The Needlejack Truth




Our Wednesday fleet this week was yet another Crow based roam down into Pure Blind. Lufax would be FC'ing as usual. But this week had a little extra spice because I had been contacted by Richie Shoemaker (of EON Magazine fame who I've known for over a decade now) who wanted to tag along on our next Null Roam. Perfect. So I decided to make things more interesting and pick up some new Needlejack Filaments.

I was going to do this on Tuesday. But sadly Tuesday was mostly spent without power as our electrical junction box was getting a much need upgrade here at the Pirate Lord Mansion. So Wednesday morning I had to log into my Jita alt and quickly grab some filaments and then safely fly them down thru a War Dec. I admit I was in a hurry. But how complicated could it be? There are only two kinds of Needlejacks - Noise and Signal. Each of which come in 3 different flavors depending on the size of your fleet. And WHOA are they expensive!! So I picked the 3 cheapest ones I could find for 15 ships, threw them into my trusty Leopard and successfully avoided several gank attempts along the way to Ouelletta.

Pure Blind turned out to be rather quiet and after an hour of trying to drum up some PvP business all we had managed was killing this poorly fit Vexor.  So we decided to try the Needlejacks. The Noise Needlejacks I had purchased at great risk to my own life. We popped out in Tenal. Which, if you aren't aware, is the topmost region on the Eve map. A place that even I had never been. And let me tell you I hadn't missed anything. That entire region is deader than a door nail. Nothing. At this point our pilots were getting anxious and started having a lot of fun at the locals expense. We even randomly bestowed a 125 million isk bounty on some random person in one of the systems.

Our next jump took us to Querious. We did manage to kill a Cyno. Around this time was when it started to become obvious that something was amiss. Our Needlejacks seemed to be taking us to empty space. It was quickly discovered that the Pirate Lord had made a grave error in the purchase of these highly expensive filaments. To his shame we learned that the Noise variant is intended for explorers and those looking to "get away from it all", while the Signal variant is intended for people like us - looking for adventure in more PvP oriented space. None of which, by the way, is explained in the description of either item. In fact, they are exactly the same in the descriptions.

Trust me. There is nothing quite like 14 other PvP hungry pirates who learn that the boss has screwed up. Much hilarity was unleashed upon me. I think I laughed for a good fifteen minutes straight on comms.

So being stuck in Querious we faced a very long road home or we could head down to Delve and derp ourselves into Goon HQ. I'm sure you can figure out that we chose to do the latter. Eventually we made our way all the way down the pipe, empty all the way, until we reached Z3V and had a Gila run from us, although we did kill his Mobile Tractor Unit. Once we reached our destination we discovered where everyone had been hiding as over 300 people happened to be in local.

We got our wish and derped ourselves into the defense fleet. I lost my Sabre and all our Crows exploded gloriously. We did manage to take down their Hecate however, so we did get something for the effort. Not much more we could do against Golems, Praxis, and everything else. Because of my bubble I ended up on several of our pod killmails, but I managed to get my pod away and self-destruct home before giving anyone the kill.

A glorious ending to a rather boring roam thru Pure Blind, Tenal, Querious and Delve. Which are apparently the quiet, boring corners of Null Sec according to the Noise Needlejacks I bought.

Live and learn.