Solo'd First Radar Site

Logged on last night to the lovely message that my system need to be loaded (indication no one had visited my wormhole yet since DT). Lost a grav site to despawn and had just the two unknowns of my static wormholes, so no work to do closing holes.

I started to finish off the last of the ABC roids from the Grav site I had worked the previous night when I got rudely interuppted by the crash.

Watch a little Jim Gaffigan and came back to see all was in order and back up and running in the Eve Universe.

Finished off the little bit remaining for the mining and decided to try and tackle the one Radar site. Setup t6he Abby for duel Large Armor Rep's, and twin Adaptive II's, had to scale back to only 5 guns to make the fit work, but definetly wanted to go defense over offense. Will need to add less demanding guns to shopping list for next trip to high sec.

Set up the Harbinger to throw drones and kill close in frigs and web cruisers.

Well not ideal setups but off I went. Really was surprised how easy the site started. First wave was all cruisers and the 1 BS in second wave never really got that hard. Fun started on the last wave with the dual BS spawn. Immediatly had to warp the Harbinger out as there was no way it was going to be able to tank dual Sleeper BS's. Got about 1/2 way through the first BS's armor and had to warp out the abby. I need to either be able tp throw drones farther or do more damage to get through a dual BS spawn without warping out.

On the second trip in, I just barely killed the first BS with about 8% armor left. With the dual repping I was easily able to tank the second BS alone. Finished the kills and got my hacking equipment.

Was quite surprised to find 2 of the 8 cans empty. Assume this is "normal" as I would expect the site to despawn if anyone had just warped in and tried to steal stuff quickly from the cans earlier.

Total net was about 20-25 datacores, and 12 chips. Estimated the haul at around 60-70 million, plus the 2 nanoribbons in the salvage. Total time was just under an hour, including the hacking and salvaging. Figure i can cut that time down with better setups.

Going to try the Mag site tonight if it is still there.

Fly Safe,
Mick

Settling In

Well seems I got my Holiday present from CCP, and I don't mean the new ship. I finally got not one but two High Sec openings into the system.

First was a small R943 in High Sec area of Black Rise. It had already had its mass reduced but not critically, so I jumped the Orca in with the small POS setup, closing the hole behind me (which was also just fine by me). Moved to moon of choice and offlined to wait for playing time to set up the POS.

After getting the initial POS and Corp hanger setup, I explored the static 2 and found another High Sec opening in the Amarr region, only 13 jumps from my High Sec base of operation. Well two Orca trips later I had 90% of my gear in the w-space and 2 weeks of fuel.

With the POS finally setup, I spent the first night running the anomalies down to just 1, in an effort to dissuade visitors from hanging out in my system. Been using a beam abby setup with a pulse Harbinger to handle the frigates and work as a webber on the cruisers so the abby can hit them easier. Seems to be working well, though still takes awhile to clear the sites.

Last night had a little RL extra time and got to play an extended 5 hour stretch. Took this time to mine 10k Ark roid, 15k Bistot, and most of a 20k Crokite roid. Nice haul when i get another opening to high sec to refine it.

Overall now getting settled in and avoiding landing on the grids of my two statics to keep the systems as closed as possible.

When I can get a chance to get the gear for my Pulse Abby, I will try a Radar or Mag site.

Fly Safe,
Mick

Last night

Orca is out, but still no way in.

With the Orca stuck on the wrong side of the collapse in Black Rise low sec, I decided that the best route to getting it "free" would be to scan down an entrance into w-space and move through w-space to a high sec opening, or change ships in mid stream and settle any decent Class 2 or 3 systems I could find.

First system was void of any signatures, but the second found an unstable Wormhole. Warped to 100km only to find several sentries around a K162 wormhole. Opened channel of communications and explained my situation and asked if they had a route back to High Sec. While they offered me "safe passage" they did not have a route to High Sec. Onwards to the next hole.

Three systems later found another K162, no sentry, but popped my head in to find a very active systems with numerous POS and ships on scan.

Couple more systems and Bingo, found a B449 wormhole, direct to high sec, and of course it was on verge of collapse so I had no more then a few hours to jump the Orca 4 jumps through the backwaters of Black Rise.

