Phoebe and Me, Pop Goes Another Wormhole, Wartargets

The Phoebe patch released yesterday, and I was really interested to see these "null sec data/relic sites" they said would now appear in C1-3 wormholes. I don't usually mess with our data/relic sites, other than to kill all the NPCs. Years of crap loot for lots of wasted time have made me pretty jaded towards them. So what I found was pleasantly surprising.

I scanned for the day and found I had two of the new sites! I checked Eve Survival and found the NPCs looked quite hard, so I added a plate to my Zealot, and logged in Firt as Wing Commander for the small boost his skills gave my tank.I warped on over to the site and found......

Nothing. Just a floating bunch of boxes. Well that was a buzz kill. I found out through some more Googling that they had removed the NPCs a long time ago. Well, rats. I was looking forward to killing stuff. Honestly, though, it wouldn't have really gone with the lore of wormhole space....these sites being thrown in to appease the wormhole masses do feel a bit odd.

What I didn't realize is how hard these boxes are to crack. I failed quite a few of my first data ones, watching them explode in frustration. Okay, this isn't going to work, I don't know too much about this mini-game. So I read up on it, found that there are rigs for both relic and data to boost your virus, and fitted out two Anathemas, one for each.

Next site was 100% easier. I highly recommend you fit these rigs. My first site netted me about 15 mil in loot, from me exploding most of the containers and the fact that it was a Data site, which means mostly research crap. Not to put research down, but it's mostly worthless. Next site was a Relic site, and it netted me 37 mil in salvage! Now we're talking!

So, in the end, I'm "pleased" with the new sites in wormhole space. I just wish they fit in with the canon of the place instead of just some sites that spawn other places. But, in the end, I'll be happy with more content, but I hope they can mold it to better suit the eerieness that wormhole space deserves.

So after this I ran two of the actual wormhole Relic/Data sites, and actually got some melted nanoribbons, finally! I believe I ended up with 12, so I was pretty happy with that compared to the previous drought we had been having. Then I turned my attention to mining.

Which means I needed to close wormhole connections.

I got busy closing the few we had, and the last was a K162 to high sec with 2 bil mass. I decided to forego the afterburner, and just jumped the Orca back and forth a few times. Hole was at half mass when one more Orca pass popped it, with the Orca outside.

Well, at least it was high sec. I opened up the B274 and I was only 12 jumps away.

Straight through the Forge. Argh.

As many of you know, I was wardecced by an alliance that apparently just sits around on gates near Jita waiting for people who are unaware they are at war, or just have no clue about the mechanics. Last I saw, there were quite a few of them near Jita, and my only "safe" route was straight through those core worlds.

Alright, I figured I'd approach carefully, they should just be on the main gates into Jita. I was wrong. About three jumps out, I found a wartarget in local, but not on the gate I came in, so I quickly docked up.

My corpmate Gnicklas is back, so I had him use his special powers to find information. This gent had taken part in a kill only two hours ago, on a freighter, with five other wartargets. All of them in Proteuses and Phoboses.

Frack.

I decided I had better scout some and left the wormhole with Forgotten and headed over to Jita in my pod to put together a cheap PvP ship. If it was just this guy, he might be in something I could get the jump on, but probably not, who was I kidding? I was looking to give them a fight, I need some PvP experience anyhow.

So off I went and fitted out a Maller with a 30k buffer tank that I was pretty happy with and flew over towards where Firt was docked.

I got to one jump out and found the rest of the wartargets.

One Phobos and a Proteus were sitting on the gate immediately after Firt's location, and immediately attacked me. I actually managed to get the Phobos into 1/8th armor with my little Maller, and it lasted a couple minutes, my buffer actually held out pretty well. But it was only a matter of time, and I exploded and warped on over to dock, only to be told I could not dock due to an aggression timer.

