EVE Online
Strategic Space-Based Sci-Fi MMO from CCP
Bit of a moment of realisation this weekend; I may not be Minmatar Tribal Liberation Army material. EVE Online's Factional Warfare expansion, the Empyrean Age, is getting on for a couple of months old now, and I've certainly given it a shot. I don't say my best shot mind you, and have been giving a go as effectively, a brand new player; a fresh out of creation newbie alt; 800,000SP, a 20 million isk bung from my main, and as it turned out, massively unrealistic expectations of starfighter glory! Its certainly been an interesting month or...
Some more Factional Warstories here. On the whole its going somewhat less well than I'd hoped, but perhaps a little better than I expected. My self-imposed stockpile of ships and equipment isn't faring too badly, for the amount of time I've been out there, and I'm down four ships out of the twelve I'd brought to the firefight. Mind you, on the other hand, I've managed a grand total of zero killmails so far, which is a bit discouraging.
Of course the odds are stacked immensely against me; I'm a newbie alt with about 1.2 million SP, I'm only...
My ongoing correspondence course in EVE Online pew pew continues, with a night spent mostly soloing out in the contested Myridian Strip and surrounds, the front lines of the recently erupted factional war between the godless rebel scum and the self-righteous fascists. Having pitched in with the aforementioned scum, it was out on patrol last night, pottering about largely on my own, partly to see if Factional Warfare can be done alone at all.
I think I'm regarding the entire project as something of a literal education actually; I've paid up my tuition fees in the form of a big...
I was going to just edit the last post, but it all got a bit complicated, so here's a whole new post! Last post, I was bitching about how long it would take the brand new player (or fresh alt), to grind out the required Faction Standing to take part in Factional Warfare. Well, several commenters came to my rescue, most notably Bremen's tip-off about the Graduation Certificate missions. So, I've spent an evening following up on that, and seem to have worked out an optimal route to the magical 0.5 standing: ...
So I finally got a bit of time to have a crack at the new EVE Factional Warfare thing last night, only it didn't quite go how I was anticipating, and I'm quickly learning that the whole PvP-Lite, Jump In and Face-Shoot aspect of it isn't nearly as accessible as I was imagining. I shouldn't be surprised really; this is EVE Online, not Planetside, and I think I'd somewhat lost track of what 'casual' actually means in this particular game, compared to most other MMOs. I'm keen! I want to give it a go, as I suspect it...
With my minerals all finally rounded up and the Ravens built and sold, its on the road once again. While the initial ordering balls-up was indeed annoying, I don't particularly regret my enforced stint as a mercantile ship-builder in EVE Online. It was a good opportunity to practice my marketeering and generally poke about in the guts of one of the more esoteric aspects of the game, and I've always been partial to a good spreadsheet on occasion. The final tally for the episode was a profit of about 30 million ISK, which was about 4.5% of the...
Just a quickie, and a reblog at that. Listeners to the most recent podcast may remember me grumbling about my lack of any kind of affinity for, and indeed, knowledge of, any of the nominations for EVE Online's Council of Stellar Management. I'm being on best behaviour here and most certainly not assuming that this is just a prize lottery, the winners of which will receive a free holiday in Reykjavik, and instead find myself quite fascinated by the whole experiment in online democracy that it is.
Anyway, looks like Crazykinux, the hardest working man in EVE Blogging, has it...
As listeners of the podcast will know, I'm currently spending a lot of my time in EVE Online paying the price for my somewhat cack-handed botching of a set of mineral purchase orders, which through a slight misunderstanding on my part, went spectacularly wrong. This all left me with about 670 million ISK tied up in what Financial Experts might call 'non-liquid capital assets', and what the rest of us call '150 little piles of shiny minerals, distributed evenly across the whole of Tash-Murkon'. It's not a total disaster, I suppose - minerals are always worth money in...
So there I was, doing my own thing in the low-sec region of "Rockpool". Mostly, this is the occasional Agent II mission, when I had time to play at all, being the multi-game hopper that I am. The vague overall plan here is to increase my standing with the local agent to the point where I can mission grind on IIIs and even IVs, and yet still be on hand if I'm needed. The whole 'needed' thing is turning out to be somewhat optimistic actually, and it seems most of the corp I'm in spends much of their...
