… you clumsy pilot.
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Yuup.
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So, I take it Miz is quoting her instead of being awful about something she’s never actually tried?
Edit:
I’m starting to see where the piratical culture of “if you get caught, blame yourself,” might have come from. It sounds like we were kind of encouraged that way from the start.
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+1 would pun again.
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Let’s just say… she had personality. Better than most capsuleers I know. Don’t know what this piece of cardboard they jammed into the current pods is there for, really.
She didn’t so much ‘encourage piratical culture’ as she encouraged self-improvement in the way someone who’s earned familiarity would.
I miss her, and that delighted mocking laughter. It tickled that drive to get back up and push on.
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Good day, ms. Jenneth.
I presume that you currently have Omega status. May I ask for your help in conducting a small experiment related to the topic at hand?
As you might know, there is a known loophole, or, rather, an undocumented feature within the planetary facilities control software that under certain circumstances triangulates and reports the exact distance between the built-in fluid router in the user’s pod and the fluid router closest to the planet being scanned - usually, it’s the customs office or a facility on the surface. Unfortunately, my current Alpha status precludes me from conducting these measurements myself.
Would you be so kind, when the timing of your current mission allows, to do the following from within an Abyssal pocket:
- Activate the map.
- Select any planet available for public access around Amarr Prime (Irnin, Hedion, Sarum Prime - anything will do).
- Select any planetary resource and try to scan for deposits with Remote Sensing.
The interface should return something along the lines of: “Your Remote Sensing skill allows you to scan within X LY, while planet Y is Z LY away.”
Then, please, publish the number Z here, as I’m sure many would be interested to see where the so-called Abyssal space really is.
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I’ve always assumed it’s to remind us of the severity of failure. If our pods popped and we just woke up instantly in the station in an otherwise identical body, it might become easy to fool ourselves that all we’d really lost was some isk and some material.
To some extent that’s all we have lost.
Displaying to us the consequences of failure ensures we don’t take it too lightly, reminds us of the others who have just lost their lives, and most importantly gives us something to focus on if the fluid router is being a bit slow.
I’d rather see my corpse than darkness.
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Assuming, of course, that the navigational systems don’t simply spew out incorrect information as a result of the filament transit…
In fact, upon testing, it does not return a distance at all, but simply says ‘you may have to be closer’.
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I see. So it got “fixed” in a recent firmare update. A pity, it was an useful “bug” while it lasted.
A negative result is a result never the less, so thank you very much, ms. Arrendis!
Thanks, Arrendis!
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Oh no, in normal space, it returned the distance: 29.4 LY from 1DQ to Irnin. That result there came in a Calm Gamma.
The navigational system simply doesn’t seem to have been able to make the determination you want while in Triglavian space. This really isn’t all that surprising, since we’ve been told that the only reason our comms systems and burn scanners maintain connection to the fluid router network is via the same fliament entanglement connections that bring you back to where you dove in from.
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Excellent! Thanks a lot.
So, last time I was in Abyss, something strange happened, my ship communication channels were flooded with white noise and then a packet of data I could later decipher as an image:
Anybody knows what it could mean?
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“We apologize for the inconvenience?”
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“Construction ahead. Expect delays.”
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“Welcome to the Enrichment Center.
Your specimen has been processed.
Please proceed into Android Hell.”
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“This Space Intentionally Left Blank.”
or possibly
“We do not validate parking.”
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Based on my wide experience with Galnet and Galnet people, I am reasonably assured that it is an invitation to triple your isk.
To anyone who thinks I am joking, or being flippant: I absolutely am not.
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So-- did a little bit of a photo shoot on my last run. Well, several runs. It’s hard to get all that many shots when you’re scrambling to … uh, get shots in?
Anyway, here are a few of the better ones.
(I was shooting for the flagship thread, so these are all me. Er, my ship. I might start trying to do this kind of thing more regularly.)
The SFRIM Void Dancer II in her favorite environment-- okay, rather, my favorite. If we polled everyone aboard, I think I’d be outnumbered-- I expect the crew prefers the safety of the dock. Like all the shots here, this is the Dark Abyss.
The business end of a Tyrannos unit. Drifters hit hard enough that I couldn’t spend a lot of time doing photography. This is the only shot I got up until I caught up to the Karybdis.
They’re not quite as horrible up close.
