Luckiest Guy In Eve: Didn't I Learn This Lesson Already?

I got really lucky yesterday. I mean REALLY lucky. Like I just won the Eve Jackpot Lotto lucky.

If you've read my blog for a long time, you know this has happened before. It's happened to almost all wormhole dwellers. That dreaded message. The one, where when it pops up, and you even knew when it was coming, it strikes fear right into your heart.

"The wormhole has collapsed behind you, are you trapped?"

At this point, we all pull a double check. Am I in the correct system? Whew, sigh of relief.

At that point yesterday, my eyes popped open wide in horror. My Orca was now on the wrong side of a closed wormhole. But the terror subsided a bit, as I knew I had a Core Probe Launcher in it's cargo just for this instance.......wait......didn't I unload all my cargo in Jita the other day? I would have had to specifically make sure I put it back.....and I don't remember doing that......

And I was right. It wasn't in my cargo hold. My Fleet Hangar, no standby Magnate in the Ship Maintenance Array for real emergencies.

Well shit.

I was in a C2 with static low sec, and one onlined POS in system. I hadn't seen anyone on DSCAN yet, but someone had to have been here, a K162 had opened into my wormhole, hence the whole reason I was stuck here. So SOMEONE must have passed through here.

I began calling for help in local after I cloaked up off DSCAN from the POS. A nice juicy Orca kill was not what I wanted my possible saviors to see before I received said help. Few hours later, no help was found. I mentally calculated my possible ISK loss in ship and implants, and it was close to half a bil.

Wormholes really do bite you when you stop respecting them. And the stupid thing is, it was totally my fault. I did four back and forth jumps with my AB running on a 2 bil mass wormhole. At 300mil per jump of mass with the AB going, that's 2.4 bil. I'm surprised it didn't close on me sooner. I didn't pay attention enough, and wormhole space was going to teach me a lesson.....again.....

This isn't the first time I've been stuck in the black, alone with no hope of rescue. When I first began exploring wormholes in Apocrypha, I tried my hand at mining the new ores I had never seen before. I hadn't learned about mass limits, or even checking the info on the wormhole to see if it was unstable.

So one time too many I rolled the dice and finally came up snake eyes. I was flying my first Hulk, and the hole collapsed in front of my eyes. I spent a few days asking for help in local, but back then, wormhole space was fairly empty, and no one ever came to my aid. So I said a fond farewell to my Hulk and left it adrift for someone to come upon and find my corpse floating next to it.

I figured that was the fate that awaited my Orca and it's pilot. However, with the changes to wormhole space, there are so many transiting wormholes that there is almost always someone coming and going in every system in W-space.

So I kept calling for help.

About two hours into it the next day, I saw a Tengu on scan. Argh. Since there was no convo attempt or any respond, I figured he was looking for me. So I tried to speak to him directly.

All of a sudden I got a fleet invite. Hmmm, I thought, he might be just trying to get a warp to me, so I asked for a convo in local, and the pilot obliged. He told me he was not the Tengu pilot, and that he was in a Buzzard and from a null sec connection. He said he was on the low sec hole, and to warp to him at 10km.

It was too good to be true, and I just couldn't trust him. It is Eve, after all, but what did I have to lose?

As soon as I fleeted up with him, and uncloaked and warped to the gent at 100, just in case this was all a trap, which again, this is Eve. As soon as I had uncloaked, I caught the Tengu on scan again. Hmmm.

I landed on grid, and sure enough, there was the A239 wormhole exit. A Buzzard  uncloaked and the guy said that was the prudent move, he didn't blame me, and GL, careful it's a low sec hole.

I was amazed, to say the least. I'm certainly nowhere near the bloodthirstiest person in Eve, but even I give very little quarter anymore after a long life in holes.

So I warped off and cloaked again, since the Tengu was still looking for me. About fifteen minutes later, I decided to go for it. Landed on the hole and cringed, figuring I had company waiting outside.

I arrived in low sec, no ships anywhere near, two jumps from Hek.

Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.

I could not believe my luck as I docked up in system, but after checking local I realized the Orca might not be making it out of low sec. Local was full of flashies, as a gang of criminals warped in and out of system. Oh well, at least I am certain to get my pod out.

I decided to chill out for awhile, already having pushed my luck way way too far. I got onto my main and scanned our my B274 and found I was only 13 jumps from Hek, so jumped in my new stealth bomber to go outfit it and scout my way out.

