Capturing explosions
1st March 2010 – 5.31 pm'We need to do this in an organised way.' The expected sarcastic replies come quickly. But moving bookmarks between ships is a painfully slow process that isn't helped when several engineers all want access at once. 
The suggestion is to copy all the bookmarks in to your ship's cargo, even if you only want to copy a couple of sites, so that the confusion of missing and duplicate bookmarks can be reduced. Let's hope CCP revamp the system soon, wormhole life depends on sharing bookmarks.
I grab the bookmarks for today's wormholes and sites so that I can haul ore from a neighbouring w-space system. The system is unoccupied and has a bounty of rocks to mine, as well as holding plenty of sites of specific Sleeper interest to plunder. I make three trips in a fattened Bustard transport ship to return bistot and arkonor to the tower, then the mining operation is halted in favour of fighting Sleepers. 
This w-space system holds a magnetar celestial body, providing a bonus to all damage. This will make it more challenging to repair through the damage spikes, and repair in general, and myself and Fin will need to be focussed in our Guardians. I wonder aloud if I can still take pictures. 'As long as they don't have us blowing up.' That sounds like a yes to me. Besides, all the best pictures have explosions, just ask Jerry Bruckheimer.
The first anomaly shows that the increased damage caused by the magnetar's influence is significant, but only really a concern when an ECM cycle fails or before it kicks in. At the same time, our systems receive the same boost to damage and the Sleeper frigates pop in a second, even the cruisers only surviving two shots from our battleships. With this damage boost, we are cutting through the Sleeper ships much faster than normal. 
I also realise that getting a message that the Sleepers are trying to scramble fleet members is a good sign that an ECM lock has been broken, helping me react to damage spikes more quickly. The magnetar also affects the ships' targeting systems, dropping the Guardians' targeting range down to 73 km, but as this is the range of our remote repair modules this is far from a concern. The DPS battleships probably feel the loss of targeting range more.
When a wave of Sleepers warps in outside of the Dominix's targeting range he punches the micro-warp drive and burns towards them. 'Cap please', he asks, quite reasonably. But the same situation occurred in the last anomaly, and the Guardians were asked to feed him cap for a few cycles to power his MWD, so when I see the Sleepers appear so far away this time I am ready. His Dominix's capacitor is being replenished by my energy transfer array, having received about five cycles' worth so far. 
'Oh, so I am.' We have become quite organised as a small fleet, defining and getting comfortable with certain duties. We know which ships chew through their capacitor and under what circumstances, and have split each Guardian's focus to certain ships or pilots. The rest of the fleet also have an idea of the limits the Guardians work with and are understanding when we need to deny energy so that we can repair the fleet. We are well-versed in Sleeper PvE.
Despite his rush to get in to range of the Sleepers, the Dominix is largely being ignored by them. 'I should fix his shield bar', says a colleague, noting that it's not as red as the rest of the fleet's. 'The Abaddon pilot wants you to come within 40 km of him', he adds, but we've all heard that one before. And mentioning things turning red, the 'sticky' meta key glitch occurs again. Thankfully, this time it is out of combat and when I am trying to shut-down my systems, but I somehow manage to overheat a repper instead of turning it off. I have no idea how I this happens, not realising there is a hot-key for overheating systems, so even when I 'un-stick' the meta keys I flail around for a little in trying to turn off overheating on that module. The module ends up a little heat-damaged, but apparently that won't affect its performance. I am a little upset that I damage a borrowed ship, though. But overall it has been another profitable and enjoyable evening, blasting through several Sleeper anomalies with a smooth efficiency.
2 Responses to “Capturing explosions”
The more and more we do this, the more comfortable it feels flying together, even as some pilots rotate in and out. The more comfortable we become however, the more and more I worry about complacency issues. Failure of attention, missed opportunities, lack of discipline.
The struggle becomes one against ourselves and less for against Sleepers and other pilots?
I think our recent pounding in C4 radar sites has shown we can rise to the challenge when necessary, but I understand your concerns about complacency.
I think it's good that we can be casual about raiding Sleeper enclaves, as it shows how much we consider w-space to be home. At the same time, we all still remain quite aware that we're in effective null-sec frontier space.