Using the magnate as a scout and waiting for systems to be empty I started my trex. First jump was easy between two systems where I was the only person in either. Second jump was to a system that had 1 guy in a station. During this jump I got a little excitement when some jumoped into the destination system, and 30 seconds later appeared at the gate. Orca was already in route. As the Orca came out of warp his Drake jumped through. We jumped together and if he saw me he did not care to turn around as I aligned and cloaked on the other side and he never jumped back through.

The real fun came on the next jump. Again waited till both systems were clear and started the Orca from the planet I was cloaked around towards the gate. As I approached three people popped into local. I jumped the Orca through, alligned to a planet and cloaked. Before I could fully alighn (man Orca's are slow), the three popped through the gate. Fortunetly none were close enough to uncloak me. As they flew off I breathed a sigh of relief. Too soon. Not 10 seconds later local exploded. I quickly lost count of the number of ships that were popping up all around me. There had to be atleast 30-40 ships coming through the gate. I can only assume they were chasing the first 3, but who knows. All I know is the closest any came to me was just over 5,000m. Way too close for comfort.

Once my heart stopped pounding and the gate was quiet for 30 seconds, I uncloaked and headed for a planet.

Fortunetly the last jump was uneventful, and while there was a scanning frigate at the Wormhole I paid it no mind as I jumped the Orca to High Sec and landed deep in Gallente space.

On the other front, two more D382's have passed without an opening to High Sec. The first was a system identical to mine with an A239 and D382 exits. The next D382 in that chain was very full and active. Last night found a very worked Class 2 system with only 3 sigs. Its two Wormholes and the one I created. As I saw no activity directional scan I warped to 0 at the first Wormhole and was greated by a manticore and a bomb for my efforts. While I could have jumped through, I did not have a backup scanner in the Wormhole, so i turned around and headed back to my K162 hole. I hailed in Local that I was looking for a way out. No response. I warped back to the B274 wormhole at 100km and saw the manticore before it cloaked. Fortunetly I was able to click the pilot info before it cloaked and found that 1) the wormhole was over 45 jumps from the Orca, and 2) they had it on the verge of collapse and were bringing in their own Orca to refuel their Class 4 POS. The other WH was a Class 1 hole that would not fit the Orca. Another night, no way to get the Orca in.

Here is hoping the next few nights brings some success.

Fly Safe,
Mick

Good News - Bad News

Well I decided this weekend that I was tired of looking for a High Sec opening to the Wormhole and that it was time to jump my small POS "forward post" into the hole so that I would at least have some base of operation larger then the Orca and could start to mine and run the anomolies without having to worry so much about visitors and safe spots.

The hole wqas 3 jumps off High Sec in the Black Rise area and I started to transfer up the small Caldari POS and ECM for the forward post i planned to set up till we could get a decent high sec opening for the Orca's and the large Amarr POS for the corp.

Well as is always the case, or so it seems, the route got hot right when we were ready to jump off high sec with the first of two trips we needed to run to the hole. The route had been quiet all night, but once we were ready we got a Pirate in a Drake bouncing around, as well as two small blobs who appeared to be looking for each other. In the end, we had a few brushes at "clear gates", with people warping in at the same time as us, but we got the two trips to and from the hole done and I now had my small POS setup in my Orca.

That's the good news.

Bad news is I learned the hard way that mass allocations most definetly are variable.

I have closed several holes so far and thought I had it down pretty well. Stranded a Abby once, but all the other times was fine with the Orca and Abby closing our wormholes. Seemed pretty easy, warp Orca through till it registers the first change in mass status. If the Orca is on the "wrong" side when this happens, then warp "in" and "out" one more time and start using the Abby. Note: all the holes I have closed so far are 2B lifetime holes (A239, B274, D382)

So I start to close the A239. Sure enough a few trips with the orca and the hole flipped to the "mass effected but not critical" message and Orca was on Low Sec side. Orca back and out again, and started jumping the abby. Got the "mass critical" with all three ships outside (including my magnate prober), same as every other time. Jumped the Abby back in and "bye bye hole". So there I sat with Orca and POS on the wrong side. First time ever that the Abby has closed a hole that had not shown critical in 2 jumps.

Well so here i sit now with an Orca and Magnate in Low Sec of Black Rise, and my abby (and offlined scanning alts) inside. Well I logged the Orca off and logged on a scanning toon on that account, and scanned the new A239 down. Found it 29 jumps from the low sec it was at (the farthest from my base yet). So I jumped the 29 jumps to get the magnate back into the hole (again since all the BM's for the system were in the Orca).