Meanwhile, I seem to have found quite a niche for myself in the EVE Online corp. Life in 'Rockpool' isn't nearly as fraught as I was expecting, and instead of the maelstrom of silent lonely ganking in the dark I was anticipating, things seem on the whole just as placid as back in my previous High-Sec region. Partly, this is due to the geography of it all. Its a dead end that doesn't go anywhere special, and not on any of the main bottleneck routes to the yawning vastness that is 0.0. This means that there's not...
So Trinity came and went and was something of a mixed blessing, as it turned out, not least of all logging in for the last few days and seeing a stonking great 'DO NOT REBOOT!' Message of the Day. I gather there was some kind of troubles with it mucking about with critical Windows XP system files? For the first time since I got it, I find myself glad to own Vista, which by all counts was largely immune to the somewhat alarming boot sector destruction hijinks. Mind you, it wasn't just that, and there's a pretty huge...
Once upon a time, I imagined myself a Scientist in EVE Online. This was the golden days of the Tech 2 Lottery, an ill-advised system all in all, and now recently replaced. After about 45 days of skill training in an otherwise useless skill, I got talking to an agent who would give me just under 50 'RPs' a day. These Research Points would accumulate over time and each represented one ticket in a gamewide periodic lottery, which governed the distribution of the incredibly rare Tech 2 Blueprint Originals, licences to print money, in effect. Suffice to say...
Quite without realising it, I seem to have drifted out of EVE Online again. It's not a bitter thing, or an angry thing, unlike many of my previous flouncing hissy-fits. I just seem to have 'had my fill' for now. Clearly, an MMO that you buy, just about struggle through the first (free) month in and then abandon in disgust is Not Very Good, but as well as that, I start to see that the mark of a really good MMO, is that somewhat bizzarely, it's good enough that you can amicably walk away when you've had enough, and that...
All in all, I'm pretty much an Ordinary EVE Pilot, or at least like to think so. I put in about 6-9 hours a week, I do missions in Empire Space, I'm a member of the ubiqutous "small, friendly, mining, manufacturing, casual" player-corporation, who aren't adverse to the occassional bout of ultra-violence when the need arises, or even internally, although conducted in a very sporting fashion, without the malice of strangers.
I know that I'm ordinary, because the various Galaxy Maps overlays show me that the majority of other players in EVE are in the same kinds of place I...
Oh, it's a cliche, certainly, but like most cliches, based on a very evident and often repeated truth, which at the end of the day is how cliches come about. The fact that we're bored of hearing it, doesn't make it any less true. In this case, it's the one about falling off horses and needing to get straight back on again, lest imagined fear paralyze you and prevent you from ever riding again. Or something.
My particular horse in this instance is the Agent 4 Combat missions in EVE Online, and my fall was detailed previously - the destruction of...
Okay, so here's what happened. It was late, I was tired, and launched without doing any real homework, which at the Level 4 end of EVE Online's agent mission system, is just asking for trouble. I was bobbing along in a state of heady complacency too, having just come out of the end of a war that ended in a very successful manner, and all in all, I had that whole "I AM INVINCIBLE!" mindset - most uncharacteristic! Self-esteem? It burnsss us!
So I picked up Enemies Abound 5/5, took a very brief glimpse at the briefing window, threw a few...
And just as quickly as it arrived, the war our Corporation was embroiled in in EVE Online, has gone away again. Somewhere under two weeks, and, as I speculated previously, our aggressor has decided 'we're not worth it', and issued a retraction, effectively cancelling the state of war between us. This happened in a largely unsolicited manner, without any wheedling or diplomacy on our part, and is probably about as near to a victory condition as one can expect in EVE.
To win any more convincingly, in an environment where it's not possible to actually die in any meaningful sense,...
Meanwhile, aboard the ISD What Would Kirk Do?, things are proceeding almost entirely not how I had foreseen it, and popping back into EVE Online after a long weekend of, well, not popping into EVE Online, finds our corporation (Guild) at war again, only this time they mean business.
As with my other EVE posting, I have to be somewhat vague in the precise details, but I can say that this corp has about a dozen members, and shortly after the war declaration showed up in the Corp Window, our boss got an email dictating exactly how much money (in used...
Ructions abound in EVE at the moment, mostly due to a kind of ideological crisis among the other folks in my current Corp, and it's all quite fascinating to watch in my usual capacity of peripheral lurker.
