System cleared for anomalies

28th April 2010 – 5.14 pm

The threat of the Buzzard is gone. I think it's safe to say we can clear some sites of specific Sleeper interest without being interrupted by his corporation. The fleet of hunting ships is stored in a hangar and battleships and Guardians brought out instead. Warping and jumping in to our neighbouring w-space system we head to our first anomaly of the night.

It's my turn tonight to hear the natty armour warning sirens. Fin got all the attention the other evening and I struggled to keep her Guardian afloat, and now the Sleeper battleships are all targeting me. My twin is somewhat more competent than me, my logistics ship wavering around the 20% armour mark for a while but never taking hull damage. At least we are aware of the alpha strike these Sleeper battleships can inflict. And although I don't take structure damage I am warped in to structures a little too often, the structures of Sleeper compounds.

My whining about having to continually navigate out of structures doesn't go unnoticed and it is suggested that it is perhaps more desirable to do that than warp in some 70 km away from the initial Sleeper presence. Personally, I disagree. I find it much more convenient to be in clear space and head towards a target when the alternative is having to determine which side of the structure my ship has arbitrarily bounced to, before having to point my ship in a suitable direction and move away, trying not to select the structure itself when trying to turn my ship, all whilst having to lock on to the twin Guardian to start the energy transfers and all the other ships in order to be ready to repair damage.

On top of that, as smilarly named anomalies have the same waves of Sleepers, starting some distance away lets me set an approach vector that will get me in range of both the intial and the second wave of Sleepers without having to change direction several times to navigate around an imposing structure. And I'm sure it doesn't help my apparent threat with the Sleeper battleships when I accidentally ram one when trying to move away from the structure either. But I'm not squad leader, so we are warped in to structures.

Irritations aside, the anomalies are cleared quite smoothly. An ally is again along for the experience, after enjoying a previous junket through w-space anomalies with us, and officially joins the corporation to remain out here. The extra damage is welcome, even if the extra ship makes repair logistics more complex than having two reppers on the Scorpion, one on the Guardian, setting the nav-comp to follow the Dominix with the last active repper, and taking a nap. But Fin and I are getting really quite handy with Guardians in a small fleet. We individually have assigned certain reppers for specific ships, allowing us to know how many are active and where for greater agility in re-assigning the reppers in emergencies, as well as understanding the fleet's capacitor needs and generally keeping everyone's guns and drives energised.

We are able to blast through nearly all the many anomalies in the system, as well as a magnetometric and then a radar site, the latter's dark dust clouds of blessed relief being a pleasant change from the bloom clouds of increased blinding in anomalies. With a little time left we clear one of the easier anomalies too, leaving only one site in the system as we jump back home. It has been a good evening for profit, bagging over 125M ISK each. That should be good to buy a new ship or two.

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