Askgar

This is a pre-emptive blog post given that sometime soon (within the hour I would imagine) it will show up on the kill boards.

Yes, I lost my second Tengu.

This time I managed it without even getting it to the character that would fly it.

I was hoping that sitting and watching, moving to each gate directly and not going afk would save me from this happening but apparently I was wrong.  Another expensive loss BUT it happens, I’m over it already and the only thing that annoyed me is that more of the loot wasn’t blown up.

I’ll link the kill mail when it shows but again, I’ve learnt and next time I will fly my main TO Jita, buy and fit the Tengu, the fly it BACK to the hole.

And please, noone tell me how I shouldn’t fly that value of cargo around in a ship like that, I know, I’ve explained up above and I don’t need anyone to tell me how stupid I am!

I was hoping to keep this a secret for a but longer but after DotLan ratted me out with a ship loss in our wormhole I had to admit to my corp mate that yes, it was my ship and no, its wasn’t my Drake or Noctis  (the other ships I usually fly in the hole).

So without further ado, I present to you… How (to lose/I lost) a Tengu in 2 hours.

1. Purchase a Tengu and fit it well enough to solo C3 sites, despite living in a C2 wormhole.
2. Fly it back to said wormhole.
3. Fly to the POS to grab some ammo.
4. Scan a site down to test out the Tengu
5. Clear site while thinking, this requires a bit more attention than a Drake to make sure the Shield Booster is only on when needed.
6. Bring in the Noctis to pick up loot.
7. Warp to another site, hoping to repeat steps 5 and 6.
8. Get to the last wave, an Advanced Sleeper Battleship with NOS.
9. Fall asleep for an unknown (short) amount of time.
10. Open eyes to see a pod on screen.
11. Think “Hey, why am I in a pod”
12. Think “Why would a player come in and shoot me but not kill my pod”
13. Notice Sleeper BS.
14. Sudden realization of  what happened.
15. Warp to a safe to log in embarrassment, and hoping no one notices.
16. Realize there is a lot of valuable loot left in the site.
17. Get Drake  to finish clearing site.
18. Get Noctis to salvage the site, slight tear in the eye when I rip apart the Tengu for anything I can salvage from it.
19. Warp back to POS then log, thinking you got away with it because no one said anything.

So where do I go from here? I could simply buy another one, swallow the loss and move on.  However I don’t think that option quite sums up the stupidity of  what I’ve done.  I am currently weighing up between buying another one, BUT repaying myself in the PLEX I’d have to sell to buy it, before I can buy anything else again (except ammo), OR, making myself do sites in a Drake until I can afford another Tengu without spending a PLEX.

However, I have learnt from this.

1. If I’m tired, bring out the Drake, its buffer instead of active so can withstand a lot more punishment when someone isn’t there, or has fallen asleep.
2. DotLan will ALWAYS see what happened, even if its without details.
3. Just don’t play Eve when tired (thanks to @carljohnstone for that one)

I’m glad to say though when I noticed what happened I didn’t get angry, I was a little annoyed at myself for being so stupid, but I’m not going to let it get to me and affect my enjoyment of the game, in fact, its given me a new goal to work towards… repaying the loss to myself!

The first day did not go well.  I find an X702 wormhole, a C3 entrance, I jump in to find system J111634. Static mapper tells me its static is U210, low-sec, not a good start.

I use D-Scan and find a POS, another bad sign, but I scan all the sites anyway, just in case there’s another K162 going elsewhere. No luck, all I find is the other wormhole, and a grav site.  I jump back out through where I came in and give up for the night, no adventure, nothing.  Hopefully tomorrow will be more productive and I’ll actually find a chain of holes to jump through!

In the spirit of adventure, and us needing a new home, I’m about to jump into a wormhole head first, hopefully not leaving until I find a new home for us.

My plan is, I jump into a wormhole, the first one I find, then I keep jumping through non kspace wormholes, until I find an empty one (of the right class) OR I get bored and give up.