We're a fairly typical kind of corp, much like a thousand others in the game - small but not tiny, active but not obsessive, casual but keen. I'm mostly there because one of my RL friends is in it, to be honest, but they're decent enough folks. There's something of a low-grade recruiting drive happening of late though, and while the numbers are up,...
No card game this week, cancelled due to injury, so instead an extra evening of EVE Online. It's a bit odd these days actually, but what with four MMOs, an actual and tactile card game, and various regular Real Life Commitments, my week is pretty much booked solid! I literally don't have enough time to spend more than one evening a week in any one game, and definitely don't have time to take on another just now.
I'm sure Lord of the Rings Online: Shadows of Angmar is fun and all, and indeed seems to be getting rave reviews pretty much...
So having a spare Battlecruiser that I didn't quite know what to do with, I thought I'd have a poke about in one of the much talked about 0.0 Outer Regions, and try a bit of 'Ratting' first-hand. The Battlecruiser is the ideal ship for this, as they are powerful enough to be able to cope with the NPC Battleships found in the asteroid belts out there, and yet affordable enough not to be too crippling if other players find and gank you.
Platinum Insurance for my chosen ship costs about 10 million ISK, for 12 weeks of cover (all...
While in other, more normal MMOs, 'Experience' is king, and gaining levels is both the means to power, and the purpose of becoming powerful, in EVE Online, it's all a little different. There, much like out in Real Life, the point of it all is to become as financially wealthy as possible. Skill levels are important certainly, and in some cases, required in order to unlock the more advanced ships and equipment, but on the whole, it's the ISK balance that's the real regulator of progress.
There are several ways to go about earning enough in-game pocket-money to be able go...
Meanwhile, in Outer Space, life goes on. Since our Corp's recent brush with War, which turned out to be a narrow escape and something of an anticlimax, we're all a bit more concerned about our somewhat rusty and/or non-existent PvP Prowess; not so much in the capacity of lone-wolf deep 0.0 solo survivalists, or massive Alliance Zerg Fleet Wings but our ability to hold our own in Empire space against a finite and known aggressor, as in the form of the typical Inter-Corporate War Declaration.
To this end, last night was our first organised Civil War event. It consisted of a...
So, there you go. More or less a year after unrolling the Planetside: Reserves program, SOE have now discontinued free access to the game for all Reserve station accounts, bringing the year-long free trial of the obscure MMO-FPS to an end. To be honest, I'm rather surprised, figuring it was going to be like the Anarchy Online one - effectively free for ever, but contractually obliged to declare it in year-long blocks for some reason. Seems I was wrong, and for you, Reservist, the war is over.
Current Reserves accounts are now locked, although can apparently still be unlocked and upgraded...
I've not talked about my recent season in EVE Online much, and while this is partly oversight on my part, it is also part reluctance too. In general, my online adventures are anonymous things, mostly because of personal paranoia. I don't put character names on the blog so that I don't get mobbed by crowds of autograph seeking fans while chasing goblins about, you see! Haha...I kill myself. But, and this is the important thing, in most of my online games, I am the only one that can do so.
EVE is a bit different though in that it's the...
Quite getting back into EVE Online again, representing as it does, an MMO that does things a bit differently, which is the sort of game I'm increasingly drawn to these days. I've auto-attacked a lot of monsters in my day, and after a while, one 'Miscellaneous "Cause Damage" Special Attack #43' hot key button starts to look much like any other, and only the particle effects start to vary. EVE Online, as I've mentioned often in the past, during my previous seasons in there, presents an entirely different game mechanic on a very moment-to-moment level, throughout play, based more in...
It's GDC time, and in the light of the now defunct E3 show, this seems to be becoming one of the high-points of our calendar. I have a sort of indifferent view on the big Preview Shows as a whole, although GDC seems to serves a somewhat greater purpose, in that it's largely about keynote speeches, workshops and all that kind of thing, where developers are the main audience, rather than the reputed bearpit of the nakedly commercial E3, which is, or rather was, more for marketing people than anything else.
Anyway, for proper coverage of the thing, do check out...
In perhaps less time than I thought, I caved in and resubbed to one of my long time online antagonists, EVE Online, demonstrating once again my embarrassing lack of willpower. Personally, I hold the EVE CCG and Eve Tribune (links to the right) responsible in equal measure, but then a return to a, hopefully, more engaging EVE experience than I'm used to from past visits, was always something I'd been planning on having a go at this year anyway.
Of course, EVE is the game you don't have to play, to play, and prior to cancelling in the usual distemper last...
