A Year Or Two In The Life

This is a post from a corp CEO in our alliance, and part of the leadership team, his name is Tekkaa, it is provided "as is", and provides an interesting snapshot into a journey through Eve Online.

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2017 according to Tekkaa.

I've decided to do a retelling of my first serious year in Eve online as i feel it's helped me grow as a person and maybe overcome or at least try forget about some of the shortcomings of health and just my general bad luck in life.

My return to eve was in December 2016 when i learnt about the new alpha clones and i thought” awesome i can play for free” i played on and off since 2009 but never seriously. When i logged back in i found myself in Teonusude (minmatar space) got myself reacquainted with the mechanics and ran some missions in my hurricane i was in from last time, how boring, that quickly gave me the shits and i stopped playing yet again. After about a week or so i googled something along the lines of what to do in eve and i come across exploration I found a fit for a probe on eve wiki and watched a couple of how-to videos and undocked, i ran some hisec sites and decided “this is bad isk” so i dove directly into wormholes as you do. Did some really dumb things lost a couple of ships also made a lot of isk as well but the most important thing is i was having fun and learning.

A few months went by and i decided it was maybe time to join a corp so i looked up the forums ,a wretched hive of people saying the game is dying, not uncommon though any game I've ever gotten serious about the forums are filled with these types comes with the territory, i ended putting up a post something along the lines of ”Aussie player looking for corp”. To which i was bombarded with replies on the forum and in game mail. After sifting through them i joined a nullsec corp thinking this would be a great opportunity to earn my null wings it was good,at first, i was told to get an interceptor sell up most of me things and wait for an escort to help me make my way over, took a day or two for that to happen and when i arrived some nice fellows gave me some ships when i arrived from memory a “Talwar” and a “Hurricane”, a couple of days went passed and i got into some gate camps that proved to be quite fun. Then came the weekend usually when most people have some free-time to play games, especially the case for myself. I soon began to learn that nobody was on in my TZ and not knowing much in null isn't much fun so i ended up spending 2 weeks out in “catch” as it didn't get any better, maybe i could have hung out a little bit longer to see how things went but i decided to leave i contracted back the ships i was given and i set myself free from nullsec. I headed back Highsec and found another corp they had a Fortizar and seemed to have some more regular players on in my Timezone “success”. For a Time it was good they had orcas out for boosts regular mission fleets, call it a business model if you like they trained up and helped players get ISKED up and if you wanted ship you out to nullsec not a bad setup, some time passed yet again and like everything in EvE nothing happens overnight At first i thought wow look at all these players people to fly with but shortly realised they were mostly Americans nothing wrong with that but i'm an Aussie and i was yearning to be with other Aussies so i was growing bored and participation in comms become less and less soon though and maybe for the best for myself things came unhinged.

The problem that the corp was confronted with was they were full of NEW members. quite literally as they had recruiters going out to the start zones and grabbing whoever they could this is great to bolster numbers but not here, not in New Eden, more numbers meant absolutely NOTHING because those numbers had no weight in them. You could say Useless players and at no fault of their own it was just because they were new to the game.

Everything began to fall apart quite rapidly as the Alliance earned itself a wardec and Leadership didn’t communicate how things should be handled during “War Time” and the Corp being so new player top heavy lost ship after ship, after ship, this began an avalanche effect and other players and corps smelt blood so they polished there blasters and missile launchers and jumped in on the easy kills. People started leaving which obviously made ot harder to do anything and wardecs kept coming. I nearly got caught a couple of time by one pilot but he was always to slow, which brings me to part when i decided to pack my bags and leave this sinking ship.

Another fascinating part of EvE i like is, after i packed my bags and begun moving things the pilot who was causing the most grief for my now former corp noticed i was leaving and invited me to a private conversation and ask why i was leaving. The answer to that if you have been reading this and paying attention should be apparent. He mostly wanted to let me know that i was switched on because he never managed to kill me.We spoke for quite some time by text chat in game and he explained that his corp were mercenaries hired to wardec others turns out they were only hired for one round but kept deccing is because of the easy kills. Can't blame him really. Why is this fascinating Somebody who 24 hours ago was trying to blow me up has now become an acquaintance and we now say hello to each other from time to time.

