Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

Nothing real notable about this one but the T2 cargo expanders in the lowslots, and that doesn’t mean what it used to:

2010.07.08 23:53:00

Victim: Vordi
Corp: Science and Trade Institute
Alliance: Unknown
Faction: Unknown
Destroyed: Osprey
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7
Damage Taken: 6897

Involved parties:

Name: Marlenus (laid the final blow)
Security: 1.3
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Crane
Weapon: Havoc Fury Heavy Missile
Damage Done: 6646

Name: Guristas Imputor / Guristas
Damage Done: 251

Destroyed items:

Rich Plagioclase, Qty: 691 (Cargo)
Expanded Cargohold II
Tungsten Charge S, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Small Shield Booster I
Sabretooth Light Missile, Qty: 23
Small Capacitor Booster I
Mining Drone I, Qty: 2 (Drone Bay)
Small Energy Neutralizer I (Cargo)

Dropped items:

Expanded Cargohold II, Qty: 2
Miner I, Qty: 3
1MN Afterburner I
Assault Missile Launcher I
Mining Drone I, Qty: 2 (Drone Bay)

I’ll say this for him. It took a while, and he did not blubber.

It’s important to remember: even a newb can be careful/paranoid.

Today I encountered one Monrew, member of Galactic Exporters [GAL-X], jet-can mining in an Osprey in Kaimon. I flipped quite a lot of Azure Plagioclase into an Ironfleet can.

Fellow did not want to fight, warped prudently away.

I took what I could carry, resumed my tour of the belts.

Finished my tour of the belts, returned to my can.

Found him there, in a Badger II, on a vector for my can. Awesome!

I locked him up and started “racing” for the can.

He grabbed the contents, started flashing red. I turned on my warp disruptor, started lobbing heavy missiles. They were hitting for 300+ each. I thought I had a kill.

Then he warped away. Sneaky bugger was stabbed!

Good job, Monrew. You can never be too careful.

Remember the Osprey pilot from the other day who contributed two of the six GSCs I yoinked?

Well, his name is Schwen. Apparently he and his buddy still haven’t figured out what makes a giant secure container “secure”.

Found him today Osprey-mining into a total of eight unanchored GSCs, of which six were full. One quick visit in my trusty Bustard later…well, as they used to say on Dr. Katz, you know what the music means.

Twice today, twice I tell you, I’ve gotten faction spawns in .7 belts.

The first time I’d annoyed a mining Osprey until he warped off, then was waiting for him to return. Instead, a Dread Gurista Arrogator frigate spawned. I engaged it with heavy missile in my Crane, a slow process, when a newbie ratting in a caracal showed up. He started shooting too, but not in time. Kaboom, my wreck.

But, uh, he’s closer to it than me. Does he know it’s worth a quick scoot-n-scoop?

Apparently not — I crawled to the wreck and was rewarded with ammo, tag, a Dread Gurista small shield booster, and a DG invul. Nice!

[Updated insert: ZOMG, I am an idiot. I looked at the Dread Gurista Invulnerability Field, noted the stats were the same as Caldari Navy, and did a quick contracts check that I must have flailed somehow. Because I failed to discover that it's a freaking 400 million ISK piece of loot! "Nice" doesn't even begin to cover it ... this is the single best item of loot in my Eve career to date.]

Then, a bit later, in another .7 system, I noticed a Hulk wreck and was going to check it out when an unlooted Dread Gurista wreck nearby caught my eye. Went to check it out and you could have knocked me over with a feather:

In all my eve career, that’s the first time I’ve ever seen a ship blueprint drop of any kind. And it was just laying there in space, waiting to be salvaged!

I love my job.

Marlenus here. Jim Bridger finally shamed me into logging on.

After his recent battle Mammoth fun, I thought about setting up a classic BattleBadger. But, truth to tell, I don’t have Jim’s skill in small weapons. So I decided to stick with one of my old trusty combat Cranes.

Out to the belts. Second belt I checked, there’s a Retriever and an Osprey mining into a cluster of Giant Secure Cans. And by cluster, I mean six of them … a tight cluster, without the minimum 5 kilometer separation needed for anchoring.

