Category — Gallery

It is gonna be hell

That was my first reaction when I heard my account had been unbanned.

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Capsuleer is a great skill monitoring application for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

With their recent 2.0 update, I decided it was due time to give it a review!

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A big thanks and congratulations to those who participated, the next time I am in need for some good art I’ll make sure to start another contest.

Prizes

1. 10 million ISK
2. 5 million ISK
3. 2 million ISK
4. Single run Rokh BPC valued at 1 million ISK
5. Single run Rokh BPC valued at 1 million ISK
6. Single run Scorpion BPC valued at 750 k ISK
7. Single run Scorpion BPC valued at 750 k ISK

I deviated a little from the announced prizes.  The reason for this is only because I received 7 screenshots that were all wonderfully done.  I was a little disappointed by the lack of entries while there were 2 weeks to submit photos, but it was nice to have some readers participate.

I chose to use all of them in the new headers, and each winner will be contacted to pick up their prize!

Winning Shots

#1 By ZeSparrow

#2 By Yargok

#3 By Koori

#4/5 By BlankStare

#4/5 By Ix Forres

#6/7 By Andrius Victor

#6/7 By Morphisat

Feburary 9, 2009 >> April 6, 2009

This is a long one that has been long overdue.  Lots of pictures so enjoy!

Skills

Well the NH has finally finished its training.  I still need to get heavy missiles up to 5 to be able to use T2 launchers but right now there are more important things to get over with.

Coming up on my plan is to get my alt to be able to produce more efficiently.  That should take about 2 more days from today.  After that it is back on with my main to get his leaderships skills over and done with so he can move on and start cross training for Amarr and Minmatar ships after my Gallente cruiser skill reaches level 5!  I want the Ishtar!

I will be doing some optimization to my skill plan to get max efficiency from a lot of these perception based skills as I will also need to train up lasers, artillery, and more weapon skills in general.

PvE

With the prowess of the NH I have definitely done some missions.  I sped through them with no problems.  In fact, if you have not noticed, the HD camera drones I purchased are doing good work.

Since my Caldari standings are at 9.95 already I decided to start doing missions for different corporations.  My first pick was Spacelane Patrol but after a look, most of their agents were too far away.  I took another gander at the available Caldari corps around and saw that Corporate Police Force had a level 4 agent in my home system.  Wonderful!

Before I began working under another corp I used my free time to cash in the loyalty points with the CN and was able to sell everything I got for a cool 200 million.

Aside from missions I did some extensive exploration for a little bit.  I went into wormholes, found some hacking cans, did some unknown encounters, and met a pirate.  I recorded the events of the unknown encounters and hopefully I will have time to analyze what went right and what went wrong, then releasing the logs for you to see and learn from my mistakes!

Let us talk about WHS (wormhole space).

While I do find the prospect of finding exotic ores in WHS to be exciting but the dangers involved are just too risky for me right now.

Some people are such idiots that they do not perform any research before taking on huge tasks it surprises me.  These guys brought in a POS in this WHS, which is fine.  What stunned me is the fact that they also brought a Cyno Jammer Array and even took the time to anchor it!  The ships they had with them were 3 industrials and 1 Harbinger.  At that moment I really wished the WH I came in was not close to collapsing!  Looked like they were going to stay for awhile too!

The amount of exploration, feelings of fear, feelings of intrepidity, and the jaw dropping backdrops WHS has to offer simply rejuvenated my desire to play EVE.

PvP

PvP action is lacking.  Lately I haven’t even had a good theory craft session about it.

Industry & Trade

While the pew pew side of combat PvP is lacking, I am doing a lot of competitive market trading.  Well not trading per say, but selling a lot of my stuff and then buying more to keep up with my production lines.

I am building a lot more T1 items to sell these days because the amount of volume being moved is just incredible.  I attribute this fact to the release of Apocrypha; so many people are exploring and fit T1 because they are afraid of losing their ship in unknown space.  Things like guns, missile launchers, ammo, and drones all sell pretty good right now.

My POS is still standing (and hopefully will remain standing).  It looks to be a good investment though it does get very annoying that I have to go refuel it and that is just a pain.

Wealth

As production increases with skills and the market being so whacked as it is, I am taking advantage of all that I can get.

After spending about 360m on the Nighthawk, selling a bunch of faction stuff, and ISK being so fluid all the time I broke the billion mark and now sitting on 1.5b.

Talking about so much money brings me back to the olde days, when it was nessessary to fly 10 jumps just to save a million and scourging the market for 10 minutes to save a few hundred thousand.

On the market is another 150m waiting to be sold.  I don’t worry too much about prices because over the week everything gets sold and when I relog on the weekend I’m good to go.  Ah, I like being a weekend warrior!

Question

Now it is your turn, what have you been doing?

Is a command ship is better than a battleship at doing level 4 missions?

I have seen this question being posed many times in the forums and below one of my Mission In A Minute videos.

• http://www.eve-search.com/thread/401528
• http://www.eve-search.com/thread/576272
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alCnBDLtkOM

This topic is quite debatable, but all of the following are only my experiences on how the two types of ships compare.

In my ramble I will be comparing the Nighthawk, Raven, and the CNR (Raven Navy Issue).

Just to make things clear, this article will focus on the ability to complete missions in the said ships with my skills; they are not very super or very the suck, just average.

When missioning, it should be for one’s ship to be able to kill the enemies in quick time while having a tank that is able to stand up to some punishment when taking the time to kill the enemies.   There are many ways to have a tank, weather that be removing the source of damage or just having a constant replenishment to the shields/armor/hull to keep it stable depends on your ship setup.

The following stats for these three ships are taken directly from EFT based on some of the most popular and useful setups I have found and modified:

DPS

• Nighthawk: 407 (Missiles: 331, Drones: 75, Damage/Volley: 1752)
• Raven: 358 (Missiles: 237, Drones: 121, Damage/Volley: 2368)
• CNR: 493 (Missiles: 372, Drones: 121, Damage/Volley: 2368)

As anyone would assume, damage is one of the most important aspects of fitting our ships to kill.  Obviously here the NH (Nighthawk) does more damage than the regular T2 fit Raven (+49) but puts out less than the CNR (-86).  This is raw damage so to speak.  The two platforms compete and if anyone who has been missioning in the Raven for a few weeks can afford to buy the CNR, but here is the catch, not 90%  of enemies are battleships on Level 4’s.

What not everyone realizes is that the thing is with every mission there are a good mix of frigates, cruisers, BC (battlecruisers), and BS (battleships).  Command ships use medium sized weaponry and as a result chew through anything BC or smaller than the hammerhead drones in the Raven will.

My NH takes down cruisers faster than either a torpedo or cruise missile user would in most situations.  Frigates are vaporized after one or two volleys of missiles.  Sure the battleships take longer, but it is not just the pure DPS that matter; it is your ability to deal damage to all of the targets efficiently that sets your overall missioning pace.  Just because EFT says there is a higher raw damage output does not mean you can kill faster.

Defence

• Nighthawk: 688 Defense (40% cap stable)
• Raven: 620 Defense (54% cap stable)
• CNR: 601 Defense (52% cap stable)

With the extra base resistances of command ships, these things are meant to naturally tank just as much as a fitted up BS.  With these extra resistances this means while less of an extra tank is fitted on, more slots are available to be used for the damage part of things.

Sometimes more gank equals more tank.  In missions, a lot of players that fly the Raven go after the scrambling frigates and try to eliminate the cruisers before they finally start shooting at the battleships.  This method of doing things result in more damage being taken by the ship when it is killing the enemies that deal the small stuff.

With the NH and its monstrous tank I can grab the aggro of the entire room, set the drones on the frigates, and start killing the BC and cruisers.  After everything dies, then I start on the battleships.  Since they die much quicker this method works.

Effective Hit Points

• Nighthawk: 97,806
• Raven: 52,141
• CNR: 132,932

Seriously, when you are doing missions, EHP (effective hit points) do not matter.  This is not an accurate attribute to judge on for measuring ones tank.  Still, the NH has almost double the EHP than the Raven, and a little more than 2/3 of the CNR.

Speed

• Nighthawk: 375 m/s
• Raven: 118 m/s
• CNR: 118 m/s

Speed is critical in PvE.  Some battleship pilots do not move in missions, some battleship pilots complain that their ships get blown up.

In a smaller ship, a speedier ship, they are without a doubt more likely to avoid damage.  In situations with long distances between gates or objects, speed is critical to get to the destination.

This speed is also a form of tank.  Although it only plays a small part, paired with the signature radius of the ship this disrupts the enemy’s turret tracking and missile damage.

Signature Radius

• Nighthawk: 334 m^2
• Raven: 460 m^2
• CNR: 460 m^2

In addition to speed, command ships have signature radius on their side, unless it is quad-shield-extended.

In larger sizes, battleships take full damage from all forms of damage.  With the smaller size command ships take less from torpedoes and cruise missiles.

Scan Resolution

• Nighthawk: 224.3 mm
• Raven: 97.8 mm
• CNR: 97.8 mm

Locking enemies means less time wasted not using missiles, guns, or drones.

Against the same targets, the NH will take less than half of the time to lock than the Raven. Once the Raven achieves lock that darn spider drone would be a floating scrap already after a volley of heavy missiles and a flight of drones from the NH.

Small and nimble targets will never be your woe again…

Align Time

• Nighthawk: 7.4 seconds
• Raven: 10.5 seconds
• CNR: 10.5 seconds

If you really need to get the hell out of a place when you are not aligned, the NH has a much better chance to survive than the Raven, period.