Now corp less yet again i wasn't quite sure what to do and i had become sick of joining corps outside my timezone and my previous attempt to find an autz corp wasn't that good. So what to do, start my own? In a roundabout sort of way i did. I begun looking for aussies and aussies only to join my corpand roughly in april and got a few guys into the fold. Slowly but surely and some of them. Are still around and thanks for sticking with me if you're reading this o7… the recruitment wagon was going along ok and i was contacted by quite a few people wanting me to bring my corp to null and be the aussie director unfortunately that wasn't the direction i wanted to go. The exact details are fuzzy but i bumped into the League of grumpy old farts (LOGOF) and began talking of an alliance. Everything they had to offer was what i was chasing and 100% Australian players this was a dream come true and obviously i was what they were looking for as well. Quantumtech industries was now apart of the alliance. I never thought at the time of joining how long this would last but I'm still around 8 months down the road and enjoying every minute of it. i hope the feeling is mutual.

Upon joining the alliance i felt overwhelmed a little, these guys had been around a long time and knew so much, i was in awe. After some time i was invited to become part of the leadership, i never thought something like that would happen to lil ol me. i underrate myself but i must have been doing the right thing it wasn't a serious role more of a fly on the wall situation. Not long after that our ceo had to take a break from the game and the 2ic at the time took the helm. I would like to think i was helping our ceo but i was very green and i'm sure he had a lot of FFS moments from the questions i asked but i was beginning to take more of a serious part in leadership.

The months have gone by now and i feel like i've certainly grown as a player and a person, EvE has some valuable lessons to take away with you into real life and if you let it make you self judge yourself in a very deep way which i have noticed now more than ever since I've become a junior Fc.

The alliance has grown and expanded and our old CEO is back with us which makes our leadership strong with all our combined points of view and knowledge. This is all possible because calculated decisions are made to keep the alliance on a steady growth path and when the members follow the path things go well and when they don’t bad things happen but i guess every village has idiots and they either take themselves out the equation or we have to forcefully say goodbye in saying that we have had a lot of great people come on board and benefit the alliance greatly and work towards our common goals.

Before becoming part of leadership i never knew how much goes on behind the scenes of an alliance even just from my point of view . Even just the recruiting part for my corp can be very tiresome, i have had days while I'm on smoko or lunch at work put to-do lists in my phone for when i logged in that night only to be brushed to the side to chat with a potential recruit turning the game into more of a chat room or email simulator but well worth it as i have had some great people join the corp. I would like to thank the greater membership for being a part of my time in this game and leadership for putting up with me.

I have done many activities over that past 12 months from mining, manufacturing, DED sites, exploration and trading and have enjoyed doing all of them, over the Year i have been part of many pvp roams, ganks and gate camps and my most recent privilege as mentioned above is being a junior fleet commander this has been the most eye opening experience and in no other game have i ever had the full blown shakes before leaving for a roam, if you're familiar with eve you would know that you lose your ship and everything in it is gone so being at the head of a fleet can be nerve racking and every week so far i believe I've gotten better. afterwards self evaluation comes at its finest, i have asked for criticism and i'm glad my seniors are happy to be honest give it to me and as of late this has helped me grow in taking criticism in real life activities whether in my career or my marriage or as a parent.

2017 has been a great year for eve with the new alpha skill sets being introduced and hopefully in the coming year we see an exponential growth in the player base and i look forward to 2018 to see what the future brings i'm sure i could make this quite a lot longer but I'm sure each story could be told in the same amount of length as this. Maybe 2018 i might start my own blog.

One last thank you to all those who have been part of my eve experience and again bring on 2018…

Tekkaa o7

Old Forums and New Launcher

I've always regarded CCP as that bumbling Uncle who means well, but doesn't always manage to do the right thing immediately, but he usually gets there in the end.

