A Waste of Frigates

It's the weekend, and I am exploring in my Buzzard.  C4b had a lot of sigs, and nobody around after the initial occupant fled from me.  I scan down C4b.  There are three wormholes incident: my static, another C4, and a C5.  I elect to go with C5a.

Upon jumping, I see an interesting dscan: Archon, two Revelations, two Lokis, two Damnations and an Anathema (?).   There is also a tower.  This looks like a escalation fleet if anything does.  But there are no wrecks.  I move off the wormhole, bookmark it, and get cloaked.  Then I work dscan.  One Damnation and a Revelation are at the tower.  The others are out in space somewhere.  I bookmark the two combat anoms, but they are not there.  They are out in space somewhere I cannot trivially fly to.  I'll have to probe.  The system has eight sigs.  Are they perhaps running a data site?

My guess is confirmed a moment later when a Sleeper large advanced wreck appears.  OK, they must have just started on a site.  There is an outer planet about 15AU out.  I warp out to launch combat probes.  Fortunately they are off scan.  I launch probes then throw them out of the system.  Now I warp back in to find their tower.  This takes just a moment, as it is at a planet with just one moon.

Now I sit at the tower and get range to the wrecks and ships: it's about 5.3 AU.  That's convenient; I use the 4 AU scan distance and I place the bubble edges on me.  Now I start pointing dscan, in ever smaller angles, then searching for the group.  Finally I have it down to a five degree arc.  This is as good as I can do without getting closer.  But it should be good enough.  Capitals are huge.  I bring the probe distance down to 1AU, then I scan.  100% on several ships, and I throw the probes out of the system as fast as I can.  (While the probes warp and start their scan I remember to warp to the Archon at 100km.)  Did they see?

I get to watch a C5 site be run.  First!

Either they do not see, or they do not care.  Huh.  Bad opsec.  I wish I had a fleet to drop on them, but I don't.  Maybe they feel safe running with C4s open because we can't drop carriers?  Dunno.  Anyway, I am in the site, and now I sit.  I can't do anything with a Buzzard, except make a perch.  So I start slowboating away from them.  Once I get far enough out, I bookmark the position and then warp off towards home.  A Manticore is just as impotent as an unarmed Buzzard against capital reps, but they might make a mistake.

Hop, hop, and home.  Reship.  Then hop, and back to C4b.  Now I think about polarization and decide to wait two minutes for it to abate on the C5 wormhole.  That done, I warp to the wormhole and jump.  Then I burn off the hole, hoping they don't see me.  And I warp to my perch.

Eight more Sleeper battleships

The fleet is still there, still slowly killing sleeper battleships.  So, now I sit and watch.  This goes on for a very long time.  They kill all the battleships, then they escalate with a Moros.  Eight more sleepers.  More waiting.

I am wondering what they will do for salvage.  If they make a mistake, maybe I can slip in and gank something.  But so far, nothing.  Finally, they deploy a tractor unit.  (Guys: do when first in the site.)  So, that is one question answered.  I bookmark it and keep watching.

Eventually they get down to four sleeper frigates and one cruiser.  My guess is that this is the minimum level to keep the site around so they can milk it.  Anyway, they have left these guys alive for 20 minutes now.  And I see a Noctis on scan.  Then it enters the site.

Strangely, the Noctis does not seem to have tractors, or it's not using them.  Ever so slowly the tractor collects wrecks, and the Noctis grinds them.  Some of the ships leave, but the Archon and a Loki are still present.  So I cannot gank.  I keep watching.

Finally the Noctis seems to have realized it has tractors.  I see lots of wrecks moving.  They are rapidly sucked in and salvaged.  And the Noctis warps, leaving just the Loki and Archon.

At this point I expect them to bring in jammers to jam out the peskies and spring everyone free from their warp scrambling.  But this does not happen.  Instead, they bring in a Merlin.  What?  Maybe they can draw fire with it, freeing up the Loki or Archon?  It zooms off on microwarp, but before long it warps.  Well, that was about what I expected.

Finally the carrier gets free and warps.  Now it's just the Loki.  Since I am not going to get any action myself, I warp in closer to get a better look at what's going on.  How will they spring their Loki free of five sleeper scramblers? 

Sucks to be him.

Again I expect jammers, but no.  Instead they warp in another Merlin.  It starts zooming off, and then boom.  Dead.  Ha ha ha!  This is funny.  What else will they try?

