I long ago stopping bringing up anything akin to specific gaming goals here on the blog.  Some like to lay out goals for the month, but not I.  This is because, on the video game front at least, there is something of a perverse relationship between my declaring a goal aloud and me then not doing that thing.

Does a mention of intent break the spell?  Or am I just chaotically bad at knowing what I will want to do more than five minutes in advance of doing it?  Probably the latter, but it has been enough for me to give up on the idea.  I write about what I have done once it has happened and remain otherwise vague about my plans most days.

Which isn’t to say I don’t have goals.  In EVE Online I generally have two monthly goals.  The first is to go on at least one strategic fleet operation, which is the minimum requirement to not get kicked out of KarmaFleet… though they are not even as strict as all that.  It is actually three strategic ops… an operation for the coalition that accomplishes something of need, as opposed to something like “hey, lets go try and rob an ESS or three,” which is considered a peacetime operation… over a three month period, though they can be a bit lax on that and only really check if you’re applying for SRP or if leadership has decided it is time for a purge of inactives.

Anyway, I am a pretty half-assed line member, but I can manage that much.  In fact, it is a rare month where I fail to log two or three, if only because every homeland defense fleet is strategic so somebody will call for a Harpy fleet and I’ll log in, get in fleet, and then we’ll find that the hostiles have buggered off or there are only a dozen of us because it is late on a Tuesday night, so we stand down.  But either way, you get logged for a strategic op, even if you didn’t undock.

And I would be happy with the easy fleet PAP, except for my second monthly goal, which is to get on at least one kill mail over on zKillboard as well.  If you go look at my stats, I have somehow manage to keep that streak going since April 2014.

There are some one kill mail months.

I recall going out one month to hunt MTUs near the end of the month until I got one, because it has to be a hostile kill mail, not just me getting blown up or zapping an alt.

Anyway, I’ve now rambled too much about that, so I’ll sum up by saying that when the first of the month rolls around I start thinking about how I am going to fill my meager goals… and I was in luck!  It turns out the alliance HOLD MY PROBS joined up with PanFam after being evicted from Feythabolis and have started pushing forward to grab some space of their own around us… so that had to be stopped.  The Saturday Fireside was all about moving caps into the Curse region to take down their staging Fortizar.

Now, I wasn’t going to do that.  I am down to one active account and I have learned to not go off on such moves unless I have my own cyno should I get stranded.  Meanwhile, there is no indication that this is going to be anything but a short jaunt, so I didn’t run to resub alts.

But after PanFam declined to show up for the Fortizar timer it was decided that we should go out and blow up some of PanFams Metenox Moon Drills in Curse.

Moon drills came in with last year’s Equinox expansion which, which even CCP’s recently suggested, did not improve the mining situation in null sec.  Beware when they say they are going to rejuvenate your play style.

Anyway, those were the return to passive moon mining and are useful if your corp or alliance doesn’t have the membership to go out and mine a moon frack.

Passive Moon Mining Lives Again

So when the call went out for a Raven Navy Issues to shoot some structures, I was ready to go.  I am not sure I had even seen a moon drill up to this point.

The hostiles, while they wouldn’t form for the main structure, showed up looking to maybe cut out a fat battleship from the herd to grab.  When we undocked we moved carefully as a group towards Curse.

A bubble on a gate as we motor towards the next system

We managed to zap one or two hostiles as we moved, but we had a destination to get to and a timer waiting for us, so we were more focused on getting to the first system on our side of Curse, 0SHT-A… known pretty much universally as “oh shit.”

In there on the Keepstar the alliance maintains was a titan waiting to send us on our way.

Sitting on the Erebus waiting to bridge

Curse is Angel Cartel NPC null sec, which means that players do not own it and it has NPC stations scattered about that can be used to stage.  We’ve been there before.  I have a post about going to Curse at one point with screen shots of the old Eagle hull model, and that has been gone for ages.  I had stuff scattered around Curse, which I slowly started to collect up when we moved to Tenerifis, which is not that far away.

We were headed deeper into the region, and when the time was ripe, the titan sent us on our way.

Ravens landing on a cyno

We were in the system with the target… there were a number of moon drills deployed, but we were after a specific one owned by Deepwater Hooligans, another PanFam ally.  We landed and found the target ready, so we opened fire.

Missiles away!

Cruise missiles streaked out and drones were launched to take down the drill.  We chipped away at it hull, the final timer having arrived for us, until it finally erupted… or didn’t so much erupt, but changed.  The explosion sequence did not arrived, the whole thing just changed to the drill wreck model.

The wreck on the field

It actually did that at all the ones we blew up, so I suspect that there is no explosion sequence, or that it is broken.

The kill mail showed there was quite a bit to collect from the destroyed drill and we hung around while GSOL, the alliance logistics group, scooped up the goods.

From there it was on to the next target.

Ravens moving through Curse

We set on a second, and then a third drill, letting fly at each target waiting to be destroyed.

Another drill under attack

Our fleet got to destroy three and stood guard while loot was collected.  After a while we moved back to the Keepstar where we had been bridged, with many in the fleet eager to return home as it was getting pretty late for the Euros who decided to go on one last op for the night only to have it stretch out longer than expected.

The Keepstar in system

The question was whether the person who chose the colors was a Minnesota Vikings fan or an LA Lakers fan.

We spent quite a bit of time lingering on the titan again, ready to be bridged out once more if the hostiles tried to reclaim their moons.  GSOL was out there planting moon drills to replace the ones we had destroyed and needed a force to cover them.  So we sat and waited.  I put myself in the “no chatter” channel, where you only hear orders from the fleet command, and started listening to a podcast.

The FC warped us around a bit, playing with the formation options available.  We also had two titans undocked for a bit in extremely close proximity.

Two titans like sardines stacked head to tail

This doesn’t seem like something really worth noting, except I remember a time when two titans getting close and bumping used to send them flying.  I have a post from back in 2012 about two titans in a POS bumping and one of them ending up a couple hundred kilometers away.

That used to be a thing.  I guess it no longer is.  But I don’t have a titan, so I wouldn’t have noticed when that changed.

Eventually GSOL was done and we headed for home.  We were given a couple of bonus PAPs for having stuck around waiting for so long.

And the moon drill offensive has continued.  If you look at the losses over zKillboard it looks like we’ve been on a roll in the region.

Meanwhile, I got in my very minor EVE Online goals for the month.  I am on a few kill mails and and got my fleet participation credit.  But if we’re going to get into an ongoing scrap where were doing things… is this going to be a stand up fight or another bug hunt, right?… then I’ll be back for some more.