With the release of the new Eve Online launcher, which is supposed to, among other things, fix the rather annoying issue of the pinned accounts going missing, I wanted to update my Linux machine/s so they'll be good to go.

Of course with CCP this wasn't going to be easy, I thought.

First thing to check is the forum post that provided the specially made for Linux launcher, as with luck, some remaining CCP staffer has updated the post with the new launcher.

See this is what optimism gets you.

Yes the recently archived previous forums appear to be down.

Right.

Now what?

So then, in a rare display of thinking the glass is half full and it doesn't actually contain clear bleach, I considered the possibility the Linux launcher may update itself!

I could not have been more surprised!

Ahh, but here is the trap.  I fully expected the launcher to have updated, but then it no longer launches the game correctly, so I'd better test it.

.......

It worked!

Amazing.

A Prickly Situation

Three Little Things

These days I’m surprised by a few things, and this list changes as I forget what I was previously surprised about, or something new comes along which gives me another “What the FUCK!” moment that suddenly blasts one of the other list members off into the void.

Never to be seen again.

Until next time anyway.

Did I mention the memory thing?

I’ve just read above this, turns out I did.

In a particular order.

Some of my nose hairs can be more than an inch long.

My urine stream appears to have torque steer.

People seem to think they need to post again and again that Eve Online is dying.

Now perhaps they are just getting it wrong, and what they mean is Eve is being dyed, perhaps with woad. Then we are destined to play a game that will turn a lovely blue colour but won’t half pong a bit!

Now I don’t know why people feel they need to post the same thing over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over again. I suspect lead in the water, parents who are very close relations, and pressurised liquefied cheese in a can.

I’m also deeply suspicious that they are logged into the forums of other games, assuming other games exist outside of Eve Online.

I’ve played Chess before, so the natural extrapolation from that experience is other digital games may exist, in a vast potential universe. For all I know, the Bugblatter Beast of Traal has worked long and hard and has now created their own planets version of Paradroid.

So while they’re logged into these other forums, the challenged Earthlings, not the creature from Traal, must also be posting the same thing, over, and over, and over, well you get the idea, just to get a rise from other forum dwellers.

When suddenly the spotlight of attention swings their way, the mental image I have of them is they rub their hands together, eye off the moisturiser cream and try to hide yesterdays used tissues from Mother.

Everything is dying, but in some places they are also dyeing.

Too far?

Universal Entropy says everything around us is running out of energy, rather slowly mind you, so you will still have to put the bins out and mow the lawn this weekend.

Rather more realistically the history of online gaming is strewn with the non existent digital corpses of MMO’s that have come and gone, and now only live on in our memories.

Will Eve Online be switched off one day?

Almost certainly yes.

Yes.

However to CCP, Eve Online and CCP create the barycenter that everything else orbits around.

They have a vested interest.

So get out of General Discussion and stop being such a little immature bitch.

The Big Three for PVP

Blue Goo Something Something

Between the Sheets

On my main computer setup I have four monitors, arranged with three horizontally and one above the centre screen.  That top screen almost exclusively shows me Discord and the Windows task manager so I can keep an eye on resource usage.  In Summer I'll also have some temperatures up there for the CPU, display card, hard drives, etc.

It's been very dry here, I don't mean in game, but all along the east coast of Australia, especially in South East Queensland.  We've been well down on our average rain for a long time, so the various critters that live around here start looking for ways to supplement their moisture input.  Eventually they discover the fact that the house and gardens have moisture, if not water, and they start encroaching on the property.

Most animals are not a problem, kangaroos on the front grass leave in the early morning and not much else is a bother, I rarely have cats fornicating under one of the front windows anymore.

However their is an exception, as almost always their is, and that is ants, many, many ants.

The little intruders get in everywhere looking for that bit of moisture they can scavenge either for themselves or the nest.  So I'm often killing ants using various methods to try and encourage them to stay out of the house.

They are persistent.

One ant, I've named him Bastard, was obviously given the mission to totally piss me off.  I mean really annoy me, so at 2am when I'm inexplicably awake, I still have some sort of visceral hate for the ant known as Bastard.

