All Good Things

Must come to an end. Yes, this is a farewell post. I did not expect to be writing it, but as all of you know, real life can rear it's head and the world of serious business of internet spaceships is the first to fall.

After some pretty serious thought about what is going on in my personal life, I have made the decision to cease playing Eve Online, and therefore, my presence in wormholes is at an end. So I planned to pack everything up and move out of our home and get everything safely back to Empire.

Or so I thought. Plans never survive contact with the enemy, and everyone is your enemy in Eve. As I was letting my close associate Soulofchaos know about this decision, he informed me he had been contacted by one of our corp members.

"The POS is under attack by Russians."

"Ha ha, very funny." I replied.

"No, really, it's being attacked right now."

"FFS."

I logged on to find no less than 18 ships in the immediate vicinity, with more on scan, most likely watching the wormhole exits.

I began logging on POS gunners.

Eight accounts logged in, and I took stock of the sitation. Most of my ECM, Energy Neuts, and Warp Disruptors were incapped. The enemy consisted of mainly battleships, a few battlecruisers, and five Basilisk logistics ships. It appears they had moved on to taking out my guns, so I started out by onlining any remaining ECMs and Neuts that were still anchored. I offlined any of the storage facilities, as I had plenty of time to re-online them in case I did indeed need to GTFO.

As many of you know, I have had alot of practice in running many accounts simultaneously. Normally that involved moving very little between most of the screens. This pretty much took the cake for information and screen management overload. I tried not to tip my hat that I was now about to control 32 POS guns and modules, so put most of my characters into transport ships and tried to appear scared and disorganized, while assigning a single ECM to four of the Basilisks, and the single remaining neut I had to the fifth.

I then picked a target. One of the group was flying a Harbinger, not exactly the best shield tanking ship out of the bunch. I then locked him with roughly 20+ guns and a webber and prepared to fire.

Switching screens eight times while making sure you don't turn off modules you already have going is a serious PITA.

The Harbinger exploded brilliantly, the Basilisks who did manage to start repping him could not keep up with the damage. I had announced my presence. Unfortunately, this group proved to be fairly adequate to the task, as time would tell.

As soon as the battlecruiser exploded, the enemy fleet commander shifted his fire back to Warp Disruptors, and I was quickly left trying to keep one online ahead of the firepower.

I examined the fleet and found a Talos, one of the new Tier 3 battlecruisers. I knew two things about this ship; it was most properly armor tanked, and that it was supposedly a glass cannon. Both turned out to be true.

I re-targetted my guns on the Talos and let fly the beams and projectiles of my turrets. The Talos' shields quickly failed, his armor melted, and he dipped into structure....and his shields began to re-appear. As more of the Basilisks began to rep him, his structure dipped and pulled leftward....but the Basilisks pulled him back from the brink and began to keep his shields at maximum. Curses.

I began retargetting my small guns onto the Basis, but they were far too close and too small to be touched, even when webbed. That surprised me, as even small artillery wasn't hitting them. So my only real option of stopping this attack was with my already smoldering ECM and Energy Neut platforms, which apparently the attacking force already knew.

And since I hadn't been logging in regularly for the past few days because of my situation, the perfect storm had developed. I would normally have been logged in at the time of the attack and would have stood a good chance with all my ECM and Neuts intact.

What followed was a game of trying to make sure I had as many Basilisks ECMed or neuted while trying to alpha ships. I managed to almost destroy a Hurricane, a couple of Drakes, a Dominix, and had the Talos on the brink of destruction again before he returned in a sturdier ship.

In the end, I slowly onlined all of my shield hardeners as my final ECM and neuts were silenced. No warp disruptors remained to hold any ship I took down into the red of structure. I took stock of my situation and was not very dismayed.

I had actually been removing alot of the material we had spent the past year and a half accumulating. All regularly sold items including all nanos, profitable PI, etc, had already been removed to high sec in the previous days. We stood to lose a few hulks that weren't able to make it aboard the Orcas, and a Proteus I had no one to fly. Numerous T1 and some T2 cruisers were going to be left in the hangars, to take their chances when the ship array exploded. Also in storage was a grav site's worth of ore that I hadn't gotten around to compressing.

So, as I've said before, everything in the hole is paid for. If you don't have the isk to replace everything, then you shouldn't be in here. So I started chatting in local.

A few of my corpmates logged in and we continued perfectly the bug out plan, and I got the invaders talking. They said they were in it for the fun, no one hired them, and they were looking for fireworks.

Fireworks, eh? I and my corpmates decided if they wanted fireworks, then maybe they were after something specific. So I flew over to the hulking behemoth of our Revelation dreadnought and boarded it. Immediately I was greeted with hope that I was bringing it out to play with them.

"Nope." I said as I set the self destruct sequence.

The tone of the conversation immediately changed to questions about why I would do that. I answered with the truth, that I was going to be doing it anyhow, we were already planning to move out. We were certainly playing on a hunch here, and it paid off.

The Revelation exploded in a flash of light, its lifeless corpse slowly doing a barrel roll as it lazily floated off center. The poor ship had never fired a shot in anger, and I had been looking forward to using it's weapons on the villianous Interbus customs offices before my decision to end my Eve life.

This really got their attention. The tone turned to trying to rationally explain that I had all the reinforcement time to try to save them, that the shield wasn't even past 90% yet. Again, I responded with the truth, that we might as well have the fireworks now since we were, truthfully, moving out.

I didn't bother to inform them I had stripped all the fittings prior to the self destruct.

My pod slowly moved over to our Archon carrier, my personal favorite carrier out of all of the ones I had built. Its sleek Amarr lines always greeted me at login, a sign that all was well in the wormhole and its power was always at my fingertips.

Now they wanted to fight my carrier, to at least let my ships go down in a fight. It was cowardly to self-destruct them inside the shield! But by now it was apparent why they were here. For the love of killmails, they had been driven to spend hours and hours of their lives in the vain hope of being one of many to strike off an armor plate from my capital ships. They had hours of striking the shield, plus 1 day and 17 hours worth of reinforcement time to wait through. Surely I would rather force them to go through that? In all, days would be devoted to the destruction of my creations. Wouldn't that be punishment enough for them?

"No." I said as I set the self destruct on the leviathan. Two minutes later its glittering shards of cooling metal were spiraling off the insides of our starbase shield.

All that remained inside was the mighty Rorqual. This graceless ship had paid for it's construction many many times over. My pilot had sat at it's controls for hours, watching over the assembly lines of sparkling arkonor as it rolled past on the compression lines.

Firtilis settled his pod in and began the self destruct sequence. By now the invaders had ceased to fire at the station, waiting for what they thought was the inevitable conclusion of their endeavor and thoughts of their capital ship killmails fell apart. In the end it all worked in our favor. These three ships were destined to be destroyed before they ever set their plan in motion.

After all three capital ships were orbiting wrecks, the russian invasion fleet retreated to a medium staging POS they had erected. I hadn't even noticed it since I had been insanely busy performing my impression of an ant colony. A medium POS? Any decent sized corp could have torn this invasion apart.

We began watching them, and they were being very careless in their movements with both ships and pods, so we set up an ambush, and caught an Iteron hauler as it came into the system and started to align too soon. Their entire fleet responded, and security tightened after that.

The next day, I surveyed our still smoking POS. 59 modules were incapacitated. The only ships destroyed were the capital ships we self destructed. What the attacking force did not know was that I had sold our Chimera carrier to a corp who we allowed in to share our system. Also, our Thanatos had been logged out, and kept logged out, during the whole ordeal. This carrier was subsequently sold to the same corp.

We saved everything else. All the ore, PI, ships and POS modules were carried out of the wormhole to Empire, where they were couriered by Red Frog Freight to Jita, for sale or storage.

I decided to leave the POS anchored, all guns and modules where they fell or stood. Until they day they are either destroyed, or I return to claim them.

Thank you all for reading the story of my journey. I do indeed hope to someday return to the universe of Eve Online. On that day my story will continue.

If you happen upon my POS, Omissa Spe, nod and smile, because you know that the Sleepers aren't the only thing that waits in wormhole space to awaken.

The Flame Wars Have Begun, They Have

So as we all know, Crucible came out yesterday. And I'm sitting here running numbers on these Interbus Customs Offices, and I'm pretty appalled. According to the screen, it's a 17% tax, and from what I'm reading on the forums, that's on market value of what you're moving. So as someone who normally has extraction and separate production planets, we're going to be taxed 34% of the item's market value before it even can become the final item....or, god help you, if you need to move it to yet another planet for P3-P4 production......yeah, that was me you heard screaming in anguish.

So PI is about to skyrocket in price. This is both a good and bad thing. Good for those of us who can replace these terrible Customs Offices with our own and get rid of this ridiculous tax, bad for those stuck in high sec who I hear are paying a 10% tax, which is still fairly heinous. So the prices raise to compensate. But wait? What's this? The tax is raising based on market prices? So you can never keep up. And high sec, and probably low sec, PI producers are going to be run out of business either by inflating prices on the tax end, or the competition who doesn't have to pay these taxes in null areas who can undercut them by leaps and bounds.

I thought CCP employed an economics expert?

So after only a single day of watching it cost me 4 mil just to move my robotics offplanet, I decided I needed to get moving on these damn offices. I bought 10 BPCs from a gentleman who was taking pre-orders, so they're already sitting in Jita waiting for me. And after doing a bit of math, it's going to cost near 100 mil per office I need to put up. So I have an extra PI character I haven't gotten around to putting anything down on, so I'm going to tool him up some planets to produce all the P3 and P4 products I can't either already produce or can't buy for decent prices. I also put some buy orders up for P4s, but the .001 isk pirates are having at them, and I don't have the patience to play that game anymore.

Short term plan: buy P2 products my wormhole does not produce. Set up chain for production of these P2-P3s, then all eight of the P4s. I want a production line ready in case someone does manage to kill one of our customs offices.

I also just contracted a freighter run worth near 1 bil to Jita, but I think I'm going to sit on it for now and see where prices go while we're not hurting for isk.