About half an hour later, I jumped Firt and the Orca clear to high sec! All I had to worry about now was wartargets...oh yeah, I was at war.

But, none showed themselves, and my Orca is bathing in the wonderful black seas of home space. Hopefully I'll be a little more careful, at least, for a little while, I'm sure.


Forgotten Heathen out.

A New Beginning?

As most of you probably noticed, my last foray back into Eve did not hold me. I had no purpose other than to raise my isk numbers. Of course, isk is all well and good, but I crave more than that. So I'm giving it a try again for awhile with a couple of friends.

So far the plan is to mine the ever loving snot out of Ammatar space, and use the minerals to produce Orcas and Providence freighters. I've also secured some decent low sec PI spots, even though that didn't go so well for me last time I attempted it. But, I am much older and wiser than I once was, so mayhaps I will not make the same mistakes.

I'm constantly fighting the urge to look for a new wormhole.......we'll see how long I can last. :)

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!!!

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!

Wormhole Topic of the Week: Mining Fleet Setups!

As I gaze out my Hulk's bridge windows, I see a vast mining fleet destroying a millenia old crokite asteroid. What sights has this old rock been privy to? What battles have been fought near it, or even over it? If only rocks could talk.

But they can't, so I chuckle as the plethora of mining lasers break it apart into manageable sizes for my haulers to take back to the station deep inside my wormhole, all while I check Jita prices on my screen and mentally count my incoming isk.

So, while my Rorqual compresses and packages our various ores for shipment to high sec, let's talk about my mining fleet setups. I'd love for you all to leave comments about how and why you do things while mining.

To start with, I add my boosting ship to Wing Commander, either the Orca when the number of hulks and retrievers do not warrant the use of the Industrial Module on the Rorqual, or in the Rorqual when most of our members are on and mining with us.

Squad Commander has to have Leadership 5 so that they can boost the large numbers of Hulks that are on with the Rorqual. The Commander also has to not be an alt, as they are in charge of warping the fleet away at the slightest sign of danger. All fleet members are also directed to make a Recall Drones macro so that they can quickly attempt to call their drones back in the event of an emergency warp-out. If drones are left, so be it, the ships are far more important, and I'll bet some people have lost them attempting to let their drones get back aboard.

Each of our corporation hulks is outfitted the same. Three Strip Miner ones in the highs, Mining Laser Upgrade IIs in the lows, a Small Shield Booster II and an Invul II Booster in the mids along with a Cap Recharger. We fly with Low Friction Nozzle Rigs and Mining Drone Augmentor Rigs, for aligning speed and mining yield improvements.

Why Strip Miner 1s, you ask? I covered it in an old post, but I'll restate why I use them: Convenience. Every thing you need trucked into the wormhole is another piece of weight on the transport coming back in. Mining crystals do actually weigh a good bit, especially when you get a bunch stacked together. A fleet really going after gravimetric sites can burn through crystals at an astonishing rate. And if you want T2 crystals, those are an added expense and huge addition in training time. I decided that training Refining Eff V on all my characters was just too long of an investment to get those T2 ABC crystals.

The other reason has to do with those of us that mine with multiple accounts, but still lies under the convenience line. When a crystal breaks, you have to figure out which client it broke on. And then what do you do to get another crystal? Is your Orca in field with a load of them? Is your hulk going home to get more crystals? What happens when you need to switch to a different roid type? Yep, you've got to swap out all your crystals. And since all the ores except mercoxit are present, that's alot of crystals on standby, especially when you're fielding 10+ hulks.

Of course, I might find the time to get all these characters to Ref Eff V, and I might just start being anal about mining yields again. Maybe then I'll deem the expense of crystals to be worth the time saved. But right now, I'd rather it all be more convenient.

So you've got your booster, who should be sitting quietly doing something either afk or anything not involving warping, at the POS. You've got your haulers, either Iteron Vs, or Impels, or even transport fit Orcas. Whatever your choice of haulers, they should be quickly shuttling that ore back to the POS as quick as they can warp back and forth.

So you've got the operation going, but is it safe? Of course, in wormholes, your operations are never safe. An incoming K162 can spill nullsec PvP fleets onto your unsuspecting mining gang in 30 seconds or less. So you need someone to scan the whole wormhole down, every signature, and identify everything before you get started. Extra wormholes you don't know about can spell the death of all of you or even your POS, if you can't get back in.

