Noctis in action

Enough speculation! I have my Noctis salvager now, I need to get out and use it to see how effective it can be. The numbers certainly look impressive but I want to experience it. It looks like I'll have the opportunity for some simple salvaging too. Exploration ends in our neighbouring class 3 w-space system, where I find the local tower easily from it being in the same place as when I was here a month ago. There are no pilots or ships at the tower, or elsewhere in the system, and scanning finds only three signatures. Two of them must be the wormholes home and out, and I already know from my previous visit that the static connection here exits to low-sec empire space, so I leave it inactive to keep the C3 isolated. The other signature is a lone anomaly, making the system almost entirely empty of Sleepers. But I only need the one anomaly.

I get my Tengu strategic cruiser out and take it to the C3, warping in to the anomaly and making relatively short work of the Sleepers there. Now I get to use the Noctis, which today is a bigger motivation for clearing the anomaly than profit, and I shall experiment. Normally, I look for and bookmark what I consider to be the most convenient wreck for salvaging, one that will get me within the twenty kilometre tractor beam range of most of the wrecks, whilst also providing a clear path to move to those wrecks out of range without having to double-back on my path. But not today. Tractor beams on a Noctis can reach much further, and I want to see what the ship can do when in rather more clumsy hands.

I don't bookmark a wreck at all, instead warping in to the anomaly's cosmic signature, which is almost guaranteed to be nowhere convenient. And it isn't, any bookmarked wreck certainly being a better option, yet all but two of the wrecks are still in range of the vastly increased reach of the tractor beams, and those two out of range only need a small movement in order to pull them towards me. Ten wrecks are locked and four tractored to my position, where the salvagers rip the remains of the wrecks on a faster cycle time to my expansive cargo hold. The increased velocity of the tractor beams' pull catches me sleeping a couple of times, still expecting them to take a while to get any wreck close to me.

Thanks to my having trained to fit Salvager II modules the salvaging completes in almost no time. It certainly seems much faster than having been in a destroyer, and my time was spent activating tractor beams and salvagers instead of calculating and tracing an efficient path between each cluster of wrecks whilst also working the modules. I am impressed. Some of the strategy in salvaging is removed but in favour of much increased efficiency, which appeals to me. Oh, and I get a little over fifty million ISK in loot from the anomaly.

Now I can help the recently arrived Fin to collapse our static wormhole, which goes smoothly. Isolated again, it is time to clear some of the anomalies in our home system. The sites are building up locally, and there is always the risk of other capsuleers passing through and taking the profit for themselves. It's not really a 'risk', as it doesn't involve direct harm to ourselves, but the profit from the class 4 anomalies is significantly above that of the plentiful supply of class 3 anomalies we have beyond our static wormhole, and we would rather realise the ISK in our home system ourselves. So Fin and I take our Tengus out for a romp, clearing three frontier barracks of Sleepers, before it is time again to salvage. We only have the one Noctis between us, and I selfishly grab it for personal use again.

Frontier barrack anomalies are awkward to salvage. In my destroyer, I generally bookmark a wreck in the cluster of the second wave of ships, low in the z-axis, before moving vertically towards the wrecks of the third wave, which warps in over a hundred and fifity kilometres from the second, and finally surging with my MWD to the final two battleship wrecks that comprise the first wave. It seems like an efficient routine, and one that works well for me, but I immediately see the potential to use the Noctis more effectively. The frigates of the third wave move quickly to intercept us and result in wrecks mid-way between the second and third waves, and those are the wrecks I bookmark to warp to.

Placing my Noctis fairly neatly in the middle of the anomaly puts me within tractor beam range of nearly all the wrecks. An impossible situation for a destroyer, and one where I would have to double-back at least once, the Noctis grabs and pulls most of the wrecks without having to move, and they surge towards me with the speed of an MWD-boosted destroyer. Even when I have to move the Noctis towards the few wrecks out of range, and even with an MWD active and pushing my speed above 1,100 m/s, the wrecks held by the tractor beams don't fall behind out of range of the salvager modules, easily matching my speed and more. The awkward barracks are tamed by the Noctis.

It is awesome to speed around and still have wrecks keep up and overtake my ship, to have ten locked targets to manipulate, not to have to path the wrecks to any sophisticated level. Fin wonders if there will be fewer ambush opportunities because of the increased speed of salvaging, but I don't think so. As I pointed out in a previous comment, I am normally waiting in the site before the salvager gets there. The only change in behaviour I will need to adopt is to predict where a Nocits salvager will warp in to the site, as the increased range of its systems may change the initial position, and I will need to ensure my ship is close enough to strike. Otherwise, the Noctis is fatter, less agile, and more susceptible to torpedoes. I would say the Noctis is a good addition all around.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: eve online, mmorpg, noctis, penny ibramovic, salvaging, scanning, tengu, w-space