Ghosts and Sleepers
7th March 2014 – 5.41 pm'Heads up, new signature on scan.' I see we have a ghost site in our system, as Fin alerts me to a potential new wormhole. As my glorious leader already has probes out I keep myself hidden as she scans. 'Data site', we can relax, our system remains isolated. I would say that gives us a good opportunity to steal in to the ghost site and see what we can nab from the silly empire rats.
We both head to our tower to refit our Loki strategic cruisers to better survive the ghost site, swapping for explosive shield hardeners, and adding a relic analyser and cargo scanner. I brief Fin on what to expect in the site, so that we don't dilly-dally whilst the timer ticks down—as if I know what I'm doing. 'Okay, ready to go.'
I warp the pair of us in to the ghost site and lock on to all of the containers, scanning each in turn to look for the good loot. It's not here, it's just covert research tools in every can. Well, never mind, it's still worth something, I suppose. I point Fin towards one can and take my Loki towards another, and we start hacking.
Clickety-click, the pressure of the countdown of indeterminate length and the frustratingly arbitrary nature of node choice has the first can explode to my enthusiastic pace of not giving a shit. That's cool, and I move on to a second can, where I perform a little better and manage to access its contents. I grab a whopping ten million iskies of research goo moments before Angel rats come in to finish the exploding.
That wasn't particularly profitable, but at least it was profitable for us and not others, and both our ships survive the explosion and rat appearance. It was also a better-handled ghost site than the first, given that I actually scanned the containers to look for the good loot. Now it's back to the tower, revert our ships' fittings, and work out what to do next. We could open our static wormhole and go roaming, or we could clear the couple of good anomalies we have and make some real profit.
Anomalies it is. There's no guarantee of finding activity through our wormhole, and it is generally wise to make ISK when the opportunity is there. We swap boats instead of fittings this time, with my even offering the Golem marauder to Fin, but Fin's so polite she declines, preferring the mobility of the Tengu strategic cruiser, and lets me use it again. I stick to torpedoes too, just to be awkward. Let's see how well I can bounce around with the micro jump drive after a while of no practice.
In to the first anomaly and the lack of practice with the MJD shows. My first bounce, required to meet the second wave of Sleepers, is horrendous. Thankfully I have Fin to back me up, and I recover well for the third wave, partially redeeming myself. The anomaly is cleared otherwise smoothly. In to the second and it's all coming back to me. The first jump forwards, to get in to range of the first wave, sends me crashing in to a structure, but after that my use of the MJD is almost impeccable.
My beautiful manoeuvring and Fin's agility in the Tengu gets the second anomaly cleared in no time, and that's the pair of decent sites completed in the home system. Time to sweep up. We have a Noctis salvager and site each, and between us we rake in about 180 Miskies, which is somewhat better than the ghost site. One day, though, we'll find something important in one of those sites, and we'll strike it rich.
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