I don't mine unless I have only two wormhole sigs in my system, which will be my known statics, and only if I know they are closed. At the least, an open wormhole will have to be crit and have a large mobile warp disruptor sitting on it, and at best, having someone in a cloaked ship sitting there to listen for wormhole activation.

After it's all scanned down and you are 100% sure there aren't any nasty visitors poking around, assume that there are. Designate a couple people as the DSCAN hitters. They need to have probes on their Overview settings, everyone already does have them cause you're in a wormhole, right? And they need to be hitting DSCAN as much as possible. Like as much as the game will let them hit it. This means they should be your lone miners, with no alts. You can't rely on the haulers, they are passing through too much of the system and may miss what goes on next to you while they are more than 14 AU from you. So it has to be one of your solo miners, banging away on DSCAN, because YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!

If you don't believe me, you can reference my old post whereupon I lost three hulks, a Covetor, and all four pods.

Your hauler choice depends on how many mining vessels you have going at the field. If you have four or five, an Iteron V or an Impel, or your Deep Space Transport of choice for the 38k cargo space. Your hauler should neve hang out in the field, and should either be continually making hte back and forth trip to your X-Large Ship Assembly Array and the field, or waiting til there's a full can in the field.

I have been using our Orca to haul lately, and I know I cautioned against it before. I still caution against it. Unless you have multiple people hitting their DSCANs and enough mining ships crushing roids to start stacking up cans your hauler can't handle, then you shouldn't use an Orca. I have mine warp stabbed and a cloak.

I've been reading a certain stealth bomber blog lately and the pilot, Chessur, looks down upon wormhole denizens who jetcan mine. In this, I tend to agree, especially after reading his stories of popping the cans of miners after he's killed them. So I'm going to adjust my hauling capacity from now on to make sure I'm not stacking up cans, as I have done in the past. Hence one of the reason I've began using my hauling Orca in the field with us. If you don't have a hauler that can keep your cans empty, it's probably not a good idea to be mining in a wormhole at all.

The risk of losing both your ship and what you've mined are too great.

A note to close out this post. If you haven't heard the latest forum flame going on, it has come to light that there has been talk of taking the ABC ores out of wormholes. Whether this is true or not, I advise you all to weigh in on the discussion at this forum post about it. You can find my opinions on it there.

Wierd Goings On

Well the past couple of days have been eventful, to say the least. I'll start off with our new PI numbers. I managed to get our current items out to Jita, the load consisted of 80 Wetware Mainframes, which was a couple days work and turned out to be worth 74 million isk. I also took out our 31 melted nanos and assorted sleeper loot. We haven't had very many grav site spawns lately, with only an Isolated Core Deposit being in our home right now, and we just can't seem to get to it.

I am pretty happy with the PI isk returns so far. Is it really more profit effective to just do P2s on all our characters instead of turning them into P4s? Does the new depletion system mitigate the ability to just turn out huge numbers of, say, precious metals? Honestly I don't know, and don't want to focus on the numbers. Another item that influenced my decision to go with P4s is the lowering of amounts that the buy orders took in for Precious Metals. Sure, this could have been a hiccup at the time I was doing some of the research, but when we began dumping larger numbers of excess POS fuel on the market, I actually saw an effect just from us, so hopefully doing P4s is going to mitigate those things.

Surely that's not all that's gone on! And you'd be right.

Yesterday I and Soulofchaos opened our static C3 and found a pristine C3 with no inhabidants. There were only 8 combat sites, so we decided to hit all of them. During this excursion, the Eve servers were experiencing huge issues with the DDOS attacks, and were acting quite squirelly. After completing two sites, I saw an Orca on scan and we started looking around for it since we knew there were no POSes in system. We actually found it at the wormhole leading to our home system.....wait what?

We were in scan range of the wormhole, never saw any scan probes, and the hole had only been open for 30 minutes or so. How did this guy get a bookmark for our hole? Things got stranger as we fired up the lasers. As the ship got into hull, I called a halt to our shooting and tried to communicate with the pilot. We didn't have any warp disruptors on any of our ships, so I had been using the Damnation with it's MWD to continuously bump the ship off it's warp out. Apparently I was not vigilant enough and it got away.

