Ecliptic Rift

Myarr!

I will admit that the idea of highsec piracy occasionally appeals to me. Hitting miners and traders to see what they’ve got? Salvaging and looting in deadspace? Shooting down overly confident agency contractors? Delicious. Sure, you have to go out and rebuild your trust with CONCORD by shooting down some NPC pirates, too, but that pays decently well on its own.

One of my associates tried it in the past, but then she disappeared for a bit on some classified assignment for the militia. I may need to find another associate to sponsor for spreading mayhem in the right places. Don’t tell the Coalition.

A former associate, Joron Darkdust, has gotten back in touch recently. He pulled himself out of whatever hellhole had swallowed him up and seems to have fallen in with some interesting folks. I hope it works out for him.

On my end of the cluster, however, I have continued my mission running for the Angel Cartel. While Curse has quite a few podders floating around, by the time I get moving, they’ve all docked up. I frequently have no other pilots in Local, and even when I do, they’ve yet to try to probe me out. Living in W-space taught me to live off the directional scanner, and so I keep a close eye on it despite the fact that it hasn’t happened yet. I believe it will soon enough, though.

Interestingly, the Cartel hasn’t had me dealing with any Republic forces out here. I suspect that the RSS has some sort of arrangement with them, because I haven’t heard of so much as a surveillance outpost. On the other hand, in addition to the expected Sansha elements, CONCORD recon forces, and occasional independent mercenaries, the Gallente Federation has quite a bit of activity out here. They like me a lot less these days.

But we all make choices, don’t we? I mean, the Cartel has sort of started to warm up. The Dominations don’t, of course, but the Archangels have, so hopefully they’ll start to have interest in working out some deals. They have things I want, I can do things they can’t, and it might even turn out that I can help with, erm, publicity.

Not only have the Sansha threatened the world, but other capsuleers have evidently lost their minds. I don’t want to get in the middle of the fighting, as I can think of lots of other ways to do well by doing good.

So I’m moving as much of my staff as I can out of the Republic. Some administrative functions will stay at the Ecliptic Rift corporate headquarters in Larkugei and others handling our remaining trade business in Rens and Hek, but they have strict instructions not to go planetside under any circumstances.

The rest of us will head to lowsec in Derelik. With much lower population levels in the Ammatar Mandate, the threat seems lowered despite the Nation’s extensive activity in the area. In fact, I intend to focus heavily on intel gathering and information warfare operations against their installations out there. This also keeps us close to Curse and the Angel Cartel. Nation won’t tangle with them too much, I expect. The Dominations will react with substantially greater ferocity than the weak CONCORD-affiliated nations, and possibly they can lend a hand with any Sansha tech my research staff can’t handle.

Now I need to go talk to Mom and get her to come with me from Eram. We’ve not spoken in some time, since that White Rose Society mess, so I can just imagine how it will go. Damn it.

Nation has decided to pick up the pace, evidently, and CONCORD knows about it. Leaks happen anyway, because (say it with me again) information wants and deserves to be free.

Some folks act surprised, others act vigilant. The Empire suddenly thinks taking slaves seems like a bad thing for somebody to do (as long as somebody else does it, anyway). The Federation now starts to turn on itself when its people exercise their much-vaunted rights of individual freedom and liberty to make their own decisions.

Suddenly the world has been set afire by the mindless slaves who tell us that capsuleers are the “heirs to a mistake” and that they’ll fix that. CONCORD flails about, concerned almost entirely with maintaining its own hegemony rather than actually accomplishing its mission. They’d like to do both, but if keeping people safe means that they don’t get to control everything themselves, then they start to re-evaluate their goals.

The whole thing makes me ill. I need to get out of here.

Pilots out in the darkest depths of lawless space know that not everything matches the cozy little categories that their colleagues back in CONCORD-policed space expect. This applies to conflicts as much as it does to the places and objects they find in their travels.

One such type of object occasionally shows up on their scanners. At its small size, ships generally need to engage their sensor boosters to lock onto it, even at relatively short ranges. Human eyes have difficulty keeping it in focus as it seems to slip in and out of reality. This object (occasionally called a “quantum olive”) has intrigued researchers since its initial discovery in the Curse region. Perhaps it represents some natural phenomenon, or perhaps the remnants of a Jovian experiment, or perhaps an even older culture. Perhaps some ancient non-human intelligence built it and let it float away once the artifact no longer held its interest, as a child with a suddenly-boring plaything. In truth, no one knows. Or anyone who does know hasn’t said publicly, at any rate…

Like everyone else in the transportation terminal, he stood transfixed while watching the reports come across the data screens.

He didn’t travel often. Wife, children, and a government desk post tied him down. But he didn’t get the urge to travel, either, so this suited him just fine.

