Break Even & Profit!

So as of yesterday's Jita run we are in the black! Corp wallet breached 4 bil, albiet briefly before I bought a month's POS fuel, but we're free and clear of what we put into this venture.

Did I mention this is an operation run by two guys? :)

I decided to consolidate PI a little bit by getting rid of Silicate Glass, Nanites and Biocells, and converting those planets over to the production of Mech Parts and Consumer Electronics, which will keep our Robotics production going full swing. I just trained up yet another PI alt, so we'll have a total of 11 characters running PI.

Before our Jita run yesterday, our B274 had opened up 38 jumps from Jita on a high sec pocket. I was able to roll the hole with the Orca and our new high sec was......ONE JUMP FROM JITA! I got everything loaded into the Orca and transported and sold as quick as I could, and quickly closed the hole again before it was noticed.

We also had two combat sites and two ore sites spawn, so I was in a hurry to get our statics secured so we could finally do a real mining op in relative peace. I got my mining ships ready to go.....when a new sig popped up.

CURSES!

So over I headed and found a K162 frigate only from a C3 with a null sec static. Sleeper wrecks were on scan, but no ships, or active POSes, cause let's face it, no one lives in null sec static wormholes. I hung out for a bit, but no one ever came to claim the wrecks on scan, so I'll never know what went down. So I came back through and put a bubble on it. Back to mining!

We hit a Common Perimeter Deposit, and it was the first time Thulium had seen asteroids of this size. I was calculating the value of each roid as we bit into it and he was really surprised. We happily chewed away with two Hulks and a Covetor while Jelloshot hauled in the Miasmos.

Until yet another sig showed up. Off we warped.

Finding the K162, it turned out to be a low sec entrance with only a 750k mass allowance. Piece of cake. Only two guys in local, one of which was probably the scanner. So I passed the Orca through twice with it's AB on, and the hole went crit. As the Orca passed back through, a HAC showed up on the outside. I was present in my Purifier stealth bomber, certainly no match for it. The Cerebrus sat around, so I warped in my Devoter fit for wormhole closing. Heading out I turned on both interdictor spheres, rendering the ship down to the mass of a small frigate. As Nyslia appeared outside, an interceptor joined the Cerebrus. But it appeared they couldn't decide what to do. I waited out the 4 minute polarization timer, jumped my bomber back inside,  I turned on the battleship afterburner and jumped the Devoter..

But the critical wormhole did not close.

Crud. I'm pretty sure my math skills were adequate. Oh well, we'll see if they come in. I cloaked all my ships and waited, watching the wavering event horizon in critical mode flicker. After the Devoter's timer went off, both spheres on and jumped back, right into the waiting arms of both ships, still sitting there.

I'm not sure what these guys were really planning on doing, but I decided to jump back quick, so turned on my AB and.....30 second timer? Somehow in all my jumping, my timer calcs were off, and now my Devoter was uncloaked and under fire from a Cerebrus and an interceptor. I turned on all my armor fittings and my EHP rocketed over 100k. 25 seconds to go.

The ceptor webbed me, but the DPS they had just wasn't going to break the tank, and they barely scratched the paint. Back inside and the hole closed, so we got on with our mining.

Couple hours later and we had all the ore worth mining, and it tallied up to 250 mil in ore. I onlined a compression array, and can't wait to haul it out next Jita run!

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.

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!

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!