Random Acts of Luck and Grand Theft Wormhole

From time to time, dumb, blind luck will surprise you. Often, as is luck’s way, you’ll simply stumble upon it, and come up grinning with success at the hand of a random act of chance. Other times, in the immortal words of Harvey Dent (or the equally immortal if not tragically ill-advised words of Michael Hutchence), you make your own; yesterday saw a little of column A, and a little of column B.

I’ll start by first apologizing for my poor performance here on this blog over the past month; from time to time it seems, we-who-write about internet spaceships on blogs that make our non-gaming friends look at us funny, have to take a step back and deal with that bitch lover we call Real Life. It seems I’ve been no exception; with a new job and a lot more work, I pretty much took a hiatus from Eve over the past 3 or 4 weeks, so you can imagine undocking for the first time in about a month yesterday felt amazing.

But back to that bit about luck and stumbling blindly into it.

The first part occurred while moving some ships around between Dodixie and Jita with an alt. As I jumped gate into Suroken, I noticed a few wrecks lying around the gate, most of which were already surrounded by a few enterprising young salvagers. For some random reason, I decided to point my Typhoon in the direction of one and lumbered my way over. Upon opening the wreck though, I stopped for a second; there, among some random crap, were 4 shiny gleaming PLEXs. The following is a direct log of my internal dialogue at this point:

Has to be a trap

nah, its real PLEX

Still, gotta be a trap

Aiden, who the hell lays a trap with 2bil in PLEX?

I might

Thats fair. Still, you should probably take it.

Good point, *yoink!*

Well done

Thanks, we should really do this more often

Agreed.

The entire above internal dialogue happened in about half a second, and in the end, I decided a 70mil battleship was worth the risk for 2 billion in PLEX. I snatched the loot, and went to hide in a safe (Suroken has no station) to wait out my timer in case it WAS a trap (as it turns out, the victim, Apollyon Echerie, is a 2 week old NPC corp toon, and was most assuredly not laying a trap for me somewhere). I eventually hopped back to Jita with my new prizes and made a very tasty 2bil off of them in less than 5 minutes. Many thanks to Apollyon for making the enlightened decision to fly 4 PLEX in a noob ship, and even more thanks to Gratcho of the Forsakened Companions for making the equally good decision to shoot him in the face and miss the loot; cheers. (see edit at bottom of post)

While sitting in Jita rolling around in and lighting cigars off of my new-found billions, I jumped onto voice coms to see a surprising number of ninjas in our Mumble channel, and the words “wormhole” and “POS” being tossed around a lot; color me interested.

As it turns out, one of our guys had been infiltrating a wormhole corp for a little while now, and today was going to be harvest day for the Per Flamma Exorior alliance. So far, our man had managed to bump out or eject over 100 assorted ships and goodies outside the tower for the first group of ninjas who were already in the hole to start scooping. Myself and a few other guys who had just logged in jumped in clean clones and shuttles to make our way the 40-something jumps through low and null to the WH in order to help liberate some of the ships.

Yet, such is the way with this group, thinking ahead more than 10 seconds in any given situation is generally not a tactic we in SN tend to practice (we prefer to think of it as “tactical concentration on the present”). The first group of guys, after killing a bunch of random stuff along with the local residents’ unpiloted Thanatos (killmails withheld to protect the guilty), managed to load up 3 stolen Orcas with Tech 3’s, Command Ships, fuel, and random crap, and set out to get home post-haste. Lets reiterate that: three Orcas full of stuff decided to jump through an end-of-life  wormhole together. I swear, there’s a reason we do the things we do.

Now that the hole was decidedly collapsed with only 2 guys still inside, without scan ships, and the rest of us bombing aimlessly through Pure Blind low-sec bordering LAWN space in shuttles, we regrouped.

While one of our guys used the director API our guy on the inside still had to start ransoming the CEO for the exact amount of cash in his wallet (to his disturbance), the two guys still in the hole started looking around at the field of empty ships now surrounding the POS for anything resembling a scan ship. Luckily, one was found and the hunt for a new exit began.

Fast-forward 40 minutes and another, wait for it, 32 jumps through low and null later (there was some confusion with one of our guys ability to read a map 😉 ), as the rest of us tried to talk down our man Waagstrom from self destructing everything he could get his hands on in the hole while Splid scanned our entrance. Finally, we had a destination.

