Venturing into Mobile Warp Disruption

I have managed to find some time to play my main after things have settled down a bit at work and on my travels along the winding ways of wormhole space I stumbled into a C1 and started scanning down all of the signatures.  I had two signatures to go when a local logs in at the tower I'm perched at.  I quickly pull my probes and find the locals have put out something that piques my interest.

Very interesting.  A quick check on the local corporation shows it's only 4 man strong and with a short history of losing mining ships on Zkillboard - it appears the corp has only been established in June of this year.  I decide this may be the perfect spot to set up camp, so I watchlist all of the corp members and settle in to see what they do.

The Covetor logs and in it's place a Stratios under a different character logs in.  It becomes apparent that these two characters must be on the same account, as one logs off, the other logs in - they are never online at the same time.

The Stratios warps over to a gas site and starts clearing the sleepers that are present.  I make a perch but I'm not hopeful of getting any action, as a Stratios doing sites usually carries salvaging drones, and this proves to be the case here.  However, the pilot leaves a couple of cargo containers it the site and warps off to their tower before the notification chimes that the Stratios is no longer online.  A second notification chimes - the Covetor pilot is back on line.  I perch up on the tower and watch the Covetor swapped for a Venture.

Thankfully there is an outside planet well off Dscan range that I can refit to my Venture killing fit with dual scrams so I warp off to get myself equipped.  Once tooled up, I warp back to the tower and try to re-acquire this Venture.  After a bit of swinging Dscan around I finally narrow the Venture down to one of the outer planets that is around 20AU from the tower, but here's the rub - I hadn't been able to scan the two signatures around this planet before the locals logged in.  Ok, I drop probes off Dscan range and do my best to narrow down the signature via Dscan before activating the probes.  Once they have finished scanning I pull them immediately, but it appears my use of Dsan isn't up to scratch, as I don't get a hit.  I move back out of range and drop probes again, this time getting a weak hit on the site.  But it appears that the Venture pilot was paying attention as I see them warping back the tower.  The Venture logs, the Stratios logs in and disappears, throwing core probes into the ether.

Around 15 minutes later the characters swap again and the Venture heads back to the same gas site.  I try again with the core probes, but it takes two efforts to get a warp in and again my probes were spotted.  The Venture warps back to their tower and probably getting the feeling that there is someone close by with not the best of intentions they log for the night.

Well that's pretty frustrating, but it does give me time to reflect on my process.  So I know where this Venture returns to, and from what direction - I've been going about this all arse-backwards.  How about instead of trying to find the grid the Venture is on, why don't I let the Venture come to me?  With that in mind I finish scanning the signatures and work my way 450 kilometres behind the POS and roughly in line with the two gas signatures at the outer planet.  I drop a bookmark before logging out for the night.

Next morning I log my trading alt in and add Min Juni as a watchlist contact.  I leave the client running all day and check in on it now and then.  Early evening a notification chimes - Min Juni is back online.  I swap accounts and scope out whats going on and sure enough the Venture is back at the same gas site.  I get in position and prepare my trap.

I had already dropped probes when I logged in, so it's a simple matter of moving them on top of the gas site and waiting.  Attentive as always, it's not long before I see the Venture on Dscan.  It's at this point that things go a bit awry.

The Venture lands on the very edge of the bubble and as you can see above I've been orbiting the mobile disruptor at 7500 metres - unfortunately my orbit has taken me outside of scram range.  I get a lock and send a volley of torpedoes at the Venture, hoping beyond hope that I can MWD close enough to land point but alas the Venture spools up their warp drive and blinks back to the tower.  Well that's frustrating, but a great learning experience.  Next time I'll remember that frigates don't usually go too far into the bubble when they are caught, so I'll be waiting at the front edge of the bubble in future.  I've also handily found the shortcut keys to overheat the mid slot rack so my process is now to overheat my mids whenever I jump into a system.  Next time I'll do better.

Eve by the Numbers

So I've been pretty busy in real life over the last week or so that has really restricted my play time on my main.  However, I have been able to address something that was nagging me for a while since I came back to playing - what would I do when I ran out of ISK?

I returned to Eve with the princely sum of 400 million ISK that I cleaned out of my alt corporation, but I'm losing stealth bombers at a rate of 2 a month.  At 45 million or so a pop, it's pretty easy to see that those maths would soon equal a negative balance and I would have to do something to bankroll my current lifestyle.  Originally my plan revolved around the other alt on my main account.  He was trained up to be a spotter/warpin for some highsec ganking I did in a previous life.  Not much use by himself, but he does have a mostly fitted Astero with the obligatory covert ops cloak.  The plan was to contract the Astero over to my main and go and do some exploration to get a pool of ISK together so I could fund myself for another X months before doing it all again.

The downsides to this is that I would be doing data and relic sites again and while I don't really have a problem doing that it's nowhere near as exciting as hunting.  It would also present a pretty high risk in terms of me flying my very last ship - the absolute worst case scenario would be jumping into the Astero and getting killed without getting any loot back to the market.  The idea of exploration in a tech 1 exploration frigate really doesn't appeal.

