Finally making some ISK
20th November 2013 – 5.46 pmI'm going to see if being in space for a while can perk me up a little. I can update my skill queue at least, which isn't too shabby considering that it means I'm less than a day away from having all the battleship skills at level V. I would be more thrilled with this milestone if I ever flew battleships, but at least now I can steal black ops ships and marauders of all types, should we encounter any.
And my glorious leader is on-line. Or is she? Saying 'I am pretending' is a little cryptic. Besides, we are all faking it to some degree. But Fin's pretending to be industrious. She does a better job than me at that, I can tell you. Fin's actually in a Hulk exhumer, complete with boosting industrial command ship, stripping rocks of ore in one of the rock fields currently in our system. She may even have been mining for quite a while, as it has been three days since we've had an incoming wormhole.
The trend continues, as I see a bunch of anomalies and just the one signature in the home system. I think it's relatively safe to assume that the static wormhole isn't open, not with Fin's Hulk still intact. And now that there are two of us, it's a good time to make a more active attempt to generate ISK. If only we had the combat anomalies of last week, we could be rolling in blue loot and melted nanoribbons, but circumstances worked against us. Now we have just the handful of anomalies, only one our favoured type.
We can make do with what we've got, and the opportunities that come our way. Maybe our neighbouring system is unoccupied, has no other wormholes, and a glut of our favoured class 3 w-space anomalies. Or maybe it will be full of Penny-hating combat pilots itching to shoot us. Best that we claim all the profit we can in the home system before looking abroad. Fin collects all her ore—I can't quite work out what a Miasmos is in time to find one in the hangar—and we board our paired Tengu strategic cruisers, ready for Sleeper combat.
The favoured anomaly is first, to ease us in to the evening. We know the waves, the triggers, the strategies. It's straightforward, with no surprises, and we warp to the next anomaly. We've not really touched different types, not for a long time, as we've not really needed to. But how hard can it be? Maybe hard enough for the second wave of four battleships to nearly crumple Fin's Tengu? Yes, about that hard.
I struggle to keep Fin afloat but am calm enough to remember to overheat my remote repair module. Fin's Tengu doesn't explode, the Sleeper battleships get whittled down, and once we're back to two-on-two the damage is easily handled. That could have been a harsher learning experience than it was, but thankfully we don't lose yet another ship in embarrassing circumstances, which would have been more embarrassing had it been to Sleepers. And Fin is smart enough to consider a new strategy for the next time.
That next time is not tonight, as moving from the second anomaly to the third also moves us in to the third type of anomaly for the evening. Variety is the spice of life, as they say, which is fine as long it's not going to give us the shits. But this third type of anomaly is perhaps the weakest, and we cope with ease the Sleeper ships thrown at us. The profit is not as good as the other anomalies, of course, but it remains profit. And Aii has appeared to sweep it up, salvaging the mess we've made, so Fin and I concentrate on generating more.
The third anomaly is cleared, on to the fourth, and finally the fifth. The last three anomalies are all the same type and dealt with smoothly, until all that's left of the Sleepers in our home system are a few rock fields and an inactive wormhole. Aii salvages the final wrecks and returns to the tower with about 330 Miskies in loot, and I swap back to my covert Loki strategic cruiser. I am not about to scan, though. I simply warp to a quiet corner of the system to hide and go off-line. There are more rocks to be chomped, and Fin and Aii are happy to resume their productivity.
3 Responses to “Finally making some ISK”
I see you log off at a safe spot. How does it actually work atm - does the cloak disable and how long will the ship be there?
And how do you appear - uncloaked?
Since you have a POS there - if you appear uncloaked - then what it the advantage of logging off somewhere else?
And thanks for providing hours of entertainment =D
As far as I understand the mechanic, when you log off (without any active flags) your active modules deactivate and your ship performs an 'emergency warp'. This warp just sends your ship about a million kilometres away in an arbitrary but perhaps generally forwards direction, so that you're off-grid.
I'm not sure how long your ship stays in space after the warp, but you're visible the whole time. I don't think it's longer than thirty seconds, but could easily be wrong about that. If you have an aggression, suspect, or criminal flag, your ship will remain in space until after that flag's timer runs out.
The only reliable place in a w-space system to watch for new local pilots coming on-line is at the tower itself. If you go off-line at the tower, you will come on-line at the tower. Even if you turn around and warp to a safe spot, cloaking as soon as you can, you will still have been spotted.
The advantage of going off-line outside of the tower is being able to cloak immediately on coming on-line and not having that cloak drop. It's perhaps not a big deal most of the time, but there are occasions when someone's watching for you. Instead of being seen, you can really surprise a fleet that is stealing your precious Sleeper loot, or just keep someone guessing as to your actual numbers or where you came from. New probes in a system where no new pilots have been seen can throw a scout in to confusion.
I did an experiment with a friend on-grid, safety logoff is 30 seconds, quit or ctrl d is 60 seconds probe able.
My main reason to not log off inside POS is to not be at a very easy spot to see plus my cloak stays on the second I activate it. My deep safe I have for emergencies but I never ever log out inside Pos if I can help it.
From my time as hunting ppl, the ones login on inside pos you always get the pilot name IF you monitor the pos, ppl like me and Penny at best you see our ship name and type flash on d-scan and you never see who we are without us letting you.