my orca alt

Aurelius Bombatsu

he is my new slave... er alt.
I finally have a second account so I don't Gimp Astral's training.
just gotta afford a orca in the next couple of months now lol.

balence is key

I am at a Interesting tightrope in my eve career.
I find that now I am back care bearing I have a fairly large and stable income, which is in turn allowing me to buy quite a few nice PVP ships.
Also I now have excess sec status (lets face it anything over -2.0 isnt really needed ..is it?) so what can I do to alleviate the mission running blues..I can hunt.
See if I don’t POD people I should be able to keep decent sec status with 2-3 kills a week as long as I do enough missions to work off my fun.
So I shall be walking a tight rope for the next few months while I try to get the baalence right..I will be Btek director and mission runner..nurturing young pilots, some of the time, and the rest of the time I will be returning to my old hunting grounds with the rabbits, probably solo hunting. I am really looking forward to getting back to it!
I already have a few assault frigs ready..some interceptors…and a daredevil which I will be spending a insane amount fitting (rude not to on that ship).
If you see me roaming low in future ..I may well be hunting you :)
yarrrrrrrrrrr

I am a lucky git

Today i sent 3 mill to Somer blink thinking id have a gamble in the long trip i was making ..when i logged in i found i had 50 mill promo credit...so I had some fun...my total investment is Somer blink so far 36 million.

me and my troll

Ok its been on my mind for a bit now, but I’m putting a stop to the idiot troll I seem to have picked up.
Every few posts he pops up leaving some dumb ass comment slagging me off with out any reasoning. Im not sure who this person is or why they feel so aggravated by me…or why they continue reading if they are?
I don’t mind a little criticism but I’d like to know WHO is criticising me, so I have removed the ability to post anonymously. Im sorry if this stops people who have something constructive to say posting, but registering with google or open id is quite easy.
If the troll finds a way round this I will begin comment moderation.
Own up or sod off.

broadsword vs arby = bad

Last night logged on to finish moving my arbitrator a few systems over in lowsec. On the way however I got in to a great fight. I was using my duel TD fit and was hunting frigates on the way..not that I found any. And then 2 jumps from my destination as I jumped through I found the 1 type of ship you never want to see…a broadsword. Those puppies have VERY fast lock times..like catch pods fast.
Figured id try to warp anyway, hell maybe he was asleep.
As soon as I broke cloak he locked me..only but none of his friends had warped in..he was solo..
So I figured id have a go..I had gate guns on my side thanks to my non outlaw status, I set my nuet , NOS, both disruptors web and scram on him and lanched a flight of warrior 2’s and sent a few missiles his way for good measure..
It was a very good fight I couldn’t break his shield before I popped but still was a very entertaining fight..he had to close to point blank range to apply DPS and it took him longer than I expected for him to break my tank.
killmail
The broadsword pilot seemed happy Posting very good fight in local as well.
I seem to be finding good fights quite a lot at the moment , just need to start winning them again.

the moral of this story, 9 out of 10 times you wont win a fight you didn’t pick.

I miss lowsec

Had a bit of fun last night.
I logged on after a explosive argument with my electricity supplyer..muppets. anyway I wanted some stress relief, so when I logged on to the imidiate question from my CEO “wanna run some sites in low with me” I jumped at it. I jump cloned out to Lerm, where I had a arby fit for exploration waiting..

Relt my CEO was fitting up his own cruiser and bringing a cov ops as I hadn’t replaced mine yet from my ninja experiment. So I figured I would refit for more of a PVP set up in case…sorry for when we got interrupted. I was buying the bits I needed (I was also selling the bits I needed which worked well lol) when a fleet of 20 jumped into system, which wasn’t uncommon, however at this point I realised I didn’t have a tracking disruption script.. ine was available 2 jumps out..and relts was still building his cruiser..
I made the 2 jumps with out incident, but as I landed in the system I noticed a fleet of 20 in local..a quick d scan showed nothing much, so I hoped they were docking up for a bio break during a roam..I docked at the station I needed and bought the script…then checked the stations guest list..
19 other pilots…
All from well known pirate corps ..
Like VETO and Shadow cartel..
I figured it was a long shot but I undocked and was hoping id sod off before they noticed I was gone.
As I undocked I saw a drake sitting off the station in my haste I miss clicked the warp out…bugger I tried again already knowing it was to late…I almost warped but the drakes lock and scram kicked in.
I re docked in half armour
I thought id play in local with a jibe about station camping and got the response “but astral..low sec is dead..we cant be station camping you”
That made me chuckle..I may have been on the receiving end but I liked these pirates.
I sat for about 5 mins chatting and hopped they would get bored ..
They didn’t.
I then figured if I tried again I might align and make it before they could point me, the arby had a fast-ish align time, if the drake was still waiting..
It wasn’t.
Instead I was greeted by a loki..shit!
The scram was on in seconds and I couldn’t re dock before the T3 ship shredded me.
I warped the POD out and posted a GF in local and thanked them for the fun..I had by this point completely forgotten why I was stressed. ..however I now needed to go get my other Arby 13 jumps away.
During the trip I got several Eve mails from W0wbanger ( the guy that killed me) and we got chatting , seems like a cool guy , sort of got a invite to go back to piracy if I want to, also in a strange turn of events he sent me the money for the ship, apparently he only wanted to blow me up cos of the blog…good reasoning to me.
By the time I had grabbed the other ship the wife was pestering me about bed, so I logged off, but I have a real itch to spend more time in low again..I have the beginnings of a plan.

