Category: EVE

The war room aboard the Kinetic Regret was abuzz—not with alarms or enemy fleets, but with what Gobbins could only describe as logistical existential dread. Half the holo-displays showed ship inventories. The other half showed spreadsheets that might’ve once been ships.

Gobbins, coffee already at maximum bitterness, stood at the center of the storm, projecting a calm that was roughly 70% practiced and 30% resignation.

“Alright,” he began, addressing the growing knot of crew, FCs, and random sig members who had wandered in looking for answers or possibly leftover rations. “Here’s the smartest move right now: start selling your excess assets. Slowly if you have to. Doesn’t matter if we’re staging now, next week, or next war—you’ve got too much junk in too many places.”

He paused, letting that settle in. No one argued. They all knew.

“Also, if you want Pankrab to cover your crab beacon, stick to the systems Dyno listed. If you crab somewhere dumb, you die somewhere dumb. That’s policy.”

From the side, Comms Officer Laski raised a hand without lifting his head from the holomap. “I might be brainfarting, but I saw an announcement about Malpais and then a list of systems that stretched into Etherium Reach. Are we talking about two different staging zones, or did I accidentally divide by regional borders again?”

Gobbins didn’t look up. “Ask Pankrab. I don’t know what they settled on. I’m not your regional crab life coach.”

Lieutenant TS13 chimed in next, typing with one hand while dragging a hauler fit from some forgotten war into an export queue. “Thanks for the heads-up, sir. I’m moving the leftovers from R1O to MJ- to get everything centralized. Selling off the doctrines we don’t use, the ships I don’t fly, and the excess hulls I don’t personally need. Idea is to be lighter, more agile. Like… logistics yoga.”

“Good,” Gobbins muttered. “If only the rest of the fleet knew the ancient practice of dealing with their hangars.”

A quiet moment passed, then Shan Sint leaned forward with a smile that made everyone nervous.

“Since no one’s asking,” Shan said, “is there anything we can do to help? Like, to help you, Captain. Do you need anything? Ideas? Money? Love? Understanding? Pizza?”

Gobbins blinked. “…I mean, if people need help moving stuff with Ship Maintenance Bays, offer that. There’s a lot of help available already, probably more than anyone’s actually using. Beyond that—defend cynos. It makes life easier. Cynos make the world go round.”

From engineering, Vilkko Okanata piped up, eyes half-buried in a local channel argument.

“Captain, there’s talk of the market module in MJ- being taken out. Any truth to that?”

Gobbins grimaced. “The Keepstar itself might be unanchored. If that happens, the market goes with it.”

Vilkko looked up. “Right, but I’m hearing that the module itself is being shut down. Not a maybe. A full ‘this-is-happening’ situation. Not even tied to the station unanchoring. One of the NBIs said it’s definitely going offline. Is that confirmed?”

Gobbins stared at the ceiling like the answer might be up there. It wasn’t.

“I’ll get back to you,” he said at last. “Until then, don’t treat MJ- like your personal vault. It might be a trade hub today, and a salvage site tomorrow.”

At the back of the room, Gallente Citizen 4586793463 silently jotted something down in their notepad, never speaking, never looking up.

“Great,” Gobbins said, running a hand through his hair. “We’re in a warzone, half the fleet’s hoarding Maelstroms like they’re rare NFTs, and no one knows if the station they’re in will exist next week. Logistics is a go.”

He downed the rest of his coffee and muttered, “God help us if someone actually asks about asset safety.”

The command deck of the Kinetic Regret hummed with low-level panic, as it always did before a major move. Captain Gobbins stood at the head of the briefing table, one hand on a steaming cup of Deathwish Quafe, the other gesturing vaguely toward the holo-map. Systems blinked and pinged behind him—none of them helpfully.

“Alright, folks,” he said, trying to sound calm, authoritative, and slightly less bitter than he felt. “I’ve got some news you’ll love. We’re moving. Again.”

A chorus of groans rippled through the crew. Someone dropped a datapad. Someone else just swore softly into a ration pouch.

Gobbins took a long sip from his mug and continued.

“Our new home is E8-4. Yes, E8-4. No, I don’t care that you just memorized the jump routes from MJ-5. That system is now dead to us. Forget MJ-5 ever existed unless you enjoy nostalgia and painful travel.”

He brought up a flashing icon on the map. “E8-4 is perfectly located to project fleets into the southern gates of our glorious, chaos-ridden territory. Which means—surprise!—we’re now a lot closer to the trouble.”

He pointed his mug dramatically. “Everything goes. Everything. From G-Q to E8-4. Subcaps, capitals, titans, your weird little loot cans, your awful decorator keepstars—pack it up. Set your deathclones to E8-4. If you forget and wake up in G-Q after a welp, that’s on you.”

Lieutenant Keleios Shizaru raised a hand. “Sir, what about Pankrab?”

Gobbins didn’t miss a beat. “Staged in E8-4. Standing fleet, too. So yes, you’ll be dying much closer to home now. Efficiency!”

He flicked to a new screen. “Seeders, move your junk. Market tax is now 0% to make it marginally less painful. No excuses. You want to restage a doctrine fit for 200 ISK less, now’s your moment.”

“Captain,” someone mumbled from the back, “what about the O-V Keepstar?”