Using an amount of skill and possibly guile that I'd not previously attributed to any ant, he has somehow crawled into one of my monitors, and then into the part between the image surface you can touch and the TFT part that actually displays the images.  That is a sealed unit on that monitor, nothing can get in there, but The Bastard can.

Not content with merely entering the monitor he makes his way towards nearly the middle, right where a person would normally look at the most when using the screen, and then expires.

So now I have a deceased ant, in a monitor part I cannot get into, mocking me every time I look towards that screen.

Bastard.

L0G0F Frigate Tournament July/August 2017

Round One

English Bishop (Incursus) vs Tekkaa (Kestrel) - Winner English Bishop - Killmail

Seviron Aldari (Incursus) vs Gralen Chays (Breacher) - Winner Seviron Aldari - Killmail

Brutus Salander (Kestrel) vs Gerrich Oksaras (Tristan) - Winner Gerrich Oksaras - Killmail

HellRazor24601 (Breacher) vs Talon Khar (Incursus) - Winner (by Forfeit) Talon Khar


Round Two

English Bishop (Breacher) vs Seviron Aldari (Incursus) - Winner English Bishop - Killmail

Gerrich Oksaras (Tristan) vs Talon Khar (Tristan) - Winner Talon Khar - Killmail


Third Place

Seviron Aldari (Merlin) vs Gerrich Oksaras (Crucifier) - Winner Seviron Aldari - Killmail


Final

English Bishop (Breacher) vs Talon Khar (Tristan) - Talon Khar - Killmail


VILF

Gerrich Oksaras (vs Talon Khar) - 25 Million ISK

This competition has now completed.


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These rules are now fixed (as of 25th July 2017 at 22:49 AEST) and will be used for the tournament.

The only rule addition was the re-entry of Rule 27 which just explains in greater detail how the process of elimination and progression will occur, with a link for further detail.

Another rule addition is 9a, with the previous 9a being moved to 9b.

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1. Standard T1 hulls only.

2. Modules T1 or T2 only, no faction, officer etc.

3. Rigs T1 or T2 only.

4. Drones T1 or T2 only.

5. Ammo - no limitation.

6. Implants - no limitation.

7. Boosters - no limitation.

8. Only one entry per pilot per real life alliance member.

9. Pilots must be in the same fleet as each other.

9a. Pilots are not to fleet, wing, or squad warp the other pilot anywhere. (NEW 29/07/17)

9b. No podding.

10. Use the in game DUELLING function to initiate combat.

11. One pilot within 100km of the Azbel, the other within 100km of the Rait, start duel, warp, fight.

12. Both pilots must stay in the same solar system, leaving the solar system will forfeit the fight, winner should SS for proof.

12a. Fights will be performed in Sadye.

13. No ISK buy in required to participate.

14. Pilot seeding will be based on the pilots age.

15. For each round the pilot will nominate which ship they will be using, they will then be restricted to that ship for that round.

16. For the next round a different, or the same ship can be nominated.

17. Once the ship type the pilot nominates is posted in game to Yosagi Yojimbo
(YY), that ship type is fixed for that round.

18. Once all the ship types for a round have been received by YY, all the ship types, and opponents for that round will be posted online for all to see at the YY-GE blog.

18a. Should a pilot not use their posted ship type they will forfeit the fight.

18b. Should both pilots not use their posted ship type they will both forfeit the fight.

19. Pilots will then have 48 hours from the following Eve Online Down Time (DT) after the round details are posted to organise and complete their fights, the winner then needs to mail YY the kill mail details.

20. Both pilots need to make their best efforts to organise the fight between each other, attend and complete the fight.  Failure to complete the fight within the specified time will leave the final result to YY's discretion.

21. Once undocked for the duel the pilot cannot redock until the fight is concluded.

22. A fight is concluded once a kill mail is generated.

23. In the event of a double kill mail the one with the earlier time stamp will be declared the winner.

24. If the double kill mails time stamps are identical then the younger pilot will be declared the winner, as the older pilot really should be better than that.

