Day 65 : The Sting

It’s hot out again. Two days in a row. I’m going to stay in anyway, avoid the sun and play EVE. I don’t care, the heat has fried my brain. Perhaps I can get a sun tan by flying down to the nearest star and then just pressing my face up against the monitor? I'm joking of course, but I do realise I've never gone down to the sun. I fire up the Grey Area and undock, heading down to the local bright blue sun. It’s nice to find it isn’t just some static glowing ball, there is a nice animated corona. I've been meaning to have a trip around and spend some time just having a look at the scenery since I found a mining spot with a large Storm planet in the background. Not only did the storms have their own flashes of lightning scattered across the face of the planet, but the atmosphere was animated. Swirling, oily patterns shifted across the face of the planet all the time I was watching. It was like mining under a particularly good lava lamp.

I spend some time looking at exploration skills after hearing the tales of Tengu Dude from yesterday. He didn’t want his name revealed so he has become “Tengu Dude” in my head to prevent me making an awful mistake and revealing his (or her) identity.

The skill queue has kicked into the final level of Small Hybrid Turret and I’d like to get that and at least a few levels in the later specialisations it will open up. As ever I'm tempted to slot just one more skill in before it. I’ve been down this route with industry skills, it starts with an 18 hour skill and ends up being two weeks of chained and related skills. I resist the temptation, there is a first time for everything.

My willpower in resisting the change is seated in a desire to go back to low sec again. The gunnery skills aren’t for PVP, they are for the rats. I’m still nowhere near ready to face off against skilled low sec roamers, but I’m getting skilled enough to get away if they turn up. I’ve also used yesterdays mining to quash the “implant loss phobia” that I think has been holding me back. I’ve a second set ready to go now, all bought at the lowest prices I could find. Hurray for (do)dixie!

I never get the chance to go for a wander. As I'm sorting things out Rob logs on. I’d been a bit worried that he’d lost the EVE bug having seen him so little lately, and he is in a different Time Zone than the rest of us in the corp. Fortunately I think we’ll be getting a new recruit in soon, another Aussie.

We get talking about scanning. He has higher skills in this than me, being slightly older and less prone to random decisions than I. When he has to log off suddenly due to a real life situation I decide I’m going to practice some scanning instead of going down to low sec. I have the dedicated attention span of a lobotomised goldfish. I’m going to scan down some of the suspected POS I was interested in that I saw on Dscan the other day.  This is an idiotic waste of time but I don’t find out till later. It was still useful scanning practice. Scanning is tricky. You need to manipulate 4 or more probes in a three dimensional space represented on a two dimensional screen. After the third time of finding out that one of the probes was miles away from where I thought I’d put it, the screen nearly had a three dimensional fist shaped hole in it.

Finally I get a 100% signature. I drop the ship off, drag out Slider and warp to the bookmarked location. It is now that I recall that I read that POS have to be anchored at moons. If I wanted to look at them I could have just set the Overview to give me a list of moons and then visited them one by one. Instead I spent ten minutes shouting at *********ing probes.

The first POS is a solitary tower. A Gallente Control Tower. There is nothing else around it , I was expecting more. I nudge closer. Nothing happens. Screw it, I fire the Microwarp drive and race down to it. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, absolutely bugger all happens. There doesn’t seem to be anyone home. I have a good look at the place but there isn't much to do. Next moon.

The second moon has more interesting stuff in place. There is a swarm of gear anchored around it, guns and labs and all kinds of other things that it is tempting to attempt to creep up to and have a look at. There are quite a few guns in place though and I don’t know the rules governing trespass. Would the guns open fire? Would the station then be fodder for the police or would I have been deemed fair game by my actions? In any case the entire place is surrounded by a forcefield. Well, either that or they went into soap manufacturing and had a water leak. It’s a huge flexing bubble containing everything but a few of the guns. I’ve got more moons to visit but maybe I’ll come back and get a bit nosier later.

At the third moon I don’t see anything resembling what I think a POS should look like. I do see a box. A box with the word “unanchored” next to it. Unanchored? I recall that anchoring my mining cans was important or someone could just turn up and steal them. Does that mean I can just grab this? I’d need a bigger ship. Hang on, this has to be a scam. It has to be some kind of honey trap for unwary noobs. I go near this, something horrible drops it’s cloaking device and pounds me into oblivion. Why do it with a POS though? Why not a can?

Sod it. I run back to station, jump into The Beast, and zoom back out to the moon. Still no one there. Right. Lets do this. At maximum I lose The Beast and my implants. All of which a replaceable. I scoop the thing into my cargo hold, all 8000 m3 of it. Still nothing happens. I warp back to station and well, nothing happens. I don’t start shaking till I pass the mouse over the thing and realise I may have just stolen something that is worth about the same amount as all the cash I have saved up. Potentially I’ve doubled my wealth at someone elses expense. I send out a mail to the corp warning them about what I've done, just in case someone comes looking. I bang out another mail to a fellow blogger I’ve come to know (making pals on the internet is handy!) asking his advice. It’ll be a while before I hear anything due to the time zone difference.

Calming down, I head back out in the Slider and begin touring the moons. I’m pretty sure this must be a one off situation but there is no harm in looking. There are quite a lot of moons with just one control tower anchored at them. They don’t have any other kit. It’s like someone went round claiming rights to the moons for future use. They have one less now. Tengu Dude drops into the system as I’m having another poke around. He can’t believe what I found either. He does have a useful distraction though. He sends me a bookmark to a mining site he found in a nearby system. Rob is now back on so we head over to check it out.

The site contains a lot of Kernite rocks but everything looks mined out. I haven’t much experience with these things so maybe the rocks are always low volume. Still, it gives me chance to grab some samples for the refining spreadsheet and keeps my mind off the theft of the century.

I spend the rest of the evening sorting through some mails and chatting with a few people. An alarming number of people have read the blog and said hi, mailed with tips, or even to say thanks for the read. So thanks to everyone who got in touch and said they liked it, thanks to the guy that contacted me and offered some good manufacturing tips for the future. Thanks to the guys in Tribal Band who offered to take me down into null sec. It’s a bit too soon for that, and being a Noob is a one shot experience so I’m not going to rush it. Tempting and humbling offer though. The amusingly named character “ps3ud0nym” from there who contacted me also left a metric ton of tips I need to look at. I’m already addicted to EFT and EVEMON but I’ll Iook into your other stuff.

So, a lot of contacts, EVE might be dark, wild and dangerous but it appears there are a lot of good people out there between the stars. One contact I don’t get is from the corp' who might be having a “One of Our POS is Missing” kind of day. I’m not going to name and shame them here. Yet. I’m going to have to have a good long think about what I do with the loot. I have no idea what I should do, but my brain has already started writing “Battlecruiser fund” across the side of it...

  Have you lost something?