Lovely weekend - with loot, kills and a taste-less POS

Mach and Scorpion......massive pay-out and sex-wee

(Quite a long post..)

A pay-out for most pirates is an important part of being. While other professions have isk generating schemes; a low-sec pirate's income can be very precarious. More so if you're solo, which I was for a long time. It was hard but it was good too. Recently, been scanning the pod pilot forums and I just wanted to link to one of Le Skunk's post about piracy in New Eden after a new pod pilot was asking if piracy could, indeed pay. Here was Le Skunk's elegant answer. I have only linked the final paragraphy. The full thread can be read here:

In return, you're the only profession in the game who makes a living blowing people up. You call no man mister. You're not skulking around in high security space with concord at your back. You don't have to bow down and ass kiss alliance leadership. No pos bashes. No ratting. No mission grind. No fiddling with 0.01 isk buy orders. Just warp and pop.

You are fighting with the biggest handicaps CCP [Sic Da Man] impose on any pvper in the game. And you are still pwning their asses.

Plus you get your own song

Le SKUNK

Amen.

The Bastards were roaming around on the Friday night, adding minor kills here and there. Business as usual really. I logged into the corporation communication net and caught up with the latest news. There was already a fleet of about nine to ten, all eager to tear into some poor pilot's ship. Over time, the fleet pilots were split over three, nearby areas. Roaming, scanning and ransoming.

I was idling in my hurricane class battlecruiser, 'Arbalast' and keeping the intelligence channels flowing. It was San Rintuu who sent a terse message to the rest of the corp, it's content bursting upon us.

"Mach and Scorp inbound to Todi." She croaked.

The pirates all poured out from the two stations and safe spots from the three neighbouring systems. There was a lot of chatter but the FC put a kosh on it immediately. The machariel is a fast battleship having been created and extensively fitted by engineers from The Angel Cartel. It is a worthy prize for any pirate to grab. This would be my third such catch. Never been involved in a ransom of a faction battleship before.

It was Proph and then Sarge who braved the gate guns and decloaked first, poised to drop down on the victims. The primary was the macherial and all points were to be allocated to it. We were not leaving anything to chance. The scorpion could run.

"Mach pointed." Said Proph.

"Mach pointed. Mach webbed. Shit, he's fast - more webs" Commented Sarge. With these two committed to the action, I urged my ship towards the gate. The gate control crews here knew us well and didn't even wait for a request, I approached the gate, there was flash and I materialised in a different system. There was the macherial, Proph and Sarge orbitting around it like vultures.

"Ronin inbound."

"Flash here. Mach Pointed."

More gate fire. More ships.

"Sellina here. Pointing. Dropping sentry drones." My overview filled up with small crosses. "Go my lovelies!" Whispered Sellinato her now deployed sentry drones.

"Ard now applying webbers. It isn't going anywhere."

"Jorge here. I can't jump yet through. Two jumps. "

"Jed arriving. Give me a target?"

"The big fecking Mach!" Guffawed Loth, flitting around in his stabber, his weapons spitting out EMP rounds.

There was a chuckle as Jedizah's Abaddon class battleship slowly turned and levelled her gun turrets at the faction battleship, a retina searing flash and the lasers joined the game.

Voice comms were crackling up as the combined firepower from the gate guns, our own guns and the Machariel's own weapons created enough localised disturbance that the static cut through most of the conversations. Ronin and I had both our 425 mm auto canons furiously cycling through our ammunition hoppers as we slammed 100s of shells into the target. The damage per second of a hurricane is fearsome. Two of them is can melt through most battleships. The Machariel was very quickly shredded. A bit too quick as we were getting ready to ransom the poor pilot. A kill is a kill but there were some grumbles that we could have gotten a nice ransom.

His companion in the scorpion inexplicably warped in, too late to assist the Machariel pilot. Jorge had arrived as well, just in time to see the dwindling explosion of the battleship dying off. All that happened was that our guns, still hot and glowing from the Machariel kill turned on the recently arrived scorpion and pummelled that ship into sputtering scrap.

What followed next had us all dumbfounded.

I approached the machariel wreck and quickly scooped the loot, my crew well used to grabbing loot and salvaging wrecks quickly and efficiently. There are loot thieves about after all.

"This is Flash. I have the loot."

"What dropped?" Asked Proph eager to know what we had managed to grab.