EDIT: While looking at Dotlan and seeing no jumps, but finding an extra wormhole, I assumed either jumps hadn't shown up yet, or the extra WH was an outbound. Then, while screwing around with PI on Eve-eye, I found this underneath where it counts jumps.

Jumps have been removed from API and are unavailable
for wormhole space after CRUCIBLE expansion

How did I miss that in the patch notes?

NO62

Not too much of note has been going on, of late. Mostly we've been plugging away at PI, we've cleared through probably 6 bil in POS fuels in the last month or so. Hopefully the prices will stay where they are at, and I forsee them doing so til the new POS pellets blow over, and then maybe they'll return down to near before inflation prices.

We've finally moved out of our second Class 2 wormhole. We've had some nice grav spawns in our main C2, but they've been de-spawning mysteriously. We saw a russian Anathema in-system a week or so ago, but today I found out three ladars have gone missing, meaning someone de-spawned them no less than three days ago. And our last grav de-spawned a day early. So it appears we have someone screwing with our sites. I understand a scorched earth policy, but this is kind of ridiculous.

Today also marked a strange occurance, we spawned a NO62 wormhole exit. This is a Class 5 connection, with a 3 bil mass limit. This is the first time I've ever seen this hole in our Class 2, and we've lived here for over a year now. So I popped through, found two Revelations, a Chimera, and a Thanatos on scan, but no one moving about, so I called in the Orca crew. 8 minutes later and the hole went critical. I decided not to screw with it further, as the C5 had a C4 static. The critical hole will keep for now.

POS Fuel and Why Is The POS Red Boxing Me?

So not a heck of alot going on of note here lately. Well, except that our own POS has shot down four of our ships. No, it's not set on aggression, and I even doubt if the haulers it shot were armed.

First up was one of the new Tengus we replaced, the pilot warped into one of our bubbles, and the POS decided to blow him to smithereens. Like a fly caught in a web. Petitioned, reimbursed.

Last night, I was flying an Abaddon back to the POS when I warped to a spot 220km off the POS in preparation for warping up to it. I started aligning there for too long, distracted, when I noticed it had decided it didn't like me. I was neuted, and it slowly took down the well plated BS. I was going to remote rep it with one of our Logi ships, but decided the POS would take that badly and blow it away as well.

So I ejected to see if it would still kill the battleship, which it did immediately without my skills. Why do POSes shoot un-piloted ships? So I warped up and grabbed a Noctis, thinking I could salvage and get out before it targetted me. Almost immediately the small arty batteries locked and began firing, and the Noctis went poof.

Alright, so no more of that. A bit later, a corpmate was running PI, and got his Mammoth stuck in a bubble as well. Normally we don't ever do this but once in a great while, but we don't have the same setup in our other C2, so we forget when we come back from an extended stay there. The POS blew him apart, and only a warp stab remained from the wreck.

More petitions, we'll see how these go. I checked and re-checked the settings, they're only on "Attack if standing lower than 10.0". Oh well.

But POS Fuels! I hope everyone else is making a killing on these like we are. We've ramped up robotics production and kept all the other fuels flowing. We've probably made 2 bil in the last week alone. The coffers are well replenished. What Eve taketh away, it can give back.

Course, we could lose it all tomorrow, but that's Eve for you.

Got a bunch of stuff to do today, so we'll keep this one short. Fly safe! o/

Moving On!

So when your comments start just reading like the eve online forums, it's time to end the discussion. We've moved on.

All losses have already been replaced. Apparently we had enough "hideous isk" from "being terrible at wormholes" lying around to take care of everything. Slight haha he he. Oh yeah, and we learned some stuff too.

I used both Orcas to start closing our high sec connection when a Buzzard jumped through and spewed probes out before cloaking. I happened to be sitting in a stealh bomber and noted he was too far away from the wormhole to jump back out, so I toodled on over and gave him a bump.

Then I shot him with torpedoes.

I managed to get him deep into armor before he made it back, but in all the burning for the hole, he left his russian named sisters probes sitting in space.

I hopped outside to check to see who was there, and found the pilot outside. He threw up a gf, and I saluted him. I got eyes on the inside wormhole and resumed my Orca jumps when a Tengu from his corp uncloaked inside our C2 as an Orca landed.

So the Orca jumped out and headed to the station to see what else would appear. Another corpmate of theirs jumping into the system with a Hurricane. After checking their killboard *INSERT LEARNED LESSON HERE* I found both large null sec roams and smaller wormhole roams with his corpmates. Since both had far too many ships for me to guard against, the aforementioned wormhole closing operation was over for the time being.

As has been mentioned before, some people have a serious ability to do nothing for hours on end for a stupid killmail, so a few hours later and no activity from our holes, I resumed closing the holes with my new warp stabbed orcas. To quote Mr Duncan, the warp stabs are permanently welded into the lows. Along with that, they contain some additional upgrades incorporating, yet again, lessons learned previously.

The corp has stepped up their PI production in the face of both these losses and the insane price inflation of POS fuels, which we are set up to produce in large quantities. Prepare the isk faucet, I'm gonna make it rain up in hea. Alright, seriously, why are the prices so high? I saw the Goonswarm attempt at controlling Gallente ice, and some sort of market manipulation attempt, but this is kind of ridiculous. But I'll profit from it, either way.

It's nice to be home.

So I Had A Funny Feeling

So our week got alot better. No, not really. We incurred the single largest lost ever seen by this corp yesterday. We lost two Orcas and two Tengus. Which was enough to get us kicked from our alliance, Talocan United. Here, let me make sure that's searchable.

Which was, of course, just an excuse. They had already been considering removing us. But on to what happened, since that's why you're really here.

We all got on that evening and decided we needed to head home and run the sites that had accumulated there, not having known that Tado and Dead Space had lost a Noctis and Drake earlier in the day, which of course, we were blamed for in my mail explaining why we were kicked. Talocan would like your corp to be on 24/7, have no life, no kids, no wives, and no job, apparently. But we didn't know about those losses, and we sure as heck weren't on to defend him. Guess that makes us at fault. It gets better because he had no fucking clue we WERE in that hole at the time. Nice job of assuming making you look like an ass, Nathan.

Anyhow, so the gravs were gone, Tado's crew handled the combats, so we headed home. And found out that our wormholes were TWO jumps from each other. That whole "same Region" thing was finally paying off. Or it was random chance, I don't know. So we packed up the Orcas with as much Arkonor as they could hold, and I made a fateful decision to "just take the warp stabs off this once".

Sometimes I hate it when I'm right.

So we made the two jumps and we popped in, and the faster ships started warping while a couple of us hung around to guard the Orcas at the hole, which was EoL, so most likely no one was coming through.

As a couple of the combat ships landed at the off grid space beneath the POS and were assigned fighters by the carrier above, combat probes appeared. Hmm. Checking DSCAN, no ships other than our own appeared, so I called for everyone to warp to the off grid bookmark.

To those that don't know, we use a bookmark immediately below the POS, immediately off grid from it, because our POS is surrounded by mobile warp disruptors as traps for both ships and cloakers. When scanning for ships, you can quickly see while probing and assume that ships at this bookmark are inside the POS.

Except in this case, here's what I surmise what happened. Prior to us entering the wormhole, our corpmate that was still inside had logged in his character while we were making our way home and ran his PI. These people that eventually jumped us were probably searching for him, and had ignored all the ships at our POS. This enabled them to quickly be able to scan down the ships as they waited for the Orcas to jump to them at the off grid bookmark.

As the two Orcas entered warp to the bookmark, an Arazu uncloaked to the offgrid and started attacking one of the Tengus. The second Tengu arrived and they destroyed it. As both Orcas landed, more ships landed, a very identical fleet in composition to the one that jumped us a few days back. Machariel, Tengu, Hurricane, etc etc. So rather than lose it all, everyone that could get away warped up to the POS. I popped out the ECM drones and actually escaped a point on an Orca, but was quickly jammed and pointed by another ship.

In short, we ended up losing two Tengus that had been flying CAP, and both Orcas, fitted not with Warp Stabs, but with cargo expanders, because it was just two jumps.

Yep, in the end, I'm in charge, so the blame is mine alone. That's fine. I can live with that and I'll hope to change my decisions in the future to reflect my experiences. But it's wormhole space, and crazy shit happens. I can point at what I did wrong and learn from it.

However, the current leadership of Talocan United are hypocrites in the extreme. We've been kicked for our losses, but in reality, we had been on the chopping block for some time as examples of what and who they don't want in their "elite" alliance of wormhole corps. They are on the verge of making PvP ops mandatory. They whine and complain constantly about how not enough people show up for this op or that wormhole invasion.

Funny how their website paints a completely different picture than what Talocan United actually is. There have been major arguements over this on the Director forums. Zariah routinely throws major meltdown fits over it in chat and in Alliance public. He recently "quit the alliance" due to things not going his way, so he was going to take his ball and go home. The guy is a self described "twat" and a "cunt".

And most of the alliance is sick of his bullshit. So in that, our removal is really a relief from his childish rants and raves, and Nathan's inability to control him. I'm incredibly glad we're out. As of last Alliance dues, we were the third largest corp in the alliance. We showed up for numerous alliance ops since our joining, and nothing was ever enough for these people.

To a point, I can sympathize with them when not enough people show up for planned operations. I've run large alliances in other games before. I know how frustrating it is when people just don't care as much as you do. But the arguement of "people have lives, wives, and families" isn't good enough for these guys. You really should be on 24/7, have no life or job to speak of. You should be playing Eve! Well guess what? When you don't have anything meaningful in your life to take you away from Eve, I guess it's okay for you to invest yourself that much into a videogame.

But the majority of us living out here in real life land aren't willing to do that.

Talocan United as a general alliance is great. The people are willing to do extraordinary things to help you out and to socialize with you. I will miss a number of them very much. The "leadership", on the other hand, can DIAF for all I care. They show a complete lack of respect for people and their playstyles. Yes, their website says completely the opposite, but be warned, they want to make you one of them, one of the people who take "Internet Spaceships Seriously!". There's a limit to what most normal, well adjusted people will take in a video game, and they really expect too much.

And, to round that all out, Nathan and Zariah are giant hypocrites when it comes to ship losses. Until last week, my corp hadn't lost more than a single stealth bomber in over a year.