More ships!

 A shuttle and a merlin.  The shuttle dies in one shot:

Welp.

 And then the Merlin:

That didn't work.

This is officially too funny.

Next, an Executioner:

Keep trying.

Two more Merlins:

How about two Merlins?

Two Merlins and an Executioner:

OK, two frigs did not work.  Let's try three.

This last wave finally does the trick.  The Loki warps off.  The C5 guys lose another two ships.

The final Merlin goes boom.

Ha ha ha.  Um, guys, jammers? 

Economics of C4 PVE

Last night my corp had an ideal system for running sites.  It was a connected C4 system packed with anoms, many of which are the best type, and totally zipped up.  We exploited it to the max.  So, how much does it pay, running C4 sites?

We have found that a typical C4 anom will earn about 100m ISK in salvage and blue loot.  There is a lot of variance, because about half of the value is the salvage and it has a strong element of chance.  There is really only one salvage part that is worth much: melted nanoribbons.  If you get lucky on melted nanoribbons, you get more than average.  C4 radar and data sites are considerably harder sites, and they earn more.  Perhaps 120m average in blue loot and salvage.  You can also get perhaps 60m from can-cracking in relic sites, which is worth doing.  The minigames for C4 data/relic sites are the hardest ones in the game, so their earning rate is not great without maximum skills.  Data site cans are not worth it, although with a cargo scanner you can probably select only the relatively high value cans and earn a decent rate on a few cans.

Last night we completed 13 combat anoms, and another 2 radar sites.  So we would expect to earn about 1.5 billion, and we did.

How long did this take?  We started right at 8:00 with three of us.  Hiljah joined about 9:15.  We ended some time around 11:30; perhaps 11:15.

Using 11:30 for a conservative estimate, three of us spent 3.5 hours each.  Hiljah, 2.25 hours.  Four players; what did we earn per player?  We earned about 117m per man-hour.  What did we get per-character?  We used nine characters: two logis, one salvager, one fleet booster, and five DPS.  Thus,we earned 52m per character-hour.

There was some inefficiency in our setup.  Our salvager was not busy 100% of the time.  Adding DPS would increase his rate of earning a bit by keeping him busy more of the time.  And of course the logistics have very little DPS.  So, by adding a few more DPS characters we might get a moderate improvement.  (In fact we left one radar site untouched for lack of time.)

I Fail Some More Ghost Sites

It's the day after yesterday.  Well, it always is, but the yesterday in question had me leaving off out in Stain, having found an unused section of null where I found two ghost sites.  I did not get anything from either.  One despawned before I even saw it; the other one had nothing special in any can, and someone in local.  Not worth the risk of hacking.  I have a bit of time to play this morning, so I figure to find some more.  This time, I hope to get some actual loot.

I set off, on pretty much the same path as yesterday but backwards.  And voila -- two jumps in, I find a ghost site!  Nobody in local!  Huzzah.  I warp to it, decloak, and then start scanning cans.  And it's almost a replay of yesterday: nothing much in any can.  However, today I have nobody to stop me, so I might as well go for it and see if I can hack a can.  Or who knows, two.

I burn over to a can, and start hacking.  Ugh -- restoration node.  Kill it, ouch.  Onward.  80/20 firewalls everywhere, and another restoration node.  Kill it.  More clicking, and I get a utility.  More clicking, another restoration node.  I have almost lost.  A few more clicks for desperate hope, and it is done.  My virus is too weak to prevail.  I head towards another can, and exit the minigame.  Boom!  The can blows and knocks off 20% of my shields.

As I am right in the middle of the site, suddenly I am in amidst a bunch of red crosses.  The timer is up: Serpentis pirates arrive.  I veer away from them, afterburner almost full ramped.  They shoot me and knock off another third of the shields or so, then swoosh, they all take off in all directions.  (Once again I admire this effect.)

Another ghost site, another failure.  I set out again.

And, next system: another ghost site!  Again, nobody.  Again, I warp over and scan all the cans.  Now something new: a can with actual treasure.  A 'wetu' mobile depot blueprint!  An ascendancy gamma blueprint! 

Goodies!

Ooh.  I head to it.  I enter the minigame.  It is the same hard minigame.  This one I do better on, but I still don't find the core.  I fail again.  Sighing, I head towards another can, and all that nice treasure explodes (and takes a chunk of shields).  Then the same thing happens as before: before I can get to a second can, the timer is out, and the pirates blow the site.

