumped to a nearby system and jump bridged into TDE instead. No fuss, no muss.

I was tuned into comms, as our corp had planned a voluntary op where we’d join Daisho in camping the Oijanen/ BWF entrypoint into Geminate. People were mustering, and making their way to BWF, so I quickly got my Hound assembled, put the modules on, loaded up the Caldari Navy Devastator Cruise missiles (devastatingly expensive when compared to normal Devastator missiles, to be frank) and made my way to BWF.

We were sharing comms with Daisho, and it sounded like something was happening on the Oijanen gate. I was still a couple of jumps out, en route, and calibrating the ship’s systems while I flew. I normally like calibrating new ships in the safety of a station’s hangar or docking perimeter, as you could encounter problems occasionally. It sounded like Daisho had spotted a large gang of Battleships warp to the BWF gate in Oijanen, and wait. I arrived at a point about 100km off the Oijanen gate, just in time to see the neutral BSs jump into BWF- there was a lot of them. Daisho ordered their guys back to the station to get Dreadnoughts- they were under the impression the BS gang were trying to bait us into carriers, get us to jump into Oijanen where they’d hotdrop us with Dreadnoughts.

The BS jumped back to Oijanen, and as everyone was still getting ready, I warped to the station to pick up some more ammo quickly, then back to the gate at 160km so I could warp quickly to the gate when the order was given. That’s when things started going wrong. As I came out of warp, it seemed the gate was ‘empty’- ie. there weren’t loads of our fleet’s ships hanging around the gate. I could’ve sworn that’s where they said they’d be. My overview was flashing ships up and then they’d disappear. I tried resetting the HUD, but that didn’t help much, so I warped to the gate. Sure enough, the gang popped into view as I got closer. As I arrived, all hell broke loose- we’d cyno’d 2 carriers and a Heavy Interdictor into Oijanen to spring their trap- sure enough, they hotdropped in approx 6 Carriers and 4 Dreadnoughts.

Our fleet was given the order to jump through, and warp to the action. As no-one was officially at war, and it was a lowsec system, the smaller ships had to be wary of the gate guns. Bearing this in mind, I requested a jump pattern into Oijanen.

“You must be within 2500m of the stargate to jump”

What?! I was within 0m!! Tried to jump, got the same flat message. Dammit! I turned the ship around, cursing, and warped to a nearby planet, listening to the comms: “Primary….Secondary…. point… webs…”. I was missing the biggest fight in a long time! Turned the ship around, and engaged warp, back to the Oij gate. The ship shuddered and shut down. Completely. NOOO!! I punched the side of the my pod, livid. I performed a complete reset, and the ship powered back up again. Comms came back up, my HUD was back- it seemed less flickery and more stable. I quickly warped back to the gate, requesting a fleet invitation so I could sync my systems with the fleets.

Jumped through to Oij…. about 250km off the gate was a massive battle. Capital ships of all races were clustered in the centre of the blue, opaque haze of a Warp Disruption sphere. At this distance I couldn’t make out the smaller ships or drones, but they’d be there. As I wasn’t in fleet I couldn’t warp nearer. The range on my cruise missiles was about 150km, but I had to be wary of the sentry guns as this would technically be a criminal act (although most of the targets were now classed as criminals themselves having opened fire on us). I thought quickly- behind the battle was Airaken Stargate, so I warped there, and warped back to the BWF gate at a hundred km. Not enough, but a start. I turned around, cloaked up to increase my speed to 520km/s and kept a beady eye on the distance from the Stargate.

It’d been a long time since I needed to be aware of criminal flagging and the mechanics of sentry guns, but I did know their range was approximately 150km. As I had about the same amount of shields and armour as a shuttle, I really didn’t want to misjudge that. Mentally urging more speed from my engines, I watched the battle- blue flashes were periodically lighting up the pinky space of Oij as ships blew up. Still not hooked into fleet, I wasn’t completely aware of what was going on. I caught sight of a Cerberus and Falcon sat some distance away from the battle- the Falcon clearly jamming people, and the Cerberus was disgorging bright beads that were floating slowly toward the cluster of ships. The Falcon would be my first target- I could drive him off reasonably easily.

The Stargate was now 175km away, so I decloaked, loaded up the correct scripts into the twin Sensor Boosters I had and locked up the Falcon. It was 128km away. Fire!