I’m going around in a Cheetah, no guns so I won’t be killing anyone (or even able to defend myself).  I’ll be being as stealthy as I can and simply scanning down a wormhole, then jumping into another one.

I’m starting in my mission system, finding a wormhole then off I go.  I’ll be charting progress as it happens, even if its just a list  of holes I end up in.

Tonight was my last night in Eve, at least for the next few weeks, and it has probably been the most eventful day in the wormhole since the threat to our POS a few weeks ago by the locals.

Mid afternoon I decided I’d take advantage of both my last day in Eve, and the bank holiday, and run a few sites before my sub lapses tomorrow.  I logged in, hopped into my Probe, and proceeded to scan down all of the combat sites.  5 sites bookmarked and I thought that would keep me going until the evening so I swapped into my drake and started on a site.

First wave down, textbook site, then all of a sudden an Anathema jumps in next to me.  I quickly warped home, monitored the system and noticed a Harby jump in after the Anathema and decided someone had come to clear sites and logged off to leave them to it, I’d rather not lose my ship and possibly my pod.

A couple of hours later I decide that they’d either be gone, or still clearing sites, so I logged in and checked.  No signs of anyone so I warp back to the site I was in earlier and amazingly, its in the state I left it (minus the wrecks).  I cleared out the sleepers, no problem, then came back with the Noctis for a textbook salvage… or so I thought!

Shortly after the Noctis jumped in the Anathema turned up again, surely they hadn’t been waiting around all the time JUST for me to turn up again.  I did what any sensible pilot would do, scream, then warped back home.  They didn’t get a point or anything on me and yet again, I’d escaped, and this time in an even less well prepared ship.

I hung around for a bit this time, nothing happened, but in the end I decided to log out for a bit, not wanting to risk it.  Yet again, however, I returned, and this time I warped into the second site on the list, cleared with the Drake quickly then when I warped back to the POS I noticed that there was another Drake and a Harby hanging around somewhere.

After a few minutes monitoring them, checking out the site I’d cleared (it was not visible from where they were), I decided to risk it, I warped the Noctis in and cleared the site, being aligned to the POS at all times.

I wasn’t disturbed this time but I suddenly had a very itchy trigger finger, so I jumped into my Rifter and warped into the site I’d determined them to be in.  A quick pilot investigation later and I left, no damage taken and still safe.  I couldn’t find much information on the pilots other than some expensive faction ship losses, so kept watching them.

They cleared the site and left it empty for a few minutes, I warped in with my Rifter to check and it was indeed still empty.  I thought I’d give it a quick ninja salvage but I couldn’t believe what happened next, a Noctis jumped in with the Drake (replacing the Harby).  After discusion with a few corpies I put a point on my drake and jumped into the site, unfortunately I was 20k out and my point only reached 9k.  I burnt towards the Noctis and pointed the Drake while doing this but made 2 crucial mistakes here.

1. I forgot to bring my drones out immediately
2. I fired my missiles at the Drake, NOT the Noctis (I’d like to claim this was a mis-target but actually I was stupid and fired the missiles at the Drake because the Noctis wasn’t in range of the point).

When I eventually got the missiles and drones on the Noctis it lost a LOT of shields fast, but was just about to warp out and so I missed my chance, I never got within point range but worse, I couple have probably destroyed it before it warped off if I’d just got my missiles on it from the start!

After this I kept point on the Drake and shot a bit but it would have taken ages to destroy, in which time I would probably be jumped by his friend, so I warped out and monitored for a bit more.  I noticed a Daredevil appear with the Drake a little later and since then its been quiet, no more appearences and I can only presume they’ve moved on.  A quick PI run later and I’m done for the night, and done for this month.

