Seven Cynos to Sakht

There is no reward under the opportunity system for “achieved maximum jump fatigue” in EVE Online.  I know, because if there was one, I would have gotten it last night.

Just four seconds late on the screen shot

Five days is the hard cap on jump fatigue, a change that came in with the Parallax expansion last November. (Did you know that Parallax was the last named expansion in Syndicate?)  Before then, from the launch of the Phoebe expansion until Parallax a little over a year later, you could ruin a character for jumping for long stretches.  Now you can max jump fatigue out on Sunday and be fresh and ready to go the following weekend.

Just don’t plan to do any jumps over the days in between.  The wait between jumps gets a bit harsh.  Here is where I stood after maximum fatigue hit.

That is almost as long as a DBRB fleet feels

So how did I end up with all that jump fatigue… or, more to the point, why?

Opportunity!

The night before, after making my jumps, I did managed to get my cyno alts inserted into the next two destinations.  So when I got home from work, I  jump cloned back to my carrier from Sakht and did those jumps almost immediately, thinking that I might have to spend the rest of the evening getting the next jumps into position.

Another jump in the Archon

As it turned out, these two locations represented the most difficult spots into which to get a cyno alt, since they involved flying through NPC null sec in the form of the Syndicate region.  All the cyno spots after that involved runs through relatively safe, and mostly deserted low sec space, with a quick jaunt through one of those high sec enclave in the middle of low sec that makes you wonder what sort of job CONCORD is doing.

And… well.. with cynos alts in position, why not take the jump?

If I had known that back end of the route would be that easy to get into position, I would have structured my jumps differently.  I would have let the ~50 minute fatigue from the first jump wear down to below the 10 minute mark before making the next jump, keeping my fatigue from building to over an hour.  Maybe, I might have not bothered with the timer on the last couple, but by that point quick jumps would have left me with jump fatigue that would have been gone over night.

Instead, not knowing which jump might be the last one for the night, I took them about as soon as I could, and the jump fatigue started to build; an hour, four hours, ten hours, twenty three hours, three days and change.

Exotic stations under strange stars

After five jumps I was sitting on a lot of jump fatigue already, and had a 90 minute count down until I could make the next jump, but by that point I figured “What the hell!”  I had an alt ready and waiting, so I lit the cyno.

Burning the beacon at the last station for the night

And then it was time to jump.

Somewhere in Aridia

That was it for the night.  Jump fatigue was at maximum and the next possible jump window was over eight hours away.

And I still wasn’t in Sakht yet.  Sakht was seven jumps from where I started and I blew my load in six.  As I said above, if I had known I was going to get this far, I would have done it differently.  But now my carrier, with a pile of ships in the hangar, is just one jump from our staging station in Sakht.

I sent my in-alliance alt ahead, and he made it all the way there.

Destination gate in sight

The smart bombing battleships were taking a night off from gate camping, so it was an easy set of jumps.  And now I have my main alt, my combat alt, in our staging system.  He even made the trip there entirely via gates in an frigate with only a cyno module fit and 250 units of liquid ozone in the cargo bay.

My carrier road trip is almost at an end.  I just have to not screw up on that last jump.  Given my ignorance or capital ship operations, I am surprised I got this far without any real incident.  I managed to place my cynos on stations in a fashion that wasn’t horrible.  I think worst landing I had put me 3km off the undock, distance quickly covered.  The rest were under 200m, with most showing 0m.  The tactical overlay option that shows the landing zone for your cyno when you mouse over the module gets the credit on that front.

So easy, even I understood it!

I also only lost one of my cyno ships.  I bought four Kestrels, named them Bait 1 through Bait 4, and only Bait 2 died, getting blown up on a gate in Syndicate.  I expected cyno ships to get popped sitting on the undock much more frequently.

Hell, I expected my NPC corp cyno alt to get popped by my own side at some point, being in a “Not Blue, Shoot It” coalition and all.  But he never got shot.  In fact, he got convo’d by a GSF pilot at one point asking about his name (a misspelled Jack London reference) during which I said I was just a lowly Imperium cyno alt, and which point I was told that I was holding up somebody’s jump as they were paranoid because a neutral was sitting there on the undock. (I forgot to dock up after the cyno went out… and still nobody shot me.)

Anyway, it was an adventure, getting my carrier from Saranen to Sakht, a 13 jump multiple day event.  EVE Online is one of those games where you have to focus on the journey most of the time, because the destination is usually just the starting point for the next trip.  But if you’re sick of my traveler’s tales in New Eden… and I admit that I never get to see anything as cool as this jump… there are probably only two, maybe three posts left in the “Getting to Delve” series, I swear.

Now to let that jump fatigue wear off… wait, I still have one more jump to go.