25. Draft and final rules will be posted on a web page at YY-GE blog, that same page will then be updated with the pilot seeding, posted ships the pilots intend to use, and the results as they all become available.

26. Prizes will be awarded for 1st, 2nd, 3rd and Very Interesting Losing Fit (VILF).

27. The Single Elimination Tournament format will be used - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-elimination_tournament   (NEW)

28. Prizes currently include but are not limited to, T1 and T2 SKINS, ISK, ship or ships.

29. All rules are subject to change.

30. If rule changes are required the changes will be posted at YY-GE blog between rounds and other places time permitting.

31. YY has the final say on all aspect and rules of this competition.

Project Discovery - Planetary Transits

Project Discovery - Planetary Transits, which I'm quickly going to shorten as PDPT, is pretty cool.  I certainly identify with it much more than the previous effort which was finding abnormal human body cells to help with some sort of research.  Admirable goals but the current PD is finding alien worlds.  Bugger helping my fellow man, I'm going to find aliens!

At least that seems to be the appeal.

Which I have to admit, I'm also on board for.

While I was looking for transits, and becoming more than a bit frustrated at near misses in my efforts, which will be shown below, I started thinking about the earning potential of PDPT.

If you're a young pilot in Eve Online the ISK you can earn from PDPT, especially if you care about accuracy, isn't to be sneezed at, but for an established pilot it isn't much.

Then I wondered if you could PLEX your account just by using PDPT?

Let's look at the figures, which of course change all the time so this will be somewhat accurate from the slice of time I bothered to look at the market.

These days I can no longer say one PLEX as you now need 500 PLEX to pay for a monthly account, 500 PLEX is roughly worth 1,546,000,000 ISK, a bit over 1.5 billion ISK.

If I'm doing PDPT, and I try to care about accuracy, it hovers around the 65 to 70 percent mark, I can make 610,000 ISK every five minutes, or 122,000 per minute.

That means I need about 12,673 minutes to afford 500 PLEX, assuming the PLEX prices have not moved while I've been banging through PDPT.

Rounding up, that is about 212 hours, and over the period of one month is a hair over 7 hours, per day, every day.

You would receive some of the awards for levelling up in PDPT, which helps the ISK generation, but if you want to spend all month earning ISK via PDPT, so you can pay for another month, it can be done.

However I wouldn't recommend it.

The Recruiting Conundrum

In my experience recruiting in Eve Online is much harder than in other MMO's.

"You have a pulse? Great! Come on in!", any other MMO.

In Eve?  The big difference is we have something to lose apart from our minds if we recruit some nut job, and let's be clear.  I value my Eve "stuff" more than my mind!  My mind is like an old enemy, but we've both grown older and the visceral hate has faded away to some half remembered discomfort about something neither of us can remember clearly.

Oh and I'm pretty sure my sub conscious hates me.

Another time for that one.

In recruiting for the corp and greater alliance I've found a few things.

Alpha accounts are not reliable and will usually kick around for a few days, perhaps a week or two, and then you never hear from them again.  The big question with the Alpha accounts is retention.  How many of them are active in the game two, four, six months down the road?  You can be damn sure those figures are, probably, never going to be released by CCP.

You never really know who you're going to get with recruiting.  We certainly have an idea of what we want but sometimes what they say, and then do, are two different things.  It reminds me of hiring people for business, roughly six months down the road you find out who the person is you've hired.

Don't get me wrong we have a great group of people, I don't often talk about them here as fluffing their egos is for their significant others, not me, but sometimes it just doesn't work out.

Other times we know a person isn't right for the alliance pretty quickly during the recruiting chat.

Often this will be due to reasons of time zone, poor standings with the faction in our region, wanting different things, etc.

Every once in a while though, wow!

Last night we had some guy, and I won't mention his name, I assume he is a guy as this is Eve Online and everyone is a he until verified.

Stereotypes save time kids!

