New Computer!

by on June 5, 2006 at 11:22 pm
Posted In: Life

Once again, it’s taking me entirely too long to get this written down. However, there was some doubt for a while whether the story was truly over….

Part of the plan for this year, especially after building Micca for Smudge, was to filter the goodness down, and upgrade the other PC’s around the house. I put this off for a variety of reasons for a bit, but finally decided to get going on the replacement for my old system the Friday before Memorial Day.

The basic plan was to take the good parts from Sunshine, the worst of the current systems (being a rebuilt HP system), and replace the bad parts with new ones, making a competent system that would be a good upgrade from my current Utena (PIII-550; decidedly aged these days). I actually already had a new case, having gotten one of the same great deals as Micca’s when I put him together.

So, off to Micro Center for a new motherboard and video card. Socket 478 (second generation P4) boards aren’t exactly common anymore, so I had to do quite a bit of hunting just to come up with a couple possibilities. After finding a pretty good one, I noticed the next variant up sitting next to it for $5 more. Looking it over, I found what I got for five bucks was gigabit Ethernet instead of just fast Ethernet. So I got it and went home. Fortunately for me, I immediately opened it up, so I discovered the hidden problem. There were two differences; it turns out that the ‘minor variation’ also changed Socket types….

So back to Micro Center and the cheaper board. I think I spent my ‘savings’ in gas.

After that, things went smoothly enough, with final assembly happening late Sunday (after FanimeCon was done). Initially, things seemed fine. But I found that the first IDE chain was occasionally dropping the boot hard drive in the middle of operation… once in the middle of a write operation, and corrupted the disk. Some tweaking stabilized the situation, somewhat. Instead of hours, the drive lasted two days before managing to blow away the entire directory structure. It was an older drive, and may have just been failing (I don’t particularly care to find out, and this may have wrecked it anyway), but it seems the problem was putting two ancient drives on one E-IDE chain. The boot drive and the CD-ROM were occasionally colliding and crashing the chain. After replacing the hard drive with a more modern one, and placing it on the same chain as the other hard drive, it’s now gone most of a week without a single hardware hiccup.

So, meet Haruhi:
MSI PM8M-V motherboard
Pentium 4 2GHz processor
512 MB DDR RAM
12x Pioneer CD-ROM (still chugging away after 11 years…)
EVGA GeForce 6200 (256 MB)
Approx. 100 GB HD space

WoW performance is a little sub-par, but workable (it’s pretty obvious that the chip’s a little low, but the memory is great). I’m still tweaking with the settings a bit. Everything else is very nice. The motherboard also has two SATA slots on it, so if I get an urge to get a new hard drive, I can get one that can make the transition to the next generation of system.

Edit: And I had meant to say that this little exercise set me back about $180 total. Most of the new system was existing parts.

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Orion Roulette

by on May 24, 2006 at 10:29 pm
Posted In: SFB

In Y148, two E4 frigates were escorting a convoy when they were attacked by an Orion Light Raider.

Patch and I just started playing this scenario from CL8 on-line tonight, with me as the Orion pirate. It’s certainly interesting. The LR is about the same size as the E4s, but is definitely more than a match for one. Two is generally a different story. But I don’t have to kill them, I just have to capture one of the three freighters they’re escorting and get away.

My initial thought was to pepper him at medium range and transport boarders over if an opportunity presented with empty weapons.

Well, that didn’t happen. I did a close range pass, and wrecked one E4. Both of our die rolls were horrible. On average, mine were worse, but I got a good roll where it counted: the overloaded photon torpedo (only 12 points, alas). He’s knocked down my #1, so… another pass to wreck the other could be a problem.

Between the two E4s, three small freighters, the five shuttles they launched, and all the maneuver markers for them, it got pretty crowded:


SFB trying to look like an ASL city fight… -or- ‘How do I get into these situations?’

Yes, there’s ships underneath all those other counters….

So, we’re at the beginning of turn 2. Can our villains get onboard a freighter? Can they get away with it? Stay tuned….