The Recruit (IC)

You couldn’t mistake where you were.
Tall arched ceilings wide arches slightly gothic looking architecture.. you knew it was amarr
The young Brutor male was led into a large circle at the centre of the bidding arena, drugged out of his mind on vitoc, he did exactly as he was told..
Around him hundreds of amarian nobles sat patiently waiting for the bidding to begin, behind them were private bidding chambers normally used by people that whished to remain anonymous ..if they had the isk to rent one.
The noise in the hall began to rise as the bidding started at a mere 200 isk, the accepted price of a brutor life.
As the back ground of the young male was read the price increased.
The announcer read “this young male, a brutor, was recently captured after piloting a rifter class frigate into amarr space, we believe he may have been part of the capsuleer program, guaranteeing a prime specimen”.
At this point the noise in the room dropped to a wispper, a bidder had jus placed a bid over 2 million isk. No one wasted that amount of isk on a slave..the bid was anonymous.

In his secluded chamber the bidder downed his drink, and sent a message to the trader, “give him the vitoc antidote and clean him up. Send him to my office when he is Ready.”

9 hours later the young broutor sood before the office to to his “buyer”. Since they had stopped the vitoc, he had been looking for a way to escape, preferably killing a few amarians in the process. Nothing had presented it’s self .. yet.
The door slid back to reveal a fairly basic office, a few displays on the wall, none of the religious crap he was expecting.

“My name is Astral Dominix, sit down”
The tone left the brutor in no doubt it was not a question.
“you were a capsuleer correct?”
“yes” the brutor grunted
“ then I have a use for you, you will be given your freedom, ISK and the resourses you need to do as I ask, if you accept the job. If not you will be placed back on vitoc and resold”

The brutor liked how straight forward this man was even if he was amarian.

“ok What do you want”
“go to Jasc, I’ll loan you a shuttle, meet my associate Vespa, she is another EX slave, she will explain what is needed of you..oh and one last thing. If you let me down ..I will kill you 100 times over.”

As the brutor left, Astral dispatched a message to Vespa “I’m sending you a new recruit…make me a orca pilot”

Poor choice of words.

Ok so my last little rant about people posting low sec is dead..maybe I had a poor choice of words, as I had this comment from Suleiman Shouaa

“Mate, I have to admit I am disappointed by this blogpost. You with your history in low-sec should know better then most that low-sec is not actually dead, but the general perception is that it is. In reality, its choke-full of targets if you can be bothered to look for them. If one region is empty, go to another!

Maybe you've spent too much time away from low sec?”

I gotta hold my hands up he is dead right. Low sec isn’t Dead, far from it, however I do think it could be made much better by bringing more people into lowsec. At the moment 90% of people you meet in lowsec are trying to kill you, most as part of a large fleet, what I would like to see is more “targets” for solo PVP’s to go after , mission runners explorers ect, and hence more solo/small gang PVP between PVPers in general.

So I apologise for my poor choice of words. Lowsec isn’t dead, but I feel it could be made a lot better.
…and maybe I have spent to long away from low…

tuesdays musing

I keep reading the same thing..
Every few days a blog pipes up lowsec is dieing, piracy is dieing!
Trouble is no one is doing anything about it.
Lets cut the long winded explanations, lowsec is not whgat it was because there is no reason to go there. The only real reason to go there is for PVP, and the way to win that in 90% of players eyes is to have more people than the other guy.
That’s it…the whole reason low sec is the way it is.
There are 2 things that “could” change that, first if people had a real reason to draw them into lowsec..for example a very lucrative mission that may offset the risk of losing ships, the other thing that could happen is CCP could impose a penalty on blobs, I’m not sure how, but if the bigger blobs were put at a disadvantage small skirmish warfare would return (and that’s a good thing IMO).
BUT
CCP has said it will be at least another year before anything like that gets looked at. So unless all the people saying lowsec is dead do something drastic to pull people into lowsec it will not change. And I can hardly see all the pirate corps in lowsec agreeing and saying “ok guys we are all gonna limit our fleet’s to less than 10 men” , it would be fun, but it wont happen because it would take away the easy win.

/rant over

In other news,
I had a reply from notorious ninja -Aiden Mourn- giving me some much needed advice on my recent attempt at ninjaing, I think I may give it another go as a part time guilty pleasure, to see if I can get good at it. It’s a very different idea to piracy as a lot of the time its VERY hard to get people to shoot at you, when you do you are often out numbered, and if they have any sense and switch to a pvp ship also you have NO idea what your warping back to. Piracy was much more direct..find someone ..kill em.
Still I feel with a little practice I can keep my kill board afloat while care bearing to pay for my ships.
Oh and I wanted to say a public thank you to the anonymous lovely person that gave me a fed navy heat sink for my birthday, I will put it to good* use sir!

*Good use may infer evil deeds.