I headed back home and swapped out to the Anathema, which I have fitted with warp scrambler, webber and a single laser so it can catch other cov-ops ships, and combat probed the Orca down. We found him sitting at what appeared to be a former WH bookmark he had kept as a safe spot. Who was this guy? So we lit him up again, this time destroying the Orca and popping the pod. As soon as I moved in to peer into the wreck, the wreck and corpse disappeared and the Orca rebuilt itself and floated in space. It proved invulnerable, and unboardable. Again, this was coinciding with the attacks on the servers, and windows started no longer updating and many things went wrong with the game, so I'm sure this was part of that.

We gave up on the Orca and headed to bed.

This afternoon, we headed back in to the C3 to look around, and lo and behold the Orca was back. I quickly tried to find him without combat probes, and then an Anathema appeared. At first I thought it was some sort of server echo of my own ship, but it was named in the same fashion as his Orca, named to look as a planet on a quick observation. Both ships then disappeared and the Orca pilot logged out.

Hmmm.

I and Soul decided to get back to running the combat sites again, and I noted we had four hours remaining on the EoL wormhole home. As we warped around, the Orca appeared on scan AGAIN, and the nthe Anathema. However, no probes ever appeared. After another fruitless search, the ships disappered. I scanned down a C3 connection and the high sec, but he was nowhere to be seen. And then Soul informed me our way home had collapsed. That's odd. So we spent the next hour or so opening our high sec connection and heading home.

Later that evening, we decided to open our static C3 yet again, this time finding an inhabited system, with one large Amarr and a Small Gallente POS. The Amarr tower had ships floating in it but the Gallente tower was offline.

And it was Russian.

We got together a combat fleet and decided to take out the Ruskie POS. Suffice to say it turned out to be a learning experience for all of us involved, as both Freethinker and Jared Knight logged in to help shoot at it. Every now and then the neighbors would log in a single ship, once a Cheetah, the second time a Legion, and look to see what we were up to. Since we weren't attacking them, they left our fleet well enough alone. Two hours later the POS exploded and we helped ourselved to the few guns that were still there.

So we've got a new kill on the board, the Russian Spartans are down a POS they probably had already written off, but I'll rest well knowing there's a nice burned piece of metal with a red star on it floating out there now.

Things I Wish I Had Known About Wormhole Space

We've been living in wormholes for over a year now, starting in Class 1s, at one time running FOUR of them with our small corp, and moving up to our Class 2s.

A few lessons we have learned. Some are self explanatory, but are worth repeating.

- Hit DSCAN as often as you can.

- If you don't know what DSCAN is, jump back out of the wormhole and find out.

- Sleipnirs are ridiculous. Do not fight one.

- Players want to fight on top of your wormhole exits so that THEY can run away, not so you can. Use them to your advantage too.

- 4 minute Wormhole Timers can be your friend, espicially if some people don't know about them. You do know about them, don't you?

- Tracking how much mass your open hi sec static has had passed through it can come in handy if a gang of ships is inside waiting, and you manage to jump inside, and out, closing them inside your home, causing them to call you "Orca Jesus".

- If it looks like it's a trap, it probably is. Admiral Ackbar is completely appropriate.

- Yes, 15 Harbingers could be Prototype Cloaked at that wormhole and waiting for you. For hours. They were for us.

- You can only keep in wormhole space what you can hold onto. Capital ships in Class 1s are completely appropriate for how much you want to keep your home. Might as well use all that high sec ore for something, right?

- Low sec statics are for people that want a bit too much excitement in their lives.

- Null sec statics are for people who want to die. But they make great farming spots because no one ever lives in them. Ever.

- Just train for a Drake and a Tengu. You'll be disappointed when you compare whatever else you train to them.

- Interceptors need a special touch when you encounter them at your POS. Webbing them with your recently uncloaked Pilgrim so that your Anchoring V corpmate can hit them with all of your POSes small weapons works very well.

- People that say "Just stay in your POS noob" are afraid you'll come out of it.

- Apparently tons of people don't hit DSCAN and see your carriers sitting in your POS shield, and set up a Small POS anyway "to see what happens".

- Talking to people is 75% ineffective. Most people coming in your hole want to kill you or your sleepers. You have no choice but to kill them first.

- Or make them think you're coming to kill them with your combat probes.