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Not so Deep in Blackrock

by on May 16, 2006 at 10:58 am
Posted In: MMO

After way too many other events, Fickle Muse finally went back in to Blackrock Depths this Sunday. The line-up was a little different this time: Blanc, Dunain, Brunev, Noxlux and Blondiewood. Also, everyone was level 60 when they went in.

With two new characters in the mix, we needed to run the early parts of BRD again. The higher levels, and probably our prior experience with BRD showed pretty well. We certainly couldn’t breeze through it, but the initial loop and into Shadowforge City was pretty non-stressful (especially on the scale of instance encounters). Incendius went down. Dunain once again regretted that he didn’t have anything he could do with the Dark Anvil, got Darkvire and therefore the Shadowforged Key for the new characters.

We also finally had enough Relic Coffer Keys to do the Vault. Kind of interesting, a bunch of vaults with… mostly junk. The main vault is why you come here (questy!), but Dunain did manage to find the one notable minor item: A bag full of gems.

After that was the final stretch for the guide’s Round 1, and the first place that took us somewhere new: the Dark Iron Highway. This was a bit tougher.

The Highway is a long stretch of road from the city with many groups of five Dark Irons marching around it. So fights were generally five on five (Mmerr! – sorry, Lance, six) with just a few straggler dogs and flame elementals to deal with separately. This was a lot tougher than the rest had been. We were winning, but Noxlux was reporting he needed a mana potion per fight.

Part of the problem was that Blanc had run out of arrows, so I was doing most of the pulling. This meant that our hate management was a lot less focused, and Blanc was needing time to really establish control. In a way, it’s a good lesson as to why Hunters have had problems with instances. The ‘job description’ implies that they should pull, but it becomes hard to avoid bouncing aggro throughout the entire party after that. On the other hand, being able to see just where all the Dark Irons were on my mini-map was a big help in clearing the area properly.

So we tried out a few things and were having some success when we finally hit the end of the road. Literally. It just stops, and there’s Bael’Gar, the reason we’re here. We almost got him the first time. He was pretty far down before he finally dropped me (right after he flattened Noxlux). The second try went much better, with only one death.

Unfortunately, the one thing Blanc forgot was the item needed to with his corpse, so we get to clear about half the highway and do it again next time.

After that, we’d been at it for several hours and were back near the entrance, so we called it a (successful!) day. Next time, there’ll be a couple chores to get done in the early parts (a sequel quest for the two new characters, and Bael’Gar for Blanc), and then it’s off to… the bar?!

What, the ale in Ironforge isn’t good enough for you guys?!

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The Battle of the Long Claws

by on May 13, 2006 at 6:09 pm
Posted In: SFB

Arch Duke Fikrohn and King Rakhzan were alarmed. The political structure of the Empire relied on playing one count against another to keep the dukes from gaining too much power. If Larkhan was able to put his (presumably loyal) son on the throne of a subordinate county, his position would be much stronger, and he would become a threat to the King. If the [Democratic Dark Star County] was attached to the Foremost Duchy, or even granted a special status independent of any duke, Larkhan’s power would be reduced. When the DDSC urgently appealed for help, Fikrohn’s fleet (supported by Silver Moon County) was already en route.

The three usual suspects, me, Mark, and Patch played this SFB scenario from S2 today, but not in our usual roles. Since this is a Lyran civil war, all three sides involved are Lyrans. It was very educational, for many reasons.

As the most experienced SFBer, I got the largest fleet: Duke Larkhan trying to re-exert control over the Dark Star County; Mark (as the regular Lyran player) got the second-biggest, the DDSC forces; and Patch got the Arch Duke’s squadron. The last two are allies, and combined are tougher than my fleet. However, if I shoot up the Arch Duke, he’ll go neutral, and go home. But the only way for me to win is to defeat the DDSC.

So my plan? Avoid the Arch Duke, and go straight for the main course before the Arch Duke (Patch) can give me too many headaches in the form of an extra fleet running around. The obvious plan for them is to link up and fight as a single fleet.

