Project Cruiser, Pt. 1

I know, It’s been a bit of a stretch between posts. Personally, I blame RL distractions (work, more work), in-game amusements (war-decs, POS takedowns), and generally a poor work ethic on my part (but mostly just that last bit). After a while, it’d gotten so long since I’d posted that I just started to worry about getting that “perfect” post as a segue back into semi-regular posting, and the cycle would repeat itself. But, ladies and gentlemen: we’re back.

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For a little while now, I’ve been flying with a new purpose, with a new challenge in mind. Enter “Project Cruiser”. Born out of my own sneakiness, collaborations with fellow ninja and blogger Solomar Espersei, and an obsessive habit of watching Silentkillayou youtube videos, the idea behind Project Cruiser has been to turn various seemingly small and frail cruiser hulls into mean little DPS-machines designed purely for taking down ships 4x their size. The reasons behind my pursuit of this goal are actually simple:

• A) I was looking for a challenge. Pewing at PVE-fit mission ships in uber-tanked hurricanes and neut-fitted battleships is a guaranteed lay-up. However, change as they say, is the spice of life (although it very well might be “variety”. Or possibly cinnamon.), and my plate needed some spice (much like my allegories need to start making sense)
• B.) As I soon discovered, killing a mission battleship that’s aggressed you with a cruiser is like rubbing the mission runner’s face in his own fail. Bears hate that.
• The third reason is that I can be a bit of a KB-whore sometimes, and the added bonus of netting 883 points for the sheer size difference between the losing BS and my victorious little cruiser is kind of awesome.

It took some tooling around, some EFT-warrioring, and eventually some dieing horribly in fires, but perfection was reached with my new Ruppy of Doom ™. The exact specifics of fit and strategy are of course, a closely guarded ninja secret, but the basic gist is to survive long enough to get under a MR’s guns, kill his drones, and then burn him to the ground. Needless to say, Project Cruiser has been a resounding success:

http://tears.evekb.co.uk/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1582256
http://tears.evekb.co.uk/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1555817
http://tears.evekb.co.uk/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1547220
http://tears.evekb.co.uk/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1568084
http://tears.evekb.co.uk/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1507123
http://tears.evekb.co.uk/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1557819
http://tears.evekb.co.uk/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=1563748

The above is a small cross-section of the fights I’ve had with my new fun-mobile. Yes, some of them were over before they even began (“oh here, I found your mission object, its in that can!”), and some were with the help of some RRing frinds, but a lot of those I won solo by clawing my overheated ass back from 20% structure. Above all, I really do need to impress upon you the pure joy and sick satisfaction that one gets from popping someones shiny mission BS in a ship that by all rights should have died to the rats alone.

However, ff there’s one thing we ninjas are all about, its trends. If there’s one ninja at school wearing some hip new sneakers, believe me, the rest of us are going to have two pairs by lunchtime. So when Solomar started prancing around in his new toy, I had to have one. Playing around blowing up multi-hundred-million isk mission battleships in a 20mil isk cruiser is fun and all (and it really is), but I needed to take things up a notch.

So, while I’m typically pretty content to fly cheap ships and just roll around in the somewhat vast sums of isk I’ve collected, at the urgings of Solo, I decided to splurge and go for some bling. Enter, the Cynabal:

970 m/s, 30k EHP, 700dps and 1,300 volley on a cruiser? Yes please. This shiny little bastard love-child of Jabba the Hutt and The Predator is like flying a Rupture on Tyson-grade steroids. In the ninja game of yoinking ships out from under peoples pods, it sort of feels like turning on easy-mode; things that the Project Cruiser ruppy fell short on, the Cynabal makes up for with leaps and bounds. For instance, picking targets with the ruppy is important. Multiple targets? Possible RR? These are scenarios in which the sneaky-ruppy has a higher than normal chance of dieing spectacularly in. The Cynabal on the other hand eats group fights for breakfast. Where the Ruppy needs to call in the RR-support sometimes, the Cynabal can solo without a scratch.

Also, above all, lets not overlook the HUGE cool-factor of flying this thing. There’s something insanely balls-out, playing-metal-guitar-on-a-burning-zeppelin-while-fighting-dragons awesome about flying a cruiser into battle that nine times out of ten, costs three times as much as the ship you’re about to take down.

Now stay tuned for Project Cruiser Part 2, in which the Cynabal tastes its first mission-party blood and fellow ninja Spuddles dies valiantly and heroically in the line of duty.

Its good to be back.

o7,

-Aiden

~ by Aiden Mourn on October 5, 2010.