Here's Zariah losing an Orca. Nope, no warp stabs there. Guess you should kick him out for that, huh? Fucking hypocrites.


Here's a Mastadon that Zariah lost. Doing a run for POS fuel and mods alone, were we? For shame! Douchebaggery!


Got caught in your Buzzard and lost your POD did you? In a Cov ops??? That smacks of incompetence, right? Kind of hard to catch those cov ops.


Here's a nice CNR loss since we're busy making up excuses. WTG Nathan!


Another one!? Really? Kick him! OMG! Poor combat choice!


In the end, who cares. Behind each and every loss there's a story. And in Eve, most of the time it isn't the majority of the fault of the victim. I've never been one to shrug off the loss and say "Oh well, we'll replace it." I need to learn from every mistake I make. But it's a damn video game, and life comes first. In Talocan United, the alliance comes first. You get to have your say in your hole, but god help you if you disagree about something with either of the two aforementioned leaders. The alliance is going through a phase right now where it doesn't know what it wants to be. It contains people from all walks of Eve life, and a vocal minority, much akin to extreme politics, are driving the majority to a place they don't want to go. People don't want and can't maintain weekly alliance PvP ops. They can't and don't want to muster out at someone's beck and call while they are trying to maintain their own systems.

Helping fellow alliance members out is one thing, but all the TU leadership want is serious e-peen so they can swing it around with the likes of Narwals and Aquila.

But it doesn't matter to me, my corpmates are standing by me like they always have, and I'll keep the friends I had. We'll be more at risk if they come across us, since the leadership harbors serious grudges and talks alot of shit about people that leave the alliance.

But it's Eve and we'll endure. It's just a game, remember? Pass me the cheetohs.

Well That Was Unfortunate

This is going to be one of those "lesson learned" posts about wormhole space. There will be lots of second guessing and head banging. I'll get the nasty part of it out of the way to begin; we just lost a Tengu, a Legion, and a Noctis, plus all three pods.

So on to the why. We had poked around in our static C3 and found the inhabitants asleep, but with a Chimera on scan, and a few jumps 6 hours previous. I normally wouldn't mess with a wormhole with a semi-active DOTLAN and a carrier on scan, but I wanted to let our Tengu pilot try out his new fit on C3s, not to mention see how my better fit Legions could take them as well. So off we went!

We had a member in a Helios scan down the entire system, and only our connection and the high sec connection were found. We also scanned down our C2 system before we left, found nothing beyond what should have been there. So now we had the Helios sit on the high sec hole, while our cloaked Noctis would sit at our C2 connection while we were running sites. I thought that this was sufficient, and, in a normal case, it would have been on par with good security measures.

So we ran a few sites and were progressing on through a fourth when the C2 connection pulses. I called activation and warped the fleet over to a near moon. A Pilgrim uncloaked, I got the name and corp. Here's where I made a mistake. No one followed the Pilgrim through, so I assumed he was alone. It's a decent assumption to make. What I really should have done was immediately check his kills. If I had, as Fernando did later, I would have found that he had taken part in some kills an hour earlier as part of a fleet. That surely would have influenced my decisions to follow.

But since I didn't, I assumed this was a solo Pilgrim that had come out of a new K162 in our home. I was, at least, partly right. But, you know what, let's not assume he's alone. We sent the Helios pilot back through to our C2 and found.....nothing. Nothing on scan and nothing at the hole.

Alright, it's probably a solo Pilgrim then, we all concurred. It's getting late, we've got enough loot for now, we decided to head home. I fleet warped us to the hole, uncloaked the Noctis and burned it over to the hole, and we jumped. On the C2 side we found a Devoter.

Wut.

Where did that come from? The Helios pilot started yelling, more ships, more ships, a Sleipnir, Machariel, Loki.....

Final enemy fleet composition was:

Machariel; Tengu; Sleipnir; Loki; Nemesis; Devoter; Devoter; Pilgrim; Hurricane

I called for a jump back to the C3, knowing we would be stuck there, but we didn't have a prayer of answering all of this firepower. We jumped....to find yet another Devoter. When we jumped to the C2, they had uncloaked and jumped a Devoter. Now both sides of the wormhole were bubbled. Great.

At this point, I'll say this was a well executed gank. It was done with great precision and they were very patient, and it paid off for them.

So we were in a bubble, with an enemy fleet coming after us. "ALIGN AND BURN!" I yelled, turning on all my modules and aligning for the quickest planet I could just click on before the rest of the enemy fleet started applying DPS and webs.

We managed to get all four ships out of the bubble. The Tengu was pointed, and went down first, because it bore the brunt of the fleet's firepower. The Legion was also pointed and collapsed into a burning ball of plasma next. However, both my Legion and the Noctis managed to get clear and warp away from the trap. Both other pods also warped away.

Here's where my actual mistakes are made. I called for a logoff. Everyone logoff. I attempted logoffski.

I had other choices, I could have warped the fleet around planet to planet til they either caught us or grew bored, the catching us part being highly likely with their numbers. I should have warped the Noctis to a moon and cloaked him. He would have been safe. I should have gotten the static high sec bookmark from the Helios pilot and warped the fleet there. Hell, I could have warped us there to begin with and it all never would have went down, but honestly, I saw a Pilgrim.

Of course, they scanned down the pods and the Noctis and blew them away. Only my Legion escaped. I have tried to gain more experience in PvP in my time here in WH space, but obviously not enough of it. It came down to what choices do I have, and it was a very short list.

I made the choices, so we'll be paying the price. All in all it's probably near a 3 bil loss, including ships and implants. We hadn't had a loss like this for a long time, I guess it was time to pay the piper. It'll take us quite a while to recover from based on our pilot count and activity levels.

But if you can't take it, you can't live here.

Some Explosions and OH NO! But Not Really.

I logged on today and busied myself with some mundane Eve business and started some scanning during breakfast.

When an Imicus and a Merlin appeared on scan. What the hell do they think they're doing here? Another round of bait thoughts ran through my head as the Imicus dropped some probes.

Hmm. Well I can't let them just have at it. So I hopped in my Anathema and went looking for them. After some retardedness on my part, which a bit continued, I got a warpin and switched to the Purifier for some reason, and warped over with the Devoter and a Domi in tow. I landed, got the point on the Imicus and proceeded to blow it away. The Merlin thought about trading blows, but as soon as the bubble on the Devoter came up, he headed away as fast as he could, and I lost the long point I had with the Devoter. Oh well. The pod exploded as the Merlin headed out the high sec entrance.

Well crap, I didn't know the B274 was open.

So I got a couple guys in Orcas and went about closing it. After checking the high sec side to make sure no one was there, I sat cloaked on our side and proceeded to have the Orcas warp to the hole.

I jumped both Orcas outside when I noticed a ship uncloaking near the wormhole. A russian Loki appeared. Ah crap.

So now both Orcas were outside with a hostile Loki sitting here. I didn't have enough DPS ships that I cared to run solo to run him off, and our allies in the hole had a Pilgrim alongside me watching, so we pondered what to do. While we did that he warped away.

So he's a cloaky Loki, so slightly less DPS output, I could grab my PvP Legion, the Devoter, and the neut Domi....hmmm....

While I thought it over, my ally at the hole reported that the Loki had jumped back and went through the hole to high sec.

Interesting. I already had warped both Orcas to a near station. Four minutes and this hole could be closed. I decided to jump my Purifier out and see where he had gone. He was nowhere to be seen, and there was no Loki on scan. So maybe he's cloaked. Well let's test that.

So I decided that both Orcas jumping in should be enough to tempt him to either uncloak or jump back inside if he were here, and my Orcas would be able to jump right back out, leaving a final jump home for each of them to close the hole.

So the Orcas arrived and I jumped them inside. No Loki uncloaked or followed. Interesting. I jumped the Orcas back outside and cloaked them in high sec.

As the time ticked down til they could rejump, I noticed russian named scan probes...had the Loki forgotten to BM the hole? One minute remained on the polarization timers.

20 seconds.

8 seconds.

JUMP!

all three ships made it back through and the B274 collapsed behind us, trapping our russian Loki friend outside. Now to figure out where he came from.

As the Orcas returned home, I scanned the system, and sure enough, found a K162 leading to a Class 4. I jumped through and found a single POS with a Moros and a Chimera on scan. The wormhole was an N766, so a 2 bil mass limit. Hopefully I can get this closed before any of the russian's friends come to avenge his stranding in high sec.

After checking the wormhole's limitations on Unknown Eve's tool, I neglected to check the info on the wormhole itself. There were very few jumps on DOTLAN so surely no one had come through this hole, and I hadn't seen it when I was scanning earlier.....but I forgot I hadn't actually completed my scan.

So I stayed inside the C4 with my Purifier and warped both the Orcas over to begin closing the hole. Only one made it through the hole before it closed behind it, stranding us inside the C4.

!!!

Wow, this could be bad. But, seeing as I have always planned for this eventuality, I was in a Purifier with a scan probe launcher, and the Orca ship array contained a T1 scanning ship as well. So I cloaked the Orca up and went to scanning.

The C4 had a beautiful C2 static, so it was only a matter of time, at worst a couple days, before I would get out to somewhere in empire space. But, as luck had it, the first C2 had a low sec and C2 static, and the next C2 had a high sec entrance, which I slipped out of and found myself 31 jumps from my wormhole. Oh well, lesson hopefully learned.

Except I've done this before. Thankfully this time it didn't cost me anything except the time spent in scanning down the exits.

31 jumps later and my ships were home. So, the lesson for the blog today is?

ALWAYS SHOW INFO ON EVERY WORMHOLE BEFORE YOU GO THROUGH!!!

Two Posts In One Day!?

It's Christmas, right?

I found a little bit of time to login and check what was going on it Eve, and hitting DSCAN...sleeper wrecks? Drakes named after their pilots? What the.....

Re-checking DSCAN, not only were a bunch of our battleships floating in the POS shield, an afk alliance Loki pilot was sitting inside as well. I double checked, no, none of other corp we shared the wormhole was on. I hopped the Anathema and logged in both the Devoter and Dominix, which was, in hindsight, probably a bad idea for two more ships to appear on their scan, but this didn't seem to matter to them at all!

