...And a happy new year!

Happy new year guys!

(Post inc in a day or two, detailing my new favourite ship. What could it be?)

Merry Christmas!

I dont really get into the Christmas thing, but I know alot of people do.

So Merry Christmas all!

(I'll keep it short, like I said, I dont get into it much :P)

Secrets out!

Its now been a few weeks since the dominion expansion and we have seen a wide variety of changes. And every change I've came across so far has been "bloody marvellous".

The most marvellous of all has been the changes to the faction ships. One of these faction ships caught my eye within the first day or two, and that ship is the Dramiel.

On paper it doesn't look like much, couple of Ac's, and a shield tank. Looks just like the old Republic Fleet Firetail. Didn't look very special at all...

...Until I started to play with it in EFT. More out of boredom than anything and I started to notice how much potential it could have. It had near uncatchable speed, half decent dps, drones, a falloff bonus, and the ability to fit a large shield buffer. After about 20 mins of EFT warrior-ing I came up with this:

[Dramiel, New Setup 1]
Overdrive Injector System II
Overdrive Injector System II
Tracking Enhancer II

Medium F-S9 Regolith Shield Induction
Gistii B-Type 1MN MicroWarpdrive
Shadow Serpentis Warp Disruptor
Cap Recharger II

200mm AutoCannon II, Barrage S
200mm AutoCannon II, Barrage S
[empty high slot]

Small Projectile Ambit Extension I
Small Projectile Ambit Extension I
Small Ancillary Current Router I


Warrior II x3
Warrior II x1

6950 m/s with snakes NOT overheated. Its insane. Overheat and you break 10k/ms.

"Yeah so what its fast" you say.

Well that's not all it is. Its got 20km falloff with small Ac's, a decent buffer should you screw up, and a better scan res than most interceptors. And on top of all that, its cap stable.

EFT it looked good. I couldn't wait to test it out in game, so I sent off my hauler to Jita to buy one and a bunch of snakes to go with it. Overall it cost me about 250 mil to buy the snakes and the ship. (I didn't buy the faction point at first)

At first I regretted spending so much on a frigate, but the moment I undocked I knew I had got my moneys worth. Holy shit! This thing was fast. It was so ridiculously agile. It literally went to top speed in about 3 seconds.

Since then I've spent most of my Eve time flying one and its already got itself 49 kills. Being the sharing type I quickly let my whole corp know about how awesome the Dramiel was. Most dismissed what I had to say at first. But soon Felix brought one, and we went on a long roam which resulted in the killing of several ships and gangs. One gang in particular consisted of a Blackbird, Thorax, Hurricane, Kestrel, Myrm, Hyena and a Harbinger. And after a long fight we either killed or chased them off with just two Dramiels. (We did have a Taranis with us, but it died within the first few seconds. Sorry Siskin!)

After that, Jaxx got one, then Spec, then pretty much the rest of the corp. Nearly everyone agreed just how awesome it was. It was everything you could expect from a ship.

We soon started flying around gangs 4-5 of these and there was nothing they couldn't handle. nothing could catch us, we just slowly wore our targets down and they either had to flee or die.

We decided to keep the details of the Dramiel and its awesomeness secret from outside of the corp. But as we started to lose a few, and kill alot of ships in gangs consisting of only drameils. The secret started to get out. Already our area is completely overrun by Drameils, there's one on scan in nearly every nearby system. And this particular killmail made me post this.

So here I am. Laying claim to the idea of Dramiel gangs. Python/Space jerks thought of it first! And the rest of you are just unoriginal twats!

Only joking of course :)

Buy one, try it out. Have a blast, send me isk as thanks!

Still Alive!

Recently the Python Cartel has moved to Yvangier. Its a small system near Old Man Star and its kind of link a quiet corner of a very hectic region.

We share the system with another pirate alliance called The Blood Money Cartel (refered to from now on as BMC). Now our esteemed CEO Spectre3353 told us to be nice to BMC, "We have to live right next to each other, we might need thier help sometime!" he would say...

