Saturday, September 21, 2013

I Almost Witness a Traffic Accident

It's evening, and I am alone in the house.  Let's see what's up in EVE wspace.  I log in, and there are two sigs in my system.  My corpie Jayne is on, scanning already.  So I sit around while I log on my market alt to mine ice in the Forge.

There are two sigs in our system.  Both are wormholes.  The C3 has numerous anoms and sigs, and a lowsec exit.  They appear to play on Euro time, so might be a good night to do PVE.  The other sig is a C5, which tends to be active on USA time.  Er, not so good.  They are not there now, though.

Jayne makes a few bookmarks, then he has to go for two hours.  I am left on by myself.  I want to get set up for some PVE later, so first things first, I pop the wormhole to C5.  This is a bit dicey at the end, as the error bars on the potential mass remaining were still pretty wide.  But I got it done.

With my rear secured, I get into my cloaky Tengu and head into C3a to start scanning.  Before running sites, you want to know where every live tower is, and every live wormhole.  Also, knowing the sites themselves is often worthwhile, in case a target happens to show up.  There are 11 sigs, and I start scanning.  Numerous gas, two relics (which I am keen to do after discovering that the minigames are easy in C3), one data, and two wormholes.

As I scan, I am warping around the system dscanning, looking for towers or targets.  There are none in the inner system, although there is one lost Hobgoblin I out in space somewhere.  In the outer system, though, I am excited to see 15 (!) ships.  That is until I look at their types: most are rookie ships.  Still, a few are not; a Noctis, a covert ops, a cruiser.  I expect they are sitting empty at a POS, but maybe a few are manned.  There are four moons, so I warp to #1 (not it), and dscan the others.  The POS is at moon #2.  I warp in, and have a look.  Too bad -- all of the ships are empty.  These people have a Ship Maintenance Array, so I have no idea why they have bothered to park little dinky ships out on the lawn.

I check out the wormholes next.  Both are lowsec.  One system has one guy in it, the other has several.  Neither have probes.  So they look pretty safe.  All in all, a pretty good system to run sites in.

Nothing to do but wait.  I consider running some sites by myself, but I don't really need the money that badly and so decide not to.  I figure there is some chance that someone will appear at the tower, so I should be ready.  I go back to the tower, and sit there cloaked.

Nothing is happening.  I dscan from time to time.  Usually nothing, but now I see a pod on dscan.  Huh?  Then he zips into the tower, and sits for a minute.  I watch him.  Maybe he will get a ship and do something.  But, no.  He warps back out towards the inner system.  I warp into the inner system, but he is gone.  Evidently logged in and left.  Well, what was that about?  Maybe he was doing PI?

Bored again.  Wife comes home, so I decide to go AFK for a while to say hi and act like a human being.

When I come back, there is a surprise.  There's a new wreck floating about 100km from me.  It's a Caldari industrial.  What happened here?  

The name of the wreck is "X's Badger II", so it is likely to have been owned by character X.  But I am sure I have just seen that name X -- and I have.  One of the rookie ships is named "X's Reaper".  Did X get ganked outside of his force field?  Why would he be out there?  He's not even near any POS modules; he is much further out.  I get info on the wreck, and sure enough, X was its last pilot.  I get info on X.  X has just, within the last day, joined a new corp.  His old corp is the owner of the POS.

So now I guess what happened.  It appears that X was trying to fly into the POS, perhaps to get his stuff.  Obviously he thought he was permitted to enter the force field, but he was not.  Not being in the corp, he was bounced out of the force field at high speed.  And not being in the corp, he was just another target that the POS was programmed to attack.  Evidently he got warp scrambled and blown up, before he could get away.

EVE never ceases to create the unexpected.

The wreck has lootses, and I wants it, oh yes precious.  But not in a Tengu -- too costly if I screw up and get killed by the tower.  I reship back home into a disposable Heron, and warp back to loot the wreck.  I hope there is something interesting on it, but no.  Just one part: a Cargo Expander I.  Whoopie.  The tower is trying to lock me, and one of the small lasers does.  100 shields down, I warp off.

Later, Jayne returns, and we run the two relics sites.  (Impressive number of wrecks in each one.)  He has to leave again, so I come back to salvage them semi-solo.  (My alt watches the POS.)  Nobody ganks me.  And then I return again in my exploration Buzzard to crack the cans.  50m each, for easy minigames.

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