Death Of An Orca
Its been a fun couple of days in Dodixie.
Ganking or PvP in Empire space is different than low sec or null, which can be both a good and a bad thing. On the downside, you usually have to actively bait, trick, or harass your target into a fight. For some people, this is more of a nuisance than anything else, and it leads them to a life of piracy (or anti-piracy) in low sec. Others, like me, enjoy the hunt and the complexity involved with the hoops you’ve got to jump through to get some pew in high-sec.
The other option is good old fashioned suicide-ganking, which involves having enough firepower and balls to just go and gank them before Concord shows up. To be perfectly honest, this is WAY easier than you might think. Currently, ship prices are still in a slump, yet the insurance on them is still the base mineral price. This means that losing say, a platinum insured, t1-fit Hurricane or Tempest really won’t put much of a dent in your wallet. This is why freighter-ganking in particular is seeing an rise in popularity recently. If the cargo’s worth it and you’ve got 12 guys in battleships ready to loose some sec status, its actually quite profitable. That said, suicide-ganking isn’t just done in the name of profit. Sometimes, hell, its just plain fun.
A little backstory:
“Hulkageddon” was a little something thought up by former SN member Aegamaeous a while back, which was basically a corp contest to see how many hulks one could gank in high-sec in a single week. The reasoning behind this was the growing number of totally untanked hulks popping up in 0.5 asteroid belts near Dodixie. Aeg, and the rest of us, viewed this is as just downright lazy, typical carebear activity, and decided a lesson needed to be taught. I’m not totally sure, but I think the winner clocked in with 8 kills.
Fast forward to a couple days ago. A call went up in the TEARS alliance channel by Herr Wilkus (ceo and founder of Aggressive Salvage Services LLC) that he’d found a hulk/orca duo mining in Balle, and upon scanning the Orca, discovered that it was a.) untanked and even better, b.) rigged with TWO large t2 cargohold optimization rigs. Jaws dropped. Not only did those t2 cargo rigs put the total worth of the ship at around 1bil, but they also SIGNIFICANTLY dropped its EHPs, especially seeing as it wasn’t even tanked. Wheels started to turn in all our little ninja heads, until Wilkus popped the question… “you guys wanna gank him?” Evil smiles formed on all of our faces and we slowly started to nod. Yes, absolutely. We rushed to fit up the fastest gank-ship we could find, insured them, and headed to Balle. Wilkus had a cloaky alt get right next to them as our fleet of 3 battleships and 2 battlecruisers waited for our last BS pilot to finish fitting and get in system. All of a sudden, the worst….they began to align, warped to station, and logged off. After streams of profanity and curses, having had our adrenaline-high brutally cut short on us, we agreed to keep the gank-ships handy and check back in later to see if 0ur target was back. Not 24 hrs later, I logged back on in the afternoon to “AIDEN! Grab your gankship! The dudes back out mining!! GOGOGO!” in corp chat, followed by a fleet invite. I jumped in my trusty “Surprise!” (gank-cane) and met everyone else is Balle. This time, with the taste of blood on our lips and a serious case of blue-balls from the previous day, we were hopping up and down ready to do this. And this time we had 5 battleships and 2 BCs. Katsu was scouting and saw the mark undock from station and warp. Local was watched carefully as Wilkus’s cloaky alt checked the belts one by one. “I got him…warp to last planet and align to belt VII-2”. Awwwww yeah….blood pumping we got into position, giggling like schoolgirls at the total and utterly biased pain and suffering we were about to bring down on this rich yet foolish miner. And then, we warped. We landed right on top of the guy, released drones, readied guns and points, and targeted. My friends, you have never seen a ship melt so fast. Within seconds, before Concord even arrived, we reduced this flying piggy-bank into a very large pile of scrap (you might note the hilarious, uh, discrepancy, between the “total loss” and “total module drop” numbers…). We started laughing our asses off as Concord shredded our ships around us, and we podded back to station to wait out the GCC. Wilkus’s alt even beat the other guys to the punch by salvaging and looting our wrecks and the orca’s before they could get to them, although I will hand it to them that we got ZERO tears from them on this. So was this “worth it?” Was this worth the zero pay-out and the -2.8 drop (yeah, no shit, that sort of surprised me too) in security status? Absolutely! Not only did it make my pilot isk efficiency on the KB SKYROCKET, but it was amazingly fun to instigate so much destruction (and hell, my net wallet loss after insurance payout was something like 3mil). And personally, its going to make me giggle (yes, giggle) every time I think about it. It’s true what they say, that there are some things money just can’t buy, and assploding a stupidly rich and foolish orca pilot in empire space is one of them =D .
o7,
-Aiden
Finders & Keepers 
Damn why am I never on when stuff like this happens? I want to have fun too.
I really need to get my sec status up quickly…lol 😀
This just made my day!
Good story, but I take exception to you calling the orca pilot “foolish”… Pirates seem to walk around thinking that it’s foolish to equip any ship for anything other than being attacked by pirates… A hi sec carebear spends 99.99% of their time doing something other than being attacked by pirates so that’s what they equip for.
@ Bingo: I get what you’re saying generally, and to a certain extent I agree with your broader thinking. For instance, in the case of something like a freighter-gank or a random (not during hulkageddon) gang hulk-gank , I wouldn’t call the pilots foolish, just unlucky. However, flying a 350mil isk ship (900mil counting the t2 rigs) out in space with virtually no defense or a tank to speak of, IS foolish. Orcas are known for being juicy targets, and finding one in high-sec fitted with mods and rigs that substantially lower its hit points was just too good to pass on. I can say honestly though, that had this pilot fitted *some* sort of tank on his orca, the 6 of us involved would have taken a pass and moved on. So again, in this case, I’m sticking with the label “foolish” because this was avoidable with a little common sense.
-Aiden
Yeah I hear you. IMO, the advantages of rigging for cargo capacity are huge, but I’d at least put a damage control on there if I was using it for mining support or a DC and reinforced bulkheads if I was using it to haul to a major trade hub it were me. But, I wonder if you totalled up all the time/ISK lost making extra trips around various places in tanked Orcas that never would have been attacked anyways… It might not be as clear cut of a decision as it seems.
Basically, going untanked is the carebear’s high risk/high reward option. I don’t neccesarily think that’s foolish. Now, if he freaked out on you guys for ganking him after not having a tank, that would be foolish. But if he’s knowingly accpeting certain risks to increase his productivity, thats a different thing.
Fair enough. But I should also underline that this was in Balle, which is 0.5 space. So now we’re talking about a 900 mil isk ship, with terrible defense capabilities, sitting in a system with the lowest concord response time. Maybe foolish is a harsh word, and I know no one EXPECTS the Spanish Inquisition ( 🙂 ) to drop in on them in the form of 5 BS and 2 BC fit for maximum gank, but I will say it wasn’t a very well thought through decision. A couple defense mods instead of all those HP-dropping cargo expanders and t2 cargo rigs would have deterred us, or at least forced us to find some more firepower. But you make a very good argument for risk vs reward Bingo, and seeing as we got no tears at all from this, perhaps the risk was known and very much accepted by the orca pilot.
-Aiden