Hmm, a couple more geniuses, or maybe bait ships. I seem to be assuming everything stupid I see lately as bait, which is still probably a good idea. It was easy to quickly check these guys and find out they were in a 5 man corp, unless, of course, their ships were named after some newbie corp. Alas, my mind overshot what they truly were by leaps and bounds.

I jumped on Teamspeak and told the alliance there were people running sites in the hole, and I had an immediate fleet both in-system and pilots on the way to assist. Still these, quality individuals, continued to run the site they were at.

I soon figured out why, as I tooled through all the combat anoms, they must be in a mag or radar site. About that time an Anathema named after it's pilot dropped some probes, then both an Imicus and a Manticore both named X dropped more probes. It appeared they had other people searching for them as well, and they had also figured out they may be in a site they needed to scan down. Still no real reaction from the site runners.

As the fleet grew in number, one of the Drakes dropped off scan, while the other was found circling the B274 high sec connection. Both me and a pilot flying our Purifier watched as he lazily circled about. Then the Imicus uncloaked, and was not fired on.

Hmmm.

The second Drake then appeared at the hole, he may have been Proto cloaked, I wasn't sure, and then both Drakes warped off, the Imicus jumping into high sec, right into arriving alliance pilots who jumped in system. If the Imicus was warning the Drakes, we couldn't tell. They went about their business, with four Core Scanner probes from someone not in the alliance attempting to find their site.....which would take forever to find a radar or mag with four probes.

So the entire fleet settled on top of the B274, Devoter threw up the bubble and we waited. And sure enough, the Drakes warped straight to the hole, actually one at a time. They were annihilated in turn. Both pods turned to goo. Their Anathema snuck out, as well as two stealth bombers belonging to Red vs Blue, who were probably stalking them as well.

With hopes that a RvB fleet was on it's way, the FC said the hole owner, me, could have the loot. Upon opening one of the wrecks, I found four Caldari Navy Heavy Missile Launchers. Sweet, that'll pay for the four Large Mobile Warp Disruptor IIs the Small POS owners managed to down.

Who runs sites like that, in a ship fitted like that? Chalk up another lesson in Eve basic common sense for the day.

Seriously? Who Does This?

Well yesterday was an interesting occurance in the wormhole we share with another alliance corp. A small POS appeared at the outer planet in the time span between both our playtimes.

I started the day out by logging in and restarting my PI, having a good chat with the guys who share our second C2 home with us. We mentioned we were scheduled to come back to the hole from our main C2 this weekend, and everyone was looking forward to trying to run joint C3 ops and hanging out. After I ran my PI, I headed out to get my day started.

In the afternoon, I logged back in to do some more Planetville jostling. I decided we really needed some better POS Bash fit battleships, and started inquiring on our alliance boards for the best ship and fits, to which I received some good responses. From those and after talking to a couple of my corpmates who logged in, it was decided to get some more characters cross trained into Ravens for serious POS bash fun. Until then, I sorted through our available battleships, no less than seven Armageddons are sitting in this hole due to me using them for hole closing. I checked out two Armageddons, an Apoc, and an Abaddon, and made sure all were properly fit for maximum DPS output or as PvP gank BSes.

I logged in later and happened to check DOTLAN for both wormholes and noticed a large numbers of shipkills in the second C2, 6, and 4 podkills. Ouch. Someone just had a bad day. I logged in the scanning alt, who wonderfully is in an Anathema now, lessons learned. Scanning around, there was a hostile Legion on DSCAN.

Hmmm. Better go check the outer planet.....that's not our small POS. I headed in and found a small Minmatar POS, two small arty batteries, one medium arty battery, three ECM, two warp scramblers, and an online explosive hardener. The Corp had been created only days earlier, and the pilot appeared on numerous low and high sec killmails of various, mostly T1, ships.

Hmmm, either these guys aren't the smartest, or this is a bait POS. Either way, I got the alliance warned, and a fleet gathered up immediately.

I logged in Forgotten in one of the max DPS Armageddons, Nyslia in the Devoter, and Firtilis in one of our Dominixes fit for remote armor rep and Sentry 2s and rolled out of our home towards the growing alliance fleet. I also managed to get my mic working, so was overjoyed to be able to effectively communicate with the fleet on Teamspeak. Nothing replaces the ability to effectively communicate immediately with those you are PvPing with.

After an interesting look through the C3 where a Rorqual and Orca, plus two Mining Drone 1s wer on scan, it was concluded after I took a look at the POS that it was some bait for their guns and we got back to bringing down the wrath.

We staged out of our POS, and managed to make myself useful dealing out some serious damage in the first assault as we took out both Warp Scramblers first. Forgotten and Firtilis dished out some hefty DPS numbers that I was really happy with, while Nyslia tagged along with an alliance Loki as it watched the C3 connection.

As we banged down the few modules the invading corp had erected, the Loki went into the C3 connection to look around. After a few minutes, a warning was raised from the Loki; a hostile fleet was inbound on him inside the C3 consisting of numerous T3s and supporting Guardians. As well, an Arazu had been watching him at the hole, and he barely jumped through ahead of him with time to escape. Nyslia also headed into warp and both got back to our POS safely ahead of the hostile fleet.

The alliance restaged into our POS and we gathered intel, learning that this was a group the alliance had run into before, and had dealt with handedly, although most of our ships were not fitted for PvP at the time. I dug through our Corp array and handed out numerous Disruptors and Webbers for our plethora of battleships. I then hopped back into the Anathema and watched the C3 entrance, finding both an Arazu and an Anathema that dropped combat probes. Most likely finding our fleet waiting, they gathered their probes and headed back to whence they came. After that, I stayed in the Anathema and banged on DSCAN inside the C3 to give us plenty of warning if they decided to come back. They never did.

I re-shipped Nyslia into a Zealot and the fleet returned to flinging ordnance at the hostile POS. More alliance members showed up and the shield quickly fell to 25% and it went into reinforced, which actually greatly surprised me. If you ignore the two Large POSes from a well established wormhole alliance, why bother stronting up?

After incapping all the guns, most of the alliance logged inside our friendly POS, waiting for the POS to come out of reinforced.

Today, the owner of the POS attempted to contact the alliance, and wanted the chance to move everything out, to which his response was "Not a chance." This is another clear example of people not treating wormhole space with the proper thinking. He didn't try to contact either of our corps, nor our alliance, before moving in. Because he "assumed" our POS was for shipbuilding, due to the Advanced Medium Array, no doubt, and that no one was active because there were no NPC kills for 24 hours. There were some within 48, however, so I'm not sure how that translates to "inactivity".

This is the third time this has happened to us, a Small POS appearing in our system without any warning or contact, and the people who put it up are "surprised" by the reaction it garners. The last time this happened, our carrier showed up as they were onlining the tower, and their response was "We wanted to see what would happen". What?! Really?

This guy was extremely surprised we were so hostile. I'm completely baffled by this, as how can putting up a POS in a system without contacting the people living there be construed as anything but hostile?

The Small POS comes out of reinforced in a matter of time, and the alliance will be there to blow it to smithereens. Another example of poor planning, no common eve sense, no attempt at previous intel, and an obvious attempt by too few to do too much. In the end it's costing them alot of isk, so there's a lesson there in itself, as many of you reading this will either already know, or will learn from this example entirely.

Of course, the real lesson to draw from this is don't expect a Talocan United wormhole to allow you to do stupid things, like this.

Seriously? Who does this?

Thanks to all those who came out to defend, I hope I can repay when the call goes out to defend your home.

Consistancy and I'm a Bad Bomber Pilot

After watching another week of terrible combat spawns, we're up to four, and after both talking with other alliance corp members as well as someone else actually posting on our alliance boards, we can safely say something is not quite right with combat anomaly spawns.

I spent today sitting in my Purifier after seeing jumps on DOTLAN. I scanned it down, headed on through and found two Helioses jumping back and forth. That stopped when my Devoter arrived on our wormhole side. I tried numerous times to catch both of them, but to no avail. I find I have much to learn about cloaky ship combat.

So, deciding I wasn't going to catch the cov ops ships, I called in both Orcas and started closing the hole, with my Purifier sitting on the hostile side of our exit. I was speaking with a member of the corp we share our other C2 with, and managed to close the hole before I hopped the Purifier back through! Whoops!

Thankfully my SB fit comes standard with a Core Probe Launcher. I watched DSCAN for a bit, seeing both Helioses had their probes out and were looking again, so I figured they had better scanning equipment, I bet where-ever they cluster is where the new D382, C2 static is, since this WH was a low sec static. Lo and behold I scanned it down and was sitting off of it before one of the Helios ever found it.

While I was sitting cloaked about 10km off of it, I heard it activate, and a Helios appeared. I excitedly clicked my Warp Disruptor and MWD as I hit approach, but strangely, targetting did not work. Hmm I said as it warped off. Guess it would help had I actually decloaked. Rats.

After heading through to the next hole, I found yet another C2 with static low sec, so again scanned down the next WH and after another narrow miss at a Helios again, finally found a C2 with high sec static.

And it contained SEVEN grav sites.

Argh!

I know there aren't a ton of people who move into WHs to mine, but do everyone a favor and despawn your gravs if you're not using them! It'll help you from scanning them down, and it'll help those in your constellation who actually do mine.

So after a few hours of screwing around, I made it back home and closed all my doors. Not an entirely exciting set of events, but hopefully I learned a number of things from them that I didn't have to pay for.

Combat Site Strangeness

Over the past couple of days, I noticed we had very few combat sites. Then none. And now, a day later, still none. I asked in alliance chat and some responded that they had the same issue along with lowered nano drop amounts.

No combat sites in almost two days is bizarre wormhole behavior. This hole has consistantly spawned 2-4 sites a day, on average. So what's going on?

Anyone else out there notice this?

War!

Well after helping defeat a large Starbridge force in an allied wormhole, Talocan United has been wardecced by Cosa Nostra, what I hear is the high sec griefing arm of Starbridge. So I took the early warning, fueled up both wormholes with a month of fuel, and prepared to weather the assault in our home wormhole.