[ 2008.08.14 19:43:19 ] (question) This action is an attack on your target. Attacking this target is a crime, will result in a security status penalty for you and will bring CONCORD to enforce the law by destroying your ship should you enter high-security space soon. Do you wish to proceed with this dangerous action?

[ 2008.08.14 19:43:22 ] (notify) For initiating combat your security status has been adjusted by -0.1000.

I ended up seeing the above message quite a bit through the battle. Good job my sec. status had been buffed a lot recently!!

My Cruise launchers flared, the Hound bucked as the massive missiles raced away at 5km+/s. They’d take over 20 seconds to hit so in that time I kept a very careful watch on my overview, and adjusted my course toward the Cerberus which was 165km away, and out of range of my missiles by about 15km. The capital ships were all about 80km away, a comfortable distance. If anyone locked me, I needed to get the hell out of there pronto. The Falcon pilot was no beginner and warped out before the missiles hit- but I had done what I set out to do, and locked up the primary and  secondary targets. The Cerberus had warped out (chased by some missiles flung by another friendly Hound pilot, i found out later), so the capitals got my attention.

Primary was fisty, in a Thanatos- due to the travel time of my missiles (approx. 16 seconds at this range), only a couple of volleys hit before he went up. Next was Elijah in a Chimera, but the Cerberus had returned and was still just out of range, annoyingly. I made a mental note to train up Missile Projection more, which enabled pilots to tweak the speed of their missiles. I was certified at level 4, but clearly needed 5 to be 100% efficient. I left the Cerb and back to the next target, KingAc, in a Revelation Dreadnought. Got some good hits on this guy, and he inevitably succumbed to the concentrated fire of our Dreadnoughts in Siege mode- they were cutting through the capitals like a hot knife through butter.

[ 2008.08.14 19:48:37 ] (notify) For your part in the destruction of a Revelation your security status has been adjusted by -0.4000.

The field was clearly ours now- a couple of their caps managed to exit the Disruption sphere and jump out, but the last one, Artallis, in a Chimera, wasn’t so lucky and went down. The battle was over.

Local channel was filled with pilots saying good fight’, in the time honoured tradition. I didn’t know if any of the opponents said ‘good fight’, but I would assume so.

Moros wreck

Thanatos wreck

So, the battle was over.  The final tally was quite impressive.

Battle report

As you can see, we killed 24 and lost 2 (one of those to sentry guns)

We spent the next 10-15 minutes scooping loot, and then having to go back for haulers to collect the numerous Fighters left strewn across the field of battle- at 5000m3 each, they were no casual item to pick up and put in your hold. They were the size of destroyers effectively, and fifteen times the cost, so they were coveted prizes.

WHile we were busy scooping loot, a hapless Vendetta Dominix warped into the field of battle… 11km from me. Everyone gleefully opened fire on him…he lasted about 8 seconds. BOOM.

Of course, we had a global criminal timer to let count down. Although I could easily warp to the BWF gate and jump through before the sentries could pop me, I didn’t see any need to take the chance, to safespotted, cloaked and waited. When I got this ship back to TDE, I’d strip it down and get to the root of the problem I had earlier. In the meantime, I was extremely pleased I’d decided to leave my agent and come back to Geminate. You can’t buy experience like this!

…and indeed it wasn’t. Any more. Well, he had been Hobarak Moon, and now his Machariel Battleship was so much scrap. My guns cycled off, and my Cruise launchers shut down. I brought the Typhoon to a halt and allowed the ever faithful Berserker drones to catch me up. They were the T2 variant, I hadn’t long trained for them, and hadn’t used T2 heavies in combat at all. Their damage output was impressive. So much so, my Typhoon’s fittings were adjusted to deal with the small fry frigs and cruisers, and let my heavy drones chew up Battlecruisers and Battleships.

Indeed, I had heard of pilots doing the crazy thing of putting 720mm artillery on the Typhoon, instead of the recommended larger projectile weapons. This wasn’t actually such a crazy idea if you had the ability to lay down the hurt on the Battleships. Of course, this only applied to fighting the pirate rabble, not other pod pilots. You always went for the cruisers and frigates first, as they were the ones who caused you the most trouble and were most numerous. As such, you wanted to scythe through them as quickly as possible, and with 720s compared to 800mm large, this was very easy, especially with a webber. The webbing and scrambling interceptors were dealt with in short order, and then the respectable damage output could be turned on the BCs and BSs.