Neither plan was accompanied with a look at the actual set up. It turns out that me and Patch start out at moderate range and headed towards each other, and Mark is some distance away on a different bearing. I pretty much scrapped that plan right there. So, do a passing engagement, trade a couple ships and hope I can hold it together against the DDSC…. Not good.

Then, I found out not only was my fleet speed was higher than either of theirs, I was going nearly twice as fast as Patch’s force (20 vs. 12). So, back to the first plan: turn towards Mark, and leave Patch to snipe at my rear as Mark faces my front.

This… went far better than I ever anticipated. Patch had expected a point-blank shootout and went slow to overload everything. Purely by accident (I wish I could take deliberate credit for it!), I stayed out of range 8, scraping by range 9 for a few impulses, which meant that Patch never got a shot at me.

As the range started getting closer to the DDSC, I started turning parts of the fleet to get directly into his path. He immediately turned to go the opposite way, putting my heavy hitters headed off into empty space. As it turned out, I had enough room to clear my turn mode and get back at him without being too far off. Mark had figured he’d get by me. I surprised us all by how quickly I got it sorted out and turned around. So, the end of turn 1 was a collision between the two main forces. As would be expected, Mark came out much worse. Two of my heavier ships took some moderate damage versus two of his lighter ones being disabled/destroyed.

The next turn it was pretty obvious that everyone else would be adapting to my higher fleet speed. I also got a harsh lesson in how much power a Lyran ship can drain down when reloading weapons. They’re real nice ships, the CA and CC have more power than anything else in their class. With all the excellent phaser coverage, it’s not enough. So I maintained speed and recharged phasers as I could.

We actually called it not long afterward, after destroying another ship it was obvious that I was going to be able to defeat in detail anything that came my way and we called it a bit early. Of course, historically, it was a DDSC win, and I don’t get to actually change history here… so that isn’t the end of this little story line…

That actually took slightly longer to play than to tell, so we spent some time figuring out what we wanted to do next, and they got to see some of my library. Which was nice, since we usually don’t get to just hang out too much since we get together for a game, and then want to spend out time finishing the game…. ^_^

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Into the Rings

by on May 10, 2006 at 7:37 pm
Posted In: SFB

The Klingons dispatched an F5S scout-frigate to the ringed gas giant Wyskoon to see if the Hydrans had set up a base there. The frigate launched probe drones toward the planet, but departed (to avoid contact with a Hydran patrol) before it received their transmissions. The probe drones collected the information and ejected their memory canisters at various pre-selected locations for later pickup….

As luck would have it, a Hydran freighter, visiting the the system to scoop gas from the giant’s atmosphere, detected the approach of the Orion ship and summoned the local police patrol.

Patch and I have been playing this unusual SFB scenario from S1 on line for the last few weeks. An Orion Light Raider is trying to pick up three probe memory canisters while dodging a Hydran Gendarme (police ship/coast guard cutter) around a ringed gas giant. If he fires on the Hydran, he’ll get a second police ship to fight in a couple turns. The Hydran has no such compunctions.

The LR is definitely a superior ship, but not by much, as they’re effectively the same size. Also, the first Gendarme has two fighters on-board to help even things out.

The LR went straight in, grabbed the first canister, and zipped through the ring, to grab the second one (floating in the atmosphere of the gas giant) and ducked around the giant one way, while the Gendarme went the other to try to head it off. This lead to a confrontation at the end of turn 3 just outside the rings (with the Orion headed for the third canister). The Hydrans lost both fighters before they could fire (bad habit of mine), but no internals (though my #1 was gone from ring damage, the Orion had been a bit luckier). The Gendarme managed to knock down two shields and do a couple of meaningless internals.

Turn 4 was pretty quick. He dashed off after defeating my tractor attempt, grabbed the last canister, and left. I shot at him as soon as the phasers cycled, but he was already out of effective range. Everything I could throw at him generated one point. Absorbed by reinforcement.

So, the Orions win with a full set, giving him the highest level of victory. This is actually somewhat better than historically, where the LR blew apart the GEN and left before the second one arrived.

With this out of the way, the year is now Y145 and we’re all set for a big battle this weekend!

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