Old news now, of course, in this whirling helter-skelter of Information Superhighways and what not:
Slashdot: eBay Virtual World Delisting Skips Second Life
All quite complicated, and still on-going I think, but the basic gist of it is that the megalithic online car-boot sale that is eBay, has decided that it wants nothing more to do with the mind-wrenching conceptual hijinks that is Online Virtual Asset Ownership, and have decided to just pull the lot. Including imaginary stuff from Ultima Online, which is actually allowed to be traded in this manner, and yet not including imaginary stuff from Second Life...
A look to the past, with Planetside, so now a look to the future, with EVE Online. I'd be hard pressed to put an exact date for my eventual return to the game - I have a lot of games I'm quite enjoying already at the moment, but the 2007 Plan is indeed, another go at CCP’s quirky niche space-based quietly-solid success story.
Part of EVE's unique appeal, is the sheer level of impact the players have on their game world, and indeed, game. Many of the elements of gameplay that exist in today's EVE Online are things that had...
Well, I'm finally caught up on my RSS from the few seasonal weeks off I took, and it does seem quite a bleak kind of season, particularly the 'round-up' type posts, with most of us still playing games from 2005 and further back, not impressed with any new titles released in 2006, and not especially looking forward to anything scheduled for 2007. Lean times, and the Year of The Expansion indeed.
The Podnositcator's holiday special, including interviews with a great many other MMO podcasters, seems to sum this mood up quite well, and can be found here:
Virgin Worlds Podcast #45
(Episode #46,...
Ah....remember this?
Van Hemlock: The Completion of Titans
That was on 28th Sept. Well, congratulations to Ascendant Frontier (ASCN) for managing to keep it alive for six weeks, which was frankly longer than I'd given it:
EVE Online Vault: ASCN Titan Lost (via Virgin Worlds)
So there you go - eight months to build, six weeks to lose, or more precisely five minutes to actually be blown up. As with most things EVE-related, the truth of the events are shrouded in smacktalk, propaganda, spin and misdirection, but a little research shows not an...
From the ‘That’s No Moon…’ desk, this titbit:
Eve Online: Ascendant Frontier completes first Titan. (via Kill Ten Rats, Heatless Gamer, at al.)
And you thought opening the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj was time-consuming. From the news post, the construction of the Amaarian Titan-Class ‘Avatar’, detailed here, cost around 160 Billion ISK in materials and blueprints, and took the Ascendant Frontier Alliance, itself a grouping consisting of around 22 member Corporations, and just under 4,000 players, around eight months to complete.
(For reference, one Agent 4 mission will take me about 45min to complete, and earn me around fifteen million ISK, or so.)
Quite...
Staying with EVE Online a moment:
Gaming Nexus: All About The ISK (Via Vrigin Worlds)
Don't worry...more harrowing Planetside war stories soon, but this whole EVE Investment Bank scam had managed to pique even my interest, so it's interesting to get a round up of what CCP, (the folks who made and run EVE) think of it all. Mostly these thoughts seem to be in the 'Oooh...interesting, but you guys can do what you like,' school of thought, and I guess they're right. The whole thing was essentially players convicing other players to give them their money, and then logging out while...
Just after I posted the previous, this:
MMORPG.com: 30K PCU Broken
More congratulations due! EVE Online reaches it's 30,000 online mark, which is particlarly impressive as they're all in the same gameworld, and as we all know, nobody likes Sci Fi, so bonus kudos there. (Sort by Genre - 146 Fantasy, 38 Sci Fi and 16 Other).
Of course I'm not really playing EVE at the moment, so am in no real position to judge, but I do wonder if a single world with that many people in is a plus point, or a minus. Certainly it makes for a busy universe, full...
Decided to take the night off of Second Life the other night, and go for a bit of a wander. I’m still quite surprised how much of a draw the ‘Metaverse’, as they keep liking to call it, has on me actually. Getting on for seven years into The Grind, in various different guises, I sometimes wonder if SL wasn’t the sort of thing I’d been looking for all along.
It stems from not really having the temperament for long sustained repetition activity I guess – I’ve never really been able to knuckle down and actually grind mobs for any...
It’s not all explosions and glory in our little corp, and part of my job is housekeeping.