I had always overlooked the Typhoon in favour of the Maelstrom, but the Typhoon turned out to be a very solid boat, and as I was armour tanking, kept mid slots free for cap rechargers and webs. The 720s proved their worth, and my mix of light and heavy t2 drones were certainly doing the job. Large Repper could be run almost indefinitely.

However, it was very dull. Although finding 2 Arbablest Heavy Missile launchers in some of the loot, worth 13m apiece (madness), cheered me up no end, I was missing the challenge of pod-pilot combat. I wasn’t that badly in need of money, in fact a business partner of mine was making a nice trade in some of the hub systems, so I decided to give the agent missions a rest again and hop back to TDE.

My agent gave me a “yeah yeah, you’ll be back” look as I confirmed Hobarak Moon was toast and told him I was leaving again. He was probably right.

Our two week stint in Stain/ Esoteria came to end yesterday. Without any great reluctance, the KIA alliance up sticks and left without a backward glance. Although the fights were top notch (notably Coven and Stain Empire who were great opponents and smack free), being at the end of a very long supply chain didn’t make operating very easy. The market in AZN wasn’t bad, but very pricey. You lose a ship, you had an issue refitting properly.

I did make the 48 jump trip back to TDE and then down again a couple of times for various reasons, and I remembered what an excellent travelling ship an interceptor is, especially one fitted with Inertia Stabilisers. Entering warp quickly, and warping at 13.5au a second made the journey just about bearable. Only one hairy moment in the VOL-MI area, where I warped to the gate without bothering to warp in at an oblique angle, and I got pulled 90km past the gate by a well placed small bubble. There was a Crow waiting. Always the Crows, I thought, very popular ships as you can keep your distance and pepper your opponent with missiles.

I did a 180° turn and burned back to the gate- I wanted to see what his top speed was. I was hitting 5.5km/s. He locked me, loosed off some light missiles and accelerated- he was clearing 7.5km/s. However, he had no web, and no way of stopping me. Then his missiles hit…. for 8 damage each. Even with my MWD on, his light missiles did almost no damage. I locked him- he unlocked me then relocked me. He was about 24km from me and well out of range of my autocannons.

I was acutely aware there were a lot of other hostiles in system, and he was faster than me- I had no web and no range on my guns. I wasn’t going to beat him, and he wasn’t going to beat me. So, got to the gate and jumped through. He didn’t follow.

As we were done, I warped to a quiet safespot in C9N, and self destructed my pod. I used to hate doing this, as I became attached to clones, but quickly got over this (frankly childish) notion. As my clone was implant-less thanks to a recent podding (poor Rapier), I had nothing to lose.

Next thing I knew, I awoke coughing and spluttering as a hand supported the back of my head, and a voice said “Welcome to Nonni”. A towel wiped over my eyes, and I blinked them open, taking in the dim lights of the cloning centre, the vat I was in and the grin of the tech who now handed me the towel, and a robe.

“All monitors are green, you’re good to go” he said. “Beats flying here the hard way, eh?” he added, winking.

I assumed he was referring to the self-destruct, and smiled weakly at him, still not feeling 100%. However, I had to make another clone jump, so there wasn’t any point waiting to feel better. I explained to the tech what I wanted, he pointed me over to another vat, this one for jumpclones. I hopped in, and waited as the tech hooked me up, dialled up my destination. I closed my eyes as he counted down, and then

<POP>

… I awoke 25 light years away in DP34, a system in Syndicate where my corp had started to set up as a R & R area just before the Tortuga plans hit the fan. As such, I’d left a jump clone out here, it’s head stuffed with learning implants (expensive ones at that), and not got around to collecting it.

After cleaning up, having a cup of tea and wandering down to the hangar, I found that, of course, Pend Insurance had given me a starter ship. I did think that maybe one of the reasons they were hitting lean times is that they were giving away these starter ships like confetti. Anyway, it was to be my ride out of here.

I powered it up and checked the market, just to be sure, for any better ships or more importantly, MicroWarpdrives. 0.0 space without a MWD was hard work, and dangerous. No MWDs on the market, if you can call it that. I sighed and undocked.

As I recalled the best way out of this region was through Reblier into Verge Vendor- I remembered it wasn’t camped much, so I hoped that would be the case this time. Some uneventful jumps later, I jumped into the gateway system, and saw to my joy that I had a 250km bookmark from the Reblier gate. I warped to that bookmark at 100km, reasonably sure any bubble wouldn’t pull me in. As I was deaccelerating from warp, I had scanned ahead and knew there was just a Claw Interceptor waiting. Sure enough, he was right on the gate. I hop-warped to the gate and jumped through. Job done.

