Friday, October 29, 2010

Lead Farmers Are Slow As Lead

I had a trap sprung on me today, to little effect to my side. Obvious trap was obvious, as they say.

I had a guy in a Helios come in just as I happened to warp to my B274 high sec static in a prorator, I was just checking to see if it was there. That could have went badly, and I guess it's a lesson learned that I actually didn't have to pay dearly for.

So I dropped and anchored two large modile warp disruptors on the hole and warped away.

So I engaged the Helios pilot in conversation, all he said was "oh hai". I told him that this wasn't a good wormhole to scan in, and to please vacate. I then checked his profile and noticed he had been a memeber of Eve University a few months prior. Being a former alumni, I told him that since he had beeen an Eve member, he was free to leave peacefully.

Two hours later, after leaving my few people logged in, so he must have assumed I was the only person logged on. I did some painting, cleaned the house, etc. I sat back down and noticed a Vexor on scan. I jumped in my new Pilgrim and headed over to the wormhole. Sure enough, the same guy was sitting there with Hammerhead IIs out.

Hmm. This smells funny.

So I headed back, popped into my Zealot, my Devoter, and my Myrmidon and warped over to the edge of the warp disruption field. I targetted him on all my characters and his response was to send his Hammerheads for me. Alright, game on I guess.

I settled in to a decent long range, barely inside the warp bubble, and quickly got the Vexor into armor, then a nudge into structure and he jumped out. Before he did, the WH pulsed and a Raven jumped in. Hmm, obvious trap is....small.

So I started to engage the Raven, while moving my ships back outside the range of the bubble.

The wormhole started pulsing like crazy with incoming ships. Yep, time to head out of here.

So I gang warped us away, with the Devoter slightly being warp scrammed, but either I slipped out of range or he was just too slow. Another Raven, an Armageddon, a Dominix, a Scorpion, an Abaddon, a Phobos, and the Vexor all jumped in. Not a single fast tackler amongst the fleet. Fail.

I quickly calculated their mass displacement, and a single jump home for all of them was all the WH had left after 861 mil mass had gone through it. I did log in every single combat character I had, including the Moros dreadnought, which was already out and on scan. I figured they were lingering around just to see if I came back(why in the hell would I?).

They destroyed both my large warp disruptors in a fit of rage and exited the wormhole. I had Gnicklas outside in the Impel, waiting to come back in, so I taunted them a bit about better luck next time, and headed back to my home, with a critical wormhole behind me that will keep out anyone else for it's lifetime.

Thanks Lead Farmers!

Monday, October 25, 2010

How Many Licks Does It Take To Get To The Center Of An Arkonor Asteroid?

So I've got a full fleet of six hulks out atm, all on an arkonor roid. I am boosted by an Orca with good skills, not perfect, so I'm at a 135 second cycle time.

So how many cycles to fill a can?

......

ONE!

That's right, one cycle produces 1693 Arkonor with Strip Miner 1s with a mostly perfect mining fleet. Orca is still sitting in the POS shield. I can barely keep up.

Wow.

Back On Track!

Whew, I can feel Evelife simmering down to a decent level now.

Back to mining, did another Grav site, this time an Ordinary Perimeter Deposit. Cleared all the ABCDGHH, and left it to check the next day. And it respawned.

The whole site.

???

Anyone ever had this happen before? I'm a bit confused as I was expecting one roid, and got the whole site back. I'm not going to complain, jumping in a Hulk now!

One thing I want to make perfectly clear if you want to be left alone in your wormhole to do your thing, and I've verified it numerous times now.

Static wormholes(non K162) do not open unless you warp to them!

This is, by far, the best way to give yourself a couple of days alone without interruption by combat probes. Sure, you'll get a K162 opening from anywhere every now and then, which is either random or certain wormhole clusters have certain timers, but by managing your statics you can make sure all that wormhole isk is going into your pocket, and not that gank lolz squad that came in from the high sec opening you scanned cause you needed a skillbook. Don't open that static unless you need it.

So due to proper static management, I've managed a few days of unmolested mining, and last night, Nick blasted through over half our combat sites and cleared 50 nanoribbons, for a profit of over 300 mil! WOOT GO NICK! Coupled with the minerals I have sitting here waiting to go out, we have 500 mil awaiting Jita.

But I've got three days more on my lowest POS fuel, so I'm going to sit on it unless another POS starts screaming. It'll give me more time to mine without an over abundance of fear of combat probes.

Of course, I'm still scanning, there are still Russians out there.

Forgotten Heathen Out!

Friday, October 22, 2010

YAY Sweet Arkonor How I Missed You!

So back to mining! Taking in all the costly lessons I've learned the past while, my mining set up looks like this now.