- Moble Large Warp Disrupter 2s are an AMAZING deterrent to people even thinking about attempting to cross the up to 40km space of inability to warp "just to see what's in the system".

- People who say "We didn't think you wanted your combat sites" are lying. They were just hoping you weren't on.

- Honestly, who lives in a wormhole and never does their combat sites?

- Getting an email from your POS that it killed a Drake is funny. What's funnier is getting an email from the pilot asking you to kill him because he can't get out. Self destruct pod anyone? I guess that's not in the new tutorial?

- Always remember that the grav site is going to spawn sleepers....and they eat Mining Drone 2s for breakfast...oops...

- There are Ladar sites that spawn with FIVE sleeper guns.

- It is possible to drop combat probes and scan you down in the space of time between you hitting DSCAN.

- If you talk smack, you will pay the price for it sooner or later.

- Assume that you're going to need that scanning alt you've got in there for an emergency, sooner or later. You do have one, don't you? Your billions of isk venture can ride on it.

- When you leave your wormhole, always make sure that you leave a scanner, and ships the scanner can actually use.....

- Unless you or an intruder loads your wormhole system everyday by logging in or entering, your POS can run straight out of fuel and never send you an alert. Evemail alerts are not sent until the system is loaded, no matter how much fuel, or lack of fuel, there is! Confirmed bug!

- If you see combat probes, or someone in your comm channel says a very strong curse word, warp away immediately! You can always come back. You can't if the Tengu, Loki, Sleipnir, Broadsword gang lands on you because you were trying to figure out if the probes were yours or not...

- Fighters cannot hit even stationary frigate sized vessels.

- If you are actively running some sort of op in your hole with your statics open, placing a cloaked ship 70km away and "Look at" the wormhole will cause you to hear the wormhole activation very loudly, telling you that visitors have arrived.

- PI Ninjas, while appearing harmless, are letting people into your wormhole, who then steal your sites. Keeping your statics closed is one of the single most useful deterrents to getting ganked.

- Leave your Orca/Rorqual boosting at your POS. The ability to load the large amount of ore does not offset the amount of stupidity you will be cursing yourself for when it gets caught because of the immense align times they have. No matter how safe you think you are!

- K162s appear at the worst times. Be prepared, not complacent.

- Try to not let your fuel get down to less than one week left. You will invariably cut it too close one day, and your hi sec static will be behind 15 jumps of low sec....

- Do not put Cargo Expanders on your Orca, no matter how much cargo you need to pull in and out. Warp Core stabs ftw! If it saves your ship even once, you saved 400 million isk wiht a couple 3k isk modules. I know they've saved mine.

- If anything russian named appears on your scanner, you are probably about to die. They are not there to chat.

- If you leave your salvage vessel unprotected, it deserves to be ganked by a stealth bomber, because he's there, watching you. Waiting.

And the number one rule for wormhole space is:

If you can't afford to replace everything in your hole, you shouldn't continue living in wormholes, because you're doing it wrong.

As Star Defender says, "Fly safe-er!"

Grav Site Spawn Rate?

So I was gone about a week from Eve, only logging in to change training or attempt to help fuel a POS or two. You would think in that time we'd get at least one gravimetric site to spawn.

I logged in and started some heavy mining with 8 accounts, 6 Hulks, 1 Iteron V, and an Orca boosting. Cleaned all the ABCs out of a field and found myself low on time, so I decided to scan out my system and count the remaining sites. My count came out one short. I showed four sites on my list, but only three in system.

So really, there hadn't been a grav site spawn since I pretty much bought the wormhole, over a month ago.

Sure, we haven't attempted to clear the hole out or anything, but I've been knocking a grav site or two off each week we've been living here. We've still got 12 or more ladar sites sitting there. Makes you wonder if there's some sort of site cap for the wormhole constellation you belong to, and if you let a large number of the other sites build up, sites of another kind won't spawn.

It's just a guess, and probably not even close, but no grav sites in over a month seems kind of odd. Guess I'll do some gas harvesting and see what happens there. I do always have a second C2 wormhole to exploit, so it's not a huge problem.

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

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

So how many cycles to fill a can?

......

ONE!

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

Wow.

Dude, Where's My POS Shield!?!

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

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

"Your POS in JXXXXXX is under attack!"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and five hulks and four Covetors.

Ouch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Forgotten Heathen out!



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