Stealing from Killers of Pirates

It's late in the evening.  The corp as a group has just been running sites in C3a, but we're done now, and everyone has logged off except me.  This particular C3 has no towers at all in it, dead or alive.  So it is a decent candidate for sale.  I jump my babysitter alt in, and immediately he sees a Imicus on dscan.   Before we ran sites, we scanned down all the wormholes, so I know the guy must have come either from the lowsec static, or from a nullsec wormhole.  I expect it is the lowsec, and I point the dscan there.  Meanwhile, the Imicus deploys probes and cloaks.  But I can see his probes on dscan so I know where he came in.

Hmm.  Maybe it is time to be a monster for a while.  With Von, I jump into Artemis, my cloaky Tengu, and warp out to the wormhole to C3a.  I jump, and move off the hole as fast as I can.  But before I do this, I see the probes vanish on dscan, and then a flash of the Imicus again.  It looks like he left the system.  I don't know why.

Hopeful, I warp over to the lowsec static and orbit it at 3000.  Maybe he will come back in, and even be polarized.  But, nothing happens for a few minutes.  Well, maybe he is on the other side... it's lowsec, but worth a look.

I pop through, and there is nobody close to the hole.  There are four pilots in system, though.  A dscan shows something interesting: there are some Angel wrecks, and 10 Hobgoblin IIs, as well as a Drake and Myrmidon.  The system has 5 signatures.  My guess is the Drake and Myrmidon are at a POS or will be soon, and the hobs are abandoned somewhere.  Well, I can look for them with Artemis.  Or I can get a much cheaper ship.  I like the latter option better, since there may be exploration sites in among those signatures.

I head back into wspace to my POS and reship into my exploration Buzzard.  My plan is to head for null, but I want to get those drones I saw out, and maybe do the lowsec system sites if there are any.  Since I will be looking for drones, I load combat probes while crossing C3a.

I exit back into lowsec.  Well, well.  Now there are 6 pilots in local.  I quickly fire probes and cloak, then start looking for sigs and drones.  The drones are gone from dscan.  This surprises me a little; I guess the Drake and/or Myrm were using them, although why the Myrmidon was using hob IIs I don't know.  There are several combat sites which I ignore.  Local drops to four people.  Next, a wormhole.  Ignore.  Local drops to three.

Now I find a gas site.  Ordinarily I ignore these, but I am not feeling very ambitious tonight, so maybe I will mine some gas.  (Some of the gas in lowsec, I have discovered, is very high priced indeed.  Much better than any of the wspace gas one gets in C4 or lower.)  I take the extra scan to resolve the signature.  It's an Angel Gas Processing site, which is a mixed combat and hacking site.  First you have to kill a bunch of guards, and then bring in a codebreaker.  So it is of little use to me.

As I am moving probes to scan for the last site, local drops to one.  Just me.  Hmm, I guess maybe the locals did not like seeing combat probes.

With just me here, things are different.  Maybe I can run the gas site, using a PVE Tengu.  I will have to look up this site on eve-survival, but first let me warp over there at 100km, to scope it out and so I can check what is actually there against what eve-survival says.

I warp in at 100.  All the guards are dead.  Yellow wrecks are everywhere, all looted except one frigate wreck.  But the scatter containers are intact!  I look at local again to be sure: still just me.  Yeah.  I am going in.

Angel Gas Processing Site, fully looted

To be precise, actually I am going out first.  The nearest container is about 100km from me, and the furthest is 120km.  I turn around and microwarp 30 km so that I can warp to the furthest one.  Now I lock it and cargo scan it.  It's got an implant!  Ooh.  I start cracking.  The minigame level is low intermediate: 50/20 firewalls only it appears.  Even with my medium hacking skill those are almost certain.  I find the core.  After a few seconds learning what kind of mini container I want at neural-boost, I am ready.  (I want Equipment mini containers.)  I trigger the loot explosion.  It is pretty small and I easily get the implant.  How much?  20m?  Er... no, not really.  300k.  Blah.

Now I scan and go hack the next container.  It has a gas harvester I, which is worth at least a million ISK.  So that's worth hacking.

The third container has the real prize: a Nanite Control skillbook.  This, it turns out, is worth something like 300m ISK.  Oh yeah.  I get another gas harvester from the last can.

300m richer I decide to head back home.  Thank you my unknown Drake and/or Myrmidon benefactor.

I need to get busy actually selling that C3 system.  So I look for comparables on wormholesales.com.  But you know, C3s with lowsec, and moderately good PI, just are not that valuable.  I find better holes selling for 200m.  Is that worth the hassle, and tying up my babysitter?  I don't know so.  Maybe it is the nanite skillbook talking, but I think I can do better.  I bring my babysitter back home.