Gevlon Globbin is famous in the Word of Warcraft circle for having mastered the “gold-cap” concept. His Eve journey show a very interesting “outside the box” approach to the game, PVE and the trade hubs, reason for which we invite you to pay a visit to his blog.
Greedy Goblin: Bubble-camp survival guide
So, you want to haul little things in nullsec or just want to scout around. As I posted already, I flied around the map, losing covops only to ignorance. You practically can’t lose these ships unless you do something silly.
First, the fitting. Your covops frigate need nanofiber internal structures in the low slot, a microwarpdriver in the middle and a covops cloak on high. The rigs are debatable, you can use either polycarbons for more speed or thermal shielding to jump further via microwarp. You can put on some small tank with adaptive invulnerablity or small shield extender, but the latter increases your signature radius, making it faster to lock you.
Skills recommended (besides the ones required for ship and fittings):
Evasive maneuvering: faster align
Navigation: faster travel
Energy management: more capacitor
Energy systems operation: faster capacitor recharge
Acceleration control: faster MWD
Thermodynamics: overheat MWD
Warp drive operation: decrease capacitor need for warp
The simplest bubble camp is the warpout camp. You jump trough the gate and the gate is bubbled, you can’t warp. You are gate-cloaked so can look around, select a direction where no wrecks, containers or ships can break your cloak. If there is a celestial there, you can align it. If there is none, you can double-click the space where you want to go. If a direction is surprisingly easy, it can be a trap, a cloaked ship can wait there.
You doubleclick or press align, then instantly the microwarpdrive and the cloak. “Instantly” means after the ship starts to move. While you can’t use modules cloaked, they finish their last cycle. This is why I prefer the long cycle provided by the thermal shielding rigs. The campers will see you decloak-recloak. They have a second to approach you with microwarpdriver. If they get closer than 2000m, you decloak and can’t recloak in 5 seconds. You can’t recloak if they lock you. So it’s important to choose a direction that is not flying directly into them. They don’t know where you are, just guess after your last position, this is why it’s important to get as far as you can by using MWD. After you got out of the bubble, just warp away cloaked.
If the gate thrown you to a very unlucky place, close to containers, wrecks you can always jump back by running to the gate. 12 km with overheated MWD is just a few seconds and you can cloak at some point. If you are decloaked at any point, it doesn’t mean instant death. MWD instantly and you can reach the edge of the bubble before they can blow up your ship.
While this isn’t hard in theory, the screen will be full of things in reality that can be overwhelming first time. I strongly suggest practicing. Go to a bubblecamp (Torrinos gate always bubbled) and pass it some times with an insured, empty ship.
The surprise-bubble is the advanced way. There is no bubble, so you casually start warping. They create a bubble before you could complete the aligning so you can’t warp. The point is that you did not start the MWD, so you won’t be far from your last position, therefore you can be more easily decloaked. The solution is simple: don’t warp away casually when there are more than 1 non-friendly are in the system. Start aligning, hit cloak and MWD. After reaching warp speed, warp. You’ll warp a few seconds later if there is no bubble, if there is you MWD-ed away from the last known position.
The most advanced is the warpin bubble:
If you warp from the gate on the top to the gate on the bottom, you’ll fly on the green line, which is crossing a bubble, breaking your warp. The campers carefully placed a container on the impact point, so you’ll instantly decloak. The solution is not jumping between gates when there are more than 1 non-friendly in local. You shall jump to a celestial and then 70-100 km to the gate, so you arrive from a different direction and land outside a bubble that completely envelops the gate. You can maneuver between the campers or turn back if they are too good.
The most common reason of dying in a covops is not taking it seriously. If you need to go AFK, if you want to Alt-Tab, first warp to a celestial, be cloaked there while AFK. Don’t do “just 10 seconds AFK” things while flying in enemy space.
Watch local channel, check the map for “ships destroyed the last hour”.
Don’t warp to belts. They can be large and even if you warp to 100km you can end up between asteroids decloaking you.
Be extra careful in tubes. They are series of systems where you can go just one way. The homeowners can get ahead of you via jump bridge. If you see someone following you (same guy in local for a few jumps), just warp to a celestial and AFK for some time.
Watch your capacitor. Long range warps can empty it, making you unable to use MWD.
With a strategic cruiser you can fit a propulsion subsystem called interdiction nullifier and an offensive subsystem called covert reconfiguration, making your ship immune to bubbles and able to cloak.
The most important thing however is that everything can be caught. When you go to enemy space, always have forward scout. If you are the forward scout, have nothing of value on the ship (you can have an exotic dancer), have it platinum insured (it won’t pay much, but little is better than none), don’t have expensive implants (no matter how tempting to use nomad set), have your medical clone updated and placed somewhere where you have replacement ship.
PS: Some conspiracy theory for today. GSF will soon reset various allies to TEST and PL. This means they will be neutrals to GSF members, therefore attacked. Still they keep on being blue with TEST and PL which makes little sense and seem to be good for nothing but misunderstandings and friendly fires. Resetting whole HBC (Honeybadger Coalition, the name of TEST, PL and allies) makes sense. Being blue to HBC makes sense. Being blue to part of them not. I think it’s a masterful move from TEST and GSF leadership in order to solidify their power. Its purpose is to make small HBC alliances to dissolve and pilots/corps join into TEST alliance (or PL). It would perfectly make sense as Dreddit, the major corporation of TEST is bigger than these alliances, so there is little reason to threat them as separate, powerful entities.
- Gevlon Goblin
Wednesday morning report: 141.6B (which is 40% of the whole TEST asset) (3.5 spent on main accounts, 2.4 spent on Logi/Carrier, 2.2 on Ragnarok, 1.6 on Rorqual, 1.4 on Nyx, 1.8 on Avatar, 2.6 received as gift)