Being a wormhole based corp, I expect the war to pass us by without much to get excited about. We've mined out the majority of our existing grav sites, and have a large stock of ore to compress soon. We also took the time to analyze our profit potential for our PI planets, and have been banging away on keeping the planets churning out materials. We're still focusing on Cryoprotectant and Biotech Reports, Biocells, and the full run of POS fuels. We were also looking to start trying to produce Nanite Repair Paste, but our system doesn't contain the Biomass needed, so we may have to truck those in. We'll start experimenting, and I expect I'll see what I can do with it soon.

Otherwise, it's been pretty quiet. We had some Rooks and Kings in here the other day, snooping about. We've kept on top of all our combat related sites, so they had nothing to bait us out with, so they resorted to uncloaked at the POS to try to coax those online outside the shield. Since only two of us were on at the time, and I was not one of them, everyone stayed safe and no one exploded. And other than a C6 connection, we've had little traffic to either kill or close. I did find our B274 had moved today, so that was a little odd......

And is there really anything worth any actual isk inside radar and mag sites, other than Caldari Decryptors? I still haven't seen a Talocan Derelict in over a year now, so all the money appears to be in the form of nanos from the wrecks. I've had very limited success with the respawn at downtime trick, so I've been leaving mag sites to try to spawn new waves, and hacking radars to try to get caldari decryptors. I ean, seriously, are they ever going to fix the other T3 ships so any other race's T3 salvage will be worth anything???

We've had a ton of ladars spawning, so maybe I'll have to actually try to react them again....argh what a PITA.

A Couple of Days

Well other than than my encounter with the two T3s, it's been a nice, relaxing couple of days in the wormhole. I had my wisdom teeth out yesterday, so it's much appreciated.

We've managed to keep our combat sites completely down, and actually picked up 25 nanos from 6 of them yesterday. The RNG gods shined on us, obviously. We were about to go poking around in our C3 static when my meds kicked in pretty hard, so I headed to bed early for once.

I've started to consider downsizing our PI back to P2 materials only. I haven't had the time or the inclination to haul beyond picking up the P2s, so my fctory worlds have been dormant and unused. Don't know if it's a good idea, but it's an idea.

We have one grav site remaining before we're out in this hole. After that we'll probably return to the other C2 and run some PvP and C3s with the two corps in there.

The Power of Perception

I just had an interesting encounter I thought warranted a post of some sort. After checking DOTLAN today, I saw we had four jumps showing. I had previously scanned so I was fairly sure we were secure. So I logged in and jumped into my Anathema and saw.....nothing.

Hmmm. A quick check of my sigs turned up one new wormhole, which I promptly headed over to see what it was. I hopped in my Purifier and headed through...to find a Loki and a Proteus on the other side. I checked the locus and found it was a Class 4. Also on scan were two combat probes and a Moa. Interesting.

I jumped back through to see what they would do and to start to kill my timer, and they followed me through. I quickly recloaked and they tried to catch me with a MWD on the Proteus, but I also have a MWD and had pulsed it before cloaking. I quickly headed back to the POS and hopped into the Pilgrim, logged Nyslia in on the Devoter, and boarded our neut Dominix with Firt. I also logged in Jelloshot in the Oneiros. I squad warped us to within 10km of the WH and waited for the fireworks.

I landed with my Pilgrim and moved off the warp in, and the two T3s were still there. My Devoter landed behind me, about 7k off the hole and started towards it. I put up the Warp Field Generator and started to orbit the WH, while they started to target her. I uncloaked and turned all my systems on the Proteus. The Dominix was in warp.

And they jumped back through before the Domi ever landed. Puzzled I jumped through after them in my Pilgrim. They warped away quickly. What the heck was going on? Maybe they had a spy at the POS? So I hung out for a few minutes to see what happened, and when no one showed for ten minutes, I jumped back through.

Oh well, I thought, guess I'll close this quick. I took the Domi back to the POS and swapped out for a double warp stabbed Orca Jesus, and logged in another Orca pilot. I cloaked the Onieros at near 80km off the hole and left the Devoter sitting on the wormhole.

I poked my Orcas through, and the Moa disappeared off scan, but the two combat probes were still there. *shrug*

On the second jump into the C4, both the T3s were there to greet my Orcas. This was puzzling to me, until I realized that they probably weren't aware of the mass limit and weren't experienced hole closers. I patiently waited out my cloak to see if they would get impatient and head back through before me as I hoped, but they sat waiting for my Orcas to show themselves. One uncloaked and they started targetting, so I took him home. The hole went crit right on schedule, so I decided to linger with my second Orca and see what kind of damage they could dish out. I have a decent shield tank on both Orcas, and they let er rip. I was hoping I could lure them back with thoughts of an easy kill, but alas, they were too spooked or they were too savvy. One more jump and the hole closed behind me.

I then got to spend an hour opening and closing our B274 looking for a good Jita connection. After three tries, I settled on 16 jumps away. I loaded up both Orcas, then realized all my PI would never fit through the single wormhole's mass. Whoops. So I moved out the expensive stuff and a chunk of it, went and got my Providence freighter from Jita and am slowly piloting 16 jumps there and will take it all 16 jumps back.

WTB web!

The Worm Is The Spice!

The past two nights we've managed to get our Hulk pilots out and took care of the majority of one grav site, and started another tonight. Unfortunately, I am still getting back into the swing of things, which is obvious since I'm forgetting any number of things, so I forgot to check the first site for any spawned roids. One of our corp members logged in to find his ship staring down a 50k crokite roid!

So back to the first field we went and after what seemed a horrendously long time, we turned it into glittering shards of yellow dust. And I don't know why, but when I think of ABC ore or look at their pictures ingame, Dune springs to mind. All that talk about spice and visions of the Navigator breathing in the red spice. Mayhaps I'm assuming that spice is actually crushed Arkonor. I can't help but think of the mining process as the mining lasers cut through the roids and process them into manageable chunks to be picked up and ferried to the waiting Rorqual, where obviously thousands of robots pound them with small hammers? I really should get out more.

Anyhow, we're picking up steam again, and it was great to see most of the corp online.

Back At It!

I had my first full amount of playtime since being away, yesterday! We cleared three combats, three radars and a mag site. Nano drops were pretty dismal, but thankfully, Caldari Decryptors came through and we found 11 of them! At around eight million each, they made up for the salvager's failure. I'll have to tear them apart to see what the heck is wrong with them......

So what's been going on in our systems? Short answer: Not Much. As I took my time away to travel to see family, my corp members also took the opportunity to take a break from Eve as well. All except Soulofchaos, who kept the hole clean of combat sites. WTG Soul. So due to his hard work, we have a collection of 100+ nanos waiting to go to Jita.

Interestingly enough, when I left, we had two grav sites in system, with plans to mine them out. That didn't happen, but I still have two grav sites now, three weeks later. And they're the same ones I bookmarked before I left. So, three weeks, no grav site spawns. Too much ABC ore coming out of WH space huh, Eve devs?

I'll be getting back into the swing of things here soon, so expect more!

Brief Hiatus

Hey guys, I've had a period of absence from Eve due to RL stuff, but I should be back again full time coming soon! Expect more pod goo!

Revenge of the Cov Ops

Here lately I've found little time to play Eve, real life does indeed come first. But a few things happened before I started logging in less.

The day after our wormhole acquisition, I logged in and hit DSCAN, as I habitually do. To my surprise, a number of wrecks and three Drakes appeared on scan! This did not make me happy, so I hopped in my stealth bomber to go check out what was going on.

I quickly found them running a combat site, and they seemed to be fairly standard Drakes, and exhibited all the signs of being run by a single person behind the curtain. I decided to find out where they came from, and rapidly found an incoming K162. It was guarded by a Brutix, and a character I had met before, Gillopi. I believe he was part of this post, an attempt to bait me onto my B274 and jump in numerous battleships, but a large mobile warp disruptor I had anchored ruined those plans.

So he had surely seen my probes looking for his hole, but he didn't react at all to it, and his alts continued to run sites. Unfortunately, I didn't have the kind of firepower at my disposal in this hole to take care of a trio of Drakes. I could, however, gank a salvaging ship when it showed up.

As Chessur has pointed out in his stealth bomber blog, leaving a salvaging ship unescorted is a bad idea. Even worse is when you've seen probes on scan. Ever MORE worse is when my corpmates started arriving, and their ships were appearing on their DSCAN. By the time the Noctis did finally show up, as I knew it would, I had two Dominixes, a Harbinger, a Devoter, and my Purifier. I felt like I had enough to challenge them, especially now that I was sure they were all being run by, at the most, two people.

So I stalked the Noctis, trying to get into point range, and missed it on a couple combat sites, knowing it was just doing our work for us. For the first few sites, no combat ships showed up to support the Noctis, til the third site, when I decided to pounce, and right before I uncloaked, the Brutix warped into the site.

It was strange timing, to be sure. The Noctis left the last three wrecks and warped out. I have no idea if one of my comrade's ship finally spooked it, or there was a disturbance in the Force. I'll never know. But they didn't listen to that ESP like they should have. I found it salvaging a radar site.

The fleet was ready so I crept in, called for the warp in on me, and uncloaked and pointed the Noctis.

80 kilometers off, one of the Drakes sat, unable to do anything to me at range. I fired off my torpedos and had the Noctis in half armor when the Brutix showed up. I turned and burned, unwilling to sacrifice the bomber with my fleet already showing up within seconds. My fleet landed and the Noctis exploded. Unfortunately I was out of point range of the Brutix as our two Domis tore into it with Ogres and Hammerheads, as the Devoter got stuck on some POS module, and arrived late to the party. *Mental note, assemble fleet at POS away from all modules before calling for a warp-in....* I also neglected to remember one of the Domis flown by me had a Warp Disruptor on it. Oops.

The Brutix warped away and so did the Drake. I gang warped the squad to the K162, and all three Drakes jumped ahead of us. I jumped through on the SB to try to point one, but all three had warped quickly away before my fleet showed up. So we sat on the WH contemplating what to do, as we were not going to charge across what looked to be not their system, when a Nemesis uncloaked and jumped.

My entire fleet followed.