I don't find any more gas sites today.

A Ghostbusting Bust

Rubicon day 2.  Last night, I noticed the market spikes in PI goods that Rubicon has caused.  Since we make some of them, and had a big load ready to export, the corp pitched in and did a supply run and return.  We made a nice windfall, too.  But I did not have time to really play with Rubicon much.  (The log in screen is spiffy.)

Tonight, I am eager to go out and find a ghost site.  I have my fit all dreamed up, but not yet created.  So the first thing to do is find my way out of wspace.  I spend a while scanning.  C3a has a highsec; very handy.  But the highsec is quite a few jumps to Jita.  I keep looking.  There is a second C4 linked to C3a, which I go into so I can activate all the things.  Just doing my part.  And there is also a C2 link.  I go to scan down C2a; it also has a highsec.  But there are some live pilots, so I go and get my Manticore to watch a while.  They don't do anything foolish, though, so eventually I give up and scan the system down.  There are four sigs, and three of them are wormholes.  There's the C3 connection I came in, but also the expected highsec static, and a nullsec.  Oooh, nullsec is nice.  This is just what I was hoping for: an easy way out to null for some ghostbusting.  The highsec is just four jumps to Jita.  That is also quite handy.  Clearly, Bob wants me to go ghostbusting out in null tonight.

I go back home to get Artemis, my cloaky Tengu.  She's fallen on hard times; I don't use her much any more.  I keep getting killed in her and not getting kills.  She's going to be converted to my ghostbusting fit.  (Artemis will return as a Loki, real soon now.)  I exit without running into anything nasty in C2a, and head to Jita.  Buy this, buy that.  My trade alt is sitting idle in The Forge, so I bring him back to trade a few items I know I have.  Gradually the fit takes shape.  I also get parts for a similar exploration fit, and a spiffy new mobile depot (1.8m and dropping.)  Now I am ready to go.

I fly back through highsec to the highsec entrance to C2a, and go in.  Nobody around, so I warp to the nullsec wormhole, and transit.  And I am... where?  Out in Stain somewhere.  JS-E8E.  Nobody in system, so that is nice.  But no ghost site.  Don't forget to bookmark the wormhole on this side!

OK, time for dotlan maps.  I have a Firefox window dedicated; I raise it and type in JS-E8E and... nothing.  Try again.  Nope, dotlan is down.  Argh!

Um.... help?  I realize with a small shock how hopelessly reliant I am on dotlan.  I am dropping out into lowsec and nullsec in new locations every day.  (I try to get dotlan again; still nothing.)  I am never going to memorize where I roam; I have to use maps.  I certainly cannot navigate using the in-game map -- that's too painful.  But I recall there is another map I have seen out there on the Internet.  So I do a search and call it up -- Ombey's.  It is a static map -- nowhere near as useful as dotlan.  But still, I can use it.  I find the Stain map and determine my direction: from JS-E8E to G-ME2K.  Let's go.

Where I was, and Ghosts were not.

I warp to the first system, TG-Z23.  Two in local, no ghost site.  Oh well.  Off to a side branch.  Nobody and nothing.  Back to the main path.  Hop.  Nothing.  Hop.  Nothing.

WHOOOSH!  OK, the engine noise is annoyingly loud.  I am zoomed in all the way.  Were they always this loud?  I don't think so, but then I never zoom in this much.  I zoom out.  Jump.  Warp to next gate.  WHOOOSH!  Wait -- I am zoomed in again!  Back off again.  And the next gate: zoomed in again.  WHOOSH!!  Ugh, a bug.  I hope they fix it.

On the plus side, this is the first time I have been in nullsec with interdiction nullification.  And I must say, it is wonderful to have.  I don't spend a minute thinking about bubbles.  I just warp, gate to gate, as if it was lowsec.  It's mindless movement.

I explore all the side branches as I go.  No ghosts anywhere.  Stain is not haunted in this direction.  Systems are mostly unoccupied; out of the 21 I go through in this direction, three of them have two players other than me, another four have one, and the remaining 14 have zero.  So I feel like I am in the right place.  There's a decent chance that I will get a ghost site -- if it is here.

