Svipul, eh? S'il vous plait!

So, I’ve mentioned before how excited I am about the tactical destroyers.  I also appreciate cheeky devs.  And I’m a huge fan of Minmatar ships (Jaguar, Rapier, Sleipnir, SFI, Sabre).  So, naturally, I hate the Svipul.

Naw, I’m just messing with you.  Of course I’m excited.  And naturally the first thing I did was go on Sisi and play around with the Svipul.

For those of you who haven’t been on the Singularity server before, it’s a strange mix between the past and the future.  While CCP does load new features on Sisi first so they and players can try them and identify any bugs and usability issues, Sisi synchronizes each player’s skills, wallet, and assets with Tranquility only every so often.  It’s maddening to see my wallet from a month ago, before I purchased a bunch of T3 cruisers and plexed my accounts for three months each.

I suspect that my first impression of the ship was the same as yours… “My god, it’s ugly.”  It honestly looks like one of those coal barges floating down the river.  But it does fit with the Minmatar “thrown together” look.  Very cunning of the art department at CCP creating a race with ugly ships… Friday afternoons have to be useful for something!

Of course, none of that matters because… vertical, baby!  Let the horizontal ship-lovers have their propulsion mode.  When the ship gets down to business, it goes the way of the Naglfar, and that’s awesome.

Long Delays and Deep Thought

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been logging in pretty regularly, doing all the usual roaming, gate camping, scanning down anoms, and even losing the occasional Deimos to a surprise blops fleet that decided to attack the camp we had been running predictably every night for the past week.  Who knew?

The answer, of course, is “everyone”, including us the moment we saw that Myrm.  But I just couldn’t help myself…  must… kill… all the things...

But, despite all the logging in, I spent a lot of time scanning down wormholes and updating RP’s bookmarks for the anoms in our local area.  I recently discovered that the Confessor can easily fit an expanded probe launcher without sacrificing much at all in the fitting (particularly with the CPU +3 implant I always fit to my ships, just to squeeze a little extra out of my maxed fitting skills).  I say “discovered” because reading is hard, and I only realized the T3 destroyers are bonused for probe launcher fitting after I finished Amarr Tactical Destroyer V (quick train, makes a big difference, do it now).

What I like best about the Confessor is the name.  Confessor.  I’m waiting for the next Amarr ship to be called the Summoner, Indulgence, or Pardoner).  But what I like second best about the ship is how, despite its advantages, it’s not overpowered.

First Thoughts on the Rapier Changes

The Proteus expansion – CCP, please stop with the ship/expansion same name thing – brought about some big changes to my beloved ship, the Rapier.  (Oh, and some other ships got some changes, too.)  Naturally, the first thing I did when I logged in was to refit my ship.

My mainstay Rapier used to be a dual-web autocannon version with five drones.  When fighting larger ships, I’d typically stay at range until I managed to kill all his drones, then move in slightly to ping him at range.  It was slow work, but it was successful.  But it really shined against smaller ships.

There were always problems with that fit.  With autocannons, my optimal range was spitting distance, and dps always suffered from falloff calculations.  Even switching to artillery only got me a few more dps in the grand scheme of things.

With Proteus, the Rapier’s weapons changed to missile launchers.  So, with EFT not quite updated yet, I plugged a few HAMs and Ballistic Control Systems in and took it out for a spin.

The Full Nine Yards

Think for a moment, about the Eve universe.

We have capsuleers who are effectively immortal (so long as the power stays on at all the facilities with their clones throughout the universe).  These capsuleers are able to inject skills directly into their brains which they can use after a suitable time for their bodies to acclimate to the information.  Time reading books is effectively unnecessary due to cybernetic implants.  These implants can enhance their mental and physical performance or, alternatively, slave them to another's will.

Capsuleers pilot spaceships ranging from single-man shuttles to massive, multiple-mile-long Titans with tens or hundreds of thousands of crewmen.  They live in space stations all throughout the known universe, while tens of trillions of humans live on settled worlds throughout known space.  They have the means to flawlessly and instantly communicate with various parts of their ships at once, effecting incredibly sophisticated sets of commands near-instantly.  Those ships are capable of firing a range of weapons with devastating effect and gobbling enough power to put entire Earth countries to shame.  Some of the missiles launched are larger than frigates, and some weapons can even bombard planets with a high degree of accuracy.

The Spaces In Between

Just a quickie today.  As I was reading Sugar Kyle’s recent post about her thoughts when choosing a character's race, I thought the idea that your Eve race might say something about your personality was so intriguing that I started to write my own post.

Unfortunately, this turned into a massive tangle of segues that spoke more to philosophy, history, and psychology than Eve.  So, I decided to junk the whole thing.

Tl;dr of that post was: Slavery as a component of theocracy doesn’t turn my stomach immediately.  I suck at sales too, and would join the Guristas if I was born into the Caldari.  The idea of the Gallente being “defenders of the downtrodden” and a “Bastion for liberty” has to either be hilariously ironic or hopelessly naïve.  AI is the only threat to humanity guaranteed to destroy us and everyone seeking to bring it about should be rooted out and eradicated, whatever that cost.  Like, right now.  Minmatar are close enough to their liberation that they still remember that growth and progress requires strife and hardship, so that'd be the place for me.

I’m sure you can imagine all the ways this article went wrong and can join me in delighting over the fact that I strangled it in the cradle.

But it did get me thinking about some of the lore in Eve.  Not as much what we’ve seen, but what we’re missing.

Gentlemen, Be Wary of Strange Corporate Logos...

There's a terrible downside to Repercussus joining Goonswarm.  A terrible downside, indeed.

It's inevitable that, on occasion, I'll play Eve while sitting next to my wife.  In this case, we were discussing a babysitter we needed for a couple weeks from now.  Now, some women will argue that men can't do two things at once.  While this may be true, it doesn't preclude certain women - my wife - say, from forgetting everything she was saying and staring, transfixed, at my Eve client.

For she came face-to-face with that downside.  Being in GSF, it was inevitable.  For she saw the Goonwaffe logo in the upper-right corner of the screen as I sat in one of their stations.

It's a unicorn with a heart behind it.

RP Welped a Fleet, and I Didn't Write An Article

Being an Eve blogger can be hard work sometimes.  Not only do you get pummeled for the things you write, but apparently you also get pummeled for the things you don't write, as well.

Three weeks ago, Repercussus lost a capital fleet in a wormhole.  It was billed as "Goonswarm loses capital fleet," but this was solely an RP thing.  "GSF corp loses capital fleet" would be more accurate.  We've done WH farming ops for quite some time, and this time we were a little lazy watching the connections and got dunked.  It's worth noting, in the TheMittani.com article, that "Repercussus didn't give up without a fight," and that one of our Chimera pilots "really seemed to know what he was doing".  That'd be either ExOmega or AdamHernandez.  These points are worth mentioning.  No one panicked, and even though the fight was over before it began, they fought to the end.  But, it was still a huge kick the the gonads.

I'm going to dispense with the common "already replaced" and "didn't want that fleet anyways" comments, since I don't know if it was already replaced, and we most certainly DID want that fleet.

In the associated Reddit post, I mentioned I wasn't going to write an article.  Well, looks like I will after all, but not an article about the welp.