Fleecing Some Tourists

Friday night.  We're always looking for a good connection to highsec to do logistics.  But there's nothing in particular planned.  Let's see what EVE holds tonight.

I log in, and check for sigs.  Just one.  Evidently the gas site we have had has finally timed out and gone away.  Scanning one sig is no problem, and I head for it, bookmark the wormhole, and jump into C4b.

C4b is interesting.  There are two POCOs that are in reinforced mode, due to come out in five hours.  I'll still be up then... hmm.  There's also an Iteron V at a tower.  I track it down and warp to it.  Empty, as usual.  Oh well.  Scanning time.  There are just two sigs, so that's easy.  I ignore our static and then find the other. 

It's EOL. Ugh.  End of constellation, unless I want to pop a wormhole.  I don't.  I think I will log my Jita alt and move around some goods.  Then I will just sit here.

Hours later... the wormhole finally expires.  (Four full hours.  Murphy strikes again.)  Now I scan down the new wormhole, mark it, and jump through.  C3b has six sigs: three gas, three wormholes.  I know the wormhole I came though.  The other two are a C2 and the C3 static.  I'll investigate the C2 first, since it will probably have a highsec static.

I enter the C2.  Nothing on scan from the wormhole.  Checking wormhol.es shows that indeed the system has the expected highsec.  I move off the wormhole, fire probes, and throw them out of the system.  I'll scan after I check out the system for actives.

The system is rather large.  It takes three warps to hit all the planets.  I start at the third-to-outer planet.  I have to check the second-to-outer planet (nothing), the inner system (live tower, no ships), finally the outer planet.  Dscan here shows ships and lots of drones, and a tower.  But no force field.  Dscanning again shows a sleeper wreck.  Ah.  Got site runners.  Two Ospreys, two Hurricane Fleet Issues, Gnosis, Brutix.

I dscan the one anom in range.  They are not there.  I do another 360 dscan.  More wrecks; too many for a gas site.  (And nobody would attack a gas site with a whole gang.)  It must be a sig site -- a data or relic.  There is one around this planet.  But I do not have it scanned.  I will try to scan it anyway; doing so will be good practice for me.  I rarely get to hunt with probes.

Data and relic sites all have very weak signatures; I will have to scan at the minimum range to get a warpable hit.  So this means that I will have to place the probes extremely precisely to do it in one scan.   I doubt I can do that; I will shoot for two scans for a better chance.  That is still starting at 1.0AU scans, meaning I need a fairly precise location.

First I use dscan to get a range.  Twiddle twiddle.  6.1 AU.  This seems a bit long, but it appears to be just in the range of the sig.  Now, direction.  90 and 60 and 30 degrees are all pretty easy.  15 takes some time and 5 takes more.  But finally I have the direction, and I crab-walk the my marker probe until it is about the right distance out.   I change my mind and scan at 0.25 AU hoping for luck.

Nothing.  Oh well.  I try at 1.0AU.  Nothing again.  What?  This should have worked.  I must be totally off.  I widen to 4 AU and move the probes closer to me.  Now I get a hit, much closer to me that 6.1 AU.  I guess I must have flubbed the range somehow.  It takes me two more scans to get 97% -- argh! -- and the third succeeds.  I throw the probes out of the system, then warp to the site at 100km.  Dscan shows they have not abandoned it yet, at least.

Watching from my perch.

I land at the site, and the enemy fleet is still working on the last sleeper battleship.  This gives me some hope that they are slack and have not seen my probes.  But in any case, I cannot attack this many people.  So I hope that they make a mistake with their salvaging.

They finish the sleeper.  Now it gets kind of strange.  They are evidently using drones to salvage.  Several of them throw out mobile depots, and refit.  Then they head in to the cans to hack.  Unbonused hacking on hard puzzles.  Good luck with that.  Of course, these being sleeper sites, you get all the tries you want.  I still expect it to take forever, and it is hard to believe that these guys will just sit in the site for that long. 

One deploys a mobile tractor unit.  They sit in the site.  Every so often a wreck gets successfully salvaged.  But it's slow.  One of them finally cracks a can.  There's nothing obvious I can do to make trouble.  And it looks like my hope of a salvager is not going to happen.  Can they salvage intermediate large wrecks with drones?  Maybe they have some salvagers to refit with.

I might as well bring in my probes and scan.  They can't see the other planets from here, at least, and I doubt they have good opsec.  I already know they either did not see me or did not care.  And I also know there is a highsec and a C4 which they ignored.  So I scan.  Scanning finds no less than five wormholes: a K162 to highsec, the static highsec (which I open), a nullsec, a C2 (EOL), and another C2.  I duck out of one of the highsecs to get an entrance, just in case I get daring and get killed.

All this time I am checking in with the enemy, warping to my perch.  They're still there, half an hour after I first saw them.  They've now got all the wrecks collected and salvaged.  They are still working on the data cans.  One of the Hurricanes goes over to collect the tractor.  I consider trying to sneak in to grab the can when he takes it onboard.  But this seems unlikely to work.  So I just watch.  He grabs the tractor.  The can appears.

Nice loot.

He does not pick it up.  That's odd.  I watch a bit more.  He seems to be moving back to his friends.  He still has not picked it up.  Is he tractoring it?  No, he just... left it sitting there.

This is my opening.  I warp to the can at 10km.  Then I check for celestials.  They are all behind me.  I will want to be aligned to one when I am ready to uncloak, so I sneak around to the left then towards the enemy (they are all about 40km off), then up.  I stop with the sun and two inner planets decently inline behind the can.  The sun will be easier to find, so I will use that.  I raise my inventory, take a deep breath, then align to the sun.  5000, 4000, 2500.  I uncloak, and double-click the can.  There's the loot.  Loot all.  Click the sun, S, and zoom.  I'm gone.  I cloak ASAP.  When I land at the sun I immediately warp back to my perch to watch.

The enemy break up fairly quickly.  They warp off toward the inner system; I don't bother to check where, since I have little time remaining before bed.  I get info on one, and check for the corp's CEO.  Ah, she's one of them.  I convo her:

Excitement over.  I head out to highsec, drop the loot and contract it to my Jita alt, and head back up.  Later I get myself killed shooting at guys shooting down those POCOs I saw earlier... but that's another story.