One Orca as Wing Commander, boosting from POS.

One Armageddon as Squad Commander or in similarly scary ship

Four Hulks with shield tanks. Numerous Mining Drones.

One Iteron V flying back and forth constantly.

With this setup I cleared a Class 2 Common Perimeter Deposit of everything except high sec ores in two hours. My refinery is happily chewing away at it, and the minerals are piling up.This will be the first serious isk we've gotten out of the Class 2s so far.

Selling my Class 1 plus Orca for 400 mil. It's going to a fellow miner/industrialist, so I'm glad they'll get lots of use out of it! Hopefully this deal goes off better than my last one did!

Still doing a bit of the fueling dance, but hopefully I'll get rid of the low sec hole as well and be down to two holes again. Oh I long for those days when I thought I had it bad fueling only two POSes in two holes!

Sounds like rain at the window, better check all the windows.

Forgotten Heathen out!

Wednesday, October 20, 2010

Dude, Where's My POS Shield!?!

So I've been in the process of moving alot of my acquired gear out of the class 1 WH with a static low sec, and there's been ALOT of runing around fueling POSes. I haven't had a chance to mine to raise some much needed cash, so running combat sites to keep up is all I can do. Suffice to say, with four Large POSes, I'm falling behind. So fuel messages are nothing new.

But I've kept up on them and check in on each everyday to make sure I'm not missing anything. While I was heading to fuel the first Class 2, I get the following message.

"Your POS in JXXXXXX is under attack!"

Hmm, how interesting. That's my Class 1 with high sec static. So I logged in the caretaker scanner alt and found a solo Gila shooting at the POS. Alright, this won't last long......as I realized in horror that there was no shimmer POS shield between me and the attacker. I was too surprised that I actually checked the fuel bay to see what was missing. No Mechanical Parts.

Whoops, I'm being targetted. Oh yeah. So I warped off and started scanning down my static high sec. Within a minute I had a WH on scan, and warping to it....discovered a Dangerous Dead Wormhole.....hmm that's not it. The attacking pilot must be from there.

So I scan again. Yet another K162. Wtf. Another K162. Holy crap, my wormhole has been the go to location for wormhole vacations and I didn't know it! Next hole..a low sec. With MY Orca sitting next to it. Crap. That means she's blown my ship array. Great. And she can happen to fly an Orca.

Seriously. I get a pirate that can fly an Orca.

At least she's a boneheaded pirate who doesn't understand the concept of wormhole mass limitations.

About this time I see more of our ships appear on scan, and somewhere in between me scaning, she leaves in the Gila and uses my own corp's Drake to destroy the rest of the arrays.

Finally, I get the high sec static, and our corp fleet consisting of my Zealot, a Devoter and Nick in a Malediction get moving the 15 jumps. I notice a Bestower moving on directional, so she's hauling stuff out. /sigh.

We finally get there and warp to POS. If my Devoter pilot had finished the training for the Warp Field Generator, I would have sent her to the wormhole to catch her as she ran, but alas, she's a few days away yet.

We arrive at the POS to catch her and scram her in one of our own Bestowers. She won't eject, so we have to destroy it, and can't catch the pod. She heads out to low sec and never returns, and we camp her in a station for awhile.

We then spend the next few hours taking apart what's left of the station and getting our Orca pilot here and ferry lots of stuff out through the high sec static.

And then we realize, we never got any fuel warnings for this POS. We backtrack and yes, there's no warnings at all from this POS. Nick petitions and a GM says, yes, this is viable for reimbursement! I decide to not get excited and assume the worst.

We start mentally ticking off what we lost in the ship array, as there wasn't much more than some modules in the corp arrays. An Impel, a Malediction, a Retribution, two Harbingers, numerous rigged Itty 5s, Bestowers, an Anathema, and a Helios.

Oh, and five hulks and four Covetors.

Ouch.

So everything gets packed up except the tower, which gets offlined after we re-onlined it. We can't fit anything else in the Orca, and it's way time for bed.

Fast forward to next day. We head over with an array of industrials and clean out the Orca, get the POS unanchored, and leave the Orca and a scanning alt inside, list the WH with our trusted WH seller, and critical the wormhole so no one else decides to check it out.

We were literally beating people away from the hole, and were repeatadly asked if we were putting a POS up or taking it down. Of course, the answer was always "Putting it up." There was even a russian I had to run through a translator to respond that "Yes, this is our system." The couple of T2 ships and the POS still up at the time convinced people to stay out.

About 3am last night, I get a text message from Nick. We're being reimbursed for everything we lose due to the bug in the POS fuel reporting. Holy crap. Whew. They are sending it all to Jita for us. Great.

