Doing the Null Sec Shuffle

The pre-Fozzie Sov re-alignment of New Eden continues apace.  If you look at the Null Sec Player Influence Maps site you can see changes on the map daily.  Black Legion has taken a big chunk of Fountain, the Northern Associates rental empire has all but disappeared from the map, and, likewise, The Imperium’s Greater Western Co-Prosperity Sphere rental space is rapidly shrinking down to nothing.

Over at DOTLAN EVE Maps you can see various alliances swapping, gaining, or dropping sovereignty.  Even CCP’s lore focused videos from The Scope has commented on the changes and possible power vacuum in null sec as the empires align themselves.

Up in the north, in the seven regions of The Imperium, the sovereignty shuffle is well under way.  The Initiative has set up shop up in Tenal.  LAWN just took over sovereignty in the Vale of the Silent, while Bastion soaked up the rest of the region.  My own corp and alliance is slated to head south from our long held home in Deklein to the Tribute region, space we took back during the Tribute War in late 2012.  I was there for that!

For me that means moving a lot of stuff I have accumulated over the last four years.  It is amazing how much stuff starts to collect in you hangar.  So I took my reactivated alt account and set him up to be a cyno monkey and got out my Archon to move some ships down to Tribute.

Archon… landing too far from the station…

Here is where the Phoebe expansion changes rankle a bit.  First there is jump fatigue and the jump activation timer, which means waiting between jumps in the carrier as well as effectively limiting the number of jumps I can make in an evening.  That part isn’t so bad.  I can wait.  And I don’t want to spend all night moving stuff in any case.

Jump timer counting down…

But then there is the second part of the Phoebe change, which limited jump range of capital ships.  Pre-Phoebe, having trained up Jump Drive Calibration to 5, my Archon could have made the jump from our old staging to our new in one go.  Now, with the 5 light year cap, it is three jumps.  So there was a bit more work for me, getting my cyno placed and then jumping the carrier in and docking up in one station after another.  You adapt to the game at hand, and fortunately I was able to get most of the ships I wanted to bring south into the Archon for one run.

The rest of the ships were a bit scattered.  But I managed to get them down safe, including some of the fat targets.

A Notcis on the go is easy meat

Moving stuff down was a bit easier.  There is a convenient jump bridge that goes most of the way down and haulers get a break on the amount of jump fatigue incurred.

Heading down in a Crane

After I got myself setup in the new staging, I started trying to reel in some of the more scattered ships I have strewn about null sec, starting with that Harpy I left in Fountain.  We still hold the staging system at 4-EP12, but as I mentioned above, Black Legion has moved into the area in a big way.

The route out of Fountain is through Black Legion space now

I figured with the Harpy I had a chance making a run for home through their space.  So I undocked and took the direct route to B-DBYQ and Cloud Ring, where I could again use the jump bridge network to at least shorten my route home.

The last Harpy out of Fountain

Fortunately, Black Legion seemed to have business elsewhere.  I zipped through the few systems, some very familiar to me still from the war two years back.

I remember fighting TEST here…

In Cloud Ring I picked up the jump bridge network as planned.  It was later in the evening on the West coast, so it seemed good odds that I would have a smooth trip from there, with just a few waits on jump activation timers before I could log off and let that Jump Fatigue wear off while I slept.

However, trouble found me where it often does, in  W-4NUU, a system I had to pass through on the route, and one that is adjacent to low sec, so which is easy for random people to camp.

I came through the gate into the system only to see a couple neutrals in local, which included a Garmur on the gate just waiting for me to break cloak.  Since I have found that my best odds in solo PvP drastically improve when I don’t fire my guns, I decided to just burn for the gate and head back the way I came.

As soon as I broke cloak and lit my afterburner the Garmur started locking me up.  He had me webbed and scrammed and was firing on me by the time I got into range of the gate, but that just meant I could jump through while he would have to wait a minute for his aggression timer to run down.  However, while he was shooting, his partner in crime uncloaked and declined to open fire, following me through the gate in an Ishtar.  Once through the gate and half a step ahead, I knew I could outrun the Ishtar.  I think he was just hoping to get lucky on the other side of the gate, that I might hang around.

Instead I headed for the alternate jump bridge route, which would actually bring me closer to our new alliance staging system.  However, there was an issue.  When you land on a jump bridge, you expect to see something like this:

A jump bridge module, ready to send you 5 ly down the road

Instead, when I landed at the POS on the alternate route, I found this.

A jump bridge module still in its shipping container

The jump bridge I was expecting to find was unanchored and just hanging in space in the box it came in, waiting for some good soul from GSOL to set it up… or take it away… one or the other.  So no jump bridge route down to Tribute.  Still, I wasn’t all that far from Deklein, so I just headed up and through fade, waving to the Space Monkeys as I passed through their staging system, and on into our old home.  One more ship back in the seven regions.

And while that was going on, there was a ping for a Reavers op.  Having used my jump clone recently, Wilhelm wasn’t going to be able to get down there.  But my alt was available, had a clone not too far away from our staging system in Querious, and could fly the Ishtar fit that the Reavers favor, so off he went.

The war down there has been carrying on, with Darkness taking back a bunch of systems.  But we still hold ED-L9T and have gone back to our more normal mode of operation, avoiding stand-up fights unless we have the numbers, docking up when we don’t, and shooting structures and setting timers whenever we can just to be annoying.

Foothold in Querious

All that is more difficult without a second front to draw the enemy away, but we have cut deals with a number of the locals who got screwed over by N3, so we have some support.

I have been busy up north so I have been missing out on some of the bigger Reavers ops.  Last time I was down in Querious we got slaughtered, but recently we have had some wins with our allies down there.  I was a day late for our last big win, and that apparently but Darkness in a down mood as they declined to come out to play.  That was a shame because a group from Karma Fleet took a wormhole down to join in the fun.  They were all in frigate and were sent to go sit on the Darkness undock and taunt them while we went about our business.  We shot one of their towers, saved one of ours, and planned what to do next time around.  I have a few screen shots from that, though nothing terribly exciting.

And so the null sec churns and I fly all over the place as we all wait for the big sovereignty changes to finally hit.

Ishtar near the new tower bubble “pucker”

Dreads joined us for the shoot

Dreads in a bubble

Reavers during the shoot