I was already sitting on the other side in my Purifier, and I hit my MWD and uncloaked as he did, getting the point and stopping his cloak from going up.

I don't think he even got a torpedo off.

And with the Devoter there this time, the pilot had no chance for his escape pod to escape.

Karma is a bitch of a mistress.

So we cleaned up the system, unfortunately losing a good number of wrecks to the time we had to spend going to buy a Noctis and fitting it, and then closing the open wormholes. A little while later we were up 100 mil and two more kills on the board.

We managed to take care of the ABCs in one grav site, the Average Frontier Deposit, which we despise, and most of the AB on a second. I bought the modules and items needed for producing Hulks, and set one in the oven.

Next day, I logged in to find Freethinker Zun telling me both the grav sites we had previously been working on had vanished. With a sinking feeling, I started to scan. I was pretty sure what had happened, as I had in fact done it before to some other invaders who decided they would live in what was our home. Four out of the six grav sites that were there the day before were now gone. The former owners cov ops had been hanging around, and obviously had been sowing its mischief. The two remaining grav sites had actually spawned after we had seen the cov ops last, so we hope they are safe.

Nothing else to be done, except to try to catch the bastard if we see him, but catching cov ops ships is very hard. I hope he has already grown tired of the game, as he can see we are not going to pick up shop and leave just due to a few missing sites.

WTF? Seriously? Again? How Many Jumps!?

So we've been looking for a C2 that is within our region, or even better, in our constellation, to do some testing, as well as give us more grav sites to mine. We also wanted to give our alliance an option to place other corps inside it, since we did not want any neighbors in our home C2.

So, after a few days of looking, I happened upon a post of a guy selling a C2 w static C3, just like our home system. It had terrible PI, so I offered the guy 200 mil. His asking price was 1.5 bil. Ouch, well that wasn't going to fly, and the best he could do was 500, so I let him slip back into the pool of goo he came from. Next day, I find a post on his selling post that he isn't in control, so I contact the other person listed, and they want 1.5 bil too!

I negotiated it down to a reasonable 300 mil, and started filling my Orcas with all the loose POS gear I had lying around while the seller and their fleet scanned down the high sec. He indicated the system and I dropped into high sec and set destination.

43 jumps!?!?!

15 through lowsec???

That wouldn't do, and the seller already knew it, and jumped into action, finding a K162 inside to high sec. 26 jumps away. Ouch. And it's End of Life? Double ouch.

Okay, I got my fleet moving. I was 12 jumps away when he told me the wormhole had collapsed. *head smack*

Okay, the seller says, we're still looking. There's the C3 static. In go the scouts.

The C3 has a nullsec static.

...

*thrown desk chair*

The seller headed out into nullsec and said there was no one for three jumps in any direction! No, sorry, that's not an option with two Orcas loaded with about a bil in POS gear and fuel.

Not to worry, this seller had his stuff together. His scouts went out and started scanning the high sec island for WHs, and found a C2 with a connection to high sec.

22 jumps away.

So I get started moving that way, re-destinationing my fleet, which is, by now, spread halfway across New Eden.

I'm jumping, jumping jumpingjumping....

10 jumps away.

Oh, and the hole is now critical.

$$$*#(#*&^@$$%!!!!

Alright, I'll bring in my cov ops and at least get one of us in there. So I arrived at the system, pick up the bookmarks.

I had to go high sec--> C2 -->High sec --> C2.

Yay, I'm in system.....and so are many other people, it seems. There are like four cov ops on scan. This does not look good. A gentleman from the high sec island is claiming to have sold the wormhole, so now it becomes a race to get a POS inside.

The seller uses a Falcon to get the hole closed, and the new one opens up.

22 jumps back in the direction I came from.

...

....

.....

*cat hurled across room*

Alright, no biggie, let's get going. again. Jumping again. By this time I had probably jumped over 200 times with the multiple characters I had logged in. What's 60 more?

So many many jumps later, I arrive, and get the POS anchoring. I release the seller, with a good job done, and leave all the transports in high sec while the POS anchors. We leave our small combat fleet circling the WH side of the high sec static. I'm off cloaked in my Anathema. The WH flashes and an interdictor destroyer jumps in. He squirts off an interdiction sphere and jumps out.

WTF was that? We already had our bubble up. Field disappears.

It's dinnertime, so I need to get some stuff cooking, so I afk while the corp watches the hole.

A few minutes later I hear something from my headset as I'm walking by, so I plop down...to find all hell has broken loose. There are ships with me yellow boxed, and as I put my headset on, they all turn to red.

"JUMP! JUMP OUT! JUMP!" they're yelling on Vent. I look down, my Devoter pilot is the last corp pilot on this side of the WH. My armor flashes red, I look down at my modules, slam both armor reppers on and hit jump.

WTF was that!?

Turns out, it was the interdictor's corp looking for kills. They had jumped through on the fleet with a Tempest fit with a full rack of neuts..and FIVE Tengus. JFC FIVE?

After some smacktalking local about how leet and uber they were, to the disappointment of the guy in local who thought he was selling to someone else, they jumped out the high sec.

We moved our fleet out of the system and took a break for dinner for everyone. We came back 30 minutes later and I found them on a locator agent, ten jumps away.

GO GO GO!

We warped the fleet over to the wormhole. Just as the final Orca was jumping through, the same fleet appeared in the high sec local and started talking more smack.

All they got was a single sentence before the wormhole popped in their faces.

Onlined the tower, got the shield up, and spent the next six hours onlining 40+ guns and ECM.

Hmm, I don't have as much ECM as I thought I did. Better open up the B274 and get some more.

I jump outside and check to see where I am by checking how far Jita is. Hmm, four jumps from Amarr....hey wait. Set Destination. omfg.

I am one jump from the system I started in that morning. Where my other C2's wormhole still is.

The things that happen in Eve sometimes are mind boggling. I ended up where I began this wild trip across the galaxy.

So I got a couple Impels and loaded them to the gills with more POS gear. And, lo and behold, I was ten jumps from where I'd dumped all the C3 POS gear, so I went and got that too. Now this POS was looking mean.

I had had a terribly long day, so I headed to bed, secure in the knowledge the POS was secure.

Unless the Russians invade.

Wormhole Topic of the Week: POS Defenses!

What is the most powerful force in wormholes? Knowledge, hide it well. Not saying where your static comes out, watching for people trailing you back to your home, scanning your system down every single day, and being generally aware of your surroundings at all times, are all keys to surviving for you, your corp, and your POS. Pilot situational awareness saves the lives of you and your corpmates.

There are really three kinds of invaders, one of which you CANNOT defend from. First, you have small corps or small alliances, which can muster a standard fleet of 10-20 BSes. These you can defeat with a single large POS, if you have it moduled out correctly.

The second is the LOLZ Fleet. They are there just to shoot stuff up and leave, hoping to get you out for some killmails. These are easy to deal with, if you follow the next points, these will not and cannot attack you.

Third are the giant Worldwide Russian Wrestling Federation fleets. You cannot defend from these. If they want your hole, they will take it. No one can stop them, they have the numbers to steamroll any and all defenses. All you can do is make it take a little longer. No amount of guns, ECM, or hardeners will stay them. This is when you do your intel, gather your most valuable stuff together, and get out of dodge with it in whatever can cloak.

So let's talk about POS Defenses! So I'm a corp looking for a wormhole to take from someone. What am I looking for in a system that makes it attractive to invasion?

Number one on the list is a POS that isn't large. With POS prices so far down from where they were when I started in the great black, there's really very little excuse to not have one. Wether you're a one man show, or an industrial only corp, a large is the first thing that will make people disregard you as a target.

And worse than that is faction smalls and mediums. These are nothing but hoeny drawing the bear in. Even my small corp will take these on. I'm not much on killmails, but this is hard isk you're looking to get destroyed here. They are nothing but isk pinatas.

About the only time you could use a small or medium POS is on some sort of excursion to clean out a stocked system, a place to hide and be safe. The POS has to be treated as a throwaway, because that's what will likely happen if someone finds it.

Number two is arming your POS. Nothing says "Come and get it!" like a POS armed with two smaller lasers, one warp scrambler, and a stasis webber. Half the game of deterrence in wormholes is psychology. Making the other person think you are far more powerful than you are. I have EIGHTY FIVE anchored and online guns on our POS. My defense force is going to be able to keep shooting, as the enemy takes out one gun, another is onlined.

Also don't leave your guns offline to "save fuel". An enemy force shows up and half your guns are offline, guess what? Those guns probably won't participate in the fight. MAX your power out with online guns. Offline ones only make you juicier as a target. Unless you have 40 more, and that scares the poo, to quote another blogger, out of them. Hit DSCAN in our wormhole with your active settings off and most likely your jaw will drop.

Everyone has their own theories about gun placement, and what kinds. The main thing that matters is to cover all fields of attack. Guns should be placed on all sides of your POS so that there is no "safe spot" in your defenses. Plan for your POS gunners to use guns on the opposite sides of the POS to shoot attackers in the gun's optimal. Space your guns out in groups so they can't all be smartbombed at once. Place ECM, warp disruptors, stasis webbers, and different size guns on all avenues of attack so that when the attackers concentrate on one side of the POS, they do not kill all of one type of your defenses. For example, killing all your warp disruptors so any ship can warp out if they get severely damaged.

Gun types is mostly a personal choice, exempting all missile launcher modules, since most people know to not use them since they shut off when the POS goes into reinforced. I use mostly lasers, with a number of small autocannons and artillery mixed in for tracking and range differences. Making sure the attackers cannot sit at a certain range and be safe from most of your weaponry is pretty key. As the recent siege of my C3 POS, once they get someone in your system, they can actually go to the test server and try out different attack options.

You're going to need a mix of mostly medium and small guns, since most of your attackers are going to fly BSes, or sub-BS size ships. I have read, and only read, mind you, that large guns are made for shooting capital ships, so very few of these, if any, is needed. I have a few due to my being able to man a large number of POS guns, and a webbed BS is probably a good target for a large.