We now had some time off to make ISK, so I figured it was time to pay my agent a visit- less hassle than killing pirates in 0.0 to be quite honest and only marginally less interesting.

Whilst enjoying some bunk time, I was idly watching a news channel. Same old, same old. Wasn’t really paying any attention, when there was a newsflash about Pend Insurance.

This got my attention- Pend Insurance are a behemoth, and any newflash concerning them was going to be of interest. They touch every pod pilot’s life in one way or another. I sat up and listened. It seems that the ongoing Factional war is costing them a lot of lost profits, with a higher than average amount of insured ships getting destroyed daily. A spokesman said they were seriously reviewing how they deal with payout, how they might increase premiums, and more importantly, the fact they were more than likely going to withdraw insurance payments for ships destroyed by Concord.

Concord themselves had been pressing for the latter for some time, stating it would make their job easier, but Pend had (until now) stuck to their guns, stating their customer always came first. Given the Factional war revenue loss, and a rising number of high profile ’suicide gankings’ where they have paid out platinum insurance to pod pilots who had not only been subsequently destroyed by Concord but also gone on to get the loot from the ‘ganked’ ships, Pend have come under increasing internal and external pressure.

They didn’t say when they’d start doing this, but it’d likely be soon.

In the same newsflash, possibly co-ordinated between Concord and Pend, Concord also had an announcement. In essence, due to improvements in hyperpatial technology, they would soon be able to respond more quickly to illegal incidents.

My career had always been on the side of the lawful, bar a few weeks of pirating where I did it for some fun, and even then my security status stayed positive as I had accrued a 5.0 status due to a long time in 0.0 prior to this. As such, the Concord announcement wasn’t a big deal, but add that to Pend’s non-payment of Concord killed ships, and you had a clear signal against hi-sec killings. Interesting times ahead?

After a couple of days of food poisoning (damn Amarrian churkken stew) and feeling extremely bad, I dragged my sorry arse into my pod in order to do anything but stare into the toilet bowl. The change of scenery helped no end, and while my ship warmed up, I hungrily went over the Alliance logs and comnet for the past 2 days to see how we were doing.

Unfortunately, it wasn’t good news. Being 50+ jumps from our 0.0 home and at the end of a very long logistic chain was a problem. Not a big problem, but one nonetheless as the market out in Esoteria wasn’t quite as buoyant as Jita.

I undocked, put some distance between myself and the station and cloaked up. I had barely spent any time in C9N since we arrived, and an entry on my overview piqued my curiosity: “Historic Location: The Remains of Steve”. Something dimly rang in the back of my mind and I warped to the beacon at 20km.

Sure enough, it was the staggeringly huge wreck of the first ever Titan to be destroyed in New Eden. Cloaked, I gazed upon it’s sheer size and noticed a shimmer of a forcefield that held the wreck together and stopped it being salvaged for it’s component parts.

It had been an Amarrian titan and it’s hull still held it’s shape for the main part. The name ‘Steve’ was so exotic and fitted the ship perfectly.

After snapping a couple of pictures for this log, I then waited for an alliance op to start… let’s see what tonight would bring…

<BWOOP><BWOOP><BWOOP><BWOO….

The alarm shut off as I smacked out blindly and got lucky with my fourth swipe at it. That second of peace, of all being well, of you feeling 100% as you wake up, before reality descends upon you passed quickly. My head was throbbing, my mouth felt like a Slaver Hound had moved in and I was very hot.

I sat up very slowly, and went to the nearby bathroom. My berth was a bit of a mess, the tidy part of my brain informed me. I silenced that unnecessary part of my brain for now and got a cooling drink of water. Too much partying, too little exercise had taken it’s toll, and I glared at some extra ‘love-handleage’ that had crept on in the last 3 weeks.

Fortunately, we were due to finally move out for some action later, and it couldn’t come soon enough. I had a shower, then

[and WordPress sucks. Very much. I've lost the rest of this quite lengthy post and am quite cross about it- their autosave feature also sucks. I can't be bothered to re-write it as it won't be the same, and I don't have time. Note to self- use notepad in future. Low-tech is good. Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr]

After a few days of taking it easy, most of us were getting itchy trigger fingers. We were given 3 weeks off, and after a couple of agent missions (which I find very boring, but easy money), and some cleansing of the belt rats in TDE, I was up for a new challenge. Most of the alliance felt the same by the sounds of it.