Hopefully next time I play even I’ll talk more about what I’ve been up to, but while I felt like blogging I thought I should get something down.  I decided to leave out the really stupid parts from todays Eve playing, such as flying with an insufficient clone and…

First, an introduction to the introduction. I have been intending to write a scanning tutorial for months now, writing down the method I have developed over my 6 months or so of using the scanning system. I seem to have ended up with a system that, presuming I use it correctly, will reliably scan down almost any site in high sec, or wormholes up to class 4, I have never tried scanning in low/null sec or a higher class wormhole but have no doubts it would work, although it’s possible that it would require higher scanning skills, something I will cover in the next article.

I don’t have a scanning ship in the traditional sense, I have simply fitted my hurricane up for scanning, its current use is a wormholecane, it consists of all the modules required to make use of the sites, bar mining, in a wormhole, again I will cover this later when I talk about the types of exploration sites. There are dedicated scanning ships, and modules, which I’m sure would make my scanning more efficient, but when i can bring one ship to cover all the bases then why bother swapping ships between each site, something very difficult in wormhole space.

I will be splitting this series into a few parts, these will be:

• Equipment Required – The modules and skills required to scan.
• Types of Site – What each site you can scan down is and what to do with them.
• Scanning Guide – A guide on my scanning technique.
• Hints and Tips – Pointers I’ve picked up during my scanning career.
• Wormholes – An extra section on tips for wormhole divers.

Finally, I can’t guarantee how long it will take me to finish this guide but I decided that if I wrote this introduction then it would motivate me to actually complete the series, and write the scanning guide I’d been intending to for months.

It was a perfectly ordinary day in eve, me and a corp mate were scanning down sites, hoping to find either a grav or Class 1 wormhole (all we could handle  as the 2 of us) and eventually I found a grav in my mining home system (where I keep my hauler and barge) and we went in and started on it.

We noticed a pilot who kept jumping in and out in various ship, first it was the same as mine, then he came out in a missile boat, then he jumped in and out a couple of times before eventually striking up a conversation with the other corp member.

[ 2010.07.24 14:02:35 ] Corp Mate > Hello.
[ 2010.07.24 14:02:46 ] Triestiono > Hi

Pretty standard opening of the convo, nice and polite, although we didn’t know what he wanted at this point, we’d have been happy sharing the site.

[ 2010.07.24 14:02:54 ] Triestiono > When did you discover this deposit?
[ 2010.07.24 14:03:45 ] Corp Mate > Not sure. About 30-60 minutes ago. Nice tree branch formation it has too!

My corp mate was purposefully playing dumb here btw, the tree branch formation comment was just made to make himself look less knowledgeable than he was.  Next, it takes a turn neither of us expect.

[ 2010.07.24 14:04:39 ] Triestiono > is it worth 5 mill ISK to you guys to keep this all to yourself?
[ 2010.07.24 14:05:02 ] Corp Mate > huh? I’m a noob, you have to spell it out for me.
[ 2010.07.24 14:06:02 ] Triestiono > I’m requesting “protection” money. 5 mill isk in order to leave you guys alone.
[ 2010.07.24 14:06:30 ] Corp Mate > Ah. Let me confer with my partner.

5 million for him to leave us alone… in Hi-Sec where the  most he could do was steal some ore (more on that later).

We talked here (well, laughed really) and decided, he’s an idiot and we both know how NOT to get killed in hisec so ignored him.

[ 2010.07.24 14:11:25 ] Triestiono > well?
[ 2010.07.24 14:11:40 ] Corp Mate > Oh. You still here?
[ 2010.07.24 14:12:22 ] Corp Mate > You’ll have to wait a bit. My partner is still laughing.

I loved this reply, didn’t see it until I got the chat log sent to me but absolute genius, if this happens again I might get my corp mate to invite me into the chat, could be much more fun.  Then, well he isn’t happy so he threatens us and then steals from one of our cans (he didn’t steal much at all though, we didn’t notice the dent in the piles anyway) in the hopes of provoking us into attacking him.

Rule 1 of mining, if someone goes red from stealing from your can, collect the loot in then go.

