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.