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Posted by: Havohej : Category: ¶ Far and wide. Sometimes, that’s how you have to travel in search of fun or profit in New Eden. Sometimes, that’s where you have to look for affordable equipment, especially if you’re like me and have committed so many crimes that the Four Empires don’t allow you in their high-security systems.
¶ If you’re lucky, you’ve got a close friend or two who might be persuaded to pick things up for you and bring them to your lowsec base of operations. I’ve managed to befriend a young Caldari capsuleer with a penchant for Badgers - the last few days, he’s been invaluable as many of the things I need to outfit the “Wendigo” are either unavailable in low-security areas of Molden Heath or they’re ridiculously expensive. It saves me quite a bit of ISK and travel, and what’s more, the Caldari works for Tobacco.
¶ Still, while Tobacco isn’t overly expensive, it adds up. And though CONCORD pays well for killing Angel Cartel employees by the Machariel-load in Omist, that’s not one of my favorite pastimes. Not that I mind the wholesale slaughter of less-skilled fighters… it’s just boring. Besides, I think of myself as a pirate and shouldn’t a pirate make his living off of other capsuleers? It was time to hunt.
¶ I’d heard that, when in a time of extreme, insurmountable and inescapable danger, a pod pilot might simply shut down all of his ship’s primary and secondary systems, logging off his connection to the vessel through the unique interface created by the capsule technology. The idea is that upon realizing that the pod pilot’s connection to the ship’s systems has been terminated, all of the ship’s available power will be diverted from all of its other systems to the warp drive, flinging the ship to a random point in space and effectively out of harm’s way. This emergency warp, using all of the ship’s available power for the warp core, is generates a strong enough warp field to defeat any manner of warp scrambling. This is called a “logoffski”.
¶ I’d also heard that, when a pod pilot uses this tactic to escape from harm, they must make sure that they have not come under fire already, because it takes much longer for the ship’s power to be diverted to the warp drive if it has recently been employed in defense of the ship whether it was being used to power weapons systems, shield systems or armor systems. I’d heard that it can take up to fifteen minutes for a ship to enter emergency warp under these circumstances. If a ship is sufficiently sturdy, it might just last the 15 minutes and escape destruction.
¶ I present to you a Tale of Two Logoffskis.
¶ flashfresh wrote that hunting in New Eden is a case of Feast or Famine. “Some weeks,” he said, “there is a bonanza of loot and ransom and then there are weeks and weeks of nothingness.” Operating primarily in Omist for the benefit of my corporation, the only action I see tends to be defense against the random gangs roaming through in nano-fitted heavy assault or recon cruisers. Every once in a while, it’ll be something else… like the three command ships that came in last week.
¶ Anyway, operating primarily in deep space, I don’t get many opportunities to look for fun in Empire, and I never get any decent opportunities for profit. I had accepted long ago that, for the moment, mine would be a life of Famine.
¶ Until last night.
¶ Warning: This entry is quite long, but then, it was an eventful night!
¶ “ENGINEERING! WHY AREN’T WE AT WARP YET!?”
¶ I couldn’t understand it. The Rupture-class cruiser that I’d taken into C9N was brand-new and shouldn’t be having any problems reaching ¾ velocity at all. I also couldn’t understand why Engineering hadn’t responded.
¶ “ENGINEERING - STATUS!”
¶ “Sir, you’re at the Republic Fleet Cloning Facility in Gulfonodi,” came the reply - the speaker was definitely not a part of my 0.0 engineering crew.
¶ I reached up and wiped the artificial amniotic fluid from my eyes and sure enough, I was sitting up in a clone vat. Everything had happened so fast…. The fleet commander had called for the support vessels and we’d leapt into warp… there had been a gunner at the station we were attacking, and then a large fleet of enemy battleships and heavy assault cruisers warped in. I locked the battleship that was designated primary just as Aura warned me that the station’s guns were resolving on us. I gave the order to warp out….
¶ Oh. Now I get it. *sigh*
¶ It’s been a long time coming. With all of the things that I needed to do to help me build a corporation and ensure that my pilots don’t have to worry too much about the tedious parts of being in 0.0, I have had to make some sacrifices in skill training here and there, like training to fly a cargo-rigged Mammoth-class industrial ship. And then, due to the fact that many of my people want to fly battleships or HACs, I had to train to fly the interceptors - it doesn’t matter how strong your fleet is if you’ve got no tackler, right?
¶ And all the while, the ship I really wanted was the Wolf.