Rule 2, if a yellow can shows up, ignore it and don’t take/put into it, you’ll go red for them.

[ 2010.07.24 14:14:50 ] Triestiono > wrong choice
[ 2010.07.24 14:15:22 ] Corp Mate > An extortionist AND a thief. your mother must be so proud.

I had to laugh, he’s so confident something will happen and my corp mate (only just off his trial) listened  to everything me and another person in our chat channel were telling him, and then added insult to injury of the failed extortion by making a comment like that.

Once this had happened I decided I HAD to strike up a convo with him, see if he could explain his motivation for trying to extort money from us.

[ 2010.07.24 14:19:37 ] Me > So you really think we’re stupid enough to attack you for stealing our ore
[ 2010.07.24 14:19:40 ] Triestiono > what’s up?
[ 2010.07.24 14:20:00 ] Triestiono > you look like you might be.
[ 2010.07.24 14:21:00 ] Me > Not at all, good try though, especially picking out the new player over the experienced one
[ 2010.07.24 14:22:43 ] Triestiono > yeah, well, I spent 30mins scanning to find this deposit, I feel like I have first rights to it.
[ 2010.07.24 14:23:10 ] Me > It took you 30 mins to scan a site?

So it turned out he was annoyed because he spent ages scanning to find a site then we just strolled in and started mining the site, so he decided to try getting some money out of us.  (Oh, and he left the chat as soon as I made the last comment, I don’t think he appreciated being insulted… again).

Anyway, this was the first decent test of my barge (other than a quick veld trip the other night), it was very entertaining to see how quickly I filled the can and bringing a survey scanner along REALLY helped to prioritise which of the many roids I should mine first.  Also, having my hauler in system really helped for getting the ore back at the end of the day.

Anyway, from being extorted to ransoming, while we were in a worm hole with our big gang on Wednesday some random jumped in on the wormhole, completely ignoring us and going off to try clearing a site on his own, I was on archeology/scanning duty (with a little dps thrown in when I wasn’t doing those) at the time so stayed behind clearing up when they jumped him but they got in, pointed, webbed (etc.) him, got him down to 1/2 armour then… stopped attacking and made sure the npcs didn’t attack him.

Someone opened a chat and asked him how much his ship was worth to him, turns out he hadn’t even bookmarked the entrance wormhole so we offered him 15 million to let him out alive, including the exit wormhole (I was trying to get them to let me give him an exit to null sec we found earlier but they wouldn’t let me ).  I think we all agreed that was very cheap for  his ship AND the exit but as a first attempt, it was fun.  We let him out then went back to our typical Wednesday outing.

After last  weeks POS kill, this weeks ransoming, we’re turning quite malicious in WH space… although with a NBSI corp policy why not?

I’ve been a bit lax in writing up the past 2 weeks wormhole outings, partly because I have been busy but mainly because they were pretty uneventful. I’m going to do a quick roundup of the highlights of each evening and explain, for the second especially, why there isn’t much to talk about.

7th July:

One of our members has been out and scanned down a class 3 wormhole, however it is through another wormhole (class 2 I think, anyone else in the group please correct me if wrong). We had all of the sites already scanned down for us so it was simply a case of grabbing a can full of bookmarks and whizzing, clearing out sites.
We work through some radar and mag sites, with me on unlocking duty, getting all of the containers for analysing or code breaking. We did a few in the c2 wormhole before moving forward to the c3. After a couple of sites in c3 we noticed a couple of random ships occasionally showing up on directional and a few of our more experienced members noticed combat probes out, obviously out to find us.
It was now a race against time, how long do we give them to find us, we decide that I’ll finish unlocking all the cans at this site, grab the loot and then run.
At this point I wish I could write some epic story about our escape, barely making it out alive, etc. But actually all that happened as we went through the 2 wormholes and got out safely, we even had a backup route out of the first wormhole to hisec in case something had gone wrong.
It was a very uneventful escape but because of the number of radar and mag sites we hit we had a good amount if loot to sell, making it quite profitable.

