On Patience

Zosius over at Cloaky Bastard has a recent post up concerning patience, with his post concerning missing a Drake because he was patiently waiting for a Tengu to come back to a site.  Regular readers of my blog would know that I can be pretty patient in my stalking and I believe that it's critical to finding content and making kills.  However, sometimes I am given to rash play when an opportunity presents itself.  Sometimes they pay off and sometimes it get's your arse kicked.

I have found a new C3 that I plan to stalk out for a while.  I quickly find the lone active tower in the system, set my bookmarks up and have a poke around.  As a general rule of thumb whenever I see dead towers I always flick to my colliders overview tab to see if there is anything of value I can have a go at and upon doing so in the general direction of a dead tower I see something that catches my eye.  I find the dead tower and confirm that I might get a pay day here.

I resist the urge to just decloak and start shooting, it's not like the corp hangar and SMA are going anywhere.  First of all I'll watch list all of the members of the corp that owns the active tower.  I'll then watch list all of the corp members of the dead tower, because you never know, they may be coming back to fuel it shortly, someone might logon, etc.  This takes around 10 minutes to complete with around 35 contacts to add so while I'm doing that I make a perch to allow me to align out and warp away if someone does try to interrupt me.

I do have further concerns in that I know that there are at least 2 wormholes in system, being the K162 I came through and the losec static this wormhole has.  I don't know if there are any more because I haven't scanned out the system yet.  I toss up whether to sit on this until the the system just has it's static as I've got some play time tomorrow that I can use to crack those structures open with a slightly greater degree of safety.  It will only take 3 or 4 minutes to crack each structure and I will be aligned, so it should be relatively safe.  Stuff it, I'll just do the smash and grab and won't bother scanning everything out.  What could go wrong?

I think ahead and launch my mobile depot at an outer planet ready to go as an adhoc cargo container and plan to ferry as much loot as I can to the depot in runs back and forth.  That done, I warp back to the tower and slow boat towards the corporate hangar, planning to use the structure to decloak me, lock on and start shooting while I align back to my tactical.  I'm just about ready to go when dscan stops me in my tracks.

There is a Buzzard on scan, so I quickly reverse my direction of travel to prevent an unwanted decloaking.  The Buzzard disappears as expected, but then I see a Vexor Navy Issue on dscan which subsequently drops out of warp 50km from the tower.

It looks like this Vexor has jumped into the wormhole with a cloaky scout and warped straight to the site.  It is likely that this tower has been watched the whole time I've been here or at the very least it was pre scouted.  If I had just started shooting straight up when I found the corp hangar and SMA that Vexor would have interrupted me for sure and this would have happened:

The Vexor wastes no time in getting drones our and starts bashing the Corporate Hangar and SMA.  He's here for exactly the same reason I am.

I have no chance at taking on this Vexor in my Manticore, especially considering it has a flight of Valkyrie medium scout drones, so I consider my options.  A bomb launcher would be nice, especially if launched just after the loot pinata is cracked open as it would kill the drones and destroy the wreck - it probably wouldn't do much to the cruiser itself however.  Problem with that is that I don't have a bomb launcher with me.   I could launch probes just as the structures are cracked open and get him to warp off, ninja in and steal as much loot as I can, but core probes probably won't cut it - he may just ignore them.  Combat probes on the other hand are a sure fire GTFO.  

I quickly warp out to my mobile depot to refit to an expanded probe launcher, launch combat probes at the outer planet and warp back in.  However I'm too late - the containers have been cracked - kills are here and here - and the loot is gone, with the Vexor sitting by the tower all on it's lonesome.  I briefly see an Iteron V on dscan before the Vexor warps off, leaving me to ponder the virtue of patience and rue an opportunity missed.