Valar Morghulis

Its been a slow summer around here

The downside of being an entirely internet-spaceships-centric blog is that when you don’t play internet spaceships, by its very nature, the blog sort of suffers. In fairness, I spent the last month or so hammering out things professionally in my life, and after 5 fantastic years together, 2 weeks ago, I finally married the gorgeous and incredible woman who’s bewilderingly agreed that I’m a guy she wants to spend a lifetime with. So believe me when I say there are a lot of things in life that internet spaceship shenanigans absolutely pale in comparison to.

That all being said, after the festivities had died down, the ludicrous amounts of booze had been drunk (Irish-Scottish-Russian wedding anyone?), the relatives departed, and the return to normal lives, there was a familiar itch for spaceship carnage and wanton destruction. A man has a thirst, a man needs a name; valar morghulis motherfuckers.

A week or so before the wedding, I’d inserted an agent of mine into a low-to-mid-level wormhole corporation; and having spent his entire month in corp either offline or doing absolutely nothing besides being a chatterbox in corp chat, the time was ripe for some good ole fashioned betrayal. I scanned an exit, and snuck Aiden and another alt of mine in Covert Ops ships into the hole and cloaked up, and having kept a relatively decent account of typical play schedules of active members, I waited until morning my time time to spring the trap. I had no access to the CHA, and wouldn’t anytime soon, but I did have access to the 2 billion in ships in the SMA. This wasn’t going to be the worlds biggest WH heist, but it was sure going to be a fun smash and grab.

Finally, the last corp member logged off, and it was go time. With my agent in place, he flipped the shield password to one of my own, warped the two CovOps into the POS, and started tossing out ships for me and my other associate to fly out; first up were of course the the two blinged-out tech 3s, which I immediately boarded and warped to the exit.

What I’d neglected to see though was that somewhere in-between sneaking into the hole and starting the getaway, someone else in the alliance had decided to stick a large T2 bubble over the wormhole, forcing me to putter 50 or so km to the hole in an exceptionally expensive Tengu and Legion. After the longest minute of Eve, I finally popped out into Aridria lowsec, made the one jump to a station system, and dropped off my shinys; then it was time for more.

Re-entry into the WH made me realize that the bubble was going to be a serious pain in the ass; pod-creep through a large T2 bubble, in Wormhole-space, on a low-sec exit, in expensive clones, is probably one of the more unfun, nail-bitting experiences I’ve had in Eve in recent memory. So for the next trip, I grabbed two prop-less, full-damage Apocs in the SMA, and went to overheated town on the bubble as I puttered towards the exit for the second time.

With the bubble down, movement became a lot easier, and I got into a routine of trucking the 3-4 bil worth of ships (before taking stock of all the faction mods fitted) out of the POS, through the wormhole, and the one hop over to a lowsec station system, just as confusion started to bubble over in the alliance intel concerning the mysterious goings-on on d-scan…

Grimweed Bubblepot > ******* was it you moving the apocs
Grimweed Bubblepot > ******* ??????????
Grimweed Bubblepot > Alkhin Moussou hey man why are all yer ships out in yer pos?
Alkhin Moussou > ?
Alkhin Moussou > all my ships are out?
Alkhin Moussou > they shouldnt be
Grimweed Bubblepot > ******* and this guy is helping them
celladorre > *******
Grimweed Bubblepot > yep so some one has doubled daz
celladorre > yep
celladorre > i cant get into the pos either…

Ahh yes, panic and confusion…now its a party.

Seeing as I had fuel access, I decided the real crime here would be leaving the large Minmatar tower just sitting in space, so naturally, I decided the best course of action would be to empty the fuel, wait for the cycle, and pack up the tower to take with me. Unfortunately, those plans went south when I was informed that taking the tower itself down was going to take something like 15 minutes, and in WH space, with no shield, no real backup, and other members of the alliance starting to log into the hole, I decided to move fast. I couldn’t exactly access the corp hangers, but I sure could blow them up! I got my associate to lower the shields, jumped into one of our newly liberated Manticores and started lobbing torps at the hanger. Low and behold, what dropped but another large Minmatar tower!

I got my alt into one of the last ships, the very appropriately named (given the situation) “DONT TAKE” Itty V, and snagged the tower as well as other dropped POS mods and goodies, just as an alliance Bomber landed inside the now shield-less tower to witness its demise. In what was probably the most impressive pvp maneuver of my entire Eve career, I locked up the Nemesis with my point-less Manti, and started bumping it and shooting it with torps as I simultaneously managed to get my 2-billion-laden Itty V into alignment and out towards the exit. I’m pretty sure the other pilot’s utter awe at my pr0 use of horrible piloting and bomber bumps facilitated that getaway.

A handful of stolen ships; props to what I hope are Ian Curtis references

And now, for some more fun…

There is a part of the abomination that is the POS management screen that allows you to see all POSs under control of your corporation; yup, apparently even the highsec one in Heimatar space no one knows about. Though I’d intended to stay in the hole a little longer to see what happened, I realized that the prospect of another pinata to wack at was much more enticing. I had my agent head out into K-space and make a beeline for the tower 45 jumps away.

The medium Minmatar tower in Emolgranlan didn’t have much I could lay my hands on; mostly just research labs that I had no access to, and subsequently, couldn’t pack up as they were full of things. I did set about changing the POS password though, about 2 minutes before they finally logged on a director and revoked my agent’s POS roles; some people just hate fun.

Two days later, then 3, then 5, then almost a week after the initial heist however, my agent was still somehow in corp. And if my calculations based off my last eyeballing of the fuel levels before roles were stripped were correct, the shield was going to drop soon, giving the corp back access to the tower and, presumably, keeping me out. No shield however, made the labs open to attack, and as my agent was one to keep his hands clean of unsavory things like corp-on-corp violence, I immediately war-deced the alliance with a 1-man alt corp.

Sure enough, I logged in the next day to find the CEO himself back inside the shields, most likely emptying the hangers, and I could assume the tower had been dully refueled. My agent, somehow apparently, still had tower access though; time for phase 2. I logged on my wardec toon, had my agent drop the shields (fun fact: you don’t need roles for that if you’re in the corp!*), and warped in a Talos for some shooty-shooty. My agent scooped the labs and advanced labs that the CEO had been kind enough to empty, and I set about blastering the other ones in the face with my other toon. After scooping the rest of the defenses that I could (again, no tower scooping while its full of fuel), I sat back with a grin on my face.

Nothing else came of the dec, and finally, two days after THAT, my agent was eventually booted from corp. Finding creative and warp-stabbed ways of trucking out the 30-odd ships and few billion worth of large-sized loot out of deep Aridria low-sec was the next fun part, but thats a story for another time never.

Again, not the worlds biggest WH heist, but a chance to cause a little chaos, make 6 billion, and get away with your hands clean is always a good day.

-Aiden

 

*Stealth Edit: There’s now some confusion about whether or not you need roles to take down tower shields. Further testing after this event has shown that you do, and yet my agent definitely had no roles when he was able to accomplish this (I double checked since I was shocked that I could). One idea is that its tied to titles, especially for a WH corp, but if anyone has any light to shine on this, speak up.

~ by Aiden Mourn on September 12, 2013.