More of EVE's history lost :(

* I only found this interesting because I'm still a pretty new player. You bittervets probably won't care so feel free to skip this post ;) *

Since I'm stuck in station, I've been spending alot more time on the forums and killboards, trying to get my EVE fix. In doing so, I came across this interesting killmail.

Crane gets pew pewed.

"So what?" you say. "Just another unlucky hauler getting nailed in LowSec, nothing to see here..."

Well, actually no. Check the rig slots. (Older players will have likely already spotted this :P)

Yep, those are large rigs. Transport ships can only fit medium rigs. Before the cries of "OMG H4CKZ0RS?!?!!", this is actually due to a change waaaaaay back in 2009, in Apocrypha 1.5, namely the introduction of rig sizes.
Before Apocrypha 1.5, if you wanted to rig a ship, it was large rigs or nothing. Obviously that meant that rigging frigates and cruisers was ridiculously expensive, and therefore it was pretty rare. Of course in our newer enlightened EVE, we have small rigs, so you can fit your Rifters with Small Projectile Burst Aerators to your heart's content ;)

But what happened if you had already rigged your small or medium ship with rigs before this update? Well they simply converted into large rigs, and you had no real loss besides from the fact that you could now buy a cheaper rig. Which made any ship rigged in this way pretty special, because it could never happen again.

Obviously as the years go by, more of these ships get killed in PvP or by random ganks, so they are steadily becoming rarer. (Infact I wonder if there will be a bidding war between collectors on the last ship rigged like this?) But my point is, Apocrypha 1.5 was released in March 2009, and this Crane was likely rigged before then (if you knew you could rig it out cheaper within a month or so, you'd probably wait). This means that this Crane has survived more than three years of pew pew until it was finally put down in December 2011.

That's pretty impressive for any ship, let alone a Blockade Runner, which is used for the sole purpose of bringing supplies into a potentially dangerous area. That's either a skilled pilot or a cautious one. Probably both.

Anyway I just thought this would be cool for the newer guys, just to show EVE's interesting history. Why not check out the changes of past expansions while on those long hauls? Some are pretty drastic (Speed nerf anyone?), and the changes they brought shaped the EVE we have today :)