Being a Typhoon and Raven combo, we tend to get through a horrendous amount of Heavy and Cruise missiles, and while these are plentiful on the local markets, I tend to regard buying in ammo as a sort of failure. However, our primary business – pro-active salvage – does tend to generate a huge amount of, for want of a better term, space junk. Whole bits of Gurista spaceship, conveniently self-packaged into floating barrels, and me with the kind of obsessive compulsive disorder...
It’s not an easy life, being contract mercenaries working for the Caldari Navy. The hours are long, the work is dangerous and the dental plan is decidedly sub-par. But the pay is good, and the looting plentiful, so our little corp tends to spend most of it’s time doing their missions. Most of the time, the jobs that come up are pretty routine – fly out here, explode all these spaceships, and sometimes we even remember to come back with the hostages, stolen documents, confiscated contraband or exotic dancers, as appropriate.
It is a mistake to think that one’s Agent is...
After my disheartening excursion with a typical EVE Online corp, I’ve taken refuge back in my old corp, a modest affair from over two years ago which exists purely so that I can more easily share piles of junk-loot with an RL friend. He’s currently playing again, and both having long-since reach the point of well-rounded and competent Battleship operation, (as opposed to just having raced directly to ‘[Race] Battleship I’ in a short a time as possible), we’re giving Agent IV combat missions a go, and they’re turning out to be both tremendous fun, and extremely lucrative.
Although some badasses...
My continuing search for the real EVE Online, err…continues, with my application and signing-up with one of the many player corporations advertising on the in-game Recruitment chat channel. The channel itself is a bit of an odd place, regularly showing more than 300 people, all of whom seem to spend much of their time spamming rather generic recruitment adverts over and over, bitching at each other for spamming too much, and subsequently arguing so vehemently that they don’t notice those few players who actually do seem to be looking for a corp to join.
Determined to get started on the bigger...
It’s back to EVE, and the usual process of trying to remember how to play. Forewarned by previous experience, I’m making sure I ease back into the NPC Agent missions a bit more gingerly this time, and started from scratch with Frigate based Agent 1 missions. As it turned out I hadn’t forgotten quite that much, and am now comfortably grinding away on Agent 2 Crusier-based missions and working at faction standing in the hopes of opening up a new line of Agent 3 leads. My usual Agent 3 people are on the other side of the galaxy, and it...
Meanwhile, in EVE Online…
Kill Ten Rats: No Longer Blue
You can’t help but admire an attitude like that; ‘We have decided the game is boring…we are going to make it more interesting by declaring war on everyone!’ Player content, I guess. Certainly big news if you live next door to the bit of space Band of Brothers have carved out for themselves, but for most it’s just another interesting news item that is unlikely to matter to them personally – like some overseas war.
My rather loose touch on EVE politics suggests that BoB do actually have the numbers and skills to...
Surfing other gaming blogs, as I do, it’s interesting to see how many other Monsterhunters are poking about in EVE Online at the moment. It seems there's a bit of a run on it currently, and indeed, check out this impromptu mini “Carnival of EVE Newbies” I’ve put together:
Buttonmashing: Learning the ropes, the hard way…
Kranky Kraut: EVE = Weird
Heartless Gamer: Joining a Corporation in EVE Online
Virgin Worlds: EVE Fails Me
Game Memes: Vaporized
And the various comment threads there show that these folks are not alone in having a go at what seems to have become the quiet ‘other’ MMO success over...
Anyone who chooses to mine asteroids in EVE Online can quite definitely be said to have 'too much time on their hands', I've always thought:
EVE News.com: Building a Model Rifter
Links there lead to a set of printable PDFs, which look like they work best on 160gsm paper. It's actually quite impressive that such a complex 3D object can be made in this way, and the Rifter - a Minmatar top-end combat fighter-type vessel, is one of the more asthetically pleasing of the ships on offer. Judging by the massive feedback on the forums, it's possible that other ships may be...
Meanwhile, in EVE Online:
OGRank: New EVE Content Patch
(Found via Prognosticator’s excellent new ‘news.VirginWorlds.com’ online news roundup service – do check it out.)
It’s a long running in-house tradition at CCP. They do expansions, but they don’t charge for them, and give them out for free, and this seems to work well, serving to keep the brand undiluted, and most likely avoids any number of ‘What if they don’t have [expansion]?’ development and design problems. Having abandoned box sales entirely, in favour of digital download, they don't really need to keep a 'shelf presence' either - one of the main jobs of...