Sadly, ever since they redesigned the graphics for the cans, my broken color vision makes it impossible for me to see whether a Giant Secure Can is anchored or not. There used to be a red nav light on anchored cans and a green one on unanchored ones, hard to see but distinguisable. In the redesign, they took this off, or made the shading more subtle, I’m not sure which … but now, the only way I can tell if a can is scoopable is to see it too near another can.

This cluster: too obvious to miss.

So, back I went for the big rigged bustard. Warp to the cluster of cans, silently scoop them. As my old friends in Suddenly Ninjas would have said: YOINK!

There was no sign that anybody noticed, so I docked.

Judging by the names, four of the cans “belonged” to the Retriever pilot, two of them “belonged” to the Osprey pilot. Between the six cans, there were four full cans-worth of Azure Plagioclase.

Then I went to lunch. When I came back, I had the following Notification in my mailbox:

Your contact level has been modified
From: Goa’ul Ra
Sent: 2010.06.22 17:57

Goa’ul Ra has changed your contact level to Terrible Standing

u mother f***ker i will get u

Charmed, I’m sure.

Remember, boys and girls, a Giant Secure Can is only secure when it has been anchored. That is all!

So. Yesterday. Your trusty correspondent Jim Bridger is still stuck in high sec waiting for a jump clone timer. Can flipping in an armed destroyer is a little too … obvious and is not passing the time. I’m remembering how much fun Marlenus used to have in the combat Cranes, but I can’t fly a Crane, and I don’t have a Prowler available inside of thirty jumps. I check the market, but they’re more than sixty million, and this 0.0 PvP stuff has left me skint.

Obviously, there’s nothing for it but to step next door into Jita and set up a nice cheap battle Mammoth.

A short fitting flurry later, the Pissed Pachyderm is patrolling the belts. What’s this? A Retriever mining barge, jet can out, flying a single Hornet I drone? Surely that’s got to be bait, right?

Quick check, the pilot has a corp, only one other pilot in the corp, not in system. He’s on his own.

Motor motor motor. Battle Mammoth is not speedy. Motor motor motor. Can is getting closer.

Pass my time investigating the pilot, one Xhaine. He’s a… what? Ohshit noshit, he’s a freakin’ 2003 character? I smell herring and buttfuckery.

But if I chicken out and shy away from this juiciest of battle Mammoth targets, I might as well put the ship away. Plus, here’s the can, and it’s mostly full of the juiciest veldspar. Take what I can put in the Mammoth, flip the rest. It’s my way.

He’s locking me. The Retriever is locking me. I start locking him back, waiting nervously for four Warrior IIs or some sort of long-forgotten unobtainium GM’s-handed-them-out-as-loot-in-some-2004-event Drones-O-Death to launch and start nibbling my kidneys.

He’s locked. Still just one Hornet on me. He’s webbed, he’s pointed, and I am autocannoning him about the head and shoulders.

Faster than you’d think, he pops. No surprises, no tricks. Just kaboomage. Turns out he didn’t even have a fitting on the barge, just two strip miners and four mining drones he wasn’t using:

2010.06.21 02:11

Victim: Xhaine
Corp: Internet Gods Inc.
Alliance: None
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Retriever
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7
Damage Taken: 2241

Involved parties:

Name: Jim Bridger (laid the final blow)
Security: 5.0
Corp: Steel Fleet
Alliance: Important Internet Spaceship League
Faction: NONE
Ship: Mammoth
Weapon: 200mm AutoCannon II
Damage Done: 2089

Name: Thorn Rocket / Guristas
Damage Done: 152

Destroyed items:

Dense Veldspar, Qty: 16953 (Cargo)
Mining Drone I (Drone Bay)

Dropped items:

Strip Miner I, Qty: 2
Mining Drone I, Qty: 3 (Drone Bay)

If I’ve ever shot at an ’03 character before, I don’t know it. And I still can’t quite figure this guy. A seven-year-old mining alt would be in a better barge, surely? Even a purchased character shouldn’t be that broke — anybody with the billions to make the buy would have some more isk available for the purchased character, right? Just can’t figure out how anybody could be simultaneously that old, that broke, and that clueless.

But it was a great first outing for the Pissed Pachyderm!