"All ships get off the gate and start to re-align." Ordered Ronin, efficient as usual.

I glanced through the cargo manifest; there were a number of blinking message notifications from my own crew. All asking for my attention.

"Er, some tech two goodies. Rest are all tech one and some named...." I froze. I looked closely, at the inventory. I wasn't too familiar with some of these modules.

Inventory #3554. Items recovered:

Gist X-Type 100MN Afterburner
Mizuro's Modified Stasis Webifier
Gist B-Type X-Large Shield Booster
Dread Guristas Invulnerability Field
Dread Guristas Invulnerability Field
Domination Gyrostabilizer
Republic Fleet Gyrostabilizer
800mm Repeating Artillery II
800mm Repeating Artillery II
800mm Repeating Artillery II
Caldari Navy Cataclysm Cruise Missile, Qty: 26
Republic Fleet Cruise Missile Launcher
Barrage L, Qty: 114 Capacitor Flux Coil II
Synth Frentix Booster, Qty: 3 (Cargo)
Dragon F.O.F. Cruise Missile I, Qty: 200 (Cargo)
Republic Fleet Depleted Uranium L, Qty: 1103 (Cargo)
Vespa II (Drone Bay)
Valkyrie II (Drone Bay)
Hammerhead II, Qty: 2 (Drone Bay)

Slowly, I realised what was now laying in my cargo hold.

"Flash. Report." Demanded someone, the eagerness clear.

"Er, guys. I, er. " I had trouble talking so I then linked the item descriptions to the fleet chat menu with their estimated market values. One by one.

"Holy shi..." Muttered Sarge.

"OhmyGodWeWonNewEden." Exclaimed Jed.

"Just did a sex-wee." I think that was RoninData. The communications channel was full of hoots and yells and yarrs and it was deafening. Nice to hear happy pirates. Someone was shouting.

"FLASH. DOCK UP NOW." Ordered RoninData. "NOW. DO NOT PASS GO." Raising his voice in order to get himself heard. He realised how a stray group or an act of stupidity could result in a potentially heart breaking loss.

I quickly checked the stations, a part of my brain was shouting at me not to warp to a high security empire gate. Being concorded with this loot in my ship would entail an instant corp dismissal. Never had a short hop to a station been fraught with so much tension. As soon as a docked up, I quickly signed over the lot to the safe keeping of RoninData, who also added the very nice loot from the scorpion kill. The scorpion loot also contained faction loot, though not in the same quality and quantity.

We calculated the value of the loot from the two kills would come to about 4 billion isk.

Not bad. We laughed hard and all did the ewok-dance. It was clear that the pilots of both ships had not planned ahead or expected resistance. Certainly, the scorpion pilot was quite young to be flying such a powerful ship. The fittings were lavish and the mind boggles at the monetary outlay but one suspected that either outside financial help [sic:GTCs] or even the nefarious EBAY was part of the answer.

For your delight: Macharial kill and Scorpion Kill

A cheeky pilot in a thrasher came in and tried to salvage the two wrecks, right under our noses. He was quickly killed. Naughty thrasher.

Sternhagel can bring it.
AntonioBanderas is one of the corp's best pilots but he missed the lucrative mach and scorpion kill, linking in just as I had passed the loot over to RoninData. I can not repeat what he said but the profanity filter on this blog would break under the strain.

Needless to say, 'Bandy' vowed that he was going to kill something and we can all jump off a building for all he cared.

Several minutes later, Bandy's voice came in. A bit too quiet as there was still a lot of joyous celebration on the communication server, so no-one caught his initial announcement.

"Vagabond pointed." Said Bandy, a little bit louder this time. Still there was no reply.

"VAGABOND POINTED!" Yelled Bandy.

"Check. Check. Check. Clear the channels. It's Bandy." The noise in the communication channel dropped down to a manageable level.

"Bandy. Go ahead."

Some static cut through but then Bandy came through, loud, clear and calm.

"I have a vagabond here at the Egmar gate in Arnher." There was a pause. "Am okay though, have it webbed and my drone will tear it to pieces. Am just a bit worried about his friends. The vagabond pilot is Steinkalt."

Steinkalt flies with N0Fear corporation and Bandy was close to one of the N0Fear's area of operation. He was clearly expecting company.