Next up is ECM. The amount of ECM you should have onlined is definitely determined by how many people you have that can defend the POS. More ECM for less people. ECM can really ruin someone's day on it's own, but it will, at best, prolong the attackers time spent shooting at your modules before they move on to your shield. Dickstars are wonderful deterrents to the LOLZ squads out there, as it makes it no longer fun for them to siege your POS. The other two groups will care less, and will persevere through the loss of lock to down your station. ECM in a balanced setup can serve a POS gunner well in getting to pick the higher DPS targets, or those that are easy to jam, and make sure they are being jammed repeatadly. On to shield hardeners.

If your POS doesn't have shield hardeners anchored, you're a target. This is one of the key things people look for when gauging how hard a POS takedown is going to be. Having a set of hardeners that takes your shields to at least 50% in everything is vital to adding time to the takedown, giving your corp or your alliance more time to get there to save the day.

Going to cut it short here, got alot oging on atm, more on that in a later blog. o/

That Got The Blood Flowing!

So after waiting around for a WH seller to get us into a C2 that was in our current wormhole's region, the deal fell through and we had time on our hands. I had run most of the combat sites, so I and Soulofchaos decided to poke our heads into our C3 static. I was itching to try out my new Purifiers, so I headed in and scouted around.

I am not that good at combat scanning people down, I'll just say that right off. But my new shiny stealth bomber can't fit an Expanded Probe Launcher anyhow, going from a fitting on Chessur's bomber blog. So I've got Core Probes only, and of course, my DSCAN.

DSCAN is a powerful tool in the right hands, which are not mine if you were wondering. I can't figure out on which degree or exactly how far people are away, but I'm trying.

So this is where I found two Retrievers, a Hulk, a Mammoth, and an Orca on scan. There were two POSes in system, and I assumed the Orca was at one of them. And then it disappeared from scan. I found it at where the other POS came on scan, so it must have warped between POSes. Interesting, wonder why it did that.

So the Mammoth was moving back and forth from a grav site I couldn't find without dropping probes. Oh well. I headed out to an outer planet out of scan range and dropped probes, telling my corpmates, who now included Raphid and Freethinker Zun by this point, what I planned on doing. Hopefully they wouldn't see the probes, I could get up close, and have them jump in and help kill something worth killing.

Well, wouldn't you know, I probed down the grav site, stuffed my probes back in the bay and arrived....to find nothing. There was no one in the site.

Hmmm. They are definitely mining. There must be two gravs. So repeat, but this time I take too long, and they see the probes and get out of dodge. I scan the site down anyhow and warp to it, recalling probes as soon as I can. I arrive there to find, Sleepers? Looked like the Sleepers spawned as I probed them down, so maybe they were fleeing the Sleepers and not my probes. So I broke out a soda and waited to find out.

Over at the POS, a Cheetah appeared on scan. Rats. Means they saw my probes and were trying to find where they came from. Off to our connecting wormhole I went, watching the probes move about, until finally, they disappeared.

I let everyone know the Cheetah would be incoming, and to chase it back through when it arrived and found our welcoming committee. Waiting for it were Soulofchaos in his Tengu, Chaosofsoul in a Nighthawk, Raphid in a Zealot, Freethinker Zun in an Ares, and Nyslia in a Devoter.

On queue the Cheetah uncloaked, and it was indeed the corp I believed it was, with 41 members. This could get sticky.

The cov ops jumped into our home and I swear I heard another activation, so I jumped the Devoter through and bubbled the other side, when Soulofchaos reported the Cheetah was still in our system. Whoops.

But he was sufficently rattled that he jumped back to his side, our fleet in hot pursuit. I uncloaked and waited to see which way he would go, as we would only have the one chance to get him near the wormhole.

And there he was, 15km off from me and heading out. But Freethinker was quick on the draw in his interceptor and stopped him from cloaking. A few shots later, his ship was spacedust, and for some reason he floated in his pod, stunned and disbelieving, so we helped him on his way to his next clone.

Since they were obviously not going to come out and play again following the death of their scanner pilot, we called the Orcas over and started to collapse the wormhole. On the final pass, combat ships started to appear on scan. First an Abaddon, then an Apoc, a Domi, a Proteus...and a Stabber! Guess that was the anti-ceptor ship.

But, with only the jump home remaining, we collapsed the wormhole behind us, leaving their angry impotent fleet to rage about the system.

Onward to more targets! Our bloodlust having obviously not been satiated, we opened the next C3 static and found a C3 with nullsec static, NPC kills, jumps and a ship kill in the last hour. Hmm, looks like it might mean some business.

I headed out into the system and got a Nighthawk on scan. Hmmm. He was running a combat site, and I only had one on scan. I thought maybe it was bait, seeing there was a ship kill in the last hour, bu I warped into the site to see what was up. I found a Nighthawk busy running the C3 site solo, salvaging and using a tractor as he went. So his DPS was a bit nerfed. A conversation ensued since I hadn't had much experience getting shot at with missiles and wether or not they could hit me going 1.5k in the bomber.

In the end I figured, what the hell, that's what I bought them for. I have three fitted out and ready to explode, in a fashion after the Flight of Dragons Punisher experiment blog. So I crept in as he finished a wave and made my first mistake. I should have timed my attack for when he was almost done with the wave. Instead, I attacked while four cruisers were on the field.

But, I had him tackled and my fleet was on it's way. And then all the Sleepers switched to me. Whoops.

So my bomber quickly turned into glittering shards of tritanium, but not before my glorious corpmates arrived to resume the trap I had sprung. Freethinker's interceptor resumed the warp disruptor as the Devoter was warping in, but he too was targetted by the sleepers, and had to warp out as well. All our guns then turned to the Nighthawk as I headed home to reship in my Legion.

Somehow in the fight, I believe the Nighthawk continued to shoot the Sleepers, and triggered the next wave, including an advanced battleship. These are extremely nasty, and it and the wave turned on Raphid's Zealot, and he warped out of the site on fire after being webbed and focus fired upon.

But the Nighthawk went down in a blaze, and I activated the warp bubble to trap his pod. Nyslia's Devoter is going to need some time in station to wash it all off her nose.

So while spamming scan, we cleaned up the rest of the site and Freethinker slowly salvaged the site with the single salvager he mounted on the ceptor to salvage our kills, taking entirely too long as we glanced nervously about, knowing an entrance was open nearby, but not seeing anyone. Having performed an object lesson in how easy it is for people to sneak up on you in combat sites, we expected a null fleet to blob us out of nowhere, but we finished off the site and headed home before we tempted fate too many times.

Four Orca passes later and the hole went pop.

After perusing the T2 salvage, and counting all the sleeper loot, we found we had made 250 mil! Minus my Purifier, we had made 230 mil in profit. Not bad for a little roam, and we all sunk our teeth into some PvP and came away tearing huge hunks, blood spattering the walls....okay, too much.

High fives all around for some fairly well executed kills. We made mistakes, that's for sure. Hopefully we'll live long enough to learn from them.

And We're Out of the Damned Place

We said goodbye to another wormhole today, as Heretical Innovations moved out of the wormhole known affectionately to it's former owners as "The Zoo". It proved too much for us and eve the PvP corp that moved in to help contain all the incursions into the system. In the end, they were too few, and we were, well, still miners.

So after having to run off a group of Hurricanes and Drakes, we packed everything up and headed on home.

So now I'm interested in finding a wormhole in our Region, o4. Better yet, I'd love to find a wormhole in our constellation, C30, but that it proving to be difficult. It won't be the C3 we hoped to be living in, but honestly, we don't run enough people to take care of it and our C2. So, to that end, we'll be on the lookout for another C2 that we are sure we can take care of.

And due to that we'll probably bring a few more people into the corp soon.

And honestly, why in the stupid hell are POS so hard to take down??/ Cmon, we don't need to be punished when we're putting it up AND down, do we?

The Post In Which Very Little Is Accomplished

Well it's been an interesting couple of weeks here in the ol hole, to say the least. After the whole ABC "removal from WH space" debacle post came up, our corp decided we needed to stockpile some isk, so we were going to put 10 bil in the corp wallet. To that end we mined and ran sites til we couldn't take the spod anymore and all the combat sites had disappeared.

So as we pondered what to do next, I realized our C3 had four gravimetric sites in it! A plan formed, in which we'd move eight Covetors over to it, along with four Orcas, and do a week or so mining vacation. That was supposed to happen last Monday, but, lo and behold, TWO grav sites spawned in one day in the C2. Well we couldn't leave those, now could we?

So more mining and a fast forward to today. We got our Mining Vacation plan items together and I scanned down the C3...to find a single grav site inside. Apparently over the course of the last week, numerous nullsec and higher class wormhole peoples had warped to them and despawned them. *serious tears* The alliance corp claimed "a third party came in and cleaned them out". Hope they got some kills on the huge amounts of mining ships it must have taken to "clean us out."

To top it off, the C3 needed fuel, and the high sec opened onto an island in low sec. This just couldn't get any better, could it? Oh! But it CAN! There's a Tengu on the high sec exit, and the best combat ship I have is either a Punisher or an Executioner, take your pick! I almost tried it just to see how long before I exploded, but common sense won out. Eventually he went away and 1 jump away there was some helium for huge amounts of isk, but I paid up.

Kids, learn the lesson here. Don't let your POS get down to one day's fuel and then wonder why that is the day the Eve gods deign your high sec will appear on an island.

So we are considering dropping the C3 altogether. The full PI is great, except I'm not doing anything with it except stockpiling P2, and I'm doing that rather infrequently. I would really need to be living in it to take advantage of all it has to offer. And while that is always an option, fighting everyday with nullseccers and C5-C6 corps running through is not my idea of fun.

So, very little accomplished there.

I and Freethinker had cleared all our combat sites earlier today, came up with 20 nanos for our trouble. Had 13 sites, so 20 isn't bad. Afterwards, he was looking to do something dangerous, so I said we could open up our static C3 and see what was in there.

Little did I know that it would lead me to a deadly game of hide and seek with a Goonswarm corp later on. But, back to the past.

We headed in and found a completely cleaned out system. Doh! However, on DSCAN we found a Small Minmatar POS. With no guns, no defenses of any sort. Wtf.

Warping over to it I found no arrays of any kind, only a Bestower and a Kestrel, both named for their pilots. Quickly checking their corp info revealed a corp of three members.