From the very beginning his pilot details started waving all sorts of red flags, and I don't mean the sort of flaccid red flag waving you see at some motor racing event, where the marshal is bored, and all he can think about is the amount of beer he's going to consume tonight to try and forget about the never ending pain.  No, this is the type of flag waving you see at a Mardi Gras, vigorous and full of pep.

The kind of flag waving you really cannot ignore.

His corporation history was an evidence trail of very short stays, which speaks volumes.  If a bunch of other corps, and we are pretty vanilla compared to many others, cannot stand you then odds are we/I are certainly not going to also.

Then of course his corp application, to one of the other corps in the alliance but happily I get to view this stuff, often it's the only entertainment I get, is something very close to "I have 3 million skill points and I'm better at this game than all of you!"

At this stage I would have done the thanks but no thanks bit, but it wasn't my corp so screw it, lets see where this goes!

During the evening while we are doing "alliance activities" he jumps into the recruitment chat for the corp he's applied for.  It's an arse about way of doing it but nobody seems to read the requirements anymore so he's certainly not on his own.

Very quickly it starts going south.

And I don't mean in a "lets head south for the winter in a slow measured way taking care to eat some stuff and visit some nice ponds" way.  This was something like a screaming banshee, SR-71 type lawn dart straight as the crow flies towards anything away from "normal".

He asked questions.  Questions are good.  But when the questions were not answered to his satisfaction he would ask them again, or just put a question mark, or harangue about not answering them to his liking.  I could see the discussion was going off the rails, I would have told him to POQ by this stage but it wasn't my corp and I wasn't leading the interview, so I was able to watch, and judge.

It quickly degenerated as the interviewer started asking his own questions , at my prompting, but I'm sure that was where he was heading anyway.  Of course that meant he hadn't answered one of the questions of the interviewee.

Then it went bad.

Well...worse.

He was accused of not answering the question, and was getting attacked for somehow "not completing the circle" I guess.

Then their was a pause, I had some idea of what was coming, and there it is!

"Thank you for your enquiry, but you're not right for us, best of luck in the future.", to paraphrase.

Somehow the guy, who wanted to join the alliance, must have thought the interview was still going well as he was quite annoyed it had taken this turn.

From his point of view he was in! All we had to work out were the details!

Probably something like a real world mental health plan for all alliance members.

So his last line of text, before he rage quit the recruitment chat was the icing on the cake, the hilarious mid point of our night.

"Fuck you cunt!"

Comedy gold.

Provi Cruiser Roam

Each week we try and take out a small fleet to start gathering, or in some cases re-gathering experience in small fleet PVP.

This was one of those fleets.

We managed our first kill using the new, and possibly improved PVP roam doctrine system!

We will get to that in a bit though.

Finding a worm hole that takes us more or less directly into a null sec system was an utter bitch.  At one stage I gave up and mowed the lawn, that held more appeal at that point than yet another bloody useless stupid effing worm hole.  Eventually I found one we could use, or so I thought...

Our small but nuggety PVP fleet formed up at Home only a few minutes late, and left for the distant system of Bika.  In there we jumped into the pre scouted worm hole, then through the worm hole, until we arrived at the exit into the region of Branch in null security space.

"Your ship is too large for this worm hole"

What?  Bugger me!  I'd passed through it quite happily in my probing ship which is fast, and more importantly small, but our seemingly massive cruisers were not going to jump through.

Plan B then.  We use Plan B quite a bit.

Provi it is! So the fleet zapped down to the Provi entrance, took a right turn, and headed towards where I thought some miners might be.

Sure enough we found some, after we'd tried a belt already and found none, the next belt had some inattentive miners!  They should have warped towards a safe spot once we appeared in local, but they didn't and we landed about 40km away from them.  Just then my internet lagged so I couldn't see any targets on my overview so the standing rules applied, approach, point and shoot them.

We managed to grab only one Procurer, which proceeded to eventually go down, all the while I'm keeping an eye on D-Scan for the expected reinforcements that I thought would arrive, they did not.  Happily by that stage my internet/overview had caught up with current events.

https://zkillboard.com/kill/63144444/

We checked the side systems and headed out of that pocket, but they were stirred up.