Gobbins sighed. “Ah, yes. Some of our less-than-essential real estate is going away. For example, that charming yet utterly indefensible Keepstar in O-V? Unanchoring. Say your goodbyes. If you’ve got ancient, shameful assets still rotting there from the last war, please extract them and move them to 9P4 at least. Or don’t, and let them be someone else’s loot pinata. I’m not your mom.”

There was an awkward pause.

Then Gobbins finished, voice steady, a little smug. “Also, for those asking—yes, we’re in direct bridge and cyno range from G-Q. Just bridge, wait out fatigue, rinse, repeat. Use Ship Maintenance Bays for the small stuff. Logistics has made it very clear that if you complain about hauling frigs, they will turn this ship around and no one gets to go to E8-4.”

He shut off the holo-map with a flourish. “Questions?”

Silence.

Then from engineering: “Do we get a moving day pizza?”

Gobbins grinned. “You get a moving day. You want pizza, bridge it in yourself.”

Found a neat C2 shattered wormhole recently, and decided to take the stratios out for a spin. Except I have no idea how to fly one, I’ve never flown anything that does armor tanking, and I haven’t used drones in a long time either (though I am maxed out on drone skills – the tengu that I adore doesn’t use any).

So I immediately warped to a bountiful gas site, and got pinned down by rats. Thankfully a wormlife freeport resident was there in their Gila, and they absolutely saved my ass. That was awkward.

After spending one entire day flying the stratios, I’ve already decided it’s just not the ship for me – and I jumped back to HS, grabbed my Tengu, and tweaked the fit a little bit. My main issue with the Tengu is always that I need to resupply ammo and the amount of space it takes, and I’ve decided that’s fine, I’ll just deal with it.

Maybe I didn’t need to fly something with quite so much bling, anyway. Hunters tend to look at a Stratios and decided it needs to die, immediately.

Anyway, back to the stratios. After clearing the C2 shattered rats, I stuck around to salvage the wrecks (using drones). A few seconds after the freeport resident landed on grid with his covetor ready to huff some gas, someone who had been in system quietly ratting away +1 friend showed up – and I immediately warped off. The covetor wasn’t so lucky. The visitors were in an Ikitursa, which I am not familiar with at all. I forget what their friend was flying, I think it was a garmur. Either way, I wasn’t about to stick around to look too closely.

I also saw my first Tholos yesterday, Wingspawn popped in as they were being chased out of a C13 by someone else. Unfortunately they did not make it, but it was still pretty neat to watch.

As always, fly your way! o7

I love trying out new apps and web sites and things that help make EVE Online a little easier for me – so when I heard there was a new mapping app, I was interested. It’s called Wanderer, and it has (at this moment, at least) a pretty active developer but it IS still in development, so things might go sideways sometimes.

I recently started using Tripwire to plot out my adventures, it’s the OG as far as mapping goes (minus just using a good ‘ol pen and paper) but it can be a bit too old fashioned. It has grown on me the last couple of weeks and is my preferred method of mapping right now but I also wanted something different for my non-signal cartel characters. My feeling towards mapping programs also changes because I really liked Pathfinder – which is still running, but is no longer being developed (from what I understand). A bunch of instances that I was using have shut down, so I can’t host my maps there any more – and that was getting annoying.

Hence wanderer.

You can share your maps between an access list, you can turn out auto tracking, add tags, and any other number of map-like features. One thing tripwire does that I don’t think either pathfinder or wanderer have done is allow for map masks, I can see other signal cartel mapping if I have my own set to corp. This helps me in so many ways, I can’t even begin. It’s certainly a feature that wanderer should perhaps look at.

In any case, we’ll see how long I stick with it for. I’m not too bothered by some of the statistics not showing up unless you pay – I can either pay, or just use zkill or dotlan (or even the in game map) to see these statistics if that’s something I care about. In most cases it doesn’t make a difference to me, unless I’m hauling something expensive around.

Speaking of – I did take a hauling trip this week to bring some stuff into the Wormlife Freeport. More about that in another post.

Fly your way! o7

I was hanging out in in a C2 with my Tengu when I decided to do a little combat site. They’re not worth much ISK at that level, only 24m or so, but as I completed the site, a heron warped in from an NPC corp. They saw me there, and warped off.

Curious.

Unless they were a brand new player and didn’t know better, there’s zero reason for a heron to warp to a combat relic/hacking site, and even though they were in an NPC corp, they were NOT a new player – so I figured something must be up (as usually is in the case of EVE Online).

The C2 had a C1 connection and two HS connections, but not much else. The C1 had a POS stick set up though, and a NS static. A few seconds later a hound showed up on d-scan (a covert ops ship that deals with instant lock and torpedo so they have a lot of range), and I had an ah-ha moment. This is why it’s important to just spam the V key (d-scan by default) any time you’re out and about in a WH. I cloaked up and moved away from the site a bit. Sure enough the heron returned. I knew they must have been scouting for the hound, even though I didn’t see the hound on d-scan any more (covert ops, so of course they were just stealthed). I decided my 1b+ ship +implants were not worth losing over 20m in blue loot, so I wandered off for a while and completed some hacking sites down the chain and came back with 150m in loot from that. When I returned almost 2h later, I saw that they had indeed looted my wrecks – but at least I lived to tell the tale, and didn’t lose my ship.