Once in, we beheld the field of goodies sprawled everywhere, then it was time to secure our spoils. Seeing as we were without Orcas now, the four of us now in the WH secured the most expensive ships we could fly, and then set about burning down and looting everything else on the field; scorched earth ftw.

Why yes, that is my new armor-rigged Nighthawk! And no, we aren’t in a Pulsar or any of hole that gives armor bonuses.

After filling our utter shit-fit new ships (armor Hawk of Doom) with random goodies, we set out for home. The interesting part now was going to be getting 5 bad-at-following-directions ninjas back through 28 jumps of LAWN null and a bunch of lowsec. On the fun side, if we DID die horribly, the lossmails of the shit we were flying would be worth the entire ordeal. On the surface of course, we looked somewhat scary: a Nighthawk, Abso, Damnation, Lachesis, and Ishtar rolling through space. However, every single ship was either without guns, without guns their pilot could use, or just unfit entirely; all part of our genius strategy, I assure you.

In the end, we made it home safe and sound. Total haul from the POS smash and grab is unknown yet, but what we DO know we snagged was three Orcas, around 6 Command Ships, 4 T3’s, 5 Recons, 2 Hulks, 5 HACs, a few Transports, and a dozen or so T2 frigs and Dictors. Furthermore, the first crew destroyed probably around 3 billion in ships, including a Thanatos.

Many, many thanks to our unnamed mole for his brilliant infiltration and help in the utter destruction of Per Flamma Exorior.

Quote of the Op:

Karma Bad: so whats left in the hole?
Waagstrom: destruction, chaos, and broken dreams
Aiden: GREAT SUCCESS

o7,

-Aiden

Edit: There seemed to be some confusion surrounding Apollyon and his loss. The one lossmail of his I could find which I ended up using as a source in this post was actually incorrect. First, it had him losing 2, not 4, PLEX, and it had the loss in Suroken (I mistakenly quipped that Suroken has no stations, and it was quickly brought to my attention how wrong I was). Confused, I decided to evemail Apollyon and ask him directly what the story was; here’s his response:

 

Re: Your loss

From: Apollyon Echerie
To: Aiden Mourn

Congrats on the find. That was a wierd situation to put it simply. Was cruising through a jump sequence and my computer glitched and I had to force a restart. Next thing I knew I was dead and had no luck finding the wreckage that you did. Here is a copy of the kill log:

2012.03.31 20:38:00

Victim: Apollyon Echerie
Corp: Federal Defence Union
Alliance: Unknown
Faction: Gallente Federation
Destroyed: Incursus
System: Kassigainen
Security: 0.9
Damage Taken: 1132

Involved parties:

Name: Caldari Navy Captain 3rd Rank / Caldari Navy (laid the final blow)
Damage Done: 1132

Destroyed items:

Dairy Products, Qty: 10 (Cargo)
150mm ‘Scout’ Accelerator Cannon
Small Armor Repairer I, Qty: 2 (Cargo)
EM Ward Amplifier I (Cargo)
Caldari Navy Midshipman Insignia III, Qty: 3 (Cargo)
Defender I, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Antimatter Charge S, Qty: 40
Tungsten Charge S, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Acolyte I (Drone Bay)
Caldari Navy Captain Insignia I (Cargo)

Dropped items:

Metal Scraps, Qty: 50 (Cargo)
Caldari Navy Midshipman Insignia II, Qty: 10 (Cargo)
Antimatter Charge S, Qty: 2457 (Cargo)
‘Arbalest’ Rocket Launcher I (Cargo)
Caldari Navy Midshipman Insignia I, Qty: 5 (Cargo)
Thorium Charge S, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
150mm ‘Scout’ Accelerator Cannon, Qty: 2
Light Missile Launcher I (Cargo)
Small Armor Repairer I
30 Day Pilot’s License Extension (PLEX), Qty: 4 (Cargo)
Antimatter Charge S, Qty: 80
Caldari Navy Captain Insignia IV, Qty: 3 (Cargo)
Small Shield Booster I (Cargo)
EM Ward Field I (Cargo)
Type-D Altered SS Overdrive Injector

Hope that helps

Apollyon

To clarify, that makes Apollyon’s loss not a suicide gank at all, but rather a harsh lesson in what happens when you fly through Caldari space while a member of the Gallente Militia, which explains the lack of KM. Lesson learned?

~ by Aiden Mourn on April 1, 2012.