Ethic has a fascinating interview here:
Kill Ten Rats: Interview: Istvaan Shogaatsu
Istvaan and his corp recently achieved a great deal of infamy by 'owning' another player corp in just about the most comprehesive way possible - an elaborate months long confidence trick hiest, far beyond the scale of anything like Ocean's Eleven, resulting in the absolute ruin of the target corp, to the tune of 30 billion ISK + Reputation, and the sheer scale of the caper even warranted a four-page spread in PC Gamer magazine, out there in the Real World.
Regardless of my own opinions on the means, I can't...
One of the key fascinations with EVE Online, for me, is the Market - the vast and complex sprawl that makes up the (mostly) player-driven economy. Much in that game revolves around making money. Due to the unique way their experience points system works, the concept of 'Level' as understood in other MMOs is by and large, totally irrelevant as a measure of progress or success. Instead, bank balance tends to function in that role.
I've mentioned various ways to go about becoming wealthy in previous posts, but last night I decided to look into manufacturing again, an activity I hadn't...
Remember school? Sitting in Maths lessons, trying to force your brain to do all manner of complex and unnatural things with protractors, cosines and triangles. I don't know about you folks, but I distinctly remember thinking to myself, at the time, that this trigonometrical voodoo was all very interesting and all, but that I couldn't see any point in my life where I'd ever find a practical day-to-day application for it, beyond end-of-school exams.
Well, it turns out I was wrong, and the practical application, oddly enough, turned out to be Massively Multiplay Online Gaming. Who knew?
Anyone one who has ever...
So our EVE Online checklist so far consists of not going outside of 0.5+ space, and not joining a guild. However, these two might not be enough, because of the way law enforcement works.
Like Real Life, there is actually nothing physically stopping you walking up to a stranger in a busy town center and killing them. You can do it, but you'd expect to be seen, reported, arrested and put away for a very long time, or excecuted, depending on local legislation. None of this helps the person you just murdered much though - it's mostly to create a deterent...
No, not a witty and insightful piece on Sony, Nintendo, Microsoft and Next Gen Consoles - it's EVE Online again. I try not to bang on about the same thing two posts in a row, but the only other news of note today is the introduction of Elves to veteran sprite-fest Ultima Online, and my feelings on that can be summed up with one long sigh of reproachful dissapointment. Could be worse though - it could be a Mecha-based expansion instead...
So, regular readers will now have a picture of the EVE Galaxy, composed of three areas; The wild open frontier...
I really should know better than to read the 'General' board at any MMO website forums by now. A great deal of what I see there makes me alternately angry and sad, and the worst part of it is that it often has no bearing or basis on what the Developers and Producers of said MMO have in mind for it's future at all. Mostly it's just a lot of anonymous hotheads trying to create the impression that if the game is not already a thing that comforms exactly to their own ideas, it will enevitably become so very soon.
This...
In far less time than I thought, I am now the proud owner of a new Typhoon-Class Battleship in EVE Online. By 'owner', I mean it in the the 'worked hard, purchased and is now my property' sense, rather than the 'OMFGWTFBBQ!!!11!!' sense, of course. I say 'worked hard', but to be honest it didn't really seem to take that long, compared with some of the 'Grinding For Victory!' I've subjected myself to in the past in these strange little worlds. Maybe two weeks of reasonably dedicated haulage work, and a keen eye for market prices on the various types...
Ever since the destruction of my mighty Maller-Class cruiser, 'Obsolescence', some days ago, I've been bringing all the powers of anally-retentive spreadsheet analysis at my command to bear on the problem of Making ISK Quickly in EVE Online, and the results suprised me somewhat.
Income can be generated in several main ways, each with pros and cons:
Mining: Mining in EVE is a matter of shoving a mining laser on the front of any ship, pulling up to an asteroid, and sucking it dry, in a very Mosquito-like manner. Once full of ore, head back to a base and refine it to...
"It is with great regret that we report the loss of the Maller-Class Cruiser 'Obsolescence', in the Lonetrek Region, late last night. Engaged in hostile action against a fleet of Mercenary Caracal-Class Missle Cruisers, the Obsolescence fought a valiant struggle, but on her eighth attack run, did not manage to complete her exit-vector warp calculations quickly enough, and was destoryed under a withering hail of heavy missle fire. Only one survivor escaped, the captain, in defiance of several millenia of naval tradition. A small service will be held later today, and the families of all 900 crew are invited to...