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!

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!

/eyeroll

*This is not to be interpreted as a general bitch against Eve, the time it takes to fully play the game, or the people in it! It is more indicative of the plethora of situations and people you can have and meet in Eve!*

Aaaahhh, so finally I can get down to the business of exploiting our wormhole like we should be doing.....maybe I'll just take a break and do something non Eve related for a couple days.....what is this? A text message from Soulofchaos. There's someone in our wormhole doing our sites. Well that's no bueno.

And so began a cat and mouse game that we had lost before it had started because I had put off getting onto Eve that day. You don't take a break from Eve, Eve takes a break from you!

So we saw a drake on scan, wrecks also. But no combat sites were coming up. The visitor was at one of our radar or mag sites. I threw out some combat probes and placed them on one of the two sites close to where the wrecks were, and presto! 100% hit, and off I warped the fleet!

And the fleet landed at the radar, with the drake already warping away. Curses, he must have saw the probes. I should have bubbled instead of tried to grab the target lock with the focus on the Devoter. Oh well, you learn from every experience.

Except for our visitor who decided to mouth off in local. Who was in a one man corp with no alliance. I guess that's probably why, so he can be an eve troll. But, as stated, he got away, and took our sleeper loot with him.

If I had scanned for the day, I could have knew which sig was the K162 he came from and could have bubbled it and got him. But, oh well, you can't play Eve all the time.

So, next day, we decided to take care of the few remaining radars that had been hanging around that "we were going to get to", and decided to try out the "if you clear it of sleepers and leave it through downtime, they will respawn". Well, 16 hours later, no respawn, just the site and cans are still there. Can I call the theory busted yet? No, will wait til 24 hours an dthen it'll be busted. Will let you know. Finished off the combats and called it a night.

Next day, SSDD. Took out the few combats we had with Freethinker, then Jared Knight got on and we decided it was time to do some mining. So we opened our Common Perimeter Deposit and found a 50k Crokite asteroid! Added to the 20k Crokite it normally spawned, we siphoned all the ABCs off this evening and earning an easy 350 mil. Can't wait to get that refined and out to sell. In the meantime, all of our precious metals have sold on sell orders in Jita for a good amount, which I should really keep better track of in the future.

ORCAS......ON FIRE.

I woke up and checked my DOTLAN to find jumps yesterday. I headed out in my scanning Anathema and found it, a deadly unknown wormhole.

Hmmm. That's not good. I had 17 jumps. Probably using my hole as a transit point. My high sec was probably also open. Checking the other side found only a Buzzard and an industrial somewhere nearby. Well, time to log in the Orcas and get this sucker closed!

Got my two Orca pilots fleeted and jumped into my Pilgrim in case of trouble and headed back to the deadly connection. I cloaked and settled up 11k meters off the wormhole, near my optimal for disruptors and my neuts. I jumped both Orcas through.

Uh oh, it went to half. Hmmm.

Upon arriving on the other side, I saw a ship cloak quickly, too quick for me to see the ship type.

Double uh oh. I better log on some help. I boarded the Devoter and sent the Chimera and Thanatos to their out of shield bookmarks and assigned fighters to the Devoter. I also logged on my Oneiros pilot and prepared to warp her in 60k off my Pilgrim, also assigned with fighter support.

The Orcas both dropped cloak and three ships immediately dropped cloak along with them. I recloaked one Orca, as they both are fit with prototype cloaks, but the other was too close to the wormhole.

Facing me were two Nemesis' and a Hyperion battleship. Time to bring the Orcas home and hope they don't have multiple points on those ships, as both Orcas are double warp stabbed for just this such event.

I initiated warp on the Oneiros and had the Devoter sitting on the wormhole. I recently refit the Devoter for a maximum tank fit with dual reppers and an active armor tank. She also had no guns. So my firepower was going to consist of 15 fighters or the drones on the Pilgrim, and the modules on the Pilgrim. I was fit with multiple neuts and range disruptors, so the Hyperion wouldn't be too much of an issue for the Pilgrim, at least. It was the Devoter and the Orcas I had to worry about.

As the Orcas jumped through, I dropped cloak on my Pilgrim and aligned both carriers towards the fight just in case it went extremely badly. Right behind them came all three pulses of the enemy ships. No more. At least for now I knew what I was facing.

The enemies sat in cloak while I aligned both Orcas and obviously sized up the situation. Did I mention they were Russian? The wormhole had five russian POSes in it.

As one they dropped cloak and opened fire. The Hyperion started shooting at the Devoter, and he was fit with blasters. I immediately had all her tank turned on and orbited at 2k, going about 400m\s. I went ahead and hit the bubble, as I was prepared for a longer duration fight. Both Orcas are fitted with active shield tanks and can take a generous amount of damage, so I had both of those going.