So the bottom line is what to do now.

First I know I need a smaller ship to make the last few jumps to bring the hole critical. The Abby is just over 5% of the WH mass and means I could get into this situation again if the mass is just over the 10% threshold of showing "Critical".

Second, I am at least thankful my POS is with the Orca. I have the ability now to jump systems in mid stream if I can get another entrance to W-space from a place near my Orca. I am not at all excited to try to runthe orca back to high sec, as it is not setup with either ecm or warp stabilizers and would be a sitting duck with its long align time.

So tonight I will reconnect the Magnate and Orca in hopes of finding a way back into w-space and either a new home, or back to high sec.

Fly Safe,
Mick

Waiting for POS opening

Well now we are waiting for an opening to bring in the POS. So far all the exits have been 19+ jumps from our POS hanger. Worst case is on Sunday we will start mass closing holes to find a suitable way in for the Orca's and POS.

In the mean time been running anomolies in both the home system and neighboring class 2 w-space. So far nothing near the haul of melted nanoribbons from he first night. Have had a couple of sessions cut short by a visiting Vagabond that did not want to leave us alone to our fun.

Still trying to get back to a station also to get mu CCP gift.

More to come as we work to establish our second w-space base.

Fly Safe,
Mick

Home Sweet Home

Well the A239 Wormhole is static, so we have found our new home.

Spent last night gathering the needed supplies and equipment for our new Amarr Control Tower. We are going with the Amarr for the shear power level it has to run either the Intensive Refining Array or the Reactor for hybrid components.

We are still short a few fuel pieces, but have most of what we need for the first month.

As for setup we went with a mix of ecm and lasers for defense.

At this point we are waiting to see if we get a good High Sec exit through our neighboring Class 2. If not in the next few days, we may attempt a Low Sec move if the Wormhole is close enough to our jump off.

As an aside, both neighboring Class 2's so far have had active POS's and High Sec exits, as well as very few sig's. Could bode poorly for potential to raid when our wormhole bottoms out. But we will cross that bridge when we come to it.

Fly Safe,
Mick

First Night

Just a quick report on the first night in the new wormhole.

The Wormhole D382 moved and this was very good news, as the static to a Class 2 was the more important of the two connections. The Low Sec Wormhole A239 had not yet moved on the initial scan, and at the end of the night I did not feel like scanningthe system down again to see if it was static. I will save that for tonight.

A quick scan of the neighboring Class 2 W-space yielded a High Sec exit that ended up being 7 jumps from my base of operations. I quickly rallied the Orca and fit it for a mobile base of operations, flipped my Abby and Harb setups for Wormhole running, twisted the arm of a corp mate and off we went to run some anomolies.

While it took most of my time to get the stuff jumped in, we did manage to get 3 anomolies run and probably netted close to 100M in salvage thanks to 16 Melted Nano's. With a Beam Abby, Pulse Harb, and Drake these sites went down pretty quick. The Beam Abby is probably the worst of the three ships for running Class 2 Anomolies, as there were only a few BS level ships. Will need to work on its setup for Class 2 anomolies. It really is setup more for Radar and Mag sites.

While my Corp Mate jumped back to our base of operations, I remained in the hole with the Abby, Harb and Orca (with scanning ships in the Orca).

Tonight, I will confirm if the A239 is static and continue to run some anomolies.

Fly Safe,
Mick

Possible Success

Well after a week of searching we might possibly have found a new wormhole to call home.

I offlined one of my scanning alts in the Class 4 Wormhole with a Class 2 connection. Knew it was static since it was the only one found during the scan the day before.

I scanned down the Wormhole and jumped through. As always seems the case when trying to find a way out, the system had like 20 signatures in it. Fortunely, I hit an unknown on like the 5th scan of the inner system (for whats its worth I try to quickly remove ladar and grav sigs in the inner system by moving a 2au cross pattern around the inner planets).

This lead to a low sec wormhole. Even better it was within 11 jumps of my main scanning character.

I jumped in my main and scanned downt he rest of the system. The last signature i scanned down was a wormhole to class 2. If this proves to be static then I think we have found a new home.

All told the system had 19 signatures. 2 radar, 2 mag, 5 grav, 4 wh, and 6 Ladar.

If the Class 2 Wormhole is static I will be jumping in my BC's, along with a throw away mammoth, tonight to start running the anomolies. From there the corp could have a POS up by the weekend.