 The ideal situation would be to just hunt on my main and have a mostly passive income on the alt.  With that I mind, I got to thinking about starting market trading again.  I had previously done regional trading with limited success and I thought why not?  I can move my trade goods in the Astero in relative safety with the covert ops cloak, time wise it's not an issue as I can do the runs in the background while doing other things, same thing with updating my orders, that wouldn't be too much of a time sink.  The pros are that I can make ISK without terribly affecting my playtime on the main, it's ongoing income and it can be one of the easiest ways to make ISK in the game.

So I did it - I invested 120 million ISK from my main to my (now) trading alt and splashed out to activate a second training queue so I could get some trade skills up to reduce the broker fees & sales tax all without compromising my mains level 5 skill training queues. I'm not going to bother trying to grind faction standings, as even though reduced fees would be great, I'm just not interested in grinding level 1 mission, etc.  And so I hit the pavement, doing the loop between Rens->Jita->Amarr, mainly focusing on T3 subsystems at this point for high margins and relatively low volume items.  If I ever find myself trying to carry more than can fit in the Astero's hold (haven't yet) I'll use a courier service - that way I'm limiting my potential losses on the off chance I do get ganked.

And so far it's going well.  From my initial investment of 120 million ISK I'm on track to reach 1 Billion ISK in cash and sell orders hopefully sometime next week:

Hopefully work & real life will settle down a bit over the next week or so and I can get back to my normal adventures.  But it's nice knowing that I can go out and lose a ship without needing to change my play style.  I might even be able to plex my account, which would be nice.  The other intriguing option for further down the track might be to switch from a bomber to something with a bit larger engagement profile, like say a neut Stratios - but the fit I'm thinking of would probably be in the order of 700 million ISK, so having a money making alt would enable that as well.

I'm planning to do a monthly update on my trading along with some spreadsheets.  I like spreadsheets, a lot.  I'll tinker with sheets for hours on end coming up with cool stuff.  Maybe that's why I like spreadsheets in space so much.

Return

So here I am back playing Eve. I suppose I never really left as I enjoy checking the blogosphere to check in on what is going on, which I really shouldn't be doing as all it basically does is remind me of the cool stuff I could be doing.   The biggest drawback to Eve is the time I invest into the game, much to the chagrin of my wife.  I tend to allow myself to get absorbed with what I'm doing often to the detriment of say, folding the washing.  Unfortunately stating that I'm about to get on grid with a Retriever doesn't tend to wash all that well with my significant other, who is probably as much an antithesis to a gamer as you can get.  But it's ok, I'll manage my time appropriately, it won't be a problem.  I'm even taking the time to write a blog about the time I've wasted playing that stupid game.  It's all good.

My previous foray into Eve saw me living solo in a C2 wormhole which a bunch of my alts.  It was always a goal for me to live in wormhole space and it was fun, albeit a bit difficult time wise to manage as occupation in a wormhole means (in my case) an orca with small POS.  As anyone who has ever run a POS would know they need fuel and fuel costs iskies.  The difficulty I ran into was finding the time to run the sleeper sites which I needed to keep the forcefield up. I was using a HML Drake so it would take upwards of half an hour to complete a C2 site and while the rewards were a bit more generous due to the C2 loot tweaks that came through around that time it was still a became a bit of a chore.  It got to the point that I seriously could nearly tell my wife that I'm just going to log in to my second job for an hour or so - Eve was taking up a significant part of my time and in the end I let the POS go dormant along with my subs.  The wife was happy.

Fast forward a couple of months and the embryo of an idea started in my head.  What if I played Eve again, but ditched the POS and just roamed around J space looking for ships to gank?  I wouldn't be tied down to a system and have to scan it out before doing anything, I wouldn't need to make any ISK to keep my POS fueled, I could just do the fun-er parts of playing Eve.  The catalyst came with a day off work during which I listened to Chance Ravinne delivering a talk to Eve Uni about stealth bombers.  I've always loved bombers and had my main train into a Manticore before I moved into my wormhole, and after listening Chance speak about bombers I just went, stuff it, I'm going to play again.

I resubbed my main account back in and was pleasantly surprised to see that while my sub was running out my training queue was still running and had completed Astrometric Rangefinding V (28 day train...) so the only things currently not at level V in my scanning skill tree is Hacking and Survey.

Oh yeah.  Scanning is my biatch.

So I log back in to find my tower with no forcefield and the Mammoth I had parked in the forcefield is gone.  Yeah, that was expected.  What wasn't expected was the corp that had taken up residence on one of the inner planets is gone along with their tower and POS modules,  There also appears to be a new tower at a different moon, I'll have a warp over to this new POS and have a look in my fully tricked-out-to-scan Buzzard.  I'm in the system map view so I don't see the bubble when I land but I hear the distinctive sound and realise that I might be in trouble.  The overview is all still all messed up as I haven't configured it properly after logging back in but worst of all my ship starts to decloak.

Needless to say the tower promptly obliterates my Buzzard.  Decloak traps and towers are the bane of my existence.  As I sit there in my pod I finally work my overview to show containers and sure enough there are several THOUSAND of the little yellow diamonds of death all around me.

And do you know the worst thing is, I didn't even use my tricked out scanning boat to scan my way out, so I'm now trapped in my pod in my old wormhole with no way out.  *facepalm*.  I'm forced to self destruct the pod get out back to highsec so I can buy a new ship.

God I love this game.