Log in next day, Nick is already checking it over, and we discover nothing that was ejected from any of the destroyed arrays was reimbursed. That's kind of crappy, as it never would have been destroyed had the bug not occured......but then Nick makes a huge discovery.

Remember those FIVE Hulks? Yep, they're in a ship array in Jita. Wow. They shouldn't have fit out through the class 1 wormhole. I'll take that over all the other stuff we lost! No complaints here anymore. I fly the Providence to Jita, then over to where our current new C2 is open to, fly the arrays in, anchor them, and we're in business with six Hulks in system plus our other Orca!

So, what looked like a terrible Eve occurance turned around thanks to the GMs actually being very helpful!

Sometimes you gotta wonder, what the heck is gonna happen tomorrow?

Forgotten Heathen out!



So I warped off and started to scan down the exit.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

That Did Not Go As Planned....

So the seller of the class 2, let's call him Slim, finally paid enough attention to our chat window that he got online long enough to try our transaction. Up til this point I thought I had a good rapport going with him. I borrowed some isk from my corpmate, Thomas, to purchase the fighters with the carrier. The transaction came out to be 1.7 billion isk for the wormhole, carrier, dreadnought and POS.

So I managed to secure another third party for the transaction. Slim sent me a pack of bookmarks and I headed there with the corp capital ship alt. I arrived with a Small Amarr POS which I started setting up immediately. Slim started taking down his POS and let me drop the Moros in my force field. I noticed immediately that the alt couldn't shoot any of the guns and mentioned that the alt was only skilled enough to sit in the ship, and actually switched the alt's training so that he could at least fire the dread's guns in the future.

Everything else went fairly smoothly as we moved ships and POS modules, until we hit a speedbump. One of the POS guns wouldn't unanchor. Slim said it was due to a bug in that the crystal wouldn't come out. I was slightly suspicious, but like I said, I had a decent rapport with this guy, so we just went on.

Then the 3rd party said he had to log off. From here things went downhill.

It's no fault of the 3rd party, he said that we should send him an email to let him know the transaction was finished and he would then release the funds. Being the nice guy I am, I told him to go ahead and release the funds, as I had control of both capital ships at the time and was satisified with the transaction. The 3rd party actually cautioned me against this, but I went ahead and had him release the funds anyhow.

So fast forward an hour later when Slim tries to unanchor the POS. He can't do it because of the gun. He asks me to bring the carrier over and help kill it. Sure, I had no problem helping him out. I stress that I was helping him, because this is what came back to bite me in the ass. My helpful nature. It was not my responsibility to help him do anything.

So with him in a Deimos and my cap alt in the Thanatos carrier, we get the gun into structure, and then it just stops taking damage pretty much. I guess POS guns are practically invulnerable in structure to Fighters and Railguns. So SLim says to go get the Moros.

I fly off to my POS to get the Dread, when he mentions that he'll need the carrier there too to online the fittings that went offline when I put the alt in it. So at this point he is ackwoledging that modules are offline due to the alt not being able to fly them. This is important for later accusations.

So of course, I say sure, and start warping back with the carrier, actually planning on leaving the carrier there, going back to get the Dread, and hoping back in the carrier. Yeah, I'm that trusting. He could have used the dread to blow my POS to smithereens.

So on the way back in warp with the carrier he says "TENGU!" in our chat. I'm already in warp, nothing to be done about it. I land and launch as many fighters as I can, which is 8. I start in one a Hurricane and take it's shields down quickly. Now remember, this is my first time even sitting in a carrier, let alone fighting anything, let alone PvP! The Hurricane warps off with my fighters chasing it in warp. The Tengu kills Slim and Slim's alt and warp scrams me as I'm trying to align for warp.

I call back my fighters, and two Curses arrive and start neuting me. I look down and read chat. Slim tells me to turn on one cap armor repper and log off. That's it. That's all he tells me. One armor repper and log off.

So instead of trying to fight to get out of scramming, I follow his advice and log off. Slim says I'll be fine, the carrier can tank these guys fine. Okay.

Five minutes later there's a Gallente Elite Carrier wreck. So what happened? He asks me if all the modules were online. I say no, of course they weren't, the alt didn't have the skills. So I send him the killmail because he can't understand why the carrier died. Slim says he'll see what he can do about restitution and he logs off and I wait to see if the gang attacks my small POS or tries to put up their own. They laugh about the kill in local and that's all that happens. Standard Eve practice.

I log in the next day, Slim convos me. He then proceeds to tell me the carrier dying was my fault. I told him he knew the alt could only sit in the capitals, and couldn't fight them. He then claimed that I had actually taken modules off the carrier. And that's why the carrier got killed.

