What's In Your Hangar?

This is probably where I spend 75% of my time. It’s a tight little beauty that has been a good friend for a long time. Her name is Wrangler, a reference to the popular Jeep vehicle. It is the third buzzard I have owned with the previous two being Jeep and Cherokee, respectively. The fitting it fairly straight forward with covop cloak, mwd, nanos and grav-cap rigs.

A very cool ship that I’m only recently getting experience with. I was waiting for a better grasp of bombs and training for torpedoes as well. The ship was originally named Hello Kitty, but is slated to be renamed Penticore after my stealth bomber role model.

This ship is a dual purpose gas miner and bait ship. When fully plated and resisted out, it has about 60,000 ehp and +70% resists across the board and completely passive. For mining gas, it works well with T2 harvesters as it has sufficient cpu, has a spare utility high slot [hello combat probe launcher] and cargo space. The first iteration was named Gas Man Cometh but version 2.0 has been named Tetris Reject in reference to it’s somewhat more angular shape [at least for a Amarri vessel].

Even after all these years, it still remains a combat favourite of mine. Everyone debates the efficacy of missiles in PVP, but honestly for small to medium gang roams, camps and hunting, they are fine. The buffered heavy assault missile drake is very nice and has a lot of utility. It makes a great second tackle, brings a fair amount of DPS and gets ignored enough to apply both damage and utility. The biggest problem with any ship is its pilot, and too many pilots are at fault for not adequately fitting this ship for use in a group. I used to name all of my battlecruisers with punctuation, so the first few were named, @, #, :, ., !, et cetra but later started giving them different names. The more DPS heavy HAM setup was Dramage [Drake + Damage], but it died and was replaced by Green Drakes and HAM which was eventually replaced by Baked and then Half-Baked. The second string was Safina Thania [Arabic for second ship] and a proto-type remote shield gang ship affectionately referred to as [] which harkens back to punctuation days. This is the only ship I have multiples of, though they are all stored outside the wormhole with the BPO somewhere.

All I can say is wow. This ship is everything I ever dreamed it would have been when I was a little Bantam pilot in nappies. It almost makes me cry with delight and it’s just plain beautiful. Her name is Hag and she is every bit as mean as her name. I’ve run a couple level fives in her [where she was massively overtanked], have hunted for ne’er-do-well’s in wormhole space and refit at least 100 different ways. I’m growing more confident in her usage and like the idea of keeping her light and nimble.

I have a tri-mark armor rigged Scorpion in Jita to use in the wormholes, but have never actually flown this one. I’ve borrowed a corp-mates a couple time and have trained to use the full range of T2 ECM skills. At somepoint I’ll get out and get it imported. It’s currently named Sc 2 x Tri 1 x P

If the Buzzard represents 75% of my flight time, this beauty is nearly the rest. It is a dream to fly and a nightmare to fit. I’ve written before about my respect for the Herculean effort required to get everything included on it that you want/need, but it is a wonder to fly. It seemingly creates cap out of thin air and makes the rest of the fleet fly with impossible tanks. In tandem with my Guardian buddy, it is a significant force multiplier. The first was named Fers Al Nahr Jo’an and was beautiful. It was lost to what I can only consider CCP mangled warp interface dynamics when the rest of the fleet didn’t warp with me. The replacement, Stop Dying, has been much more resistant and accounts for a lot of our wormhole fleet tank. This was the first ship I started keeping multiple copies of, as it is essential for us running the higher class wormhole sites.

As a carebear, where would I be without my trusty asteroid obliterator. I’ve lost a fair share of them, but keep using them as it only takes a couple of hours of mining out in the wormhole to replace it. It isn’t rigged, the tank won’t survive a gank, but it mines and mines and mines. And when it’s done mining, it sits in the SMA without making a peep. This is the only ship that has been through so many names that I couldn’t begin to tell you them all. Both because I’ve lost a fair few and I tend to rename it often while I’m mining. The current one is named Banner’s Brain Child and the first one was named Lou Ferrigno

It’s big. It’s slow. It’s really big and slow. The Luxury Yacht has been with me longer than just about any other ship. She’s made multiple trips from Gallente to Amarr space and back hauling everything from ice and ore to ships and once an entire load of garbage.

The first Orca was a splurge. I didn’t really have the means to replace it if I lost it and wasn’t entirely sure what I would do with it, but I wanted no, NEEDED that ship. I loved that ship so much I gave it away to a corporate spy/thief. Disaffected and disturbed I tried to be bitter but knew I had learned another lesson I needed to know anyway, namely: Every last one of you are lying, cheating, disgusting scum who deserve to be shot in the back of the head with an auto-cannon. Er…, no wait, that’s a different post – lesson learned – don’t fly it if you can’t afford to lose it. The backstabbing cheating part is only partly in jest. I later bought another Orca, not to replace it, but to defy pirates and sell it in Aunenen for a hefty profit on their scam order. Managed to slingshot the Orca past the perpetual gatecamp with a web and dock at the offending station to find that someone had filled the contract about 15 minutes before. So what do you with a massive, slow ship in a system full of deranged pirates looking for juicy kills? Web it and fly it back out just because you can. Because it survived that trip, I decided she must really like me and decided to call her Keeper. She is.