Wait, where has all this money come from?

Yesterday I realised that around 60% of my ISK wealth is concentrated in my Incursion boat (with about another 30% invested in Project K. God I'm dreading losing that ship). As someone who wants to eventually make PvP my EVE "career", that's quite an odd situation, as surely you should invest the majority of your money in what you enjoy doing?

So in order to recoup my ISK investment of my SNI, I decided to stop doing Incursions (gasp), and focus instead on occasionally running Level 4 missions with my corpmates to earn some "side ISK", while putting most of my cash into PvP. But that meant I needed a new Level 4 mission boat, and I was tired of the "point and click" aspect of missiles. Which in turn, lead me to this beautiful machine.

The Maelstrom

When people nicknamed Minmatar ships as "Winmatar", they weren't kidding. This thing just melts other ships. Even with my crappy battleship skills, I can throw out around 600DPS up to approximately 45km with 800mm Autocannons, and still get some pretty consistent hits up to around 65km. While that's nowhere near the range of my CNR or SNI (both of which could reach out to +100km), it's still a respectable distance to reach for a "short-ranged" weapon system. Not only that, but it tanks just as well as my SNI, with a 7.5% shield boost bonus per level of the Minmatar Battleship skill.

Besides, the range is hardly a problem when most missions consist of:

- Shoot at enemies to get their attention
- Start flying away when they chase you
- Blap them in the face until everything is dead

So far I've had no problems tanking/murdering every mission that's come my way, and it's about a thousand times more fun to fly than my missile battleships. It's also about 250million ISK cheaper than my Incursion SNI, (which was worth approximately 700 million by the time I stripped it down and sold it o.O) even though I've pimped out the Maelstrom with a few faction mods for the luls. For all those dying to know the secret of my success, here's my current fit:

High slots
- 8 x 800mm Heavy Prototype Repeating Siege Cannon - EMP L 


Mid slots
- 3 x Mission Specific Shield Harderners (Usually 2 x EM and 1x Therm)
- Caldari Navy X-Large Shield Booster 
- Caldari Navy Shield Boost Amplifier
- Heavy Capacitor Booster - Cap booster 800s (Incase I screw up a trigger and need to perma-tank)


Low slots
- 3 x Republic Fleet Gyrostabilisers
- 2 x Tracking Enhancer II


The two Caldari Navy items I've had since I pretty much started missioning, due to a generous donation by a fellow mission runner (who was up to his eyeballs in faction fitted Marauders), though I'm ashamed to admit I've forgotten his name. The three gyrostabilisers were also pretty cheap at around 63mil (after you consider I sold three Caldari Navy Ballistic Controls for 95 mil each) and the hull itself I managed to snag before the mineral price hike made it far more expensive.

All in all, it's cheap, tanky, has good DPS and it's fun as hell to fly. Remind me why I ever flew Caldari again?


Besides my new mission ship, there's a few other things that have been happening recently:

Sadly I lost two of my Autocannon Merlins to a 1 v 1 in Amarr. The second was an extremely close fight, and the only reason I lost was because he had fitted a rocket launcher (his autos were missing for obvious reasons) which slowly wore down my buffer tank... However it was an extremely useful experience, and taught me that an armour Merlin can work under the right conditions (i.e not against missiles).

I've also taken the plunge in terms of PvP, and entered the murky world of combat boosters. Thestarling, from the Black Rebel Rifter Club put me in touch with his "dealers", for which I am extremely thankful. I've purchased ten units of Strong Exile Booster for my Vengeances, which cost me 43mil in all. Hey it sounds like alot, but when it saves your ship worth 60mil, I call it a good deal. Also it was about 7mil less than what I would pay for the boosters on the market, and I got free delivery to a LowSec station of my choice. Can't argue with that!

After all this messing around with my Incursion ship, I've managed to pull about 200million back out of my PvE activites, which has gone straight into two more Vengeances (I really love this ship), a Rupture, a Hurricane, two Arbitrators and a scattering of Rifters.

The fleet is prepared, and hopefully I'll have some good fights in the coming week.

Fly safe!