Really? A C3 and you're going to run a small POS AND only have three members?? I guess if it had worked up til then. Soulofchaos was on by then and we wanted some blood, or at least some sort of metallic tang, so we suited up in our POS bashing ships, and started shooting.

This was, to be honest, our first attempt at any sort of online POS. We had vague ideas of when it would go into reinforced, how long the stront may be on a small, etc etc, so it was a learning experience for all of us. So it was with surprise to us that it didn't go into reinforced at 50% shields, and we high fived that it must not have any stront and continued shooting.....until 25% ticked and *insert sci fi sound here* it went into reinforced for 1 day and five hours.

Rats.

Oh well, maybe this will teach them to not run a small POS where every Tom, Dick, and Forgotten gang wandering by will take a shot at it just cause they're bored. One of the ship owners logged in and I sent a helpful email about it being in reinforced, to see if he would log into the POS and our cloakys could get a shot at him, but no dice. No return email and no login.

Double rats.

So, after all the excitement of the POS shoot, everyone else logged to head to dinner, and so did I. I returned later, and everyone else apparently found better things to do. :p

So I screwed around with PI, floated around while looking to replace our C3 with something that wasn't going to try to kill us in our sleep, when Sisters Probes appeared on scan.

Oh? What is this! I quickly hopped into my Battle Anathema and laid a single probe of the same type out, and ascertained he hadn't come from any new signature. Warping over to the C3, I sat for a bit and was rewarded with seeing another Anathema cloak up. He sat there uncloaked for a bit and I thought I might get into warp disruptor range, but alas, he disappeared. But no wormhole flicker. Hmmm.

No more probes appeared, I had Nyslia logged in and watching near our POS for any signs of him, but nothing. Maybe he logged off in the system, thinking our cap ships would make a tasty morsel for some Goonswarm fleet, mayhaps?

As I floated in my invisible vessel 10km off the wormhole, I noticed Duncan McCloud came on, so I started a conversation with him to see how him and the wormhole we sold him was doing. You may remember Zombieland. *sigh* Never should have sold that wormhole.....but he's doing fine! /wave Duncan!

We chatted for a bit a,d I decided to call it a night on the Goon, when the wormhole flickered. I caught sight of a disappeared ship and surely it must have been the Anathema?

So I dropped cloak and afterburned over and jumped. Now, mind you, at this point in time I'm flying a Battle Anathema, fitted with a Warp Disruptor, Web, Tracking Disruptors, and a single light laser. I'm supposed to kill other cov ops.

I shimmered into the C3 system to find a Tengu uncloaked almost directly on top of me!

Where the hell did he come from!?

I sat motionless, hoping I would make the timer to jump back home and away from this ridiculous match-up.

Off to the right, the Anathema uncloaked, and the two warped away, apparrently not noticing my second wormhole pulse. I decided, what the hell, I'll play some games with these two gents. I headed back home and hopped into the Pilgrim, waited out my timer, left Nyslia in the Devoter on the C2 side, and jumped back into the C3 with the reinforced POS.

There were probes on DSCAN, and I was certain they hadn't entered this hole from my hole, so they probably used the static low sec of this hole to enter. I warped to it, having previously bookmarked it, at 20km. Nearly 5km away from me was the Anathema, uncloaked and scanning.

Wait, where's the Tengu......this doesn't smell right. Maybe they did hear me come through. But that is a cov ops with a possible sisters probe attached sitting at least 15km off the wormhole and safety........so I threw caution to the wind and dropped my cloak.

I launched my light drones and kept trying for the after cloak lock....when the Tengu slithered out from behind his own cloak and started launching missiles at me! I knew it!

I finally boxed the cov ops and started neuting him to death while my drones started chewing on him, as I hoped to make the kill before I had to hop out. I had him near structure as I tried to get some sort of transversal on the Tengu, but it just wasn't working, and I dipped into 25% armor.

Recall drones and JUMP!

I appeared in low sec, not quite on fire, but just barely not. Oh crap, I'm 1200 away from the WH, I can't cloak. I punched Keep At Range and pulse by AB, praying to get cloaked before the Tengu came back through to finish me off. As soon as I cleared 2k, the wormhole pulsed and I cloaked....hey wait. I shut the cloak off and repeatadly pushed jump and came back into the wormhole.

To find an Anathema, also almost on fire, sitting on the hole. I moved 2k away and started targeting ,but he quickly jumped back out. I moved off the hole a safe distance and waited a bit. And waited. As I suspected, the Tengu had a hole timer for this hole left, or he just didn't want to bother trying to find a cloaky that had the lead on him.

I decided that was enough for the night, headed back to the POS, repped my ship up, and called it a night. Please excuse typos, it's late, and like five people asked when I was going to write some more! Hope you enjoyed. Maybe next time I will explode.

Definite New Grav Mechanics

So we've been watching our grav sites very closely for the last few now, and I can safely say there's been some changes to the way they are operating. In what way you ask? I'll tell you!

In our entire time in wormholes, we have had very few of the "downtime spawn roids", asteroids that spawn in your "open" fields(those that you have warped to). And when I say very few, I mean like 5 total over our entire wormhole career. So it has been very interesting when almost every single day we warp in to find a new roid waiting for us. Not only that, but they are piling up! Lately, it is not uncommon for there to be two different spawn roids from two seperate days because we haven't been able to mine all the first!

And not just any roid, oh no. Up til now we've only had spodumain asteroids spawning as our downtime roid. But, about the time we started repeatadly having these roids spawn, crokite roids started spawning as well. 25-50k ones.

Shhh, don't tell the CSM! OMG more nullsec ores in wormholes! It'll destroy the game!

On top of these new downtime roids, we've been getting extra roids that spawn with the field. I've documented this over the past few months. Once, as readers will recall, we had a 250k spod spawn with the grav site. It, of course, promptly disappeared. But extra rocks with each site has been more than welcome.

Of course, there is alot of "are we done yet?" while you mine 90k spod. But it's also money in the bank. I'll deal with that while we can have stuff to mine.

So why, when the nullsec community obviously wants ABCs removed from wormholes, would CCP already have wormhole grav sites getting buffs? Obviously the grav changes have either been in the game, and were on some sort of lower setting, or they were already planned and on the table before any CSM whines were heard.

So what's going to happen now? Are these changes going to get reversed? Only time will tell. Hopefully CCP sees through the self serving bullshit of the nullsec CSMs and actually takes a look at it's own data. Or sleepers are going to mostly be the only thing found in wormholes again soon.

Jita Run, Mag/Radar Sites, Pothole In The Superwormway

Well I'll start out with the last while it's fresh in the mind and finish with the first. I just got done throwing a roadblock in a C5 dwellers superwormway. I sat down to do some PI and what do I see? 32 jumps. I had both statics closed, so someone's connected to us.

I jumped on and saw a Mammoth on scan. Then an Impel, a Pilgrim, a Myrmidon and some pods. Yep, someone is using us for transit again. Normally I don't mind it, espicially since we didn't have much to defend as we'd done most of our sites, but I was in a mischievious mood, so I logged in dual Orcas, a Devoter, the Deimos, a Damnation, and a Tengu.

I quickly scanned down the offending new wormhole and watched to get a good count on any combat ships present. I saw the Mammoth and the Impel warp off, so I decided this was the time. The deadly K162 was at half, and I guessed it was probably more than that with 32 jumps. I flew back and jumped in my Pilgrim and got everyone underway from our Off Grid bookmark.

I'm going to guess that they saw us coming, because as soon as the Orca jumped through to their side, and the wormhole went crit, the Mammoth arrived back at th wormhole it had previously jumped out of, without time to have done anything. Obviously some sort of warning was had. I found out later there was an Anathema cloaked I hadn't seen, but I don't know where it was watching from, maybe at the POS.

The Mammoth came back through as I furiously stabbed at the JUMP button for the Orca. I was pretty sure the Mammoth wouldn't make the hole close, but you never can be sure, even with accurate ship counts. But with an activation I was back through, and the hole closed. I warped as quickly as possible to the B274 I had already scanned down, threw up the bubble and made a mistake. My Orca was in slow warp far behind the HIC, so the Devoter brought the Orca out of warp 11km from the hole. So it had to slow boat on over.

In the meantime, an Anathema jumped through. Rats. Oh well, cov ops are hard to catch when they're on the ball.

I finally jumped the Orca out and back....and the hole only crit. *sigh* So, leaving the fleet on the entrance, I hopped in a shuttle and headed over to the nearest trade hub, which happened to be Rens, and bought an Armageddon, brought it home, and closed the hole, which I'm now scanning for our new B274 so I can have the loc for tomorrow.

Today we ran two mag sites and one radar site. Awhile back I had spoken to someone who had mentioned that they got Talocan ships in their mag/radar sites all the time. So I had hopes with our plethora of sites to at least find one in over a year of looking.

Nope. Not a one. My dry spell continues. I spoke with Nick about it to make sure the damn things aren't another object on the overview, and he says they are just hacking cans, so I should see the bastards. Argh.

But, in relation to a previous experiment, I can report an affirmative on the respawn of radar sites you leave open through downtime. The last one we left never did spawn any new Sleepers. This one we left did. So we picked through the wreckage of an extra radar site, three combat sites, and two mag sites....for a grand total of 17 nanos. I was hoping for more, but I'll take it. We've had a large dry spell of late on those too.

So onto the Jita run. I dropped off all our nanos and Sleeper loot, along with tons of PI, and all thanks to a handy K162 straight to high sec that opened up five jumps from Jita. Couldn't have asked for better timing.

I also located our cache of research and development items, and sold most of them off, everything on sell orders this time except the Sleeper loot. I sold that straight to buy orders.

So far the grand total for the sell orders and loot is 1.2 bil. Of course I turned right around and spent a few hundred mil on our Jita list I keep all week from everyone, and headed back to run the above mentioned sites.

I also took the time to go looking around for our BPO library, as we're going to start getting re-involved in equipment production, but I could not locate them. They must be on one of Nick's alts. I'll have to look into that later.

So onward to finish off my scanning for the night, and maybe run that PI before I was interrupted!