Salvaging in a black hole system

There are three strategic cruisers popping Sleepers in our neighbouring class 4 w-space system, and they are all ours. I'm not quite feeling ready to take the Pengu out to join in, concerned that my most expensive ship so far probably needs a little more subsystem skill training to be completed. But my salvaging skills cannot be improved and I always enjoy the act of salvaging itself. I volunteer to help, launch my Cormorant destroyer, and jump through our static wormhole to start clearing up the wrecks.

Today's neighbouring system contains a black hole, one of its effects being to increase the base speed of ships. Whilst the extra speed helps to move more swiftly between wrecks it can also hinder efficient use of the tractor beams. A tractor beam pulls with a force that, ignoring physics as usual, maintains a specific velocity. If you fly towards the object being tractored it approaches more quickly but if you fly away from it the relative closing speed is reduced. And in a black hole system you can speed away from tractored wrecks more quickly than usual, the phenomenon not affecting tractor beam velocity.

I usually activate my salvager module before I am in range of looting the wreck, looting range being shorter than salvaging range, and rely on the tractor beam to pull the wreck close enough to loot before the salvager cycle completes. This method works well, even when I change direction away from the wreck being pulled towards my ship, because the tractor beam velocity tends to be sufficiently faster than my ship's. But in this black hole system my ship speed is increased and the reduced relative velocity of the tractored wrecks needs to be taken in to account. My normal method of salvaging is floundering.

Several times I misjudge the timing of salvaging, mostly when changing vector to get within tractor beam range of different wrecks, leaving me unable to loot the wreck before it is salvaged. The efficacy of the salvager II modules gives me mostly successful cycles but failed cycles at least offer more time for the tractor beams to pull the wrecks closer. Instead I am left with cargo containers adrift in space, no longer a wreck to house them, making me lose efficiency by having to lock and tractor them to my ship solely for the purpose of looting. The solution is to move directly towards the wrecks and hold the course for longer before changing direction. Of course, this effects my efficiency too. Salvaging in a black hole system is not ideal. But I cope.

I take the effects of the black hole to be another variable in the process of salvaging and try to adapt to it as best I can. I also enjoy zooming between groups of wrecks using the micro-warp drive which, as it boosts the ship's base speed, is much faster than in normal systems. And I need to speed between various groups of wrecks, and quite a few individual wrecks, because the attack paths of the strategic cruisers have not kept the Sleeper waves bunched up as a more standard fleet composition would. Four anomalies are cleared of Sleepers in total and I follow up behind salvaging and looting in those four anomalies. The loot is totted up and split amongst the fleet, making each of us seventy-five million ISK richer.

Posted in Gaming |
Tags: cormorant, eve online, mmorpg, penny ibramovic, salvaging, sleepers, w-space