Ecliptic Rift

So, what’s in your hangar?

Most of my ship names consist of trying to find something that sounds technical and might relate in some (tangential) way to the ship’s purpose. Occasionally, I give them names for specific tactical purposes, like naming a ship after another ship class, to confuse inexperienced pilots who might pick me up on the directional scanner.

Let’s see…

1x Fenrir, “Ootini”: I use this ship when moving bases, though in reality I suspect I may free up the invested capital for other things that have a better ROI. It shouldn’t take a lot of thought to figure out the name’s origin.

1x Orca, “Quantum Heliophase”: I use this ship primarily for POS ops and sometimes as a mini-freighter. This provides a pretty good example of the naming style that has served me for a long time (though I occasionally deviate from it slightly sometimes now).

1x Mastodon, “Normal Vector”: My day-to-day low-sec hauler

1x Hoarder, “Fuzzy Waffle”: I don’t remember how we named this remnant from W-space ops. I can neither confirm nor deny whether alcohol played a part in this.

4x Drake: Several of my exploration ships came from a player no longer with us, and he named all his tank-heavy W-space exploration ships “<adjective> Soul”, like “Unwavering Soul” and “Vigilant Soul”. I retained those names. I also have one named “Asymptotic Security” because of the heavy passive shield tank it carries.

1x Myrmidon, “Meshigator”: I took “Mesh Navigator”, realized it sounded too much like other ships I use for low-sec exploration (see below), and just smushed it together.

2x Cheetah, “Lattice Navigator”: Almost exclusively dedicated to exploration with some light low-sec courier work, using these ships to find deadspace pockets full of goodies led to another faux-technical name.

2x Claw, “Parabolic Series” and “Exotransportation”: These interceptors get used primarily for courier work and sometimes salvaging in lowsec. Sometimes I find a battle, like a gate camp, then wait it out and clean it up. “Exotransportation” should be particularly obvious, I suppose, though I also named it while perusing a blog about exoplanetology.

3x Heron: I use these for exploration on the cheap, often in high-sec. One of them remains unnamed, but the other two are “Neutrino Interval” and “The Seer”. Pretty sure that last one came from W-space as well, probably left over when we had to pull out quickly.

1x Maelstrom, “Meganebula”: I kept the same initial letter, but shield boosters have this odd connection to nebulae in my mind, and since this ship gets a bonus to those, the name just sort of congealed in my mind.

1x Dramiel, “Vikarion”: Named for the pilot and friend who gave me this ship for free. Well, not free. He wanted Casiella’s immortal soul, and she figured she didn’t really need it anyway.

1x Cyclone, “Whirlwind”: This name actually doesn’t refer to the hull type but to its function (gas harvesting). Not my best moment, to be quite honest.

1x Buzzard, “Dark Lightning”: Null-sec courier. You should never see it…

Bleh, clearly I have entirely too many ships.

Urbanus proteus

I’ve wanted a strategic cruiser for some time, but held off from training Racial Cruiser V because I didn’t have tech II projectiles (for a Loki) or missiles (for a Tengu). Then I realized, hmm, I do have skills for tech II drones (light and medium) and decent drone skills overall, plus pretty good armor tanking.

So here’s the Proteus fit I think I’ll use for lowsec and nullsec exploration, primarily for radar (hacking) sites. The targeting delay introduced by the cloaking device won’t matter so much to a more-or-less focused drone boat; the railguns mostly help grab aggro and add a bit of DPS. The philosophy grows from my exploration Myrmidon, and you may want to replace one of the rigs with a gravity capacitor.

According to PyFA, with this setup and my skills (plus Gallente Strategic Cruiser and Subsystems all to IV), you’ll end up with something like 27k EHP against a uniform distribution. I tuned this particular setup against Sansha rats, but of course you’ll want to adjust to your region. In particular, note that it won’t be as strong against Angels due to the Proteus’s natural weakness to explosive damage. I can tank 484 HP/s, which should really do just fine in most cases. I might end up tweaking that down, actually, if needed, so I can improve capacitor stability (this ship’s primary weakness).

I welcome additional thoughts and suggestions.


[Proteus, Exploration]

Salvager I
Improved Cloaking Device II
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
Expanded Probe Launcher I

Codebreaker I
Omnidirectional Tracking Link I
Drone Navigation Computer I
10MN MicroWarpdrive I

Medium Armor Repairer II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Reflective Membrane II
Energized Thermic Membrane II

Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Medium Auxiliary Nano Pump I
Medium Auxiliary Thrusters I

Proteus Defensive - Adaptive Augmenter
Proteus Electronics - Emergent Locus Analyzer
Proteus Engineering - Capacitor Regeneration Matrix
Proteus Offensive - Drone Synthesis Projector
Proteus Propulsion - Interdiction Nullifier

Valkyrie II x5

After Rettic mentioned his desire for a ship he’d never have to refit, the ensuing discussion reminded me of how well the Myrmidon did as an all-purpose low-sec solo exploration ship. If that’s your thing, then this ship will do quite well. I don’t quite recall which hybrid charges work best for this purpose, but they really don’t matter as the drones make up most of your offensive punch anyway. If you work primarily in a given area, you could replace the EANM with region-specific hardeners. And with 400 m³ of cargo capacity, you can pull up quite a bit of loot before needing to do something with it.

Assuming the pirates don’t get you first.

UPDATE: Thanks to sharp-eyed commenter knucklesamich, I’ve made a key change so that the fitting actually works. Due to my user error when tinkering with Python Fitting Assistant (pyfa) and trying to check actual capacitor usage, the old fitting went way over the CPU limitations of the Myrmidon. I recommend replacing the Omnidirectional Tracking Link with a Cap Recharger II. However, if you find yourself able to handle incoming fire with just one active armor repairer most of the time, you might think about using a named target painter instead. Sorry about that, and props to knucklesamich!

UPDATE 2: Some folks have asked about powergrid usage. Remember that you only need to online modules that you can use, so you might not want to keep your analyzer and codebreaker online at the same time.

[Myrmidon, Exploration]

Salvager I
Core Probe Launcher I
Improved Cloaking Device II
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M
250mm Railgun I, Antimatter Charge M

Analyzer I
Codebreaker I
10MN MicroWarpdrive I
Medium Capacitor Battery II
Cap Recharger II

Medium Armor Repairer II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Medium Armor Repairer II
Capacitor Power Relay II

Medium Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I
Medium Capacitor Control Circuit I

Hobgoblin II x5
Hammerhead II x5
Valkyrie II x5
Warrior II x5


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.

• I fitted out a new Vexor yesterday and took it out on a quick mission for Boundless Creation. Those Angel Cartel frigates and destroyers didn’t stand a chance; this could end up being very, very helpful. However, once I finish Drones V in a few days, I’ll probably use my Myrmidon a good bit more. I just don’t want to risk such an expensive ship without that extra damage from the 5th drone I’ll have learned to control.
• I spent quite a few hours picking through Sansha wrecks in Penirgman looking for survivors but found very few. However, I did recover quite a bit of equipment and salvage, to the tune of well over 12 million ISK. Their sacrifice will continue to support the Dream.
• After spending something like 100 million on minerals, I’ve begun to gear up for a large production run out of Pator. Primarily, I intend to focus on Stabbers and Thrashers, with some Ruptures next week, in addition to getting ready for some Vagabond, Muninn, and Huginn invention attempts. My Sabre attempts should be done today.
• Crvena Strijela finally saw reason and accepted the 2 million ISK contract for the head of that privateer commander. Vikarion gave me the corp title “Headhunter” based on this whole episode. I don’t know whether to smack him or buy him a drink.