Worst case the Class 2 is not static and we bring in more of a transient setup instead of the full blown Larege Amarr POS.

Fly Safe,
Mick

"Standard" Low Class Wormhole Configs

As I continue to scan w-space I am finding several "standard" WH configurations.

To be clear, I have not scanned more then a handful of anything other then High Sec systems to get into W-space. But I am finding a lot of "shallow" w-space systems, and a very flat class 4 systems.

The most common type of "system" is a class 2 with a high sec exit (wormhole B274) and a class 1 connection (wormhole Z647). Another is a Class 3 with a low sec static that is basically a one system "system".

I have found other configs but the majority are of these types of systems.

So to get deeper into w-space usually requires a Wormhole K162 to get in deeper.

Now the other observation is Class 4 is very very "flat", meaning that once into a class 4 the most comman static is a Wormhole X877. I have repeatedly run into 3-4 straight systems that are Class 4 to Class 4 connections.

On a good note, last night finally got my scanning alt into a 4 with a static 2. My concern here is if this is one of the few "down class" wormholes, I expect a lot of traffic.

I am moving my empire scanning efforts to low sec to see what i find there, since high sec scanning seems very limited in what you can find.

Fly Safe,
Mick

False Alarm

A disappointing weekend on the w-space front for sure.

Really got excited Friday night when I found a class 3 WH system with 3 outbound WH's in it. Low Sec, Class 3 and Class 4. Thought I might have really found something good. Knew it was unlikely that all three were static, but if any 2 f the 3 were then this was a good system. It had a local phenom so thought that might be what was keeping settlers from laying down a POS. Should have known that since it was unoccupied that it was a mirage.

Woke up Saturday and scanned the system down to find only the Low Sec exit was static. To add insult to injury, I spent the rest of the weekend trying to get my scanning alt back into deep WH space with no luck. On the other sacnning alt in the Class 4, I twice ran into very occupied class 5 and 6 space and was unable to find a route back to empire.

Oh well, that's life in Eve.

Fly Safe,
Mick

Venture Capital

Well the time has finally come to sit down and figure the costs of the venture out and decide both how to raise the necessary isk, as well as how to run the operations and distribute any profit.

First step was to sit down and decide on the POS setup. We settled on an Amarr Control Tower for the energy needs of running either a refining array or reactor. Spec'd out cost with all modules for the setup was $650M. Add a months worth of fuel at about $200M and the one month of POS and Fuel is $850M. Less then the $1B i had estimated.

The next step was to decide what to do with the ship needs. We could either go for a BYOS, but this seemed to be too loose and would require too many people trying to get in on th elimited space the Orca will have. We decided for the first 30 days we would settle on comman ships and have the corp own the ships, so that no one has to keep track of who owns what at the POS. Need a Raven for the night, get a Raven and hopefully return the Raven at the end of the night. Should reduce both the nuber of ships needed and the logistical nightmare of everyone trying to get stuff into the Wormhole.

So sat down and made a ship list. Hulks, Ravens, Abaddons, Scorps, Blackbirds, Buzzards, oh my. Turns out there were a lot of ships needed for all the various tasks of WH life. We will have to sit down and reevalutate the list, but initially it looks like we are in the range of $4.5B in ships and setups. Seems high, but heck the Orca is 500M by itself.

So bottom line is our little endevour is going to need over $5B worth of "stuff" to get off the ground and have a shot at making it through the first month.

Now the fun part. How to raise it and how to "pay back" those initial donors, but still allow for people to join and help and profit, even if they don't help the initial raising of the Venture Capital.

Fly Safe.

The Hunt is On

The hunt for our next wormhole home is on. Prefer to find a Class 2 or 3 with a static 2 or 3. I regret the fact the early on in our hunt for our first home I found a 2 with a static 2. It was unoccupied and unfortunetly I did not know the value of the statics at that point.

To help in the search I have created seperate toons on my accounts and spent the minimal training to get their skills high enough to fly a scanning frig, grav rigged, with Sisters probes. I trained Rangefinding to 2 and feel I have decent skills to quickly get through signals at least to pin down the types. Getting to 100% is a bit slower then my main scanning toon, but I can leave these "sub-toons" in WH systems and really dont care if they get popped as the most expensive thing they have are their 5 Sisters Probes. As of today, I have yet to lose any of these toons and have flown through numerous systems.

