I was with you on targeting disruptors later than webs until I met the Ghosting Damavik. Until I took that Crash dose I just couldn’t make any progress! The cross-reps were too fast.
Something I’ve just found: it seems like while HAMs are too big for Triglavian area suppression to keep quashed very well, light missiles are another matter. First time I’ve needed to fire more than one volley to crack a cache.
Starting to think everything’s going to have close calls some way or other, and I haven’t even tried Tier 5.
Also can confirm a rapid light loadout does have the predicted “lots of battleships means slow going” problem.
Maybe I should just use HAMs and try target painter drones? My poor scout drones don’t seem to do a lot of damage for how much they get shot at.
… I’m thinking maybe if I upgrade my hardwiring? There are a lot of little things adding up in all of this, and it’s easier to improve application with the HAMs than it is to squeeze extra explosive power out of the rapid lights. Especially when their overall damage output is … like … half what I get out of the HAMs.
What’s the rush? Why is it so wildly important that we “must know and we must know now!” that violent invasions is “the only way to learn”? Why is mass murder our opening gambit in dealing with new residents of the cluster? It is kind of irreversible, has a huge cost in lives attached to it even for us through the inevitable amount of failures and it doesn’t exactly seem to be reducing their numbers either.
This is what I’ve never really understood about a lot of the capsuleers on these boards. Break out the guns against actual enemies who’ve spent centuries or more establishing themselves as active enemies, and it’s somehow great crimes and horrible acts, but then there’s entities we’ve just barely discovered even exists and the default response is “Let’s kill them. All of them.”
Why is this mass murder okay? Where’s the line drawn for when it isn’t? Once they fly Amarr Banners, is that the cut-off point? I mean, sure, historically this is exactly how the Amarr acts when they discover something new, but they also do like to claim that this is no longer the case.
… gotta wonder, in the end, who among us ends up with the most lives taken by the time we’re gone. The fighters, or the “peaceful” folk, drenching themselves in small oceans of blood.
It is a bit rich, Ms. Jenneth, for you to insist on my horribleness on this of all weeks.
For the record, the number of “murders” I committed this week by your own standards probably runs at less than a hundred, that is, slaves sacrificed during my Blood Liturgies plus slaves who die in the course of my usual harsh treatment of them above and beyond what is acceptable in orthodox Amarrian slaveownership (as wayward and liberal SFRIM and PIE are, even they don’t count deaths due to legal but harsh treatment of slaves as “murder”).
By contrast, ARC is actively murdering thousands and thousands of these Abyss people and its justification for that is “in the name of science”. The only other major culture in New Eden that murders people in the name of science is the Blood Raiders, who abduct people and experiment on them as a matter of course. Naupliusism certainly does not murder people in the name of science, although we of course consider it permitted to glorify God in the destruction of Minmatar (and only them) by any means, including experiments.
ARC. Just start worshipping Molok openly already, just like the Blood Raiders do. Little else seems to separate you and them.
I can’t help but agree with this. Unless I’ve missed something on the news lately, the Triglavians haven’t actually initiated hostilities against us first. They don’t even seem to have any interest in our cluster like the Drifters do. Of course, you could justify the violence - sort of - by claiming self-defense when using the filaments to travel into their turf, but… we’re kind of trespassing there. No moral high ground to claim there, really.
I’d really like to hope that this is indeed some roundabout Triglavian plot to let us be “tested” by combat and not just a cluster-wide smash-and-grab extravaganza run by immortal lunatics in search of ever-shinier loot.
That depends a little, Sah. If you count the first CONCORD expedition sent into the Abyss … it was attacked on sight by Triglavian frigates. It survived, but subsequently encountered a Leshak-class Triglavian battleship. It didn’t survive the encounter.
“Well, we were trespassing. So we should stay out, then!”
Is it ordinary to shoot trespassers on sight? Perhaps among beings as ruthless as we are ourselves. That’s maybe not a good sign for peace.
“But we captured that cruiser!”
Sure. And maybe that was something they would consider aggressive enough to respond with force when they spotted one of ours: retaliation. But, if so, we’re now at something very much like war.
Or maybe not. I haven’t yet seen a single Triglavian colony, and the process of an Abyss dive has taken on a lot of very strange ritual-like characteristics. So maybe there’s something else going on. I can see how living in a place like the Abyss might leave a culture with a few kind of hard edges.
Maybe at some point there was another way, another path we could have taken. But either way, hostilities have begun. Whether, as a society, our actions and motives are laudable or condemnable, we capsuleers have been set a task. It’s for us to see to it as best we can.
Nah. You’re not under any kind of command structure that can demand your compliance. That’s the one thing that all freelancer capsuleers have in common. No one, absolutely no one but ourselves are responsible for what we choose to do. CONCORD, our Nations, our corps and alliances, whatever and whoever outside of ourselves… none of them have the power to make you do something unless you willingly agree.
Do your thing, Aria. Invade and kill, that’s your call. Just don’t start pretending it’s anyone else’s responsibility than your own. We are one of the exceptionally few classes of people in New Eden that never gets to say “I was ordered to…” when the question of liability and responsibility comes along.
It is for us to look at what we are asked to do, and decide whether or not it’s the right thing to do.
That is literally true of damned near every human being, in every decision and action we take. There may be mitigating circumstances, but everyone is responsible for their own actions, unless something like a TCMC or Sansha implants are involved… and then it’s not really fair to call them ‘their own’ actions.
As for ‘invading’… only in the sense that we’re inserting ourselves into their territory. These places the filaments take us… they’re very structured. There’s nothing in them except the gates, the boundaries, the opponents… and a can that might contain rewards, right near the gate. These places we go… they’re very much built for people to go there to fight. They’re not some civilian area we’re breaking into. They’re not someone’s ‘safe’ space or ‘escape’ the way Anoikis could be seen for the Sleepers.
We’re walking into a testing program, and the only things I can’t understand about what’s happening are:
Whether we’re the ones being tested, or we’re a challenge to be overcome…
Whether it’s a test of our combat capabilities… or behavioral testing. Like we’re rats in a maze, being trained.
Given what we’ve recovered and/or deciphered of their internal communications… I’m not even sure they’d recognize what’s going on as ‘hostilities’ so much as… ‘competition’, or even shake-down trials. And while that may make the idea of going in there and being violent less troublesome for some people… at the same time… it’s worrying.
Like, ‘is CONCORD in bed with these guys and playing us in both directions?’-type worrying.
There’s also a possibility, however incredibly, incredibly slim, that this was a misunderstanding, of sorts.
Triglavians already seem to be at war with the Drifters. I wouldn’t put it past them to overreact at the sight of unidentified, yet obviously heavily armed intruders.
Of course, I’m trying to evaluate their actions through the lens of our own reasoning and morality, which is probably not the best approach to take when trying to make sense of a completely alien culture.