Tuesday 21 August 2012

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?



18 comments:

  1. lol sometimes finders are keepers u know :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. Seriously loving this blog. So good to get a fresh perspective on things and reminds me why I play. Bravo good sir!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Chaunnay Solette21 August 2012 at 14:50

    Congratulations, you're a dead man.

    J/K. not mine, good find!

    ReplyDelete
  4. I think it is more intresting that you do NOT know the mechanics.
    Pulling the hiest and being in terror, being afraid of the pos guns...
    I miss those days.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Congrats on the pos! Definately finders keepers.
    You could perhaps set up a pos of your own at a moon, providing you have the reputation for it, and run your manufacture and research from there.

    Gharthak

    ReplyDelete
  6. Awesome grab!

    As far as pretty scenery, three great blogs to check out
    - EVE Travel (Mark726/@webspaceships) http://evetravel.wordpress.com/
    - To Boldly Go (Katia Sae/@katiasae) http://www.saganexplorations.net/
    - Interstellar Privateer (Rhavas/@EVE_Rhavas) http://interstellarprivateer.wordpress.com [Shameless plug]

    I recommend Plasma planets (should be able to find them anywhere) and Shattered planets (see more info on my blog, closest one to highsec is Seyllin I - be careful, lots of pirates).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I've read EVE Travel and thought it was great. Both you and him are in the followed blogs already! I have some catching up to do though. I'll take a look at To Boldly Go.

      The Tengu Dude recommended Seyllin, and the Titan at Luminaire that I'd somehow missed.

      Delete
    2. I actually was just going to mention Luminaire! It is for sure worth a visit. Of course there is always the EVE Gate as well which is worth a look. If you are really brave you can grab a cheap ship and head to 0.0 and see the mortal remains of Steve. Both the first titan ever built in New Eden, and the first ever destroyed. Humm.. what else. There are a few more sight seeing things. Seeing the cloud ring is something mind blowing. Even if you just head to Orvole and look in that direction it is amazing, flying through it is mind blowing.

      There are lots of cool places in EVE! If you want to try out 0.0 in a location which is a "freeport", try the HED system. It is Cribba's nul-sec base and is just off a high-sec system so you can head in and check things out. Because he has Freeported it, everyone is allowed to dock at the HED station unlike the majority of 0.0. Just be careful jumping in and use the MWD Trick to get out of gate camps.

      The MWD Trick: this is something ALL pilots should know and practice religiously. It is very simple. You fit a Microwarp of the appropriate size to your ship and a Prototype Cloaking Device II. When you arrive at the other side of the gate, you first ALIGN to your target and then hit the microwarp drive. Then, right after you hit that MWD, you hit the cloak. Then, wait for the MWD cycle to completed. It will automatically turn off at the end of the cycle due to the cloak. When it does, immediately uncloak and hit warp. You will instantly warp.

      This works as follows. You need to hit 75% of your base speed in order to warp. This is your "align time". When you hit your MWD after aligning, your speed shoots WAY up. Because the cycle always completes, it means that although your speed is reduced by the cloak, the max speed you reach will still be significantly greater than your max speed. When you uncloak after your MWD cycle complete, you will be going much faster than your max speed so the ship enters warp instantly. You can use this trick to get very large and slow ships into warp faster than their align times as well.

      Delete
    3. Went to Luminaire this evening. Nearly jumped out of my skin when I saw I'd warped into a cloud of red crosses! The EVE Gate has been on the list for a while, and thanks for the tip about HED - I'll take a look. I really need to keep a TODO list somewhere!

      Delete
    4. Ahhh...the Caldari Prime Titan... didja know you can kill the rats there for fun & profit if ya don't mind the Caldari security status hit... Ninja salvaging is also fuun and profitable there too, but ya gotta really be on yer game for that.

      (http://turamarths-evelife.blogspot.com/2011/08/fukbeans-banannaslippers-fire-fire-fire.html)

      Delete
    5. That, my friend, is a task for the far future! My Caldari status already took a large hit from running just level 1 and 2 missions. I got scared and learned Diplomacy to get it back above zero. Once I know where I need to go and be, things might be different....

      Delete
  7. Great stuff ... just blew a few hours reading through everything to catch up, while mining, with industry jobs running. I'm 6 years in but with a few years away so reading this is helping refresh all of the little things I had forgotten or skipped over the first time.

    One blog you might want to check out is the 0.0 Experiment. It hasn't been updated in years but I get the feeling that you might enjoy it.

    http://00experiment.blogspot.com/

    ReplyDelete
  8. Spent all day at work reading from day 1. Great stuff.

    Take a look at exploration in low sec. The competition for sites is lower. You can find many back water systems with no one in them. The rewards can be incredible.

    As far as low sec goes you are generally better off in systems that don't border high sec. The deeper into low sec you get the fewer pirates you run into generally.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cheers! The current plan is : stop swearing all the time when scanning. Learn to pilot Covert Ops ship. Try low sec sites. When I'll master the ability to focus on one aim with the skill queue is another matter.

      Delete
    2. The Tengu Dude :)22 August 2012 at 21:50

      Finding sites in lowsec is easy enough. Actually running them (combat sites) can however be challenging. I'd say stay out until you have a setup that can run level 4 missions.

      Delete
  9. In case you are unaware, a cluster of probes can be moved simultaneously in a couple of ways. One moves them all in one direction together, another way moves them in or out of a common centre. Both methods allow for quick and efficient increments to be made when resolving signatures.

    I've written a fairly comprehensive guide to basic scanning techniques that may help.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Another read for the TODO list! Thanks for the tip! At some point, probably in a post full of expletives, I'll let people know how I get on. ;)

      Delete
  10. Another tip regarding Scanning. Stay in .8 and below to get good sites, just finished a 3hr session of scanning and raked home about 490mil after loot is sold (and that is if i just right click sell. Not setting up contracts/sell order)
    Granted you might have a little bit of difficulties with Complexes but you would be able to work wonders on Radar sites (still a very good payout with chance for BPs IIRC)

    Give me a hollar in game if you wanna go for some scanning / want help with a DED Complex or something :)
    - Zzzzleepyhead

    ReplyDelete