The Motherlode...

This blog is, at it's core, a learning resource for Eve pilots.You come here to read of, and laugh at my mistakes. In doing so you are (hopefully) less likely to make those same mistakes yourself. As you will come to see, I can make some seriously gross errors of both judgment and action. But nothing like this... nothing like this...

That thing that every corp hopes and prays for has recently happened to the corp that I am a lucky member of...

I live in a C5 wormhole with my corp. This particular C5 has a static C2 exit. Every day we scan it out and jump in to see who is home and if possible where the connection to high sec is. This is common, this is life in a C5. This particular C2, though, was anything but common.

Pilot A jumps into system and begins calling standard recon info.

Pilot A: "In system, wormhole is clear. Tower on scan, a few ships, industrials, no combat ships. Looks like an industrial corp. Lots of silos and assembly arrays on scan."

Pilot B also jumps into system to help speed up intel gathering, AND makes an excellent observation...

Pilot B: "uhhhh... Pilot A, do you see a force field on dscan?"

Pilot A: "hrm, no i don't. Going to track down the POS to take a look".

about two minutes later...

Pilot A: "Corp, you're not going to believe this, we have a fully loaded industrial POS with it's shields down!"

The heavens have smiled upon us this day...

At this point we kick off 'Operation Pinata Buster'. You see, it works like this; when the force fields go down, your POS modules are no longer protected. This means that other persons of ill repute can mosey on by and take pot shots at these modules. If one has the time and the firepower they can destroy your POS modules. When a POS module is destroyed, it jets it's contents into space. Meaning that if I can blow up your corporate hangar array, all of your belongings float into space where I can collect and sell them, thus the pinata reference. Anyways, such was the case with this particular POS. It was found with it's shields down and we wasted no time in tearing it to shreds and looting it. It took roughly six minutes to destroy 48 POS modules. When we were done, there were dozens and dozens of cargo containers littering the area. Now came Christmas, what did we get? After collecting all of the goodies, we ran all of the loot through a pricing engine against current average prices. It looks like or haul was worth roughly...


10 BILLION ISK!


o.0

Somebody got royally screwed today and, for once, it wasn't me. So what did we learn from this?

*Lesson Learned: Keep fuel in you tower, DUH! Not just keep fuel in your tower, but make sure that you have enough spare fuel to operate for a possibly extended period of time. In addition to this, do not wait until the last minute to go to the store and buy fuel. You never know when a K162 into dangerous unknown space might open up and the denizens therein may otherwise prevent you from leaving your POS. *

One of the first things you should have been wondering this whole time was 'Where is everybody?'. After combining the situational Intel that we collecting in the system and referencing data on the web we believe that the people who lived in this particular wormhole had been ganked a couple weeks earlier. It appears that they were all killed before they managed to bookmark the outside of their highsec connection. This means that once they awoke in high sec, they had no way to make it back into thier wormhole.

*Lesson Learned: I cannot stress this enough, if you are going to live in a wormhole, you MUST park an alt INSIDE the wormhole in a scanning ship, preferably at a safe point, not inside the POS. At a minimum this alt needs to know astrometrics I and needs to be fitted with a probe launcher and probes. It would also be a good idea to put this alt in a scanning frigate equipped with a prototype cloaking device (protocloak). If you do not have a protocloak equipped, you need to create a circuit of safe points that you can warp to (DO NOT USE CELESTIALS) while scanning so that you don't get nailed down by combat probes and killed.*

Once you factor in the market and contract prices of all of the blueprints and add them to the total item prices, we can probably assume that this haul likely exceeded 8 Billion ISK. It took us longer to collect and haul all of this stuff than it did to actually destroy all of the modules.

*Lesson Learned: Pay attention to your duties, even if they might seem menial and / or boring. This was probably the 500th wormhole that our two operators have jumped into and because they were paying attention to what they were doing, our corp gets an 8 billion isk payout.*

All in all, it was a good day to play Eve Online.

*Lesson Learned: Life is not fair. It probably took this corp months to build up all of this stuff at their POS, but it only took about 30 minutes for us to take it all away. Such is the way of the world in New Eden.*