14th July:

The call went out, our scanner had found a pos that had run out of fuel! This meant that we had basically found an undefended space piñata! It was 2 deep in wormholes so we race across, blow up a command centre, with a huge amount of crokite and othe assorted things I missed because I didn’t have a large enough cargo hold. There was also a hanger, can’t remember the name, but when it went pop, 4 ships popped out.
Me and another member stayed behind to protect the site while the others left and dumped there ships and came back in pods to pick up the other ships, among them were a frigate, a drake, I think, and a mining barge, which wouldn’t fit through the wormholes so in an act of pure evil, we made it go pop for the 40% base insurance payout. And even more evil, but following the corp policy of nbsi (not blue shoot it), any loot we couldn’t carry was destroyed, the cargo container it was in was blown up.
The rest of the evening was rather uneventful, we spent a while searching down a new wormhole and all we could find was c2s, and c2s in c2s. We eventually went into a relatively quiet one, clearing a couple of sites but then, the inhabitants stirred. Every so often one of them would jump into one of the sites we were in, the jump out again, we kept trying to jump them but unfortunately they were warping in too far out for us to web and scram them and they kept getting away.
After this happened a couple of times one of our member went and found their hangout and monitored it from a distance, we didn’t really know what to expect from them and even with some extra research carried out on external sites we couldn’t get much information about them so decided in the end that we would get out before anything too bad happened.
We jumped out, transferred the loot to one person, and kept the earlier acquired drake for the ship replacement fund, as a number of people use them. The take for this night is probably not much different to last weeks, but most of that will have come from the pos destruction, where we found a lot of what we would usually get simply from doing sites. I did acquire most of a barge fit from the exploded barge which I will use once I’ve trained up the remaining skills I need to fly the middle barge!

A good bit of fun the last 2 weeks however this week was a little bit of a letdown, we only had a c2 to work in and, despite being entertaining, the giant space piñata felt very underwhelming, despite it’s good payout.

Oh, and most of these recent posts have been written on an iPhone so if there are any oddities please let me know and I’ll correct them.

A few nights ago our new player discovered a gravimetric site in eve and went in to mine it, however his ship had no defences at all and couldn’t cope with the rats that were present at the site. I checked with him and I was only a few jumps out so I jumped across and started protecting him.

It started off as me transporting the loot back and forwards while he was mining into a can, this worked well for a while, however I decided that it would go a bit quicker if I grabbed a mining laser and did a bit of mining as well.

I noticed I could use miner 2s so ended up picking up 4 of them, as well as replacing all of my low slots to make a bigger cargo hold. Back I go to the grav site and start mining. We do this for a while, dumping into cans, until we both have to go, the trouble is there is quite a lot of ore in cans now so I look and see my hoarder only a couple of jumps away. I dump my cane and do a 6 jump roundtrip to get my hoarder to get all the ore, a couple of roundtrips and it’s all in and we’re done.

I had a lot of fun doing this and decided to have a look into getting a more dedicated mining ship, I look at the barges and decide to go for the middle one, forgotten the name, as the difference between that and the basic one was a day or 2s training, but for the max one it was an extra week or 2.

Since this mini excursion I have gone out another couple of times, mainly solo, but only for a small period so I don’t get too bored of it.  I tend to take a couple of autocannons for defense, however I usually end up using combat drones to defend from rats as my medium autocannons can barely hit them.

Another thing I am getting more into is the scanning side, I have gotten my scanning tactics to a very reliable point and can now scan down most sites in much less than 5 minutes.  I’ve had a couple of good radar sites as well, netting me 4-5 million per site.

The thing that continues drawing me into eve, is the fact there is such a variety of stuff to do, I can go out, all guns blazing for a fight, or I can sit back and casually mine, or I can do some scanning for something a bit different from most games entirely.