Our Industrial wing had arranged a mining op, and were getting to it, munching ‘roids and hauling their goodness back to the station. A few more of us who weren’t mining orientated or equipped were gate camping to deny entry. It was a fairly boring job, but I recorded the highlights.

17:49- a shuttle!

A scout reports a shuttle coming in… and sure enough a shuttle jumped in. Now, rather embarassingly, none of us were able to anchor a large mobile warp disruptor bubble (there wasn’t many of us), including myself, so we had plenty of mediums spread around. Unfortunately, the shuttle appears just outside of a bubble’s sphere and warps off to the station. Local chat ensued (shuttle’s pilot was is Samuel Caldara):

[17:49:27] Samuel Caldara > woah, maybe buying something here wasn’t such a good idea =(
[17:49:29] Xyyreen > lucky b****d”
[17:49:37] Samuel Caldara > yea well, i’m f****d now
[17:50:09] Samuel Caldara > your fricking kidding me

I thought his buying something here comment was him being funny, but his ‘you’re kidding me comment’ was presumable him not being able to dock. Somewhat amused by this, I called up his record- he wasn’t a very old pilot, but surely if he’s out in 0.0 he’s either very brave (as he was in Caldari Provisions, a starter corp for Caldari pod pilots, and not aligned to any other corp/ alliance) or is up to no good on behalf of someone else out here.

[17:53:19] Samuel Caldara > don’t even bother
[17:53:21] Samuel Caldara > kill me
[17:53:27] Samuel Caldara > i’m in a frickin shuttle =D
[17:53:51] Samuel Caldara > thank god i got a warp clone

He warped back to the gate where he met his fate- seemed pretty resigned to it, understandably. I hope whatever he bought here wasn’t too expensive!

1751- Dread Guristas

To our amusement, a Dread Guristas cruiser and two of his mates show up to have a go at our gate camp. They have balls, I’ll give them that. They didn’t last very long.

1807- HICs

At last, we get joined by a couple of HICs. Now we can stop ghetto gatecamping and do it properly! Start pulling down the medium bubbles.

1902- Enemy gang! Oh wait…

We hear reports of a 4 man enemy gang coming down the pipe. We all wake up and drool in anticipation. Regrettably, they send in a Vagabond to scout, which due to it’s inertia, we can’t stop getting back to the gate (even double webbed by me) and the gang runs away. They would’ve got slaughtered had they not sent in the scout. Ah well, I guess we are there to deter or kill any threat to the mining after all. I return to looking at markets, contracts and a ’specialist’ holoreel.

Eve-Mag has just written a nice review of my maps, so I thought I’d big them up in return. The Eve-Mag site is really nice on the eye, well laid out and it makes you want to stay and peruse the various article.

The articles themselves are well written, informative and cover all the main aspects of eve. Also, for the budding writers out there, Eve-Mag will host their stories where anyone can read.

All in all, a nice site, founded by Smakalicious who also runs the Eve-Places site. Clearly he knows how to make a nice looking website. Kudos!

The dust was settling in TDE, indeed in Geminate, and we had been given leave to go earn some ISK. And I needed it after the purchase of the carrier, skill books and modules. After a couple of days of killing the hapless Guristas pilots in the TDE belts, I was getting bored. My Drake was setup specifically to deal with their type of damage.

I had left the carrier in lowsec, and clone jumped to TDE, now I clone jumped to a different system in hi-sec, which was far far away from my favourite mission agent. Although I found running missions for agents almost as tedious as killing belt pirates, it did pay well. Good job it wasn’t for long, it could drive a pilot mad.

I hopped in the rather cool Apotheosis shuttle that had mysteriously been delivered to every pod pilot a month or two ago- no-one saw who delivered them, they just ‘appeared’ in people’s hangars. Caused quite a fuss at the time, all these shipping crates turning up in hangars. No complaints of course. They were Jovian looking in design and handled really well. They were also selling for upwards of 10m ISK these days!

