Enduring Punishment

Oh no, I've not forgotten!

The nearly one-year hiatus of this blog is but a minor consequence of finding so many other things in this game to do.  Today, however, I decided to dust off the ol' catalyst and get back to work.

On the hunt for some juicy stationary targets, we could across a young Retriever.  The guy's gotta learn some time that this game is rough.  The crew took flight, and the Retriever was toast:

 Not exactly the most glamorous of targets, that's for sure.

So....the hunt continued.

This particular system also happens to have an ice belt, which popped shortly after snagging the Retriever.  Ice belts are often times good hunting grounds, as sometimes you can find covetors!  Easy peasy.

No covetors here though.  There were 5 skiffs, a providence, and then a....ooooh, an Occator!  This might be fun!

We loaded up and shipped out.  Only to fall flat on our faces.  Apparently this guy likes to tank his industrial's!  How rude! 

Well, ya win some and ya lose some.  But I'd kept my scout cloaked off the belt for just a bit longer, and to my surprise it paid off.  I got to add a new ship type to my roster of kills:

I've never had the opportunity to snag an Endurance, and I'm certain it'll be a rare thing.  It went down pretty easily.  While I did not get the pod (darn drones from nearby miners!), I was happy enough for this kill.

So surely there will be more kills in the future.  Just have to hunt 'em down!

Fun with Failures!

Been an slow week for me.  Yesterday I decided it was time to relocate, as my usual hunting grounds have dried up.

Earlier in the week I did manage to find a belt full of juicy targets.  Hulk, Mackinaw and a Bestower (hauling out of his MTU -- apparently they were jetcan mining).

I figured there's no way I could solo the Mack, so I thought I'd give the Hulk a try.  I've certainly solo'd some Hulks in the past, as well as lost some also.  So, I thought I had a 50-50 shot at it.  Since I was the only one on, I thought 'what the hell!'

It was close, but in the end, I got popped.  A few more seconds and I might have had him, but I didn't have a few more seconds.

Before I continue though, I feel this is an opportunity to mention something that's very important to me, that I'm trying very hard to maintain, and that's my Rule #1 for ganking.

Rule #1: Don't Be A Douchebag

So, when he survived my gank attempt, I did what I always do in local...

So I try to be nice and get a lesson on why I died.  Alright then; no big deal.  At this point I'm actually docked and pulling CONCORD away.

Great! He's decided to fly Skiff's now -- this is a good idea!  Now, you'll recall I said that I'm trying to maintain rule #1?  Yea, the emote wasn't necessary.  I'm learning!

So while I'm back at my base, waiting out my criminal timer, I decide to just do a quick check of the belts and see if the Skiff's are out or if there are any other potential targets.  Lo and behold I see the same group!  Hulk, Mackinaw, Bestower.  Now, I know I can't kill the Hulk, and I know I can't kill the Mackinaw.  But the Bestower....

I undock and get ready to go...and then Max hops online!  What perfect timing he has.  I tell my tale and ask if he'd like to make merry with drone-powered miners, and off we go (3 of us this time)!

This time, the fight ended in our favor.

I've been working on my reflexes for getting pods, and so far it's been working out well for me.  

So, with that, we had some fun in local (pulling CONCORD when my buddy Volk didn't think we could), and headed off into the sunset.

But wait, I mention failures, did I not?  Oh yes...

You see, every once in awhile my buddy and I are absolutely stunned by something (be it on our mains, or these alts).  The next day we thought we'd line up a nice Mackinaw.  The setup was perfect actually!

Staging was just a hop, skip and a jump away.

The result?  Well, it can't be describe, but it can be seen and heard -- I hope you enjoy!

 

A Little Taste Of Control...

I didn't have long to play tonight, and seeing as my main character is still under a wardec, I thought I'd see if there were any unsuspecting miners about.

I flew to a couple of my usual spots and there was no one.  The only two people I actually saw were from the corp that had recently paid for protection.  The evil pirate on my shoulder kept saying "DO IT! DO IT!" while the good pirate said "WORD IS BOND!"....or some stupid shit like that.

