Happy Holidays

Hope everyone had a happy holiday season. Mine was good, and I can also say that the Eve Santa just kept on giving this weekend. While my better half was playing the new sims 3 add-on, I spent some time moving a jc to 0.0, and doing a lot of hisec exploration.

It all started when I rescued those exotic dancers from that gurista hidden hideout...
The next thing I know, I'd found a Gurista Scout Outpost, being run by a moa and a drake.
I helped them kill the rats in the first room, and when they were gone, I warped to the next (Mr. Drake was 50km from the next gate, wtf?)

I focused on the satellite dish and for my effort scored a pithum c-type medium shield booster.
I continued scanning that day, and 6 jumps away I got another of the same boosters!

If this doesn't sound lucky, the next day I had only a few faction mods found. The day after that, which was two days ago, I found nearly 40 different exploration sites, 7 of which were gurista scout outposts. Three of which dropped pithum c-type medium shield boosters.

So in 3 days, that's 5 boosters worth nearly 400 mil each, 250mil in assorted radar decryptors and datacores (even counting the lower prices in caldari space as of late), plus a few other assorted faction mods that dropped from a few gurista watches.

I found it odd that I ran a total of 18 Gurista Watch sites, only 1 escalated, and only 2 had a faction ship spawn.

Merry Christmas CCP, I hope the drop-lords get a nice bonus this year :)

First taste of Dominion exploration

War is hell. Well, they're fun actually, especially if you can piss off your war targets.

Sometimes they like to gank you, so to that effect I went as far from my hq as possible in case I managed to lure some WT's away from the rest of my corpies. So I went off exploring in Black Rise, trying to pick systems off the beaten path that had few or no people active or docked.

I did find a lot of signatures, but something is definitely different. In two nights of exploring, I found only 2 radar sites. A gurista minor shipyard (with NO loot at all, wtf!), and another site that had maybe 2 user manuals. That's a pretty poor turnout for 30+ systems scanned.

Combat-site wise, I found 2 gurista scout outposts, 1 gurista watch, and 1 gurista vigil. I got a faction resist from one of the outposts, someone had already farmed the other, and I got a t2 low-grade beta from the vigil.

Pretty dissappointing, but I'm a long way off from the usual exploration circuits I use, so it could just be bad luck.

Oh, there was one other annoying thing. I found at least 15 Gallente Prison sites, which I believe are the final stage of one of the epic arcs. I was a bit excited when I found the first one, figuring it was time for a bit o' ninja-ing. Alas, I did not have the right tag to proceed into the second room. A quick check on contracts showed one person selling it for 180 million. No thanks.

Dominion sure looks pretty....and the space between the 'scan now' and 'recall probes' is a godsend. Props to CCP on those improvements. The whole interface and its performance feels a lot smoother now.

Now I just have to finish designing and modelling a T3 battleship (see pic) and see who I can flog it to at CCP...