Both stealth bombers launched bombs at the same Orca, and timed them quite well. They blew through all of the Orca's shields, so they must have been shooting torpedoes as well. I quickly turned on all the large armor reppers on the Oneiros and kept the Orca easily at full armor.

At the same time, I set all 10 fighters onto the Hyperion, decided to range and tracking speed disrupt, in case he switched targets, which at about that time, he did, to the Orca that had taken the most damage. I sent my five Acolyte 2s at one of the Nemesis', and it dropped into half armor and fled through the wormhole. The other flew back towards the wormhole, as it had flown out of range trying to keep on the Orcas.

All this time the Firbolgs and Dragonflys ate at the Hyperion's armor while my multiple neuts must have brought his cap lower and lower, until finally, realizing he wasn't going to crack the Orca, with his armor falling rapidly past 50%, the Hyperion and his Nemesis buddy, who was himself into hull, both faded back into the wormhole from whence they came.

Leaving me, two Orcas, and a swarm of buzzing fighters looking for targets.

Hmm, this wormhole had already lost a bunch of mass. I brought two more Orcas back and it didn't go crit. The chances are that they were heading for reinforcements. Doing the mental math on the wormhole, I decided it must have gone to half with the second Orca jump, meaning I should have enough mass left to put an Orca through and back one last time. If not, I and it's pilot were in trouble. This Orca had an Anathema in it, so if he did get stuck, the pilot could get away.

Probably.

So I took down the bubble, sent the wounded Orca home and jumped the other one back into the fire.

Upon re-coalescing onto the enemy side, I at first found no one waiting. The wormhole had gone to critial mass, and one jump home remained for me. As I waited out the timer, I realized that the Hyperion could go back if it were here, stranding me on purpose, because it most likely already had my high sec bookmark!!!!

I kept clicking jump, and it counted down from 14 seconds. At about 7 seconds, an enemy fleet arrived and the Hyperion uncloaked about 5k away from my Orca. One of the Nemesis had returned, along with a Tengu, a Hound, a Broadsword, a Typhoon, and a Thanatos of their own!

Come on come come on come on come on ohshitohshitohshit!!!!!

3.....2......1.....JUMP!

With a huge sigh of relief, the wormhole spasmadically closed behind me, shutting in the face of the russian fleet that was ready to rip apart my insolent industrial command ship.

Orca Jesus strikes again!

I headed quickly over to the B274 and found that it looked untouched. Hmm. I'll close it just in case someone is outside and they decide to launch a vengeance fleet. :)

So that hole closed, and I decided it was time to take some stuff to Jita to sell. Hopping back into the scanner, I headed outside and found I was only six jumps from Jita!

I loaded up the Orcas with our PI, most of it Precious Metals, Cryoprotectant and Biotech Reports, along with some Melted nanos. The haul was about 446 mil. Of cours,e I had to immediately spent 100 mil on POS fuel, and added to the 200 mil I spent on POS fuel for the C3 POS, we were only net 100 mil.

But, it looks like our bill for fuel will be going down significanly. Jared Knight has an alt he is spending alot of time on ice mining with, and has contracted over 173k helium to the corp, which will save us over 100 mil in POS costs. Thanks Knight!

Oh, and the Revelation is finished.

Hehe. I took it out on it's maiden flight, visiting Freethinker while he was doing a combat site. This thing is HUGE. And it's easily one of the best looking Amarr ships. Now I just need to buy some giga lasers for it.......WHAT! 50 mil PER laser!?

*BPCs purchased*

Updated PI Chain

Well I finally decided during the last week before the craziness, that I was going to actually check the numbers on Wetware Mainframes because they just didn't "feel" right.

And I was right. After doing the numbers, I concluded we were losing money by turning all of it into P4 Wetware Mainframes. And then I found EVE Tools which did all the work for me and told me I was right. Seems like everything EXCEPT the Wetwares in the chain was profitable, just not them. Go figure.

So I cut the head off the top of the chain, and am busy making Cryoprotectant, Biotech Reports, and Supercomputers, since we were completely tooled up to do these things anyway.

So I should see a serious marked improvement on PI profits next time we hit Jita. And it looks like they will, again, make up most of our profits, as nanoribbons have been few and far between of late. Looks like we've got a dry spell.

Revelation Commenced!

In all the madness of late, both in and out of Eve, I started the production on our new Revelation Dreadnought. A quick update, there's 3 days 2 hours left until that puppy is ou!

Report:Your Starbase in J144725 is under attack!

I don't even know where to begin with the events that unfolded today. I started my day mostly as normal, but the few things I did out of the ordinary made things either highly more annoying for me to get defense to my wormhole, or actually severely hurt the attacking force. I only still hold our class 3 through exceptional luck and coincidences. I salute the attackers, Sephray Industries, for a very well planned assault that should have succeeded.