I was pretty stunned and I was mad. I mentioned that he had been the one who told me to leave only he cap armor repper going and log off! I even asked him again if he meant only the one armor repper when I logged the alt off!!

So he took no responsibility for what happened. Sure, the gang was probably not a bunch of mercs he hired to get a kill and some of the modules back from the caps. He had been pressuring me pretty good about paying extra for all the stuff, and I relented on the fighters, having to borrow money against a corpmate for them. He said he wanted another 100 for some faction modules, which he then said he'd throw in for free. There were no faction modules on either cap ship that I saw.

And it just so happened that one gun needed both the capitals there to kill to unanchor the POS.

Honestly, no, I don't think he orchestrated the whole thing and it turns out to just be a fluke of Eve. A random event that makes you think something else entirely is going on.

So after the arguement about him not taking any responsibility for the carrier loss, I said, forget about the carrier. There's a large POS that I need unanchored, that I paid for. And I would hate to have to post that it looked like he hired a bunch of mercs to get capital ship modules back. He then decided that our business was concluded because I got my money's worth out of just having the dreadnought.

So there's probably an alt of his logged off in here, and someday I can assume that his POS is going online unless I get some combat ships in here to take it down.

So much for any honesty in eve. Again, yet another expensive lesson I learn from Eve; never ever trust anyone. Ever.

And when you do wormhole transfers, if you buy a POS or anything, let them do all the work so they are responsible. It's the seller's responsibility to see that you get everything you paid for in the agreement. And always listen to the 3rd party and his suggestions. It could have saved me alot of money and alot of grief.

Thanks Slim, for griefing me. I guess you showed me.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Waiting Game

Well, after a week and a half of getting the asking price, the person I am buying the Class 2 off of sat ingame while I and my 3rd party tried to get him to respond. For two hours. Oh well.

He messages me later and tells me he can't do the transfer today. I had already scanned down my WH exits for the people I needed to help with the transaction, and I was out all day today, so it's scheduled for Monday.

Looking forward to consolidating everything down to a couple wormholes, then I won't be running around fueling POSes so much! So here's hoping the deal goes through tomorrow.

Forgotten Heathen Out.

Wednesday, October 6, 2010

In Which We Need A Cap Pilot ASAP!

So we've been in discussions with another corp to purchase their wormhole, including a Thanatos carrier and Moros Dreadnought. Well, I obviously wasn't thinking ahead enough: we need a cap pilot for the transfer!

For some reason I thought the ship could just be left in a POS Ship Maintenence Array and we could anchor our POS around it, but that's silly, we couldn't open the array except to blow it up! So I started freaking out, and contacted a number of cap third party pilots, and quizzed my corpmates if they knew someone who could fly said capital ships.

Lo and behold, Thomas, our third corp member, has been training an alt of his just for Gallente cap ships. Whew. All he needs is the Cap Ships and Gal Dread skills...ouch. That set us back 450 mil, so we'll have to make that up on our goal to 1.5 bil for the hole.

So with that crisis averted, I switched to our other new C2 and started farming with my Zealot, Nick's Zealot, and my alt in a Devoter.

And then I got the Zealot destroyed. Whoops.

I guess I had my music up too loud, and he either got caught on something and that killed his speedtank, or he just was head-on with the BS I was fighting. I tried to warp him out as soon as I noticed he was about to go into hull. No dice.

Oh well, I'll replace that later, I have a spare in the other C1. He has all the skills to fly the Abaddon that's in here, so I'll stick him in that for now.

The melted nano drop has been wretched the past couple of days, but I guess I've been spoiled. Only about 100 mil worth per day the last couple, with lots of dry sites. I'm also impatient,I must say, trying to get the cash together for our next major corp purchase.

Looking into T3 ship production next, so throw any ideas out on that, if anyone is actually reading. Thanks if you are!

Forgotten Heathen Out!

Monday, October 4, 2010

Vacation and Empty Wormholes

Well, I recently made a 8 hour trip to see a friend of mine who lives in Europe who is visiting the states, leave my three wormholes mostly un-attended since my corpmates log in nowhere near as much as me or as they used to. So fueled them up and headed out.

While at the hotel, I checked the DOTLAN on them, and found a Ship kill and over 70 sleeper kills! What in the heck had occured? A Russian fleet invasion, another Hulk loss?

I got home the next day and found out we had a high sec opening into our low sec static wormhole. It opened into Dodixie, of all places. There were even Sleeper Wrecks and cargo containers on my scan. WTF.

So, in the end, we'll probably never know what happened. A huge influx of carebears and pirate oppurtunists came in and cleaned us out, and some of them got cleaned out on their way, it seems.

And the floating BSes and HACs didn't seem to disturb any of them, if they even bothered to hit scan.

Sheesh.

Forgotten Heathen Out.