Last night, late, the starmap showed a vast quiet all the way up the very long Querious pipe I traveled to get to Delve. So, I decided to head for Empire. Like my previous trip to 0.0, this one was interesting and exciting and mostly profitless; the compromises needed for solo safety are fairly solidly designed, I’d say, to prevent much chance of enrichment.
The trip home was almost uneventful, though I did meet two gentlemen in Vagabonds camping my exit gate in a system I was passing through. They chased me through the gate but did not catch me on the other side, then raced ahead to try again at the next gate. I decided to take a little break and catch up on my personal hygiene. They were long gone by the time I came back to my keyboard.
I must admit, though, that I’m intrigued by the wealth that’s sitting unmolested in empty 0.0 systems, one after the other, as far as a wandering salvager can see. I’ve read about people ratting in cloakable ships, who merely sit patiently under cloak when enemies are in the system. The idea has some merit, but to do it all in one ship (ratting, looting, salvaging, getting the loot home in decent quantities) sounds very difficult. And it would also be difficult (not impossible, just difficult, maybe taking multiple tries) to get an unescorted battleship into position.
I find myself musing, however, about how much fun it would be if one could magically arrive in 0.0 in an Orca. Imagine if one had an alt (no great imaginative leap) who had an Orca stuffed to the gills with useful ships (a Cerberus, say, or even some Caracals fitted to kill rats from extreme range with heavy missiles; a basilisk fitted as a buffer-tanked salvage cruiser with tractors and salvagers; maybe a Prowler full of missiles in the ship maintenance bay; a covert ops frigate or six; that kind of stuff.) If you in whatever ship and your alt in said Orca were transported by some miraculous means (imagine if a wormhole opened in the fabric of spacetime and sucked you through) to a quiet 0.0 system, you could rat in peace for weeks at a time. The Orca would cloak when logged in, but be logged out most of the time for safety; you could rat (hiding patiently when visitors arrived) and salvage and work out of a constellation of anchored giant secure cans, logging in the Orca infrequently to service the cans, collect the loot, and replenish any ammo or lost ships.
The only flaw I see is that eventually you’d want to get the Orca home again. But — and this is key — at current market prices, you can *insure* the bloody thing for a hundred and twenty million ISK, and get back a hefty fraction of its purchase price on ship loss. So it’s not inconceivable that you could eventually lose the Orca (perhaps while following more rifts in the fabric of spacetime hoping for another miracle) and still profit, especially if you first sent your loots home by normal routes in the cargo hold of a careful Prowler pilot.
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February 10th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
You’ve done a decent job describing my dream EVE experience.
February 10th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
I simultaneously love and hate the Orca – it taunts you with just such possibilities and yet it just doesn’t quite work logistically. Eve Online should have some kind of logistics badge or skill or something. There should be some recognition for all the moving stuff about we all have to do.
Have you ever looked into Black Ops ships? I would have thought they’d be right up your street – particularly with their magic jumpdrives. Perhaps a tad flimsy though.
I do love your idea though, I think the Orca will make the best wormhole exploration ship – just as long as the mass limits aren’t too tight!
February 10th, 2009 at 11:31 pm
Malphas, to be honest I have considerable interest in the Black Ops battleships, but I don’t have the skills to fly them, nor will for a long time. More importantly, if they are as expensive as I’ve heard, I can’t afford them; I could probably beg, borrow, and steal enough ISK to obtain one, but at that point I couldn’t afford to use it. The appeal of my Orca plan — if only I could get it where I want it, which it sounds like might be theoretically possible once the wormholes get here, but not very likely in practice — is that the expensive asset is always (a) logged out; (b) under cloak, or (c) uncloaked in a system that has no hostiles in local.