Making easy iskies from explosions
29th July 2013 – 5.36 pmThere's a Retriever visible in the home system. Kill, kill! Oh, the mining barge's name looks familiar, and Aii's on-line. My Sherlockian skills lead me to deduce it is my colleague mining, and not an intruder. That, and Aii greeting me and asking for another few minutes to chomp on rocks a bit longer before we go exploring. He's already scanned the home w-space system and resolved the static wormhole, which remains the only wormhole in our system, so I'm cool with waiting a bit. He's collecting rocks for our important projects, after all.
Okay, Aii's finished with mining, let's go. Our neighbouring class 3 w-space system looks empty from the K162, but with only one planet in range the odds of that are pretty likely in many systems. I launch probes, blanket the system, and explore, revealing seventeen anomalies, nine signatures, and no ships. A tower sits empty on the far planet, giving occupation but no activity, so I loiter there whilst I scan. Gas, relics, relics, gas. The static connection leads to null-sec k-space, and as it's the only wormhole in the system I guess I'm going that way.
Appearing alone in a system in Malpais gives me an opportunity to rat whilst I scan. Well, rat. The sole signature in the system is the K162 I came through, but as space looks quiet and the system is well-connected I think I'll try scanning again in an adjacent system. I go one way, Aii another, and one hop across puts me in a system with a Drake battlecruiser visible on my directional scanner. There are no rat wrecks that I can see, so the Drake may be idling in one of the two towers. And as there is a single signature in the system I may as well see what it is.
Warping out to launch probes changes my plans. I see a tower and corporate hangar array, but no force field. Finding the tower sees that the CHA is indeed off-line and ready to be cracked open, which is all the invitation I need. I note that the tower belongs to the same corporation as the Drake, and as he's in the system some caution is recommended. But he's now out of d-scan range, so as long as I keep d-scan updated, and stay far enough from the CHA to cloak, I should have plenty of time to get safe if I need to.
I bounce off the planet to warp closer to the hangar, lock on, and start shooting. It's not a glamorous process but it's simple enough, and I'm not interrupted. A lack of explosion is a little disappointing, but the jetsam that survives the destruction of the hangar is a nice little haul. Not only do all the salvage components fit snuggly in to my cloaky Loki strategic cruiser's hold, not needing to get a hauler to pick them up, but they are worth almost 350 million ISK. That's not bad for little effort.
The signature turns out to be a combat site, which I'm not interested in, and Aii hasn't found anything better, prompting him to suggest collapsing our wormhole to start afresh. That's a good idea, although maybe we should pop some Sleepers in C3a's anomalies. I only realised the presence of three decent anomalies in our neighbouring system, and how we should probably profit from them, once I was in warp to the wormhole. But as we've found space to be exceedingly quiet I think we're probably safe enough to bring some expensive ships out to play.
We get home, swap to a Tengu strategic cruiser and Golem marauder, and return to C3a to shoot some Sleepers. There's no real fuss involved, although it feels like the Sleepers have upgraded their weapons at a couple of points, and as my marauder sucks up the wrecks as we fight we don't need to make a separate trip to loot and salvage. We return to our tower with around 150 Miskies of profit from three sites, which isn't bad. Combined with my earlier haul from null-sec, we've made about half-a-billion ISK tonight. That's damned good.
Now I need to do a bit of maths to work out how to collapse our wormhole. Both Aii and I have been out and back in strategic cruisers, then there were the Sleeper boats, including the big Golem. We send a big ship to and fro until a change-of-state occurs, then massage the figures, resulting in the wormhole imploding on schedule. Job's a good 'un. And that's it for me tonight. Exploration, pillaging, and profiting from Sleepers. It's been a full experience, so I'm happy to leave Aii to get back to mining.
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