Will mine for faction gains

I'm currently working for a manufacturing agent with Core Complexion, Inc., which involves mostly courier missions. These are nice and simple and let me run around high-sec space in a shuttle, the Orca Mk II, with most deliveries fitting in the voluminous 10 m³ cargo hold. The undemanding nature of the missions also gives me time to check the market and my industrial jobs, even if the speed of the shuttle lets me jump across systems quickly enough that my screens refresh frequently. Whilst courier missions mean I don't need to worry about ensuring I have an hour or two to deal with a blockade my agent gives me occasional requests to mine some ore for him, the git.

Although I'm still quite the newbie I am not so unprepared as not to have a mining ship to hand, as I try to take advantage of the occasional floating chunk of omber or pebble of kernite that crops up in mission deadspace pockets. It is a simple task to take my shuttle back to my Caldari Navy mission base to collect the White Cat, my mining Osprey, briefly checking its configuration. Fitted with mining lasers, a single launcher with bloodclaw missiles and a drone bay full of Hornets I am ready to go AFK in deadspace. I shove the shuttle in to the hold of the White Cat so that I don't need to make a separate run to collect it afterwards, thinking that I may as well keep the Osprey handy, and as the amount of ore to be mined will need to be hauled back by my Badger anyway the reduced cargo space is not much of an inconvenience.

I warp in to the deadspace pocket, find the asteroid that has the barely interesting rock composition and set my mining lasers upon it with all my vigour. After one cycle of the lasers I jettison the collected ore in to a can and go off to wash my dishes, returning every two or three minutes to free up space in my cargo hold. As I get to drying with my tea towel some flashes on the monitor grab my attention. I amble back with great excitement to check on my mining operation to see that three rats have warped in, targeted the White Cat and opened fire.

CCP really needs to sort out the failing sound in Apocrypha, because had I been 'resting my eyes' whilst mining I may not have noticed the rats shooting my ship until I had been reduced to a pod. Of course, they could just accept that mining is boring and not try make it seem more dangerous simply by throwing rats at you every fifteen minutes. Never the less, I am prepared, even more so after taking advantage of the skill training queue to beef up my drones.

It is because I have been warned of the dangers of mining by a previous agent that my Osprey has Hornets and not mining drones in her bay, and now that I have trained in some more advanced drone skills there really is a marked difference in their effectiveness. My drones cut through the rat frigates like a Mackinaw through ice. It's great that I can see so clearly the benefit of the recent skill training and realise how much more effective I can be with a full drone bay at my disposal. With the drones having a whale of a time my launcher remains cold.

Mining and collecting the ore is a simple enough task, particularly with the rats swatted aside by my drones, merely time-consuming. With the asteroid eventually depleted of useful ore I run the White Cat back to base and recover the ore with my Badger to complete the mission. It is handy to keep the cruiser around and not just to be ready for any further adventures in mining. The Osprey is a good complement to the Badger and shuttle for courier missions. Without it I would have to use the Badger for anything larger than a few cows, which my agent has some fetish about, and the industrial ship is awfully sluggish compared to the shuttle. But the cruiser is fairly agile and its moderately sized hold allows for quicker deliveries of just about anything except for large quantities of minerals.

With my shuttle, Osprey and Badger I am beginning to make my Core Complexion, Inc. agent quite happy, and I'm having a pretty good time in the process.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: deadspace, eve online, mining, mmorpg, penny ibramovic