Our Heroes Seek a Higher Education

The Open University of Celestial Hardship looked great.  Tesla and I had briefly discussed E-UNI, but ruled it out very quickly as we were more interested in the martial aspects of Eve, as opposed to training in every facet of New Eden.  Essentially, we were looking for acceptance into a small dojo of Eve survivalists, instead of an Ivy-League institution like E-UNI.

Joining OUCH was painless.  We were told to register in the forums so our progress through the syllabus could be tracked.  Ground rules were basic and made sense, and mainly consisted of making sure you were actively participating in training, and ensuring that you did not participate in any PVP combat unless it was in a fleet led by an instructor.

If you, dear reader, are a new player, then a program like the one offered at OUCH is a great idea.  Knowledge deemed essential for survival in combat and traveling through 0.0 is broken into separate courses, each lasting about 3 hours and taught by faculty on (usually) a monthly basis.  Tesla and I learned the basics of creating safespots, using d-scan, unfucking our overview settings, etc.  

In terms of teaching ability, the faculty at OUCH was very capable of imparting their knowledge to me in each course I took part in.  As with any school setting in my experience, there were other students who ended up making my time in class less enjoyable.  Without naming any names, there was a Sycophant amongst my peers who drove me nuts, and some of my sessions deteriorated into Tesla and I passing notes about this person in a private convo.  Apparently school - like war - never changes.

Unfortunately for me, my real-life commitments conflicted with some of the courses on offer, and Tesla was able to move ahead of me in the syllabus and jump into the gate-camp sessions offered as part of the training requirement.  Tesla didn't share too many details about the gate-camps at first, beyond his mild excitement at getting on a few killmails.

At this point, we decided to undertake the independant study portion of the syllabus, which consisted of completing a roam through pre-determined null systems within a time-limit, and posting screen grabs on the forums.  Tesla and I fitted up a few of the suggested frigate hulls and took off into nullsec, taking turns acting as scout.

Wandering through nullsec was exciting.  We would enter each system and set up safes, and d-scan our next gate to check for bubbles.  Flying was a nervous exercise.  There's nothing quite like moving through unknown space, expecting the alarm of a hostile ship locking your hull at any moment.  It took us a few tries to succeed.  On our second-to-last attempt, we had managed to almost complete the loop through null when Tesla was insta-popped two jumps ahead of me:

http://zkillboard.com/detail/26661365/

I scrambled around behind him and attempted to create safes in K-QWHE, in order to approach my destination gate from an unaligned point.  My aim was to avoid the bubble completely.  My aim was a little off:

http://zkillboard.com/detail/26661541/

We did eventually manage to complete the course (it turns out, the best strategy to travel through 0.0 is to do it during the week at about 0400 eve time).

Our time in OUCH was beginning to grow short after this.  Details to follow in the next post.