I make it to the end of the line, and head back.  11 hops, all of them retracing my steps.  So perhaps a small chance of a ghost site popping up.  No ghost sites.  I am back to JS-E8E.  I check, and dotlan is back up.  Hurrah!  Now I can get a decent map showing number of jumps.  I decide to head south, towards a cul-de-sac with almost zero traffic in the last hour.  Set course for 9O-ZTS.  16 jumps.

Hop.  Warp and WHOOSH.  Hop.  Warp and WHOOSH.  Initially a few systems with people, but then even fewer people than the other way.  But also no ghosts.  I explore a few side-systems on the way.  Then I get to the end, and explore the rest of the cul-de-sac.  No ghosts.

It's getting late, so reluctantly I head back.  Again I am retracing my steps, but I check for sites and there are none.

Total tally for the evening: 43 systems hit, 27 of them twice.  Of those, perhaps 12 had anyone in them other than me.  No ghost sites.  Skunked.

In wspace, I check out all four systems in our constellation tonight: no ghost sites there, either.

I Fall for a Scam

The background here: my Jita alt, who mines ice, has been slowly adding industrial skills.  Of recent, my corp has started mining in wspace.  It's not great pay, but it's something to do when we have our system zipped up and don't want to open it.  This is actually fairly common due to the way that 16 hour wormholes work. 

Anyway, because we are mining, I want my Jita alt to be able to perfect refine all ores except for Mercocite (which does not happen in wspace).  And if he trains up the skills needed for ore refining, he can also refine ice with a few hours more training.  Since I mine ice, that would be a useful skill.  So I'll train that too.  But to refine ice in his current station won't work, because he lacks standings with the station owner, Expert Housing Foundry.  And there are no better owners with stations in Otela.  Since I am not leaving Otela, I have decided to grind up my standings with Expert Housing.  Since my Jita alt has no combat skills other than drones, I am going to do courier missions to grind the standings.

And so the story begins.  I have three courier missions headed out into the Forge.  I am my Viator, since none of the loads are very large.  As I enter Olo, there is an industrial wreck just off the gate.  Being curious (and having nothing of value on my blockade runner other than my mission items), I go over to look.  Hmm.  There are some nice blueprints here.  I set my safety to yellow.  Steal now?  No, there are a few people around, one in particular in a Buzzard that does not seem to be leaving.  I expect he is trying to get kills.  So I am not going to steal.  I right-click on a blueprint to show its market value.  Whoa.  The Cyclone one is 500m ISK!

thieves need warp core stabilization

OK, I head into the station where one of my missions sends me anyway.  I drop everything I am carrying, and I refit the Viator with two warp corp stabilizers I always carry for just such situations.  Then I warp out again.  I don't expect anything to be there.  Just like $20 bills on sidewalks.

Stuff is still there (seems fishier and fishier).  Why has this frig not stolen it?  Oh well, you only live once forever.  I slide past the wreck, then just as I am getting to 2500 again, I align to the station I came from. So I am moving back past the wreck the other way.  Quickly, I am aligned.

Now I steal the blueprints, and start warp.  The Buzzard locks me almost instantly, and attempts to warp scramble, but my stabilizers work and zoom! -- I am away.  I dock at the station and get ready to sit for 15 minutes.

the getaway

Only while sitting do I notice the scam.  These are not BPOs.  They are one-run BPCs.  Oops.  A lot of risk for nothing.  Dodged a bullet there.

Bashing a POS

Tuesday night is here.  Since Friday, we've been involuntarily sharing our system with a Russian interloper who set up a small POS.  Diplomatic outreach has failed.  We've planned an attack.  It's time to smash.  Our plan is to reinforce the POS tonight, and then see when it comes out.  After that we may have to fight to take it down, or perhaps the enemy will abandon it voluntarily.  It may come out of reinforced when we are at work, and then we'll have to bash it again.  This process could iterate several times.  That's one reason why I wanted massively more torpedoes than we'll need tonight.

I am on by 7:30.  There are only two signatures in the system, a gas site and our static.  A couple of us close our static.  Now we are sealed off from the rest of EVE.  All we have to do is keep an eye on the discovery scanner and we will be perfectly safe, except for people who are already in our system.  And we're pretty sure there are none of those, other than the probably sleeping Russians.

My corpies assemble promptly at 8:00pm.  This should be about 4:00am in Moscow, so we do not expect to see any enemy.  Most of us are flying Ravens with a full load of nova torpedoes and Valkyries: these will hit the small POS (which is Caldari) in its explosive resistance hole.

