EVE Online is, essentially, a big sandbox full of toys given to us by Icelandic developers CCP. Some 500,000 capsuleers live in this sandbox and get up to various forms of mischief, dastardly deeds, mining, farming , politics and all sorts. These are some of my stories. They are limited to my own experiences, a tiny fraction of what actually goes on in the vast galaxy of New Eden.

Recollections: In which I bubble myself and we lose a Sabre, Orca and some Ventures

Living in a wormhole, there’s some tasks that must be taken care of from time to time. One such routine duty is the act of ‘rolling the hole’. For those who don’t live in W-space I’ll explain:

Our wormhole will connect, at random to others. At this point in time we lived in a WH with a C2 and LS static. What this means is that we will always have connections to another random C2 and a random lowsec. When one of these collapses another will spawn almost immediately. When looking for fights or farming the holes combat sites it’s fairly common to “roll the hole” by shoving a ship with a lot of mass through and back. Each wormhole has a mass limit, reach that and it collapses, spawning a new one.

When you jump through a wormhole twice you are polarized, meaning you can’t jump again for five minutes. In order to roll holes we had an Orca fitted with a cloak and probes (in case it collapsed on the wrong side, which has happened resulting in someone scanning themselves back out to k-space in an Orca solo). The Orca was used because we had a couple from some of the corp guys industrial past and also we used them to haul stuff into the WH as you can’t squish a freighter into a C2.

Perhaps we should have invested in a dedicated rolling ship. Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

So there we are, about to roll the hole. We have a couple of slinging ventures designed to dual-web the Orca when the pilot initiates warp, slinging it off to safety without the lengthy spool of of the Orca drive. We have a scout, we’re ready to go.

The first pass goes perfectly to plan. The Orca lands, goes through and back and gets slung off in moments. All is well.

Just as we’re about to bring the Orca back a second time a Proteus suddenly decloaks on the hole.

There comes a moment in Eve when something unexpected happens and you either think “shit, time to bail” or “We can take that.” I am definitely of the second persuasion. No doubt this has contributed to main ship losses in the past and will continue to do so in the future. However, win or lose, it’s good fun. Those times you do win against what seemed like impossible odds, well, those are some of the best moments in this game.

I saw the Proteus and I’m in a Sabre. With the people we have on comms I call the appearance of the Proteus and declare we can take it. He’s out of range of the wormhole so he can’t jump away. I bubble him, this seemed like a good idea at the time.

What I didn’t know is when I called the Proteus and launched the bubble, not only was our Orca pilot just about to hit warp and couldn’t stop it in time, the Proteus’s cloaky mates were on the other side of the hole. People on our side were quickly jumping into ships. The Sabre went down pretty rapidly, in retrospect, trapping myself in a bubble with a Proteus in a double-bubble Sabre wasn’t my best idea but, you know, heat of the moment and all that.

Suddenly the Orca arrives, it’s presence smashing onto grid like a floundering whale that’s just jumped out of the ocean and onto the deck of a whaling ship, much to the bemusement of the crew.

The cloaky T3 gang jumps through the hole, no doubt, to the surprised call of their Proteus pilot that an Orca has just presented itself.

By this point, we realise these are odds we cannot take: Seven T3’s, a guardian, HIC and, because why not, a Brutix. We stay POS’d up as the Orca is melted by the firepower on grid. A learning experience: think before you bubble.

But my favourite part about this story is the Orca pilots reaction. Stuck in the bubble he knew he wasn’t getting out. When the Orca popped he had hopped the bubble would have dropped, allowing him to warp his pod away but, it was not to be. In a moment of inspired thinking, between the Orca dying and himself being podded, he managed to rip out all the implants in his head, a set of +5 training implants at that. Denying the enemy a juicy pod killmail as well as the Orca.

That evening we built a dedicated hole rolling Scorpion. Fit with plates, EWAR, a cloak, probs, a WMD and a microjump drive. The idea being if it was nabbed it would just EWAR the crap out of anything holding it whilst spooling up the MJD to hop out of danger. In the end, it was never tested in a combat situation.