Stumbling at the first step of a Wormhole suicide trip, plus Crucible 1.1

Given my main character hasn’t been doing much for a while, I figured I would re-fit one of my recon’s for exploration, find a wormhole, and dive in on a suicide mission to see how many of them I could travel through.

I spent a good hour or more looking at the options before settling on a shield tanked Rapier. The Probe Launcher wasn’t too hard to fit, it aligns reasonably, and I figured it had the DPS to take down easy targets.

[Rapier, Suicide WH Explorer]
Damage Control II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Nanofiber Internal Structure II
Co-Processor II

Y-T8 Overcharged Hydrocarbon Microwarpdrive
Sensor Booster II, Scan Resolution
Stasis Webifier II
Warp Disruptor II
Large Shield Extender II
Large Shield Extender II

425mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP M
425mm AutoCannon II, Republic Fleet EMP M
Expanded Probe Launcher I, Sisters Combat Scanner Probe I
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II

Medium Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Medium Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I

Warrior II x8

I was able to set this up with my spares in 0.0 – except for the Probe strength rigs. I haven’t done much scanning for a while – so I figured this would also give me a refresher. I checked my clone, undocked, drop probes, warp to a safe and start scanning. And scanned. And scanned some more. I just couldn’t get the only signature in system. Part of the problem was obviously my rusty skills – but looking in EFT, the strength of the probes in the Rapier was 61.6, while in the bonused Helios I use in 0.0, they are 104.3.

So do I abandon the idea; source some Gravity Capacitor Upgrades to bring the probe strength up to 74.5; Switch to a covert ops but give up the hunting aspect of the trip; or go that extra step and setup an exploration based Loki to suicide in?

The CSM minutes from their last meeting have been released:

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3377

I have a half written post on these to finish off – but I find I keep getting discouraged reading through it. There is some good stuff there – but I just can’t shake the feeling that if the CSM had their way, I would not enjoy playing EVE as much.

There was a Dev blog discussing an upcoming focus on the EVE Client and how it behaves. I support that approach. (Plus I would love to be able to run three clients on my PC again.)

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3380

Crucible 1.1 is set to be released tomorrow. An overview of the features can be found here:

http://www.eveonline.com/en/crucible/features/

Some additional information on these features can be found in this Dev blog:

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3381

There are some of these I am quite looking forward too – particularly condensing chat member lists.

Last of all there were some interesting stats on the game:

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3288

There is quite the flood of interesting bits and pieces on his twitter feed:

http://twitter.com/CCP_Diagoras

Well worth keeping an eye on.