Sansha Invasion = Great Opportunities for.....

I've been using the Vigil as my main mode of transport around hi-sec, it's relatively cheap
since it has more space, faster unboosted speed (700+m/s) and a trio of warp speed rigs to shave seconds of the time taken to warp across a system. I fill out the highs with salvagers and I've found more than a few wrecks for the taking on my travels, it has no need for guns, but I usually toss a combat drone in the drone bay. In the midslots It fits a MWD - giving a boosted speed of almost 5000m/s, a Capacitor Battery and recently the third midslot is fitted with a target painter. For a while I was fitting a shield extender for more tank, but it didn't really add anything and the vigil does get a bonus for target painting.

But what use is a target painter on this ship?

Well along with the drone it's proven quite effective at getting me onto killmails for those Sansha carriers turning up in hi-sec, being able to move across grid quickly and hitting the target with EWAR from 50km out is a hugely effective way of securing my place on the killmails. On top of this, the salvagers and speed make speedy work of the vast number of Sansha Battleship wrecks that end up being left on the field of battle. I turned up to some previous events in a Hawk, but a combination of the hawk not being hugely fast (would be nice to have had that AB bonus we talked about) and the 'Slave' turning up in a Nightmare meant that the target died before I could get in range, the short lifespan of battleships is why they've switched to carriers. Sure I worked hard and blew up scores of the loyal frigate rats that were webbing and scramming other players, but my hard work was barely recognised.

So, the 'killmail whore' setup is performing exceptionally well in that respect. I'm seriously mulling over the possibility of creating a comic alt who's entire purpose is to get onto other people's kilmails. My strategy would be to fit a frigate with an ECM burst and basicly trigger it in the middle of other people's battles in 0.0, it's possible to do this on an astrometrics frigate with an expanded probe launcher so in theory you could drop scan probes around an engagement and warp right on top of targets, fire the ECM and then try to GTFO - and repeat this until you finally get caught.... One day I shall test this theory.

Anyway, at the Sansha event in Vylade yesterday I also managed to get on scene with an alt in a tackle frigate, for about 5 seconds - warped to zero, landed next to a carrier, locked, fired and got blown up by a smartbomb. At which point it occured to me I had seconds until another smartbomb cycle was going to take out my pod and the UI was running far too slowly to make warping to a celestial in time so fearing for my implants I hit ctrl-q at which point my whole system grinds to a halt and windows decides to spin while closing the app. I get control back on my main character just as autopilot jumps him into Vylade, so I head into the breach and target paint my way onto the killmail before salvaging as many wrecks as possible. I finally log my alt back in and she's still in her pod, so I bookmark her wreck, fly to station and come back in a shiny new noobship.

For what it's worth I grab the remains of my ship, and figuring I have nothing to lose if I aggro someone I look in the wrecks around me. First wreck is the remains of the carrier.... containing a Capital Shield Booster!!! Nice, now I have to figure out how to get it back to station before someone else does, a 40million isk module is fair payment for the trauma of losing my frigate.

hmm there are a lot of people sitting nearby, I wonder if they've noticed? So I jettison the shield booster from my old ship and flip the Capital booster into the same can, I hope that Slave dude doesn't come back anytime soon because now he's within his rights to shoot me. Meanwhile with my main I'm looking around for a hauler, I've got one 4 jumps away, probably too far, and on the market some enterprising individual has bought up all the haulers in system and relisted then at 1000 times their regular price. No I do not want to pay 500million for an industrial. So I head next door to Dodixie and get myself a Mammoth.

Back at the wreck site, I can see people coming and looking in cans around me, every 3 minutes I add another jetcan to the collection of stuff around me and I keep the cap shield booster switching from one can to another in an approximation of the shell game. At one point a pilot in a Cyclone comes by and steals my old non capital shield booster, just as I switch out the cap booster to another can. But either he doesn't notice the real prize, or he doesn't think to flip it into his own can, and after a tense few minutes I arrive in my brand new mammoth to secure the prize. Sometimes the most exciting things in Eve are nothing to do with shooting at anything.

That shield booster will pay for the Research Project Management skillbook my alt was about to buy.