Gas Mining in Wspace For Newbies

[UPDATE, October 2014: I have a newer guide to gas mining in wormhole space.  Click that link.  Note that it assumes you've read this first.  So, read this and then click on that.]

Hunting that Venture reminded me of a guide I already wrote for newbies.  If you want to ninja mine in a wormhole, don't go after low-value minerals. Arkonor? It's there, but it really does not pay well. Not compared to gas.

Go after gas! Not all the gas, just the valuable gas.

Here's the fit you want:

[Venture, Gas Miner for Newb]

Emergency Damage Control I

Medium Azeotropic Ward Salubrity I
Incremental Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array I
Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field I

Gas Cloud Harvester I
Gas Cloud Harvester I
Core Probe Launcher I, Core Scanner Probe I

Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I
Small Low Friction Nozzle Joints I

This thing takes very little training -- less than 4 days. (Spend a few more to buff your scanning skills.) Yet it sucks gas as well as any ship in the game. Total cost is about 7m ISK. So you're not risking much. Mining wormhole gas (the good kinds) can be worth 20m per hour. More in higher class wormholes.

With a bit more training time, you can get Gas Mining V so that you can use Gas Miner IIs, for a substantial increase in mining rate.

How to use it: find a wormhole. Take this thing in there. Safe up. Turn on the ECCM for the duration of the time you are in wspace; ECCM makes you harder to scan down with combat probes. Not impossible, just harder. So you have to use d-scan to watch for probes. But the ECCM along with your already small signature should prevent anyone inexpert from scanning you down quickly, and it is the warning from seeing probes on dscan that you need. If you see such probes, bug out.

You also want to turn on your damage control and adaptive invulnerability shield, the entire time you're in wspace. Ventures have a good capacitor; use it.

Deploy your probes and search for signatures. You want ladar sites, and you want to select which ones. There is one site -- Ordinary Perimeter Reservoir -- that has sleeper sentries in it. Ignore this one unless you can bring in a combat ship to kill the sentries. However most ladar sites in wormholes don't spawn any sleepers until ~20 min after they are instantiated (which they are whenever they are first warped to). So, you can mine them for that initial period. You're "ninjaing" not just against the people living in the hole, but the sleepers!

Once you've got a ladar scanned down, look it up on eve survival (or just refer to this summary), to see which kinds of gas it has. You won't have time to mine both gas clouds (unless, again, you can bring in a combat ship which can kill the sleepers). So look up the prices on eve-central (here's a helpful link), and determine the better of the two types of gas that it contains. Got it? Keep it in mind.

Now warp to the site at 100. You don't know whether anyone has warped to it yet, and you don't want to plunk yourself down in the middle of already-spawned sleepers. Make a safespot close by as you decelerate from warp. If sleepers are already spawned, you can't mine it; bug out ASAP before they kill you. Otherwise, good. Bookmark the better gas cloud. (By the way, you did test out gas mining in highsec first, right? So you are certain that you've got gas clouds showing on your overview?) Warp out to your nearby safe and back into the just-bookmarked cloud.

Lock the cloud and start mining. Orbit the cloud at 500m -- being in motion does not affect your mining but it does make you much harder to gank and also harder for the sleepers to hit when they spawn. Now sit back and d-scan. You want to be hitting dscan at least once every 15 seconds to stay safest.  (Or, just don't.  Risky, but a lot easier to do.  Read a book.)  You can keep probing for other ladar sites, too. Just remember to do a dscan each time while your probes are moving then scanning.

After about 15 minutes you should pay more attention because the sleepers will be spawning soon. When they do, they will spawn in the middle of the site (at least on those I have run), so you will initially have some distance. But they can come fast, and the larger ones can hit hard at a distance. So be ready to GTFO.