Got a double-deep-space message beacon from Jim Bridger late last night, flash priority. Signal quality was so bad, I thing the message drone must have had a hell of a trip before it ever got withing range of a Concord beacon.

Bottom line sounds like Jim’s deep in a wormhole complex, staring at an offline tower surrounded by most of a deathstar’s armaments, just sittin’ there waiting for an adventurous salvage corp to come along. I’m supposed to round up some battleships and haulers (and shovels and rakes and implements of destruction) and be ready to haul ass halfway across the known universe, when-and-if Jim finds some deeply-implausible chain of wormholes that doesn’t lead back to the ass-end of Syndicate where he started.

I called up the Empress of Greater Mars (you remember her? She’s the lady who managed the logistics for my one long sojourn into wormhole space) and she’s game. She’s standing by with the wormhole-fit laser battleship and an impressive array of hauler minions.

So now we wait. Updates as events warrant.

Update, a day later: The wormholes were not friendly; there’s currently no good route for the ships needed to get in there, and the mods to be salvaged aren’t worth using a bad route. So I parked a probing minion in there to wait for better wormhole conjunctions.

On a brighter note, while exploring wormhole chains I found a very-badly-defended (but alive and shields up) small tower with an Orca parked inside the shields. That’s more than Ironfleet can handle, so I passed the intel along to TEARS, in hopes that some of the merry thugs in that fine organization may be able to put together the small expedition required to liberate that Orca.

Dear Marlenus. What a time I’ve had! After tonight’s adventure, I knew you’d want another postcard.

I remember fondly the Ironfleet forays into the wormholes with The Empress and on TEARS ops. But, since I’ve been down in 0.0, I just haven’t seen very many wormholes at all. And the few I have found, didn’t lead to anywhere interesting.

Until tonight. One jump out of my “home” in 0.0, I found a wormhole leading into unknown space. As I was in a covert ops ship, I jumped on in and warped around a bit, checking for locals on my directional scanner.

It quickly developed that the system contained one armed POS and had two ships in space — a Retriever mining barge flying T1 mining drones, and a hauler. So I went to a distant location, uncloaked, dropped combat probes, recloaked, positioned the probes very carefully, and did my best “speedy probe” evolution. Just as soon as I had a warp-in on the mining barge, I pulled the combat probes back in, then warped at 100 to see what was what.

And there they were, merrily mining Arkanor from the Retriever into the hauler, via a transfer jet can. There was *nobody* else visible on directional scan, but of course there might be other cloakers like myself.

So, back “home” I went (2 jumps) for a combat ship. Normally I would have recruited some other guys from the alliance, but everybody else in local was vigorously engaged in a long-running and futile-seeming effort to bait and trap a cloaky Vagabond that’s been hanging out in “our” system. So, I didn’t want to try and pull them away for a wormhole mission that won’t advance our local military interests.

Instead, I decided to jump in my trusty Sabre light interdictor, which I’ve trained on for years but never actually flown much. (I did lose one shortly after getting to 0.0, in the process of which learning that I don’t know how to use them properly in fleets. So, my other two have been gathering hangar dust.)

My reasoning is that I could hit the wormhole, warp directly to the barge/hauler pair, pop a bubble, and with a bit of luck maybe even get two kills. And (I hoped) if I could pod the hauler pilot clear out of the wormhole, I might even get a chance to sneak back in later and salvage some of the yummy Arkanor they were mining.

Like any military plan, it did not survive contact with the enemy intact. Here’s how it actually went down:

I hit the worm hole and warped right to my Retriever bookmark. Unfortunately, he must have been alert (or lucky) with his d-scanning, because by the time I got there, the Retriever was gone. (I know he left in a hurry because his mining drones were still there.) So, I popped the bubble and engaged the hauler.

Weird, it’s some Amarr hauler I’ve never seen before. Impel? Which one is the Impel?

And right about then I noticed, this Impel is isn’t dying as fast as I’d hoped. In fact, it’s pretty crunchy. Did I really catch me a Transport?