I really only have our new alliance, Talocan United, and their allies in Transmission Lost, to thank for saving our wormhole. Without their quick reaction to the invasion, they would certainly have returned their home to their ownership. But I digress, for it is an interesting tale, and I hope I do not miss the details.

I have always thought there was something odd about the C3 wormhole that I bought it a kind of backroom deal last month. I expected to find drugs and dead bodies inside. But instead I found null sec K162s, busy high sec connections, and dangerous unknown corridors that led to places I dared not tread. But from all these came the greatest threat: knowledge that we lived inside.

Over the past month or so, I noted that we just seemed to have alot more traffic than was normal, that mayhaps someone was inside, opening holes and letting people in. I wasn't certain, but I was right all along.

I woke up late this morning, not knowing the attacking force was already at work, and in fact counting on my hours of normal play. I logged in, messed around with PI a bit, and did not bother checking the evemails that were, in retrospect, obviously sitting in my Notifications box, trying to tell me I needed to pay attention.

I logged off.

A few hours later, I decided to log in and do some scanning for the day, which I normally do when I get up, but had neglected to get it done til late. Wait, what's this in my inbox.....under attack? For HOW MANY HOURS!?

I quickly shifted accounts, finding a group of ten battleships and stealth bombers at work on my POS guns. Panic began to set in, but I calmed myself, I had the high sec already scanned from yesterday, didn't I? Yep. A short warp later, and no wormhole. Rats. Well better start my scanning then. Over the course of my scanning, I ended up with four wormholes. I contemplated what to do.

Taking stock of the situation, I realized I had two PI alts and a scanning alt in the system. The scanning alt could not fly a cov ops, nor was there one in system. I had Onyxs on scan near what had to be the static to high sec. I decided I couldn't lose the scanner, so fitted out a magnate with the single afterburner I had, and prepared to try to bust the gatecamp.

By this time, I had already mentioned in alliance that our POS was under attack, and the response was amazing. We had been members of Talocan United for less than a day, I hadn't even gotten a bill for dues yet, and they mobilized a large fleet and waited for me to find where the high sec exit was. I was quite embarassed that I had allowed such a large invasion to go un-noticed, even in my secondary wormhole, and on top of that I did not have the tools to try to extricate ourselves of the situation.

By that time, I was warping the poor Magnate to it's fate, and hoping at least the pod would make it into range through the bubble.

I landed 18 km out from the wormhole and aligned and pushed the afterburner button as soon as the interference from warp dropped. I rocketed up to 800 m/s and managed to catch the hole campers off guard. At near 10k, they began to lock me, and near 7k the rounds began to fall, but barely was my speeding ship's shields were scratched when I was through!

I called out the system to the alliance and the fleet was moving. As I sat outside in high sec, metaphorically huffing and puffing, a number of ships jumped out. Orcas. Yep, they were trying to close the hole.

Bah, it'll take alot more than....uh oh, more Orcas. Maybe they can.

At that point, alliance and ally ships started showing up, and we all started bumping the huge industrial command ships away from the wormhole. Annoyed and obviously not getting in, they warped off. More alliance members showed up and took the fight inside, driving out the few enemies who were camping inside, ceding control of the WH to us.

And by "us", I mean loosely "us". All I had by then was Sgt Ramerik in a Magnate. :) But it was a FIERCE Magnate!

Back in the C2, I was blissfully unaware how I'd "forgotten" I had the B274 open the previous day, so it was long gone, and I had to scan to even get out of my home. And did I mention I was in a HURRY?

Finally I was on my way with a few choice ships, a Legion, Devoter and the Anathema. 22 jumps later, we arrived and headed in to help in any way we could.

The alliance had it pretty wrapped up by then, and were sieging their POS and holding negotiations. In the end, they came to an agreement that let them leave the wormhole, with the option to join the alliance.

Turns out this corp had lived in this Class 3 before, and had been run out by a massive Russian invasion. And then the bastard russians sold the wormhole to me. Oooh, dirty, I got some on me. Ick.

So after chatting with one of them, Greygal, at some length, a convoluted web of intrigue and stalking emerged. Apparently they had been watching me for 11 days prior to their assault. They had found the best spots to sit for my guns, they had scouted out my corp's characters and playtimes. They had followed me around high sec trying to get a spy in our C2.

And they should have won. I had no assets in system, no backups in place, none of the things I normally have set up to at least mitigate anything that happens. I was lax, and a trifle lazy. They used excellent intel opportunities, planned the operation down to the fine details. They were undone only by chance, and my lack of posting of late. Just a few factors changed, and they would have carried the day.

I was quite impressed by their tenacity, and hopefully we will cross paths and not lasers in the future.

The insaneness of the day carries on, and it's far too late now. I know details have been lost, and to be frank, forgotten.