We had two options at that point, go home or go deeper.  We went deeper.

Pretty soon we had to bust through a small gate camp of an Ishtar and a Harbinger, but then the're mates caught us.

Bubble Camp!  Yes we'd been caught in a bubble after jumping through a gate, but we don't really expect these ships to come home anyway, and this is all a learning and/or rust removal experience so it was all good.  All of our options in the bubble were bad and soon afterwards we all died.

Good times!

Afterwards, at Home, a small wake was held for our lost ships and pods, plus a quick discussion on what we learnt from the roam.

It was very instructional.

Even My Dreams Have Dreams

A new update?

Longer contracts.

Some harder PVE thing.

Our alliance logo hovers above the Citadel.

Cool.

The Sun looks nicer.

Anything else?

.

.

.

Oh...

Four Hundred and Fifty!

Oh shit!

I'm allowed to swear.

It's my universe after all.

I just realised I've passed the four hundred and fifty post mark a few days ago.

For something that peaked early and has been on the long downhill slide for quite sometime I still find that impressive.

Especially for me who doesn't usually stick with things for that long, unless I have some sort of organic connection, which therefore makes me biologically obligated.

If only I'd kept my genes inside my jeans.

That won't have the same impact if you say it out loud.

Seriously though, for the people that actually do read this, and I have the metrics to prove that at least some people do.

Thanks for reading and with any luck some of it isn't horrible.

Eight Golden Rules of Sci Fi According to Yosagi

1.  No Sound in Space

As space is a near vacuum their is no sound.  That means so engine noises, explosions, etc  Very few movies and games get this right.


2. Spacecraft Do Not Fly Like Aircraft in an Atmosphere

See point 1.  Furthermore they shouldn't move in space like aircraft, submarines, etc.  For every action there¹ is an equal and opposite reaction.  This also means your spaceship will not have a top speed, essentially, as if you have thrust, you have acceleration, and your speed climbs.  However at some point you'll have to arrest that momentum.

I say "essentially" as space is a "near" vacuum, some atoms of this or that do exist, as do dust particles and larger.  Eventually, and that eventually may be millions of years into the future, the object may encounter enough "stuff" that the motion of that object is significantly slowed.  Or of course it travels a few kilometres, and is pancaked by a large asteroid in its path.

As an example for Eve Online.  If my ship is moving, and I jettison a can, that can should continue moving through space forever at the same speed of ejection and in the direction it was ejected.
Realistically the game engine cannot be expected to track millions upon millions of objects forever, but perhaps until downtime, or even an hour, would be possible.


3. No "Hollywood Helmets"

When you're in the dark, trying to be all stealthy, the absolute worst thing for you are lights shining in your eyes, illuminating your face for the bad guys and ruining your night vision.  That is what a "Hollywood Helmet" is.  You'll see them in many Sci Fi movies, and probably some games. The reason they do it is simple, it shows the overpaid actors face, stroking their ego just that little bit closer towards completion.  If I was the bad guy though, I'd be super stoked the people I was trying to kill gave me a perfect target location, all lit up, that would also be an almost guaranteed kill shot.

Handy!


4. Everything is Moving!

I've touched on this before on this blog, and also above, but in space everything is moving.  I'm standing on a planet rotating on its axis, which is orbiting the Sun, the Sun is orbiting the centre of the Milky Way, the Milky Way is moving in a direction with other galaxies in The Local Group, etc etc.  Everything is moving.  So why isn't everything moving in Eve Online?  Partially it's because Eve is an old game at its core, and having everything moving back in the day would have not been technically possible.  These days it may still not be but more objects could be in motion than they currently are.  Bookmarks wouldn't have to be different from now, as they would also move in relation to whatever object was closest.  Using the Earth year as an example (which would be atypical in reality Universe wide) you should be able to visit a planet in Eve over the course of one year and the location of the planets, stations, citadels etc in that system would change due to their orbital mechanics.  This wouldn't change the game mechanics, but it would look more realistic.