I can be nice. When I want to be.

But after a few days it became clear that BMC didnt want to share thier little corner of the universe, and started to become downright hostile. They convod our CEO and after finally getting to the point, they less than politely asked us to leave. Jerks! (you can read the chat log on Spectres blog here)

We at the Python Cartel didnt take kindly to this, and what started our as a little bit of smack in local has blown into a full blown war. We fight at every oppurtinity and thiers no quater given. They bring Falcons, Logistics and other ECM boats. We undock our carriers and sniper BS's and each fight usualy ends up in a stalemate.

Yesterday was a good example of how we have decided to fight these chumps. We sat outside thier station at the undock with a couple of carriers, a BS or two, and several other different types of ships, camping them inside the station. I myself was in my Tempest Fleet Issue, which has been redisgined and is actualy now a really good ship. Able to fit an armor tank, and have enough slots left over for alot of DPS and nuets.

Anything undocking either died or docked back up immediatly. Only the fastest most agile ships were able to get away and a even those sometimes died horribly.

We kept this up for a few hours and even tho it felt lame, it also felt good to be showing BMC who's boss.

We had no intention of letting up untill an Invicta Hyperion appeared on local scanner, and a few moments later it arrived at the station we were camping.

Now we were very cautious around Invicta. They had a habit of fitting a cyno onto a bait ship and waiting for a carrier to agress them. Then they would light the cyno and jump in 8 or so Dreadnoughts and a couple of carriers.... then kill the carrier before it could deagress and dock backup. Just like what happened to our friend here.

The Hyperion pilot docked up his ship, and then undocked in a pod and left system. And for a moment we thought they were gone. But one of our carrier pilots noticed a suspicious pilot in local and a quick check of his records showed that he was a cloaky-Pilgrim-cyno-pilot who hangs around with Invicta.

We assumed he was watching us and we assumed as soon as one of our Carrier aggressed we would see the Pilgrim uncloak, drop a cyno and unleash a whole world of pain.

So we all agreed that our Carrier pilots wouldnt agress. They would just rep and see what happens.

And nothing did happen for a small while. Untill 2 BMC typhoons undocked and agressed us. What were they thinking? We had like 4 Carriers and had no chance of killing anyone of us. So we soon realised something else was at play here.

Our BS's shot at the Typhoons and we managed to kill one before the other one deagressed. looking at the killmail we saw that the Typhoon had been fit for pure tank and now we knew what they were trying to do.

They were working with Invicta. They wanted our carriers to agress. And they wanted to cyno in the Dreads.

We carried on camping for a small while, untill the second Typhoon undocked again and immediatly started shooting at my Tempest. Our BS's retaliated and the moment we did Mr cloaky-pilgrim-pilot uncloaked. Popped a cyno and to our suprise and shock.... 8 Dreadnoughts and 2 Carriers appeared.

We all immediatly deagressed and it seemed they were all gunning for me. 8 siege mode dreads, 2 carriers and a BS all shooting at my Tempest. I quickly assesed the situation and began to move my ship very slowly. I was being webbed about 5 times, but the 15m/s seemed to help a little. the Dreads couldnt track me very well while I was moving, and my corp mates in thier Carriers bust thier nuts to try keep me alive with reps.

Spamming the dock button I wasnt sure if Id make it. When I hit structure I was so sure it was over. But a few moments after I managed to dock up intact. The Carriers followed me, and all that was left was 8 Invicta Dreadnoughts, looking stupid outside the station, waiting out thier siege modes.

I experessed my love for our Carrier pilots and wondered how the hell I had managed to survive a hotdrop like that. I was STILL ALIVE somhow and I thought of the perfect song for our Invicta buddies:

[ 2009.12.06 02:54:02 ] Andrea Skye > hey invicta
[ 2009.12.06 02:54:04 ] Andrea Skye > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y6ljFaKRTrI

This song also has special meaning to us Pythons as its one of our corp anthems. The other being: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6hi6yfgOclw