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.

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.

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.

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.

Mines of Madness

Well we finally got back into the mining swing of things the past couple of days. We had a Common Perimeter Deposit and we cracked it open. Lo and behold, it spawned with an extra 50k Crokite roid!

We knocked that and all the ABCs, along with mining a bit of some of the higher ores before calling it quits, happy that we got as much as we did out of the site.

Next day, I checked the site. Not only had most of the site respawned, but a 75k spodumain roid had spawned along with it! Again we hopped into our hulks and chewed through most of the site again, and called it a day feeling pretty darn good.

The next day, I warped to the site again....and found both spod roids had respawned along with alot of the high sec ores....so we hopped back into our hulks and chewed away at it til we couldn't chew no more. Suffice to say we had our mining fix for awhile.

Today this site despawned, to my dismay. I was hoping to see a continuation of events, but alas, it was not to be. Now we're left with a mining dryspell again.

Has anyone else seen this behavior before? I thought we were incredibly lucky to get the 50k crokite roid to start, but then the site partially respawning AND the 75k spod spawn. I've never had a site "partially" respawn. By that I mean it didn't respawn the arkonor, bistot or crokite. Everything else.

Maybe a new mechanic to make wormholes more profitable for the industrialist again? We'll have to see if this continues on a regular course. I'll be keeping track, that's for sure!

New Gravimetric Mechanics?

I know I posted about this last week, along with the GM response, about the giant spod roid we encountered that subsequently disappeared. Well, we warped into a grav site this week and were happily mining our way down the list when we ran into a 35k bistot!

We are 100% sure we opened this site and it had not gone through a downtime. We've seen this a few times now, and this is the third I've documented. The GM claimed that the site mechanics haven't changed, but I've been doing grav sites for a long time now, and this is the only consistant time I've seen these roids occur with the site spawn.

Anyone else out there running into these yet? The bistot was not any bigger in actual size than the rest, so the only way we knew it was alot bigger was with a survey scanner.

Class Three Incursions

No, not those Incursions.

We took down our second to last grav site, leaving a couple roids to try to spawn some ore at downtime, but no luck. Strangely the site lived to the full five days it looks like, which it shouldn't have, since when we warped to it, it had a 75k spod roid in it. To me, that roid meant the site had been warped to grid at least one downtime, so I assumed someone had warped to it and it had been open for a day, at the very least. Guess I was strangely wrong and it spawned with it.

Anyhow, that left us with a single mag site and two ladars. Which finally pushed us into looking at our C3 static. The last time I and Nick tried to do a C3, his Legion blew up. O.O

So with a certain amount of trepidation, I headed in and scouted around, finding a single large tower that belongs to a german corp. A helios appeared on scan, but I never saw him at their POS, he dropped a single combat probe, to which I responded with five. He then pulled his probe in and we never saw him again.

After checking with Wormhole Thingie, I decided to try out C3 sites without sentry guns to start with, so we headed to a Fortification Frontier Stronghold. First couple of waves were fine, but the third with the webber plus the nossing advanced sleeper BS almost made me have to warp out. Gave me quite a scare. This was repeated on the second site with Nyslia.

We only made it to three sites before we all had to call it a night. I felt a slight twinge at doing "other people's" sites, but like I've said before, you can only keep what you can defend, and we've been on the receiving end of this many times. I guess I don't really relish doing it because someone else lives here. I'm not going to be the ones saying "Stay in your POS noobs!".

But you have to do what's best for your corp and not theirs.

So fast forward to tonight. we ended up with a D382 that someone opened earlier today, no idea who, because it's EoL now. Unoccupied C2 with low sec static. Also no combat sites. Eight grav sites!!! Oh so tempting. But after running the math on a 20k arkonor roid being 320km3, I decided it just wasn't worth the effort. And living in a static low sec WH isn't going to happen again. So we're letting it go.

And we opened our C3 static again on accident, but what a wonderful accident it is.

We're currently inside it, an unoccupied C3 with static low sec, and tons of combat sites!

I decided to drop the two Heat Sinks Iis and go with a much more conservative tank. I noticed I had a 60% thermic resist, so threw on Centii A Type plating and closed the thermic hole, and replaced the other with another EANM II. Add in a fleet boosting Damnation and I've got 78/80/83/91.

The difference is night and day. I haven't even needed my second repper now. Course it's probably mostly the boosting ship with all three Armored Warfare links, but still no problems makes me happy. I think we're down five sites now.

Anyone want to buy a C3 with low sec static? Cheap!

Busy. Busy, Busy

We had another round of intergalactic wormhole highway yesterday AND the day before. When it rains scanning probes it pours them in here. Again, I suspect there's some sort of mechanic at work that is making this wormhole so much busier than our nice quiet Zombieland. I kept watching the DOTLAN tick up and up on the jumps while I was at work yesterday, frustrated at my inability to do nothing but watch. Thomas, who I was texting with about it said that he missed our nice quiet C2. *sigh*

Two days ago I managed to arrive home in time to find a PALADIN, of all things, poised to start stripping our system of combat sites. I spoke in local saying hi, and I got a convo from him immediately say "You shouldn't talk in local!" I replied that it was my wormhole, I think I might hold the right to speak in local, and that the carriers had both fighters and pilots. We then had about a half hour conversation about how I was too "passive" and should try to gank everyone. Hehe. I was called "too nice of a guy". I'm starting to hear that from alot of wormholers. I guess they're all used to people who want large numbers on their killboards, which I communicated to this gentleman that I wasn't interested in. I mean seriously, who likes spending 45 minutes combat probing someone jumping around the system just to have them jump out a K162 you didn't manage to find first? I sure don't.