Anyway. A 27 jump extravaganza lay before me, so I got on with it. Empire was very busy, more than I had been used to recently. As I jumped into Algogille from Kassigainen, my overview registered a mass of wrecks and structures about 250km away. It looked like Gallente BS wrecks. Ever curious, I warped to them and took the above picture. Something big had happened here. I spent some minutes scanning the news archives… and had to go back some way. Found this:

breaking news: caldari navy task force crosses federation border, invades gallente space

2008.06.10 21:26:47

Algogille - *** This is a breaking news story *** A Caldari Navy task force has just crossed the Federation border in what is unmistakably a large-scale invasion of Gallente space. Numerous Federation Customs patrol ships have already been destroyed as Caldari ships continue to stream across using the Kassigainen stargate and at least two jump portals. This is a breaking news story that we will continue to update as information becomes available.

I spent a moment of quiet respect, then moved on.

A couple of jumps over, I was about to jump into Hek when I saw a Curse and Brutix belonging to a corp called Malum Crisis attack an Iteron V belonging to a corp called Bountyhunters. I thought I’d grab a picture just before the Iteron was destroyed. I found a couple of things odd about this. Firstly, you can see it was close enough to the gate to jump through, yet it didn’t. It got bumped 8km off the gate and killed. Secondly, the corps aren’t at war with each other, nor in any militia. Unless there was some can flagging going on, which I doubted, I didn’t understand. I mentally shrugged and continued my journey with no further incident.

With no small degree of excitement, I sauntered down to the hangar area of the station in lowsec Forge, and went past the usual sub- capital hangar entrance. The corridor changed, lighting was softer, the floor became carpeted, and small vases of flowers were on tables at intervals along the corridor. A smiling Caldarian dressed in a very smart butlers uniform opened the door to the hangar for me with a flourish. Awkwardly I fumbled for some loose ISK and palmed it over to him via a handshake. He appeared very grateful, not so much for the ISK but that etiquette had been followed correctly.

I walked past him and into the hangar- the place was huge, massive, bigger than any hangars I’d seen before. I walked to the edge of the walkway, and looked over… there she was. My first ever carrier, the Nidhoggur class. I had spent days with my head in books learning the basics of how to fly her, and I still wasn’t completely up on it. But I knew enough. I had named her Varuna.

I went onboard, and said hello to the Captain and the crew, just to introduce myself, and also so I know who I am flying with. You can feel quite isolated in your pod, but it’s always good to remember you aren’t on your own and you have other’s lives in your hands.

They seemed like a nice bunch anyway. I got into my pod, the fluid starting filling it up. I ran the usual startup checks, and then switched the HUD to external cam, to watch as my pod was lifted into the behemoth. It was so big, it beggared belief. Once the pod was inserted, ran the startup checks for the first time, and noticed my HUD had some extra entries. Ship maintenance bay, and corporate hangar. Carriers were supposed to be a logistical ‘port in a storm’ and the bay and hangar would provide just that. Right on cue, I watched as my Tempest battleship was towed into view, and I opened up the Ship Maintenance bay doors.. and watched the Tempest swallowed up inside the bulk of the ship. I wasn’t going to get used to the size quickly.

Rojman, a fellow carrier pilot in the corp, was also leaving at the same time, going to TDE in Geminate, so it made sense to share a Cynosural Field. He was an old salt at Capital ships, and I felt much happier that he was coming with me for the ship’s inaugural flight. I checked on comms he was ready to go, and he was. I then contacted Sam, our Cyno Generator in TDE- she wasn’t 100% sure what she was doing either, never having generated a Cyno before. Rojman talked her through it, she generated the Cyno, broadcast it’s location to our Jump Drive’s AI, and we initiated the jump. Space froze, folded, blanked… and then we re-appeared in TDE.

The re-assuring site of a KIA POS appeared, as did Sam’s Probe- dead in space, as was expected. The Cyno field took so much to generate, it drained and effectively ’stunned’ the ships systems for approximately 10 minutes. However, under the eve-watchful eye of the POS guns, she would be OK. We greeted her, then started the very slow align to the station. I was exhilarated by the whole experience, the first time I’d ever used a ship’s jump drives (Titan Bridge didn’t really count). And it was way cool- the way to travel. None of this gate nonsense, it was cynos all the way!

A curious Intercepter had turned up to have a look at the Cyno, it was Wotlankor. I greeted him, he congratulated me on the new ship, and I finally entered warp. Over comms he told me he had taken some pictures also- and very nice they were too!

Despite the ships slow speed, I felt a fly-by of the station was necessary (local channel was empty of hostiles and I could dock very quickly anyway), so I did one at Wotlankor’s request, taking a picture of course: