The Darkblade Crime Family

I talk about my alts pretty frequently. Though I'm not sure that I've ever said what each of them does despite being asked on occasion. Time to put pen to paper.

I use a total of five alts across two accounts:
 

1. On the same account as Kirith. Back when Kirith went outlaw, which lets face it didn't take long! I needed someone to haul ships and supplies to low-sec. This alt was made to do just that with a Hoarder. Since being in The Tuskers & since flying larger hulls I haven't needed or been able to use the Hoarder, tending instead to use corpmates logistics or my own Freighter which another alt flies. She now mostly sits in a station doing station trading with very few market orders.
2. Also on the same account as Kirith. This one sits in Jita 4-4 and very rarely undocks. This character can only fly basic frigates. Used predominantly to buy and sell for Kirith. When loots get shipped to Jita she receives and sells them and conversely she buys the ships and supplies for Kirith being sending them to him. In her spare time she station trades with the basic number of market orders.
3. On my second account and originally intended to be of all things a mining alt! It's even trained too fly a Hulk and has one too, the theory was to mine whilst afk. Even afk I found this pretty tedious especially when I had to frequently log out to my prober. Plumping for a far more passive source of income I retrained him as a station trader operating out of Rens. He's been docked there ever since. His trade skills are one level from maxed on a single skill though I only use around 70 orders daily. All he does nowadays is station trade and the odd contract trade.
4. On the second account and operates as my prober. Contrary to popular belief does not fly a boosting ship! All I do is probe with it, though I really would benefit from maxing out his probing ability one day.
5. Last one on the second account. She flies my Freighter when needed which is occasionally at best. Otherwise she runs Caldari Navy level 4 missions in a Drake when I'm unable to pirate due to real life circumstances. She's pulling together the isk for the Thanatos she's training for.

Hope that clears things up

June 2010 Character Review

It's a couple of days late, for which I apologise.

June has been a weird month for me, it kicked off with the Alliance Tournament which seems like oh so long ago. Then I was swept up with the Dramiel whirlwind and destroyed a host of ships with it. Since the loss of the Dramiel though I have struggled to find the inclination to fly. Tonight for example I was determined to get out there and fly. And I did just that, but only for 25 minutes. In that 25 minutes I managed to lose Blog Moar!, the Wolf which I have talked about a couple of times. It was lost valiantly tackling a Myrmidon whilst a corp mate attacked it with his Ishtar. Now I am logged off again feeling a bit "Meh, can't be arsed". The biggest factor in this for me is that June also saw my trusty laptops graphics card overheat and completely wreck my laptop. I have been attempting to fly on my desktop PC but I just can't get my mojo using a desktop. Fortunately though my new laptop is scheduled to arrive on Monday so I should be back to my pillage & plundering ways soon enough.

After some catch up on the Rifter plan for having diverted to the Dramiel I had three level V skills to catch this month before getting myself into the interleaving of plans. Motion Prediction, Rapid Fire & Sharpshooter are now all resplendent at level V, Hull Upgrades V has only two days remaining now. 229 days remaining on the Rifter plan. I don't expect much progress on that plan through July as I will be getting Medium Projectile Turret to V along with Medium Autocannon Specialisation to IV. Maybe just squeezing out one or two Rifter skills.

I have purchased my first Cruiser hulls already in anticipation. Five Ruptures & Stabbers, Two Bellicose & Cyclones and a single Hurricane. A drop in the ocean in numbers as I will have another five Ruptures, eight more Cyclones & nine more Hurricanes joining them soon. Moving them is a logistical "challenge" but I do like to keep a very well stocked hangar.

PS. I also plan to buy a Scythe for my comedy collection.

Kirith sits at 16.3m SP right now, major gain in the month is clearly to Gunnery. I did have to train Target Painting up for the Tournament, but other than that blip things went to plan.


My trading alts profits dropped again this month to 104m from 138m the previous month which is disheartening. Following the "free" 100,000 SP's from CCP (Thank you)I chucked a load into trading skills for my Hulk pilot to make him a much more effective trader. It early days of course as this was only a few days ago, but early signs are good. My probing alt as has been mentioned previously has now finished getting his skills to a good standard so i have moved onto my Freighter alt which again is an isk sink to train up even without the actual purchase of the Freighter!

Some stats:
Tuskers: Rank 20 on Battleclinic
Kirith: Kills 678(188 in June), Losses 108 (4 in June)
Kirith: ISK Destroyed 18.9Bn, Lost 1.1Bn

Spring has Sprung

Casiella Truza of Ecpiltic Rift posted a few days back about their in game plans in the near future taking them through Spring 2010. He asked the community if they had any interesting projects coming up.

Jumping on the bandwagon, this is what Kirith and my second account characters have lined up:

Kirith
As I worked out this morning has another 118 days to go before setting foot into a Rupture. The Rupture will be nicely fitted out and have all the necesary skills to fly it well and I am very much looking forward to the day I fly cruisers, and especially battlecruisers.


Why so long? a lot of corp mates have asked. Well, of course I could fly it quicker than that but I have some rules that I am following you see. I am determined that I do not lose sight of my long term goal of flying a max skill Rifter. When I say max skill I mean literally every skill that is publically available and affects a Rifter I will have at 5 at the plans conclusion. This includes all of the support skills. Not only then will I fly a fairly overpowered Rifter, but loads of those skills will naturally benefit a host of other ships. But I digressed a bit, so back to the subject of why so long. Every skill towards the Rupture I am taking to least level 4, once I have that skill to 4 I do another Rifter skill to level 5 and interleave them. Eg.

- Combat Drone Operation, train levels 1-4.
- Fuel Conservation, train level 5.
- Drone Interfacing, train levels 1-4.

You get the idea. Now the shortest of my Rifter plan skills as they are all train to level 5's from 4 is currently 7 days 22 hours and they get longer from there.

There are two distinct sections of skills for the Rupture, Drones & Cruiser specifics like medium guns. Once Kirith completes training the Drone skills, a quick stint of Gallente Frigate 1-5 will be trained to give my a bit of fun as I plan to buy a Dramiel to mess around with.


The alts
My alts are still doing a comfortable job of station trading generating a nice income stream on their basic bog standard 5 orders. Bringing in an average of 8-10m isk per day for 30 minutes of time spent updating orders.

In 12 days my "afk miner" will be in a Hulk.
Plus 33 days an alt will be behind the wheel of a Charon Freighter
Plus 55 days the other alt will be a properly skilled Covops pilots

TL:DR
Kirith, Dramiel & Rupture
Alts, Hulk, Charon, Covops

How about you, anything interesting planned?

Decimating a Wormhole Mining Gang

Last night something happened which went so well we couldn't have asked for more.

In a system near to Hevrice a prober found four wormholes. Then across vent you hear something which surely cannot be true...

Prober> Err, guys. I have three Hulks mining in a wormhole
Other> No wai!
Prober> Way!
Other> No wai!
Other> You're joking right?
Prober> No wai!

(Above transcript fictional for poor attempt at humor, but you get the idea)

Immediately everyone starts burning back to base to get in the most useful ships, and once the gang composition is complete there are ten of us waiting at the wormhole entrance. The key component of the master plan being two Arazus each with three points. They take up positions after some sneaky manouvering, and just as they are about to decloak and engage points a Mastodon (T2 Hauler) arrives at the scene. The Arazus decloak and spread their points around while the rest of us make best speed across 50AU. A Drake appears on scene too as we land, which is primaried and destroyed in fairly short order. Once he's down we leisurely work our way through the rest to make sure everyone whores onto the killmails. All bar one of the enemy pilots manages to get their Pods out, the one we snag declines the ransom opportunity and is swiftly despatched. Cleaning up the scene of devastation we loot the wrecks, salvage all the wrecks (mmm T2 salvage) and steal the ore too. Nobody will ever know we were there right? A superbly orchestrated operation.