In the wormhole, our two main conduits of isk are grav sites(minerals) and combat sites(melted nanos). I will, of course, fight to protect our sources of income. I told him it would have been a different story had I seen wrecks on scan or NPC kills on DOTLAN. Then I would have had blood in my eye.

So after a round of scanning, and Soulofchaos and Freethinker got on, all hell broke loose. Scanning ships briefly appeared on scan, probes were flying everywhere, it was insane! "Who's Iteron is that? Where'd it go? It freaking cloaked. I count 15 probes on scan. Who's Proteus is that? We don't OWN a Proteus!!"

The Paladin ended up being part of a wormhole corp that had just gotten set back up in a C6 that was connected to us, and they had been using us as a conduit for all their stuff. So in the end we had TWO K162s and both statics were open, and people were pouring in them like crazy. I'm incredibly lucky my corpmates got on, or it could have gotten bad.

Soul's Tengu, my Legion, and Freethinker in a Dominix held things down at a K162 while I poked Orcas through it and critted the first one, then closed the second one. Then I turned my attention to our open statics. I got them both closed with Orca Jesus power and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

Then they got to work on a grav site and I logged off to chill out.

And then day two of International "Screw With Forgotten" week kicked off.

By the time I made it home yesterday, we had 18 jumps in the last hour, with like 30 for the day. Argh.

Again, my corpmates came through for me and we camped the K162 we had, I burned it away, a Cheetah and a Helios appeared, and they decided to head out our C3 static while I was jumping Orcas through it, and managed to trap them on the C3 side. They may have lived there, I don't know. I didn't care. The ordeal was over.

We welcomed Freethinker's brother, Jared Knight, to the corporation yesterday. He had came into the wormhole the day prior, but had been in another corp, and had to wait 24 hours to drop roles. I thought I had set the POS correctly so it wouldn't shoot him, and he warped in. I had given him an incorrect forcefield password on accident, and as he sat in space outside the field, the POS started targetting him. In a few seconds, his hulk was scrammed, damped and noised to death.

I had shut all the guns off just in case I didn't know what I was doing. Imagine that.

Thankfully he lived through it, and I can turn all the guns back on again. Welcome to the corp guys!

Corp Mining Op & Russians!

I'm sure I've mentioned that I LOVE a good mining operation. This Friday, a few of us managed to get together and mine out most of an Unexceptional Frontier Deposit. We managed to pull in all the ABC ore, and our new corp member, Freethinker, managed to kill off a Dark Ochre roid all by himself the past couple of days! Overall it was a half a bil endeavor, thanks to our Rorqual making it so we no longer lose 25% of our minerals!

We've managed to keep all our statics closed, and our DOTLAN clear over the weekend, and no unexplained probes on scan, so I think we're back to being good again! No more Lokis lurking for us to do PI any more.

I think they've reset scanning back to pre-patch. I was having a hell of a time getting anything probed down. Now everything is back to giving me a Type after getting down to 2 or 1.0 AU. Wonderful. I can actually stand scanning the system down now.

I set up the last of the guns we had lying around from the five or six POSes we've had up over the last year, and we have a total of like 40 guns up now. Course there's only 10 online, along with all the ECM, but we look really scary! Going to buy a few more larges next time we are in Jita.

Had a Russian visitor named Tyranid Dady in the wormhole a few days back, running our radar sites. As soon as I logged people in, he warped off immediately. He then convoed me, and we had a neat conversation through Google Translator after I figured out which dialect he was using. He of course gave me the standard "I thought no one was running them, there were so many!" speech.

I asked him what his name was respresentative of, of which I was pretty sure already, and he said "I play Warhammer Tabletop". My main Warhammer 40k army is Tyranids. Seriously lol. So I wasn't going to really try to hard to get this guy if he really was leaving our hole.

But he gave me advice about leaving the carriers floating in the POS shield, and told me not to do it. He explained that it would lure certain corps or alliances in solely to siege the POS and get killmails on the carriers.

My first response was "Well if they want them that bad, then they're going to do it anyway.", but he had a point. But it runs counter to why they are here in the first place: to make most sane and rational people think twice about running sites in our system. And I think it does work. We've had alot of 1 or two jumps on Dotlan, and no sites run. I know if I peek into a wormhole and see type "Carrier" on Scan, I'm done looking at that hole. I can't fathom running sites alone and having people log in their carrier people. I guess I just don't have the guts or the confidence to do that yet. Of course it would be a russian that would. I swear they have a special PvP course for russians when they log in.

I've never met a russian industrialst, have you? o.0

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.