There’s a young Ironfleet member named Dingo Indere (I think he might be some sort of distaff cousin of Jim Bridger’s) whose only joy in EVE is to mine for gas in a Badger II. AFK. In w-space.
There’s a certain Leroy Jenkins logic to the whole thing. He’s got 900k skill points, he flies a Badger II that costs what, 200k ISK? And he loads it up with modules that reduce his scannable signature down to the size of a frigate. A new clone costs him forty thousand ISK when he gets podded. And even at the current low prices, every gas cloud is worth millions of ISK, for close to zero effort.
He’s had great success, too; I think he’s cleared at least half a dozen Ladar sites without ever encountering hostile action.
Usually, though, he mines late at night, in the quiet hours before the server goes down. Today he tried it bright and early on a Friday morning, which is not quite so quiet. Thus, when I logged in, I had this in my corporate losses window:
2009.05.08 18:09:00
Victim: Dingo Indere
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Badger Mark II
System: J235321
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 2505Involved parties:
Name: The Grum (laid the final blow)
Security: -1.3
Corp: Apocalypse Enterprises
Alliance: Chain of Chaos
Faction: NONE
Ship: Vagabond
Weapon: 220mm Vulcan AutoCannon II
Damage Done: 2505Destroyed items:
Warded Gravimetric Backup Cluster I, Qty: 2
Gravimetric Positional ECCM Sensor System I, Qty: 3
Gas Cloud Harvester I
Fullerite-C50, Qty: 1500 (Cargo)
Core Scanner Probe I, Qty: 20 (Cargo)
‘Dactyl’ Type-E Asteroid AnalyzerDropped items:
Warded Gravimetric Backup Cluster I
Deep Space Scanner Probe I, Qty: 3 (Cargo)
Gravimetric Positional ECCM Sensor System I, Qty: 2
Expanded Probe Launcher I
Combat Scanner Probe I, Qty: 10 (Cargo)
Deep Space Scanner Probe I, Qty: 52009.05.08 18:10:00
Victim: Dingo Indere
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Capsule
System: J235321
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 320Involved parties:
Name: The Grum (laid the final blow)
Security: -1.3
Corp: Apocalypse Enterprises
Alliance: Chain of Chaos
Faction: NONE
Ship: Vagabond
Weapon: Hobgoblin I
Damage Done: 320
He says it tickled a bit, getting podded; but was, overall, more fun than the week he spent as the designated target drone when The Empress Of Greater Mars was learning how to shoot her POS guns.
By now he’s probably right back out there in another Badger, harvesting 10 units of gas per minute and watching those foul Amarr slave-porn holoreels on his pod viewer.
Entries (RSS)
May 8th, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Hey if he’s got protection then I also think this is a way of mining :)
May 8th, 2009 at 4:30 pm
But what modules decrease signature?*
May 8th, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Gas mining = Win
AFK gas mining in wormholes = Uber Win
Tell your corpie he is a winner. :)
BTW- I would also like to know which of his modules was decreasing his signature.
May 9th, 2009 at 8:51 am
The “signal strength” of a scan target is defined by a ratio of the target’s sig radius (which cannot be reduced by modules so far as I know) and it’s sensor strength (which is affected by active ECCM modules in the midslots and by backup arrays in the lowslots).
It’s unclear to me how much help this provides, to be honest. Highly skilled and well equipped probers can scan down a frigate-sized signal almost as quickly as they can scan down an unaltered industrial. However, if you have some goober in a battlecruiser who has shoehorned an unbonused probe launcher into his fit, it might help a little bit.
May 9th, 2009 at 12:43 pm
Ah thanks for the tip!
May 9th, 2009 at 11:25 pm
I can’t believe someone had to ask that question when the killmail said it all already.
May 10th, 2009 at 9:58 am
I think it was more a confusion between sig radius and scan signature; they could see the modules in the killmail, but they didn’t see any (because there aren’t any) that reduce sig radius, so they didn’t understand what I was talking about.
May 11th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
Not sure if quotes work here, but as someone who has scanned down frigates quite a bit..
It actually makes quite a big difference. Keep in mind that my scanning boat is relatively pimped. All of my scanning skills are at IV, covert ops at V…I use faction probes and a faction launcher, and 2x rigs on my scanning Cheetah.
Scanning down that Buzzard we found in w-space, I had to set .5 AU probes, and even then it required putting the probes very close together. Contrast that with, say, Marauders (Huge sig radius + small sensor strength), which I can find easily with 8 AU probes. BCs I can usually find with 2 AU probes.
May 11th, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Awesome, that’s good to know. It matches my experience, but I haven’t scanned down very many frigates so I wasn’t sure.