[Compilation] The Lore of the Jove

[Jandice_Ymladris]

The visitant blueprint story wasn’t known to me (but seems to be true according to the wiki)

You’ll also enjoy the recounting of a famous incident involving a Jove mining laser based on your post:
Here’s the account of someone involved in the T5 Mining laser incident: T5 mining Laser
Note that the Dev side & player side of the story conflict & has created quite the mess for CCP back then. The event itself (Jovian gives/loses Jovian mining laser) is canon & ended with the Jovians (devs) trading their T5 laser back for a T2 blueprint (the first or among the first T2 blueprints if I recall correctly)

[Valiran_Teleros]

Yeah, I’m familiar with that one. I even found a Tweet by Torfi Frans that seems to prove it was given instead of taken:

Haha, was hoping ppl had forgotten about that.I gave it with best intentions. @HilmarVeigar then said "you have given them the atom bomb"

— Torfi Frans Olafsson (@torfiFrans) July 28, 2017

The wiki article is where I learned of the Visitant BP story, but since the page doesn’t cite any sources it’s still just an unconfirmed rumor. We could try contacting the person who added that information, but even if we get a response they might not remember where they learned it.

[Valiran_Teleros]

So, there’s news on the Visitant front. I managed to track down a database on EVE-RU that has the BP entry, and it’s listed as T1. Maybe this was what CCP changed it to after a while and it used to be T5; there is a T4 icon still in the game files:

For now, I’m going to contact the guy who made the edit and see if he can give me more information. The info was added by a user named Kraosdada, and there’s someone on r/Eve with the same name, so I’m going to send them a PM.

Edit: I just looked at the Jove ship entries on EVE-RU and Chruker; weirdly enough the Wraith, Specter, and Phantom are all listed as Tech 1, but the Visitant and Eidolon’s entries don’t have that information. EVE-RU also lists all their blueprints as Tech 1: Wraith, Specter, Phantom, Eidolon, Visitant. I think this might be a bust, everyone.

[Jandice_Ymladris]

The explanation for not seeing the T5 icon is a bit different. It didn’t exist back then. But it was in the description of the item. Lucky I do have a link to the old description of the T5 mining laser so you can use that as a reference if you need: Nibelung Particle Bore Stream V
The Tech level description ingame later changed to the meta level (and then no longer represent tech levels)
Can’t find any similar old style Visitant (blueprint) records, but I suspect that event wasn’t as well recorded.

[Valiran_Teleros]

Yeah, I got in contact with the guy and he showed me the Nibelung’s picture:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/stuckincustoms/110542665/

So far no dice on the Visitant BP story’s source, though he laments on how the wikia got abandoned. He’d probably appreciate help improving it.

[DeMichael_Crimson]

Definitely an excellent in-depth write up.

Bookmarked for future reference.

[Valiran_Teleros]

Kraosdada hasn’t gotten back to me yet on the source (and I don’t know if he will), but he did tell me roughly when it happened:

Well it’s indeed true. An egger got really lucky early in Eve’s history and obtained that thing. As CCP didn’t intend for Jove stuff to be playable, they convinced the player who obtained the bp to give it to them. There was also thst incident with the Jove Mining Laser, the Nibelung Particle Bore Stream, which was also Tech V. nibelungbase | Trey Ratcliff | Flickr

So if it was posted somewhere on the official forums we’d probably have to scour the first one for posts around 2003-2005. Not looking forward to that.

Edit: He doesn’t remember and suggested I ask some of the really old players who have been playing since the game launched, or thereabouts. Maybe Chribba would know?

Edit2: Found t0rfi’s confession about the Nibelung on eve-search.

Edit3: Found a description of the Jove ships from a community manager:

Wraith (‘newbie frigate’), Spectre (frigate), Phantom (cruiser), Eidolon (battleship), and Visitant (industrial). That is the extent of the Jovian ships currently residing in the EVE database. The Enigma is not a Jovian ship, for those that are keeping score.

[Valiran_Teleros]

So, I have news on the T5 mining laser front. After spending a considerable amount of time rooting through old copies of the database and managing to track down a still-working download of the Red Moon Rising item database, I’ve come to the conclusion that the Nibelung Particle Bore Stream V was not, in fact, a Jove-tech mining laser.

For evidence, I would like to present some old conversations from back in the heady days of 2003; one concerning a Tech 5 CPU that was worse than the T1 photonic version and another concerning the OP nature of Tech 5 tactical shields (80% resists! ). If Ouria and his fleet were packing those then I’m amazed the players managed to kill those ships at all!

It appears that the Nibelung was just what the devs at the time planned to use as an empire’s Tech 5 mining laser when they got around to introducing tech level 5, which we all know didn’t pan out. The laser was probably Minmatar (due to the Scandinavian theme naming) or Gallente (their old racial mining lasers had “particle bore stream” in the name).

Unfortunately, eve-db no longer exists and Archive.org hadn’t saved any of the information I was looking for, so unless one of the old crowd from back in the days of Castor, Second Genesis, or even the beta managed to save a copy of the game’s item database and graciously allow me to see it, then I’ll probably have to file a ticket with CCP and beg their indulgence.

Please keep your fingers crossed, because even if they’re willing to send me a copy there’s no guarantee they’ll have what I’m looking for.