Where it would change the game is missions, PVP, objects, etc.  An example.  A ship is destroyed and drops several containers which are ejected at 2000 meters per second in random directions.  They keep moving, they're getting away, which ones do you chase?

Annoying?  Yes.  More realistic?  Also yes.


5. Space Doesn't Have Shock Waves

Well in fact it does, but only when matter is encountered.  This is seen quite clearly around stars which have exploded for one reason or another.  If a missile explodes in Eve Online their should be zero shock wave, as their is essentially no gas to compress.  However the particles of the missile, casing, shrapnel, etc would continue outwards striking everything in their way, essentially forever.


6. ABQ

Another bloody quarry/old factory.  You'll see this one, from my experience, more in older British Sci Fi, but the amount of episodes that just get lazy or cannot afford decent locations is tiresome.


7. Aliens

Where do I start?  Budget reasons cause most of the following problems, but some would not be hard to avoid.

Aliens are not human shaped with funny ears and/or noses.

Some aliens should breathe other gases and/or liquids than oxygen.

English is not the universal language, in fact it may not even be our semi-universal language.  These stories are often set a few hundred years in the future.  Consider how much English has changed in the past few hundred years, the changes now we are seeing with a new type of shorthand thanks to mobile phones and online chat programs, now extrapolate all of that into the future.  However with the introduction of the internet, and the equivalent of the internet in the distant future, that may in fact be homogenising the language towards something more stable.

But that probably isn't English as we know it.

Translators are fine, in the ear, on a device, whatever, but then the mouth movements shouldn't match the translated language should they?

Inter species sex.  Where do I put it?  Can I put in somewhere?  Is that how you do it?  Do you rip it off afterwards?  Does the place I'm about to put it into have thousands of rotating grinding little teeth?

Talking before intimacy will never be more important.


8. Gravities

Earth standard gravity is not universal.  Again this is usually done for budget reasons but as we've found the mass of our planet Earth is not common, and so therefore our amount of average gravity shouldn't be either.


¹ I'm aware of the grammar error, but I'm uneasy correcting Newton.

Yet Another Movie

Another day, another gate camp, but this time with two kills recorded for your viewing pleasure!

It was a fairly long and tedious gate camp, some guys left as they succumbed to fatigue, we had to endure a long down time due to (seemingly) an update to the global worth counter, but then finally some ships.

As you'll see.

Updated Some Broken Stuff, Future Videos, General Rambling

It would seem some people are reading this adventure into literary madness.  With that in mind I've removed and/or updated some of the broken modules on the right hand side, and adjusted the order to better reflect my mind space this morning.  So hopefully I've made the blog a nicer place for everybody who is apparently visiting.

As you may have noticed in the previous posts we are now making in game videos, and when I say we I totally mean I am making in game videos.  This doesn't especially bother me as mentally it's just an extension to the creation of so many radio adverts from far too many years ago.  So in the near future we should have a station advert for Oh Bugga, the backbone corporation of the alliance, and some more PVP video of unlucky souls melting under our guns.

I'm often amazed by the dedication people have for this game.  As an example I am currently chatting with someone via Discord who has the app on his phone, he's talking hands free while driving so he can touch base with alliance operations for this evening.

I'm not even that dedicated.

An Annoyance Dies!

The other day, week, etc, we stumbled across a local guy who enjoyed killing some of the locals.

We were finishing up some scheduled PVP, our scout entered a system and noticed this guy in local, we set the trap, and you'll see the outcome below.

An Alliance Typical Mining Operation

Recently I've discovered the joy, and the work, of creating videos.  I started trying to use a freeware video editor called Openshot.  Openshot is adequate but seems buggy for me, crashed often. Finally I bit the bullet and bought Adobe's Premiere Pro, which is awesome.

This video shows a "typical" mining operation.

You'll get the idea.

An Eos Kill!

During a camping session we killed a few things, and then this guy decided to try his luck.

Auto piloting.

Into low security space.

With his only protection being some warp core stabs.

It didn't end well.

However I was able to make a video out of it!

Enjoy!

Portrait Of My Music