Bistot and a Buzzard

It's another quiet evening mining arkonor. Of course, being in w-space, mining could lead to being ambushed by stealth bombers, your own corporation colleagues on manoeuvres, or the inevitable space madness. Luckily, I have a companion with me who is actually skilled at shooting rocks. I still cannot interface my pod with a Coveter, which is unfortunate if only because the engineers manage to find one adrift in a neighbouring system and bring it back to our hangar. But with Kename Fin around, the rocks get chewed up pretty quickly.

The gravimetric site had already been visited earlier in the week, so as it is assumed that the asteroid field is soon to disperse we are trying to grab as much ore as we can. I start on the arkonor, but when Fin turns up she lets me know that bistot is currently valuable and we train our strip miners accordingly. With an expertly pilotted Hulk next to me the bistot is soon gone, as is the chunk of arkonor I left. With the rocks being mined so efficiently, we have time to grab some crokite as well. The directional scanner still shows no ships, making it look like there will be no surprises tonight.

Fate doesn't like to be tempted. As I am thinking how relaxing the evening has been, scanner probes appear on d-scan. I call out an alert and we both warp back to the corporation's tower safely. Switching ships so that we appear a bit more menacing than passive miners, a keen eye is kept on the readings from d-scan. A Buzzard cov-ops ship registers briefly, which allows to gather a little intelligence on the pilot. The capsuleer looks to be a carebear miner, somewhat like us, so Fin decides to open communications in the local channel.

As it turns out, the visitor in our system is most likely harmless and only looking for a way back to k-space. Getting caught up in the tangle of wormholes in w-space is easy if you are not careful, and some of the engineers still occasionally forget to bookmark a wormhole after passing through it, only realising when warping away. In a gesture of goodwil, and to remove the extra ship from the system, I drop a bookmark for the capsuleer to pick up in a jet-can orbiting around a planet. The bookmark leads to a neighbouring system with a static exit to k-space. It is possible he takes time to probe the planet, perhaps to ensure it's no ambush, before picking up the bookmark, witnessed by the jet-can disappearing from d-scan. And, with that, he's gone.

Our mining was only really interrupted minutes before we were planning to stop, so nothing much is lost. The abandoned ore is picked up and we call it a night.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: eve online, mining, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, w-space