Something had changed a few months ago. He found himself thinking more, reminiscing, examining the paths he’d not followed earlier in life. What if he’d studied in a different field? What if he’d not taken this position? What if they hadn’t had children? What if he hadn’t married her?

Perhaps these questions occur to all men of a certain age and station. Not all men had the access he did, though, working for the Republic Security Services. So he began to indulge his “what-if” dreams, furtively examining a file here and there. He reasoned that he hadn’t hurt anyone, as he hadn’t passed on the information to anyone or even saved it. But what about that recruiting officer that had pulled him into the RSS? What happened to the students he knew who’d entered the Fleet? Had anyone analyzed the relation of career trajectory in the RSS with family status? What about his own wife’s past?

The inquiries turned into an addiction for him, the endless data dumps like a drug that kept his mind off his own dreary life. They provided far more interest for him than just processing CONCORD criminal reports and trying to keep the peace when he got home.

One of his what-if scenarios drifted to a girl he’d known back in school. Time had dulled his memory somewhat, or perhaps burnished it, so that he could no longer see her face so precisely in his dreams. But as he thought more about their relationship, or at least their friendship, he believed he saw more potential in that past than he’d realized. Perhaps his life would have turned into something better, or at least different, if that had gone somewhere.

And that tormented him.

So now he dug further. She’d moved to Luminaire sometime in the distant past. He found her dossier and kept reading. In fact, now she was a civilian employee for CONCORD, working in their Yulai datacenter as some sort of budget manager.

An eternity of restless nights later, he had enough. He needed to see her, to know what could have happened. Late one night, after the children had been put to bed, he coldly informed his wife that he had to travel and didn’t know when, or if, he’d return. No, he didn’t want to discuss it. Yes, he’d contact them later. No, he didn’t want her to try to find him. Yes, of course his job knew.

She stared at him with un-cried tears in her eyes as he finished packing his bags and left for the shuttle terminal to catch a liner for Yulai.

Then it happened, and, like everyone else in the transportation terminal, he stood transfixed while watching the reports come across the data screens.

Yargok, who writes the excellently-named blog Wherever I May Roam, had a great post idea about discussing your RL job in EVE terms. So, how would your exact job look, translated into EVE?

In my job, I’d work for some financial-industry megacorp, monitoring our portion of the fluid router network for security violations or attempts to breach our network. I’d spend time poring through the connection and transaction data, all to protect the corporation’s net from folks trying to run codebreakers on our data systems. And I’d frequently work with the CONCORD CRC in order to coordinate threat response and share intel on the sorts of activity we’re seeing or might see. Yes, the anti-explorer, that would be me.

This probably explains why I play the sort of character I do: escapism, the anti-reality…

Image credit mugley

The intricacies of power politics never cease to confuse me. I spent some time out in Syndicate this week, conferring with the Intaki Bank offices in TXW-EI (and a few other corporations) to clear up some confusion from a few months ago. An agent had asked me to remove a troublesome Minmatar Republic convoy, and I had trouble. We exchanged some heated words and evidently he filed a report indicating that the Syndicate couldn’t trust me. I’ve got it all fixed now, or nearly so.

But during this renegotiation process, when Louis Stiers, another agent, had asked me to deal with some police surveillance squadrons and listening posts, an odd request came up. Interspersed with various assignments focused on the Khanids, apparently working with the CONCORD Directive Enforcement Department (DED), and, to a lesser degree, the Republic and even the Gallente Federation, I received a nudge to hit a Thukker convoy. When the agent transmitted the contract to me, I immediately turned it back around. Not only did the Thukker tribe have traditionally good relations with the Syndicate (if a little strained due to Maleatu Shakor‘s political efforts), but they have a station in the same system. I may not mind starting all sorts of violence among podders, but I’d rather stay out of an underworld war against two large groups with whom I really like working, particularly where Back Alley has an office and various business interests.

For a bit, I wondered if they not might have just tried to test me. I thought this because, as soon as I rejected it, the agent immediately gave out an assignment to deal with some regular scum who had made the mistake of falling behind on rent payments for their pleasure hub location in the next system up the pipe.

Yeah, right...

At any rate, the Bank has assigned me another agent for now, one Guispon Meganier. He understands how to use my abilities a little better, so I’ve done some discreet deliveries and even inserted a marine detachment into a Syndicate station whose guard commander had gotten a little corrupt (well, independently corrupt). Unfortunately, I lost my Prowler to a Nighthawk underneath the station while I argued with traffic control to let me back into the hangar.

So I clone-jumped back to Oursulaert for a few days to attend to business there. In the meantime, I consulted with my old friend Eran Mintor, who seemed equally troubled. Wonder if I should go talk to somebody back at the Tribe about this?

Image credits josh.liba and america.gov

It wasn't me!

Despite what Egonics and their ilk will tell us, copying music isn’t piracy. Doing violence against somebody’s ship to gain something from their cargo or passengers, though, definitely qualifies. And pilots can make a bit of ISK engaging in piracy, even in “high security space”.