By 8:10 we are ready to go.  We warp to the enemy POS, lock its one defense, an ECM.  (This was onlined over the weekend, along with a corporate hangar array, a personal hangar array, and a ship maintenance array.)

The drones swarm the ECM, and our torpedoes smash into it.  The shields drop quickly, but the armor is considerable.  We have perhaps 4000 DPS total; the thing has 1.5 million hitpoints of armor.  To disable it takes about 5 minutes.  Fortunately, it never jams any of us.  Evidently the enemy has not configured their POS's "when to attack" settings very well.  (I retrospect I think we probably did not need to shoot it.)

Now we attack the tower.  And -- oops.  First problem: normal drones cannot attack towers.  The force field prevents them from getting close enough.  Welp.  Next time, we bring sentries.  Lesson learned.  Meanwhile, we apply a bit less damage than we hoped.  We each lose about 100 DPS out of 800.  So, it will be a bit longer.  We have to inflict is 3/4 of 12.5m hitpoints.  We settle in for the grim and boring structure grind.

We have about 3500 DPS or so.  The grind should take a bit less than an hour.  I give a monologue on what reinforced mode is and the game-design reason for it.  This kills maybe 3 minutes.  There's a lot of dead air.  I can see why people watch movies in operations like this.  Some guys talk golf.  We discuss more fully our course of action after we have reinforced the thing.  Will the enemy corp (which is several times our size) do anything?  The POS appears to be a "wildcat" operation, probably just one guy's alts, but that is hardly sure.  It may be a base for an invasion. And in any case a POS defense would be content for the other corp.  I figure I can always hire mercenaries if necessary to help squish it.  Obviously at this point we are not going to coexist.

Now the tower is down to 30%.  And 29%.  We perk up a little.  I have seen a reinforced tower a lot of times, but I have never reinforced one before.  Will there be some spiffy graphic?  Probably not, but I want to see it anyway.  28, 27, 26.  OK, now it is at 25%.  Shouldn't we see something?  Yes, I explain, a reinforced tower is visible in the entire system.  It is very obvious.  We're probably just at 25.9 and it requires 25.0 or something.

Then it goes to 24.

Allll riiight!  The enemy has neglected to stront their tower!  This means it will not go into reinforced mode; we can kill it tonight; now!

We still have about 20 minutes before killing it.  The grind continues, but I am much happier in the knowledge that we won't have to repeat it again and again.

We discuss what to do with the few POS parts.  We'll have to kill the ECM we disabled earlier.  But what about the other three parts?  The internet is at hand.  It seems that if we blow up the corporate hangar array, and probably also the personal hangar array, there is the normal 50% chance to drop.  If we don't hurt them, we can scoop them, but then 100% of their contents are destroyed.  Since we might want a personal hangar array, we decide to spare it and scoop it.  We don't need another CHA, so we decide to blow it up and hope for goodies.  The internet is not completely helpful: can we potentially get ships out of a ship maintenance array?  We think maybe yes, and anyway we don't need another, so we'll blow it up and hope a blingy missioning Tengu pops out.

Now we are through the shields, and there is another million armor and structure.  These go fast enough, and... boom!  A very big explosion.

Now we bring over an Iteron V, and it first scoops a giant secure container that was here.  This is, as expected, the enemy's loot can, and we score about 100m in various sleeper loot.  The Iteron also grabs the personal hangar array.  We blow up the other structures as planned, but nothing drops from any of them.

The site is now clean.  But I am not done.  I have a nasty plan.

To be continued...

Logistics and Someone Else's Wrecks

I am hunting in Artemis, my cloaky Tengu.  There are two wormholes in my home system.  Both have the same signal strength.  One must be a K162 from who knows where.  The other is my static.  I take a guess and go for one.  It's the one I wanted, the K162. I fly to the signature and appear about 5km from the hole.  This is fine.  I sit and scan.  OK, nothing else out of place.

Time to go in.  I enter the wormhole.  The other side is a C2 system, with dual statics: C4 and highsec.  There's the expected tower on dscan -- wait a second.  A tower, but no shield.  It's offline.  Surely this system cannot be uninhabited!  If it is uninhabited, it would sell for a pretty penny.  And I've got my system-sitter alt back the POS, ready to log if needed.  But there is one planet out of dscan range.  I fly near it, dscan -- oh well.  Tower and shield.  Rats.  I scan down the system, finding a highsec entrance 11 jumps from Jita in Amarr space.  I hop out to bookmark the entrance and the nearest station.