"We're on our way Bandy. Hold on." The fleet began to move out, most of our global criminal count downs had expired now, saving us from the opportunity fire from gate guns and station guns.

"Shit! Contact. Contact. Contact." Yelled Bandy. "Vaga is down. I have a tempest, munnin, maller, thorax, blackbird and dominix. They're on my ass."

We were still two jumps out.

"Bandy: we're inbound. Get to the Evati gate in Arnher. We're almost there."

"Negative. Bandy is going down. Bandy is going down."

The N0Fear/Sternhagel fleet melted Bandy's myrmidon down to it's constituent components.

We chased the slower Tempest into Lasleinur, catching it on the gate as it decloaked and tried to lumber away. The NoFear fleet was already smaller than ours by four ships and they had the bad fortune of being split up between two gates. We killed Tial'c's tempest with contemptuous ease. The presence of the blackbird, maller and thorax distracted us somewhat but me and Ard recognised the potential danger of the EW cruiser and dispatched it quick enough. The maller and thorax crusiers than bugged out while the muninn and dominix class battleship came roaring in, too late to save Tial'C but quick enough to get themselves well and truly snared. Coming into the fight, in small packets like they did, doomed them.

Still, much respect to N0Fear (and to Sternhagel in general) - as they do bring the fight and one has to respect them for it. They have NO FEAR, so I can't argue with that. Seek them out for some pew-pew.

Comic Strip.
Well, The Bastards has some talented individuls and I have to mention Loth'nwenar.
I feel that New Eden needs to have more comic strips. WinterBlink and his comics are the trailblazer but please check out:http://thebastards.stripgenerator.com/ (NOT WORK FRIENDLY!!!!!)

Yes, The Bastards have their very own comic strip(s).

Mention must always go Rob Repper, Jarek and Gazur who all have also put together some very funny strips but, for now - they are only on The Bastards internal forum. Have to give them all a shout out so here's Jarek's efforts.

It tells us a story of a mission runner who was jacked by us and he lost his VIPs...
Rob has a funny story about a well-known pilot who frequents our area. We have killed him many a time but he still keeps on trucking. We now decide to run away in fear as we reckon he's not what he seems. Take it away Rob...
Some of our tales of yarring are better retold in the comic form. Well done to Loth for the strip. My intention is to feature his work and others in the blog each week or so.

But there's more...
San Rintuu has a new Blog called 'Ramblings of a Bastard' and VBSarge has his literary outpourings here. San has already demonstrated his eloquence in posts to the EVE-O forum as well as in our internal forum. I love his style. Sarge is a dark horse, he has already written some outstanding materials in the form of short stories and I hope he can revisit them for my (and your) benefit. All our blogs will be linked together. Two outstanding corp mates now taken to writing down their thoughts and actions and between us all, I think people will have a more complete picture of what we, The Bastards, do in New Eden.

Overkill? No, this is New Eden
Overkill? Maybe - dropping a carrier onto a rupture that was already under sentry fire!
http://www.the-bastards.com/kb/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=3126

However, the kill mail doesn't tell the whole picture. We failed big time to get these chaps to engage us as we dropped a dread and a carrier on them before they aggressed. Premature ejaculation one can say. They wisely docked up without firing another shot and stayed there for the rest of the night. They laughed at us, which is fair enough. We executed the trap poorly.

Is there taste in EVE? [OOC]
We did end up going after a rather tasteless POS in Evati. One of the pilots who frequents Evati caught my eye last week. He has the name 'SS Deathcamp' and his bio (probably since changed) was in a poor taste, to match his name. I made a mental note to bring this up to the corp directors. More so that he was hanging around in Evati then anything else. His corporation (The Minmatar Defence Project ) had a large POS set up and and we discovered that the pos labs were named after notorious death camps, to match his rather tasteless name. It had some scramble, dampner and neut towers; nothing to worry about.

Now we tend to ransom POS owners, and ask them for a weekly fee so as they can stay unmolested. For the POS, we demanded a 100million isk a week ransom AND a change in the name of the offensive modules.

We jumped into the POS and proceeded to knock down the shields of the weapon modules. We cyno'ed in the dread that was used in the failed hot drop from Todi to help speed up the job. The mods went off line one by one. The POS owner could not do anything as we were set up now and kicking his doors in. He paid the ransom. He then changed the POS module names and apologised for a lapse in judgement in naming his modules as he did.

Winsauce.