Not wanting to tarnish my reputation for keeping my word, I decided to have a little fun with him.

But first...his bio:

Now, to put this into perspective, I had ganked him before:

Nothing fancy, and it was recent, so I'm sure it was fresh in the mind just who I was.

The thing I took issue with in his bio was that he stated he was "permit free mining".  Now, I'm not part of CODE, nor do I exhibit the religious-like fervor with which they conduct their ganks.  I have a newfound appreciation for the content they've created, but I'm not part of that.

That said, however, the fact that his CEO paid me 300m ISK for a 60 day "permit" to mine without my corp ganking him seems to contradict his bio.  So...I wondered if I could change that.

I'm a terrible bullshitter, I really am.  So I apologize for the lameness with which I conducted myself.  Hey, I'm new to this whole "being evil" thing.

Not long after, his bio information updated:

I suppose I should keep an eye on it, just to make an honest man out of him!

There are many pirates out there who have forced their bidding on others (quite often referred to as the 'jedi mind trick'), and in that analogy, I feel like I finally used the mind trick to levitate my pencil.  It's a start!

Oh, I may have also accidentally blew myself up when I aborted a gank by slowboating back to a gate, only to have the faction police wtfpwn me.  Max just laughed at me.

 /sigh

Extortion. The name of the game!

So it was a long day at work.  I was looking forward to hopping into my trusty Catalyst and seeing what havoc I could cause.

I flew to a system that I have frequented in the past month, where I've had quite a few ganks.  Low and behold I see a Procurer on D-Scan.  We haven't tried ganking a Procurer before, so this was really a DPS-check for us.  Could three of us take it down?  Since we fly Proc's in our mining fleets, we know they can be tough.  The toon is a little over a year old that we'd be attacking, so his tank could be good.

We try, and we fail.  Oops.  Oh well - at least we know! We came pretty close though - our target said he only had 3500 HP left.  We didn't pre-spawn CONCORD, so that was our mistake.  We were too greedy!

So, if you enjoy seeing me dead, here you go:

 

Lucky for me I have over 50 more Catalysts fit and ready to roll!

But then....I get a private convo invite from a Monoran Forevr...

 

How very, very interesting!

A little back story.  This guy's corp hangs out in the system I was at, and I've ganked at least 4 of their guys, and attempted to gank 3 or 4 more.  I haven't purposefully been targeting them, they just happened to be close targets.  Me, not being very good at these sorts of things, decide to give it my best shot.

 

So I feel like I'm being quite reasonable.  I'm also being 90% honest with him.  I didn't tell him that it's my own mining alts used to produce all of my own equipment.  I figured he didn't need to know that part.  So....how much ISK can I get?  

 

 Hmm...well this wasn't what I expected.  Since most of the ships of theirs I think I've popped were T1 barges (I've popped some exhumers, but I can't recall off hand if they were from his corp), I decide to make the first offer.  And a very generous one at that.

Well this isn't going well at all.  So this time, I begin to twist his arm a little.

Okay, so here I was a little untruthful.  I didn't actually have 100 fully fit cat's in the hangar.  BUT...I easily could.  After the above, I closed the conversation.

By this time my timer had worn off, and I was a little annoyed that we didn't get the Proc.  So, Max found a Retriever hanging out in a nearby cul de sac system.  Excellent!  We mounted up and headed on out.  I put my new test fit (a Sensor Booster in the mid with a script) to use, and we were successful!  I got both the ship and pod kills!

Not going to get rich off that, but it did plummet my sec rating from -8.5 to -8.9!

Then....I get another convo invite, but not from Elios.  Instead, it's from my buddy Monoran:

 

 !?  "Seriously!?" I thought.  

Pretty crazy!  300m ISK is probably what we've put into our month of terror in the areas we've ganked, so I split the ISK amongst my cohorts and put a little note in my calendar for September 18th.  Who can say what will happen after that...

Setting Up a Gank - The Scout

Had a day off from work, so was hoping to get a few good ganks in today.  Low and behold, the EVE cluster is kaput!  Ah well, what can one do except lay out just the setup portion of how I've been initiating my ganks.  This may be old news to some, it may be new.  I'm simply documenting my processes here.
 