Turns out, I did, a genuine no-shit Deep Space Transport kill:

2009.09.12 02:18:00

Victim: Hauling Styx
Corp: Division of Dying Stars
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Impel
System: J151516
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 6441

Involved parties:

Name: Jim Bridger (laid the final blow)
Security: 2.0
Corp: Steel Fleet
Alliance: Ocularis Inferno
Faction: NONE
Ship: Sabre
Weapon: 250mm Light ‘Scout’ Artillery I
Damage Done: 6441

Destroyed items:

Medium Cargohold Optimization I, Qty: 2
Expanded Cargohold II, Qty: 5

Dropped items:

Expanded Cargohold II, Qty: 2
Arkonor, Qty: 1503 (Cargo)

He died well. No bribe attempts or blubbering. But of course, I had to pod him anyway, just in case he had a spare hauler lurking in that POS:

2009.09.12 02:20:00

Victim: Hauling Styx
Corp: Division of Dying Stars
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Capsule
System: J151516
Security: 0.0
Damage Taken: 407

Involved parties:

Name: Jim Bridger (laid the final blow)
Security: 2.0
Corp: Steel Fleet
Alliance: Ocularis Inferno
Faction: NONE
Ship: Sabre
Weapon: 250mm Light ‘Scout’ Artillery I
Damage Done: 407

So then I spent the next little while chortling as I hauled 1504 units of Arkanor (3 trips in my Prowler blockade runner) home to my hangar. (With my refine skills at the local station that’s roughly 2000 Megacyte and 1000 Zydrine — quality salvaging in anybody’s book!) The Retriever pilot was briefly on scan in a Heron, but I never encountered him again.

Wish you were here!

So, late last night the hyperspace telephone rang. “Marlenus, this is Jim. Sorry I’ve been too busy to write! No, I’m doing good. Hey, can you do me a favor? Can you bring me a Prowler full of Nitrogen Oxides? No, no, just part way, you don’t even have to leave high sec. Just twenty jumps, yeah, I’ll meet you there, I know a guy with a covert jump bridge who is taking me the rest of the way. When? Well, he’s waiting now, how quick can you get going?”

It turns out he and his boys have been using bombers to drive ice miners out of the ice belts, then going in and scooping the mined ice in blockade runners. The scooping part, of course, was Jim’s idea. Talk about “in the best traditions of Ironfleet!” How could I refuse?

I couldn’t. Not even when he said “…oh, and by the way, would you pick me up a couple of bomb blueprints on your way? We’re running short down here, but we’ve got minerals coming out our ears from all the hauler spawns and rat loot.” 180M ISK, Jim? Sure, no problem. You can owe me.

I’m glad he’s having fun down there…

Dear Marlenus –

Still having a great time in 0.0. Since my last postcard, I’ve lost a covert ops ship and a couple more frigates, gotten podded once, and been in some fun (if usually inconclusive) fleet fights.

My Steel Fleet brethren, though, are strange bunch. They think nothing of losing two or three battleships a night in pursuit of mayhem — at which, they excel — but they shrink and quail from flying a 300,000 ISK hauler two jumps through 0.0 to clean up a mineral spawn. Today I was snooping around two jumps from our home system when I found a hauler spawn, three cruiser-sized haulers guarded by four cruiser-sized rats. When I announced this find in fleet coms, I was astonished to hear “naw, that’s too far.” Two jumps! In further discussion, these intrepid warriors explained that the two (then completely empty) systems were too dangerous for a hauler, we’d need to set up a fleet and get scouts out, and it wasn’t enough minerals to be worth the trouble.

Needless to say, my years in Ironfleet have trained me to view the world in a different way. “Well, then,” said the little red hen, “I shall simply eat it myself.”

I went back in a Rifter and killed all the rats. (If anybody had told me you could rat in a Rifter in 0.0, I’d have been out here long ago!) Got my first piece of truly excellent 0.0 loot when I did that — one of the hauler rats dropped a named mining laser upgrade (the “Elara” one) which is about a thirty million ISK module. Then I went back in my Mammoth for three loads of mixed tritanium and pyerite. In all this time and jumping, I never saw another soul in local. However, I was able to entertain myself by listening to the Steel Fleet boys on vent, who spent most of the same time sitting outside of “our” station, shooting each other and swapping insults.

All in all, a most productive afternoon!

– Jim