So far I have two of these toons in a class 4 with a static classs 4 that I am hoping will be our home when we get good at what we are doing. The other toons are traversing W-space looking for a suitable system.

At this point, I have seen a lot of systems groupings that have a class 2 with High Sec static and Class 1 static. These little systems groups do not allow for deeper penetration into W-space unless there happens to be a K162 from another system. So I have taken the tact of trying to get these scanning toons into higher class systems. I guess the ideal would be to get them into a class 4 with a static to a class 2 or 3. This would "guarantee" a class 2 or 3 a day to look at for a suitable home.

The most interesting hole to date I have stumbled accross was a Class 2 with a static 4. The system was packed with no less then 6 POS's and only had 3 sigs, all WH's. I asusme this was a serious staging area for running the static class 4. By far the most developed W-space system I have seen.

So our High Sec mining and industrial pursuits continue as we look for the next Worm Hole base.

Fly Safe.

Leaving Our First Home

We have effectively bottomed out our first hole, not that it was packed to begin with.

We moved in the Small POS when we found the Wh had 3 grav sites and direct connection to HS. Being our first endevour as a corp we thought that the High Sec static wormhole would be a good thing. Quite the opposite. While it did allow us to get out every day and refine our mins at 100%, it did also have the downside of attracting a lot of traffic.

The first three grav sites despawned and another one spawned. It lasted 3 days and we got another.

Yesterday, I logged in to find a fairly large contengent in our "home" and they were chewing through the last grav site, so decided it was time to pack up and look for a better wormhole to call home.

Figures the night we decide to pack we had a ton of activity on the High Sec Static. Fortunetly, we made a friend in a Legion who helped us guard the hole and we got everything out with no problem.

At this point we are building some stuff to sell to get what we need for our next trip including a reactor for gases, and a refinery so we dont need to open our outbound holes.

So now the search is on for a nice class 2 or 3 with a static 2 or 3 to call home.

Fly safe.

Background

I played Eve awhile back for about a year, ran with a good corp for PvE. After about 6 months I decided to see what else the game had to offer and split training between an Inventor/Indy main and fighting Alt I was borrowing from a corpmate taking a break from the game. At the height of my first run in Eve I was running a successful Indy Corp making T2 mods and bring in over 1B a month for the corp in profit.

However, RL changed rapidly with a job loss. At the same time the corpmate wanted to come back to the game, so I gave him his character back. I also gave my Invention character to my second in command at the corporation I was running. I left Eve to concentrate on RL issues.

Fast forward to this fall and I decided to get a trail account and see what was left of the old corps. As has a way of happening, they had all scattered to the winds. The T2 Corp had long been dissolved and my character no where to be found. My fighting friend is very inactive. Old corpmates had RL issues and also left game. I finally ran into a buddy from Sweden who told me I should check out the Wormholes in the expansion, and exploration. I told him h was nuts I didnt have time to sit around and watch a scanner probe for 5 minutes at a time looking for crap. Boy was I in for a surprise.

I could not believe the difference in exploration. It was insanely better then it was before Apoc and I was instantly hooked.

About the same time I ran into another friend the runs an Indy Corp and has for a very long time. He loaned me a drop in the bucket for him, but a fortune for a new character and I was hooked on Eve again. As a bonus, he flew an Orca about every night and allowed me to tag along. Man is mining a heck of a lot more fun and profitable with that baby along for the ride.

SO for the past month and half I have been trying to absorb all I can about Eve Wormholes. I have read and re-read ArcDragon's guide. I have spent hours asking many helpful people in chat rooms all I can, and I know there is still tons to learn. My toons are new, and I know my skills greatly lag my knowledge at this point but it is my goal to make a living in the Holes of Eve.

To date, I have lost a retriever in a my first Class 1 with a Grav belt. I have lost a few Hulks to stupidity in a Class 2. Nearly lost my Harbinger in a Class 2 Radar site (corpie lost a drake), and have mined more Ark, Bist and Crok then I ever imagined in our Class 2 home for the moment. All in all it has been great fun so far.

Right now I am days away from a Abby for my main and fighting alt, as well as days away from an Orca for my Indy Specialist. I have a couple of toons offlined in a Class 4 with a static Class 4 connection and await the days I have the skills to go there and meet my fate among Eve Wormhole space.