Well, highsec access means it is time to run a freighter load out and back.  Back at Jita my market alt buys up a new load of PI inputs, loads up a few things and starts the laborious trek.  Freighters are very slow.  So, there's dead time.  First I carry out the high value stuff in our loot can in my Buzzard.  Then, I change ships and escort out a Orca full of bulkier stuff: gas and PI goods.  Rather than wait, I send the Orca back empty.  I am pretty certain there is nobody in the C2 right now.  That may not continue, especially given the highsec entrance.  There's only enough goods coming in the freighter to fill two Iteron Vs; I don't think that's enough to risk the Orca.

I get my two empty Iterons out to highsec, park at the station, and wait.  By this time, the freighter is close.  So I twiddle my thumbs as he does the last few jumps.  OK, now all three of us go back in carrying goods.  Made it.  Now my alt can use an Iteron to do his PI as I sit watching.  He visits each planet.  Goods get on, goods get off.  Nobody ganks him.  And he can leave.

Now I am ready to hunt some more.  I fly to our static wormhole to C3, and enter.  It's a large system, and I am near the middle.  Three planets I can see; three more are out of dscan range of everything including each other.  This means three warps.  I fly to each, looking for prey or spoor.  At the third one, I see sleeper wrecks!  You know what this means: someone has been here killing sleepers.  No ship is on dscan.  A chance to ambush a salvager!

Strangely, there are just eight wrecks.  This won't sound odd unless you've run sites in C3, but there are very few sites with eight sleepers.  (I think one gas site.)  Usually there are just a few sleepers (with asteroids and gas), or 14+.  So, I am already curious.  Where are the wrecks?  There's nothing I can see near here... wait, turn on anomaly display.  Yes, there's one anom near the outermost planet.  A tight-beam dscan shows the wrecks are there.  If I can still see the anom, that means that there are still live sleepers in it.  I fly to it at 100, preparing to make a perch.

It's a strange sight that greets me.  The eight wrecks are there.  But so are 5 sleepers: three battleships and two cruisers.  I did not think any C3 site had three battleships in a wave.  I check the site on eve-survival, which is a Solar Cell.  And I am right, sort of.  Usually this site has two battleships.  However, it does mention an "additional spawn" which looks like it would happen only in the initial group.

So, what's happening here?  Someone stopped halfway through a site.  I guess that whoever was running the site was not ready for three sleeper battleships (that's about 1000 DPS).  So, maybe they will be back with more ships.  Or maybe not.

Suddenly, a wreck disappears.  And a second.  Oops.  (All wrecks in EVE vanish after two hours.)  Evidently, whatever happened here happened two hours ago.  Well, that changes things a bit.  Nobody is coming back for these wrecks.  I can't salvage with the sleepers here, but I can get the blue loot.  The wrecks are about 100 from me, but there is a sleeper building far enough to warp to.  I warp to 50, to get close to a wreck.  As I do this, two more wrecks evaporate.  Artemis certainly cannot take 1000 DPS very long, so I will have to be careful.  I close in on a wreck, it uncloaks me, and I loot it.  Now I power towards a second, about 15 km.  I want to cloak but the cruisers lock me while still near the first wreck.  Now I cannot cloak.

The sleepers are pretty far off, and their beams are not hurting me at all.  But the battleships lock eventually, and start hitting me with missiles.  I lose about 1/2 shields before I loot the second wreck.  Then I bookmark one of the other two, and warp to a nearby celestial.  And back.  I get the third, and the sleepers pound me down to 1/4 shields.  I bookmark the last wreck and warp again.  This time I finish scanning the system for a minute to let the shields regenerate.  Then I head back and get the last blue loot.  All in all, not much there, about 8m ISK total.  But it was fun getting it.

Here's one of the things I love about EVE.  It feels real because you are interacting directly or indirectly with other people, and they do many strange things.  The setup I had -- a small amount of loot with powerful guardians, nonetheless easy for me to handle by avoidance -- was nothing someone designed.  Rather, it is just something that happened.  It was the result of the failure of some other player's plan, and as such, rare.

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.