Battleclinic Stats

Thursday, April 22, 2010

It happened AGAIN

Ok, so now I think I may have a problem with my motherboard. Or there's a serious problem with Windows 7. One of them is eating my hard drives. I blanked a drive, installed Win7 and this morning it crashed. As in the drive is not visible even in BIOS. What are the odds of two physical hard drive failures in one week?

Grrrr. And I just ordered Starcraft II for the beta, should be getting a code today...

Monday, April 19, 2010

Ouch

Ok, so my hard drive crashed. "That's OK, you're an IT professional, just restore from backup and move on."

Ok, so my hard drive crashed and I don't have a backup. OS, programs, these are fine. I still have my XP disk and I can still get online and with a spare hard drive I will soon reinstall Win7 + Eve et al. the problem is that I've started keeping my receipts from my bills, taxes, etc. as digital copies. So I've lost 2-3 months of receipts.

So....Ouch.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

PVP Quick Lesson 2

Rifter vs Dramiel

Ok, this time I was on a gate and saw a flash. New neutral in local. He decloaks. Uhoh, it's a Dramiel and I was 20k off the gate and burning like crazy to get to it before he killed me. Ok, he's locking now, drones out. Locked, taking damage, pointed. Rifter's a goner, right? Oh hell, tank isn't on. DC on, small repper on. Ok, that's a bit better. 5k, 3k, spamming 'Jump' button. Whew, made it through. Warped away to stay away from the guy. Oh yeah, he aggressed and I got through. He has to wait a minute.

I reported this fight on Vent. The corp guys were eager to chase him down, but it was close to downtime and he was marking safes as he went, so time expired before we could catch him.

PVP Quick Lesson 1

Rifter vs Shuttle

Huh? How is this even a fight? What possible lesson could you learn from killing a defenseless shuttle? Why even bother? Well, I warped to the gate, and as I landed I noticed a shuttle 15k off the gate. Red. I locked him and he locked back. As I'm turning on the mods, I wonder why he locked me. I finally decided he's either hardcore and pretending he had some modules to shoot back, or he was a real noob and didn't have 'lock back' turned off.

How was it a fight? Well, he had a friend. The Crow (and more later) came through from the other side of the gate and tackled me. I started calculating whether my insurance would cover replacing my ship. Just for practice I keyed the mic and reported in Vent. "Xal in [system name]. Crow on [gate name]. Crow is aggressed. Xal's tank holding but Crow's out of scram range."

A corp-mate in system showed up in a Sabre and the Crow burned away.

Two things struck me about this fight.
1. My Rifter actually survived. I attribute this to the fact that I kept my speed up so that his missiles did a reduced amount of damage. (AB on and set to approach him).
2. Crows don't like Sabres.

Real life...

Due to a combination of real life issues and errands, and a need to spend time with my family, I have been playing little of the last week.

I've been having a good time running around with the corp (Agony Unleashed), chasing folks out of our little area. One thing I'll say for this group, they drop whatever they're doing and show up fit to kill whenever there's a scent of a target. More in the next article.

Monday, April 12, 2010

cough cough

I was legitimately, miserably sick last week for three days. I spent a lot of time playing Eve. (See Carebearing article). Now I find that all those chores in real life that I put off last week still need doing, only now they're short deadline or late.

Carebearing

Ok, so my "ground up, PVP only lifestyle" has been more of a ground up "exploring sovereignty with a PVP oriented group (Agony Unleashed)" lifestyle. With the Infrastructure Hub (IH) technology added with the Sovereignty overhaul, we have been able to upgrade one of our systems to a high military level and have added a Pirate Detection Array. This has made ratting both simple and profitable. I spent quite a bit of time online last week, most of it running anomalies.

I look forward to spending some isk on some real combat ships and taking place in some ops where I stand a real chance of losing those ships. In line with my ground up approach, one of those ships will be a faction frig (Hookbill or another), others will include a couple of cruisers including a Moa and a Thorax. Finally, I will include a couple of Blackbirds so that I can prepare for using Falcons when my confidence level improves.