Now this is what I'm talking about, needing PvP experience. I've never fought anywhere with docking, or stations, or any of this other nonsense. I have to say I panicked a little, waiting for my executioners to land and end my pod. Thankfully, I had the presence of mind to warp off quickly, and return once my timer expired.

So this whole getting Firt home plan wasn't going to work right now. I checked the Star Map and found I could go around, but would have to traverse a single low sec system. Not a problem, I can scout. Bought a shuttle and headed towards that, with my Orca in tow as I scouted. A single wartarget chased us up the pipe, but lost us when we turned.

I jumped into the low sec system to find a Drake sitting on the gate my Orca would need to use. That wasn't going to work. Oh, there's a cyno in system, I bet it's in use and they're guarding it. So I docked up and waited an hour, and sure enough, everyone had left. I got the Orca moving, headed to the next gate, and met a jump freighter coming in my from cyno. Bet he's glad I'm not a problem.

So I got around Jita, circled it, and made it home. Closed the B274 and got mining!

We've decided to switch to Procurers to mine instead of Hulks after looking at the yeild, cycle duration when boosted vs price of the ship, and I've never been real happy with using Hulks, other than their yield. Now, with the major changes to mining ships, having a 54k EHP tank on the Procurer matters more than the extra yield.

Here's my Procurer fit:

{Heavy Shield Procurer}

High Slot: One Strip Miner 1

Med Slots: Em Ward Field 2, 2 Adaptive Invul 2s, Med Shield Extender 2

Low Slots:2 Mining Laser Upgrades 2

Rigs: Core Defense Field Extender 1, Anti-EM Screen, Anti-Thermal Screen

Unboosted with modules running, it's 49,470k EHP. 54k when boosted by the Mining Foreman. I'm actually looking forward to getting jumped by some stealth bombers.

I got to work mining with three Procurers, swapping out to the Miasmos when I hit four full cans. We had started this site the previous couple of nights, but didn't get very far before we were interrupted, so I mined the rest of the ABC, and took down the Spodumain and Dark Ochre before calling it quits for the night.

Glad I decided to mine, because logging on today, the site is gone. So are all my gas sites, so I'm assuming someone warped to all of them. Means I need to get to the remaining ore site, pronto.

Forgotten Heathen out o/

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.

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

Profit, but no exit.

Well, I've had alot of peace and quiet lately since I read about a theory concerning your wormhole exits. That theory is that if you don't warp to them, they won't actually open to the outside. Of course, this doesn't take two things into account. One, that people can open entrances on their own by scanning. And two, you can't know which WH is your static, and which is a wormhole with tech 2 cruisers spilling out of it.

But, I've bookmarked a single wormhole for the past five days, and it's stayed right where it started, and it's the only one, so I know it's my static low sec WH.

I went ahead and warped to it yesterday, hoping to have a few jumps to some trade hub, since I'm sitting on a growing pile of 600 mil worth of minerals. No dice, over 30 jumps to any trade hub. So I ran Retrievers through it til it went critical. No one has come through since.

One thing to note that is in favor of the "warp to" theory, when I did warp to the hole, it was still "will not last another day", which is what this static starts at. So it seems that WHs only start their life cycles when someone warps onto the grid with them. Five days of watching it on a scanner almost prove this. I'll be keeping track of the next one I leave alone.

So more mining. I was always so engrossed with the more profitable ABC ores(Arkonor, Bistot, Crokite) that I didn't notice that the high sec ores are severely under-represented. To the point that building battleships, as is our goal, is almost impossible. Veldspar roids are only in the 200k, at most, and far apart. I've got 350k zydrine, but only 5 mil in trit. Enough for one BS, and some of that was trucked in.

So I'm wasting time mining out the high sec ores, really. I've decided my time is better spent getting the more expensive ores, and buying and hauling the other materials I need, although having only a static low sec restricts my hauling to our blockade runners, or scouting. Which, as my previous Impel loss points out, is not fool proof.

Oh well, good with bad in wormholes.

Forgotten Heathen Out.