Shooting Sleepers for fun and profit
20th June 2011 – 5.46 pmA bit of early scanning finds little of interest. Our neighbouring class 3 w-space system holds a pulsar phenomenon, an on-line but empty tower, and a mutated handful of anomalies. There is only one wormhole present in the dozen signatures, which I keep closed for the time being, the rest mostly resolving to be gas and rocks. I decide to wait for company to arrive, either friendly or hostile, before getting involved in any operation, and grab a sammich back at our tower.
Still no one is around when I return from stuffing my face, either at home or in the C3. All space and no capsuleers makes Penny a dull girl. I warp to our neighbour's static wormhole to see what I can find, jumping out to null-sec k-space in the Outer Passage region. Only one other pilot is in the system with me but only for a brief moment, leaving me alone again. I scan the system, hoping to find anything to keep me entertained, but the only signature besides the wormhole leading to the C3 is a drone site.
I'm not sure if shooting drones will help my security status or not, and rather than waste time in the site I think about wasting time warping between asteroid belts looking for rats. But jumping back in to the C3 sees a Tengu strategic cruiser on my directional scanner, looking like he's launching probes to scan. A Tengu is interesting but a cloaking ship will be almost impossible to find, and the pilot isn't sitting inside the local tower whilst he scans, so I don't even know if he's local. But the probes converge on the home K162 and, with the promise of some excitement, I jump back and swap to my Legion strategic cruiser to throw a welcome party for the Tengu.
Welcome parties only work if the guest turns up, of course. Mind you, as both our home system and the C3 hold a pulsar, harming armour and helping shields, I am a little relieved that my armour-buffered Legion doesn't get to tangle with the shield-tanking Tengu. After a wait I scout the C3 again to find no sign of the Tengu or any scanning probes, and I am back to Plan A of shooting belt rats in null-sec. Disappointingly, and perhaps inevitably, the rats are also drones, and although my Drake makes short work of them I am perhaps not making best use of my time.
Shooting Sleepers is more profitable. Or, at least, their loot is more compact, and although clearing anomalies solo can be a little time-consuming I may have spent a couple of minutes activating all the ladar and gravimetric sites in the C3 when I scanned earlier, alerting the putative Sleeper defences of capsuleers' presence. I take my Drake back to the C3 and warp to the first mining site to pop the rather weaker Sleeper drones than are found in anomalies, looting and salvaging the wrecks as I go. I clear two mining sites, pocketing twenty-four million ISK in profit, before Mick turns up and suggests we make real ISK in anomalies. That sounds like a plan!
I get home, swap to my Golem marauder, and head out with Mick in a re-jigged Tengu. Three sweet anomalies are swept through efficiently, netting about a hundred and forty million ISK in loot and salvage for about the same time cost as my belt and mining site ratting. We move on to the sole magnetometric site in the C3, clearing two waves of Sleepers before both changing to more suitable ships for the range and damage mitigation requirements, the dual-remote-repair Tengus rather more capable for the task. As the Sleepers here are always shooting and neutralising a single target, rather than splitting their attentions, remote-repair works better than local repair modules, as the companion ship has all the capacitor juice it needs to effect repairs and we are never really tested.
When cleared of Sleepers, I bring a Noctis salvager in to the site to sweep up the wrecks whilst Mick analyses the artefacts. Another sixty-five million ISK in loot and salvage is recovered, and Mick estimates the artefacts are worth around a hundred and sixty million ISK. That's over three hundred and fifty million ISK for a short afternoon's shooting, which is rather splendid. A quiet day has turned in to a profitable adventure.
One Response to “Shooting Sleepers for fun and profit”
Quite profitable for a quiet afternoon.