I find it extremely helpful to have a second character in an NPC corp as my scouting alt.  Sure, I've been called out once in the Anti-Ganking channels (more on those later), but not everyone monitors those so for me it's pretty low risk.

I've set up my scouting alt to be able to fly an Astero with Covert Ops Cloaking and (soon) a Salvager II module.  Not only is it my scout, but I use this character as my loot collector after a gank.  Whenever possible, I try to recover everything that I've dropped as well as my target.

The setup is pretty simple and straight forward.  D-Scan is the primary means of locating a target for me.  I use it exclusively, and I'll have a separate post later about my own personal methods of using D-Scan.  I do not use combat probes, as I feel it takes far too long for what I want to accomplish.

So beginning with the idea of having a target in a known belt, I warp to the belt at either 50km or 70km to scope it out.

In the above image, when I first warped to the belt, I was considerably off where I wanted to be.  So what I did was bookmarked a rock that was closer to where I wanted to be (shown above by the white square), then I warped off grid and back to that bookmark at about 30km.

My target is in the red square above - a hulk.  What I do is line myself up so that the target is directly in between me and the stargate where I'll be coming from for the gank (in the above case, noted by the yellow square).

It often takes about a minute or two to slowboat to the correct position, but once I'm there, I'm set.

In the above picture, I'm simply waiting at this point.  My target is 49km away from me, so when I jump in through the stargate, I'll warp to my scout at 50km and will land right on top of him.

That's all there is to it!  In the above setup, this did not result in a successful gank unfortunately!  The hulk had a pretty good tank setup, so kudo's to him for that!  I did, however, manage to swoop in and collect my junk before getting away.

Win some, lose some - that's the game!  I congratulated him in local before heading back to wait out my timer.

Start Here...

Where to start?  I believe I should start by listing the fit with which I use at this time.  I'll just get right to it, with analysis after:

There it is.  Nothing fancy.  The one thing you don't see is ammo.  I currently use Void S ammo, and load 160 units into the cargo hold.  My good friend Max (more on him later) pointed out that once you undock, simply group your weapons and then hit the reload.  You'll get exactly 20 units of ammo in each gun.  Why only 20?  Well, in a typical ganking scenario, you'll never need more than that.  It helps to keep the costs down.

Some other questions -- why no webifier?  There's no need in my opinion.  If I land on grid and the target has shifted or is already escaping, then I abandon the gank (more on my process in a future post).

What I have pondered though is adding a Sensor Booster to the midslot, in the hopes of being able to more quickly target the pods.  I'm not getting nearly as many pods as I'd like.

So there's the fit -- in another post I'll do a listing of skills that I have, that I recommend getting, and what implants to go for.
 

Eyes Wide Open

So.  A bit about me.

Yes, I believe that's how these sorts of things start, right?

I started my space pixel journey in EVE back in January of 2014.  I was hooked.  I also began life with the goal of being a miner.  So over the course of 2014 I pursued the path of mining.

I won't bore you with the details, as many people who play EVE think mining is boring.  I don't -- I enjoy it.  So my main characters are a miner with a max boost Orca pilot.

BUT!  This isn't a mining blog.  Nor is this a mining toon.  This is about ganking miners, and the fun it brings me.

All too often, the idea of being a miner and ganking a miner are seen as completely separate from one another.  I think you might be hard pressed to find a member of CODE out mining, or openly saying they enjoy mining.  That's where I believe I'm different.  I like mining - it's relaxing, it's relatively stress free, and it's how I build my ships and fittings to go out and gank other miners.  It's a circle-of-life thing, really!

I had my eyes opened to what this game is about roughly a month ago.  I have participated in all aspects of EVE (WH, nullsec, lowsec, and hisec; missions, exploration, trade, industry) except being an evil toon.  So I thought I'd give it a try.  To be honest...I've never had more fun than hunting for miners!

My goal for this blog is twofold - show that anyone (literally) can do this by openly showing my fit, my skills, and the process of HOW I go about this, and secondly to document my path to recycling 10b isk worth of ships!