2030: I log in after the GW Dragon Festival, mainly to sort out my PI, as it had just ran out. I do this then decide to go scanning, to kill some time and make some isk. I found a combat site and cleared it out quickly. At the same time I was advising the newest member of our motley crew on scanning in general.
2100: I scan down my next anomaly and get a wormhole, excellent, I put out a shout to our group and we start forming up however upon investigation I appear to have found an occupied class 2 wormhole. I found a couple of wrecks in it which disappeared but didn’t see any ships. We decided we didn’t have the manpower to cope if people were there so we left it.
2115: Our newest member had discovered a wormhole and I was dispatched to check it out, however he warped in and found a wormhole that I could identify remotely, it went straight into a class 1, perfect for us. We all grouped up and warped to the system and met up with our new player, who really seems to be getting the hang of scanning.
2130: I go in first to scout it out, I warp in, almost forget my exit bookmark, then go to a planet and scan. No occupants, just a mobile warp disruptor and control tower (burger king). I scan with my probes and… Whoa, probably 20-30 scanning sites and even more combat sites.
The rest of the fleet warp in, we set up various bookmarks and prepare to scan down our first site…
2200: A cane has come in behind is, he doesn’t do anything an leaves, however we did not expect what happened next, on voice I hear, “the wormholes collapsed.” None of us could believe it and a little bit of panic ensued, has it really gone, how do we get out… What now?
We formed a plan, we leave our cloaked scanning salvager and new player in a safespot, trying to find an exit, while the rest of us carry on as usual, clearing out combat sites and if some of our scanners find radar/other non mining sites we’ll tackle them as well.
2230: Still combatting and still scanning, quite slow as we only had 2 dps fits, but we found a few bits and also hacked our way through a radar site.
2300: We get a call from our primary scanning ship, he’d found a wormhole but couldn’t quite pinpoint it. We completed the current site and while I was salvaging the wrecks, anyone else who could scan got involved with tracking down the wh. Eventually we tracked it down and it was back to null-sec, not quite what we were hoping for.
2315: We sent through our cloaked scanner to find out where we would emerge, it turned out to be about 8 jumps out from the nearest hi-sec system, through some IT alliance space, former BOB space.
We regroup back in the wh and have a discussion about what to do, it’s getting late and most of us need to get going, having early starts the next day. Eventually after evaluating the route we decide it’s a quiet section of space at a quiet time of night so we’ll go for it, a quick briefing on aligning, staying in cloak for as long as possible, etc. And most importantly, keeping an eye on local to see other pilots in system and we’re off.
2330: We head off and in the most organised display of voice chat I have ever heard from us, barely anything said other than aligning, aligned and warping we go, system to system. We see about 6 or 7 people in about 3 of the systems on the way so we go via planets in those, avoiding possible bubbles. The final jump, the only lo-sec one was very anxious, expecting gankers, but we saw noone and got out safely.
0000: We’re out, everyone is exhausted ad we’re almost ready to call it a night. But first we get to the nearest station, dump the loot with our fc and leave it at that. I set my autopilot to my home system, about 30 jumps away, check the systems, only hi-sec and I let my autopilot guide me home while I sleep.
0715: I awake to find me floating in space at my home system, I dock up and end the ordeal.

Thanks to all the people who were on the trip, especially the fc who got us back in one piece through null-sec, which I had never experienced before and kept is calm during the ordeal. Our new member, who scanned down the wormhole and performed amazingly given it was only his 4th day in game I believe. The cloaked scanner who found the way home and the pair of ships who bend time and space, just to keep us supplied with cap and armour.

And the lesson I learnt from this, pay attention to the mass that a wh can handle, we didn’t and that cane that closed the wormhole on us did us a favour, if it hadn’t been for him we would have probably closed it while leaving and left behind some of our members in wh space, making it even more difficult to scan a way home.

One final request, if you read the whole story and like what you read please leave a comment, I enjoyed writing it and if people enjoyed reading it then it might cause me to be less lazy and write more!