So while CONCORD provides consequences., pilots have to provide their own safety. They can do so generally through tactical awareness, battlefield intelligence, and good flying. For example, let’s say a mining barge, such as a Retriever, sits calmly in a belt in 0.5 security space, mutilating rocks for commercial gain. Perhaps the local non-pod craft pirates (NPC rats) might harass them a little, but they keep a few combat drones deployed just to deal with the pesky little frigates. (That NPC pilot provides a great example of somebody with poor tactical awareness.) The Retriever doesn’t have much in the way of defensive equipment because the pilot doesn’t intend to get into any fights.

Now, a podder ship warps into the belt, maybe in a combat cruiser like a Rupture, and burns toward their ship. It could have arrived just to take out the rats and get the CONCORD bounty, but that assumption doesn’t actually protect the barge very much. Suddenly, the cruiser bumps the barge off of a possible alignment to a celestial, locks it, and opens fire.

CONCORD takes a few seconds to warp to the belt. During that time, the Rupture can get off four or five rounds from each of four autocannons, maybe a few heavy assault missile salvos, all enhanced by target painters. The Retriever will have exploded before CONCORD arrives, and the destruction of that pirate ship won’t console the victim very much. The pirate warps away from both wrecks in his pod.

Then it gets worse: another ship warps in and loots the wrecks. Oddly enough, those wrecks don’t belong to the victim pilot, but to the pirate. Now the victim, who might have swapped to a combat ship like a Rifter, or maybe a friend of said victim, open fire on this third ship out of frustration. Bad idea, because CONCORD enforces the law without favoritism or empathy. The victim of the first engagement has now broken the law and they will warp in before methodically scramming, jamming, and blamming. And the third ship gets away with the loot, for which the market will generally pay a decent amount if that Retriever had nice equipment on it. The Rupture pilot, who would have insured the ship that CONCORD destroyed, also probably used cheap “meta level 0″ equipment and not lost very much ISK. In fact, it could well be that the equipment from the Retriever easily pays the remainder of the replacement of the pirate’s ship.

Not that this happened in Nakugard tonight with any of my associates. Or Hek. (Or Uttindar, but that incident can get left out of this discussion…) No, I just think that pilots should understand how all this works.

Image credit Dyanna

Colonies depend on towers

For a long time, I’ve dreamed of a world without centralized power structures. A world where people work together in an effort to build something new, with their efforts rewarded with freedom and liberty.

My dream just took another step on the road to reality with the establishment of a starbase for the Back Alley Trading Company in a wormhole system.

Granted, it took a bit to find our foothold. We’d spent several days scouting every wormhole we could find, looking for a place that met our criteria. One of my scouts found a promising connection in the Khanid region, but a couple of other pod pilots had gotten there already for a quick raid. I vectored in another scout and raced across 17 jumps to reach it myself in my Drake.

A Maller and Myrmidon evidently paid no attention while my scouts stalked them, so when I arrived, I had a scout give me a warp-in point. I landed on the grid and started spewing missiles from range. Of course, we didn’t have any warp disruption on them from that range and didn’t want to use covops frigates for that purpose, so they fled back to K-space. In reality, while I wouldn’t have minded a kill or two, this accomplished our primary tactical goal of clearing the system. I had little intention of actually destroying their ships (though I would have done so if they’d chosen to engage).

When I chased them back into Ashi, the wormhole closed behind me, with my scouts still inside. Perfect.

We hurriedly arranged logistics while they probed out a new entrance and set up our starbase. We’ve already cleared out quite a bit of Sleeper activity, plus some gas clouds. I left pod for a while and came back to find that my associates had lost a couple of barges due to not watching their directional scanners or staying aligned. As I told them, I don’t mind losses, but I do mind losses from which they learn no lessons. I think they got the point… actually, I know they got the point.

A few other lessons I learned: in tower management, you can choose which roles can perform various tasks on specific structures in the base. The settings for Ship Management Arrays and Corporate Management Arrays have selections for Starbase Fuel Technician, Config Starbase Equipment, Corporation, and Alliance. I set those to Corporation and then created a title, “W-space Pilot”, for the folks out there that gave them access to the proper hangars and such. This lets everyone do their jobs without having the ability to take the whole thing offline themselves. Security matters, and I’ve learned paranoia in my years as a podder. (Fortunately, I had a consultant come in and help us with the organization, so we have the needed bureaucracy already in place to grow quite a bit.)

Also, if you want your tower to shoot at neutrals, you need to set the defense AI to target anyone below 0.1, not the default 0.0. Obvious in hindsight but I just did too many things at once.

Later we’ll move to a system with a higher rating, but for now, this system gives us a great opportunity to work out the kinks in our operation and get some of the newer pilots accustomed to flying in space without CONCORD’s paternalistic protection.