It went up kind of dramatically, as Drifter battleships kind of strongly tend to. This shot feels like a holoflick ad.
I love the gesture of this shot. That’s a spider-tanking squadron of … I think Sleeper drones? I was about to say Damaviks, but I don’t see the disintegrator beams-- so, drones I’m engaging, using the glow from the cloud to help me place my shots. You can see the remote armor repair systems active, top right. Just to the left you can see one of the more palatial kinds of crystal formations.
The Dark isn’t necessarily all that … well, dark. What really strikes me as odd about this is that it looks an awful lot like home. That is, Amarr space. As in, I could swear that’s the same nebula? Just muted.
Just what and where (and what) is the Abyss, anyway? … I wonder whether even CONCORD has a clear answer yet.
Spindle rock formations. You can’t tell from the shot, but they’re probably not so close that I could fly out to them without the gravity twisting the Void Dancer into a similar shape. Sometimes they’re closer, though.
To me, they represent the strangeness of the Abyss really well: what kind of gravitational force breaks sticks into pieces-- slices, even?-- and after applying that much force just leaves the pieces adrift so close to each other, as though that was just the way they’d always been?
(For that matter, how do you get, basically, forests of spindle-shaped asteroids all oriented in more or less the same direction? Magnetism, maybe?)
This seems like a good shot to end on, too-- threats overcome, gate open, the path home clear.
(All that work and I still can’t find a good one for the flagship thread. Oh well; I’ll see if one looks better for that in the morning.)
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“AAAAAAAAH!”
To what will probably be absolutely nobody’s surprise at all, I’ve been taking a little advantage of CONCORD’s recent troubles with its criminal flagging system and some unknown party’s dealings with the Agency. Only … I haven’t actually tried another Chaotic Dark run, yet.
Basically, I’m scared of the clock. It’s what killed me last time, and my Raging Dark runs so far haven’t been as … brisk? … as I’d like them to be before I give it another try. (I’d like to routinely have plenty of time to spare before I tempt fate, and time, again.)
So, I decided to try something different and do something a little more popular: a Raging Exotic filament.
Exotic … isn’t my favorite environment. The exotic particles play nicely with kinetic attack forms (so, Cerberus is cheerful), but they tint everything this disturbing Drifter green (coincidence? Hm) and aren’t otherwise very helpful (sensor enhancement: not that critical usually. Compare to the capacitor recharging qualities of Electrical filaments). Still, I tend to finish fast and with minimal trouble, so, why not give it a go?
I don’t … like boosters, you know? They don’t feel like … me. And a recent bad experience with dosing both Blue Pill and Crash (Lord Avarr, thank you thank you thank you) has me extra leery. So I try not to use them at all unless I’m looking at Raging or higher-- they just stay in cargo, emergency use only.
But: Raging Exotic. It’s a defense problem, in contrast to my usual Raging Dark, which is an offense problem. So, I have my pod inject a dose of Standard Blue Pill. Whee! Nice airy floaty-- hm, I seem to be having trouble maintaining shield capacity … oh, well! The shield booster’ll manage fine anyway.
I apparently reckoned (in my booster-addled head) without the Abyss’s sense of humor. First impression on arrival in Exotic Abyssal hellscape: “Okay, Karybdis, two squadrons of Lancer-types … should be fine. Why is half my shield red?” Booster starts clawing back the shield. Shield then turns completely red.
As it turns out, I’ve run into a very sensibly-assembled Abyssal Tyrannos task force: one squad of stasis webifiers, another of target painters, and a kiting sniper battleship. The Void Dancer II is pinned down, the Karybdis is receding into the distance, and the soft spots in my shield have “insert exotic plasma here” painted across them in shiny red letters. The Dark has kind of spoiled me: I’m way too used to Karybdis having trouble hitting me at ranges outside about 35 km. This one has no such issues.
Gods and spirits, what a scramble! Punch the assault damage control, claw the shields back, start shredding a webifier, notice the capacitor’s failing and the ADC’s reached cooldown, start firing cap booster charges, start shredding another webifier…
And that was the first room. The second had energy neutralizing Sleepers gnawing both my shields and my ability to keep them charged.
Did make it, down a bunch of booster charges but with armor and ship intact. No pictures, for obvious reasons. Will try to get a few next time. I do not think I’ll be trying a Chaotic Exotic filament run, though.
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