The Saga Continues

This is a story in progress, it starts here.

I didn't expect Monday to be a day I could get online, but my wife ended up working late and when she came home she needed to run to Home Depot to buy a mini fridge.  I went with her and afterwards we went to a local slider place I hadn't tried yet.  Greasy steam grilled burgers are good for the soul.  By the time we got home I realized there was some laundry that needed processing, so I logged in for a bit while handling that.

It turned out to just be a PI session, and an excerpt from any of those movies where people repeat the same day over again making the same mistakes.  Managing the power grid on a Planetary Installation, even with max skilled grid, can leave you short of your goal if you do it in the wrong order.  I have this habit of starting my extractors first, because "free resources yay," and then realizing I need to drop one or two heads to fit whatever installation I had meant to add to the planet.  I did that on two out of three planets, on the same night, and this was not the first time.  Sure I could just cancel the extractions and fix it, but they would be done again in 24 hours or less and I'm gonna get better at this memory game eventually, right?

On Tuesday I expected to play, I was even a little excited.  I've been pounding it into my head that running combat anoms is still way better than running high sec L4's in terms of the ISK earned and time spent.  If I can run those I can run these and be happy about it.  The argument was working, I was looking forward to logging in and running some sites.  The wife was going out for a girls night and the oldest son was at a hockey game.  Once the younger son was in bed I logged in and bounced around the wormhole, all clear, time to get to work.

Earlier in the day I had reviewed some information about the combat anoms and determined that I'm not going to run Sleeper Data Sanctuaries again unless I have no other choice.  They take longer to run and drop less blue loot than a Perimeter Checkpoint or Perimeter Frontier.  I prefer those two, in that order, with Checkpoints dropping less but being quick to run.  So I selected a Checkpoint, jumped in the Drake and warped to the site.

Having run several before now, I have the process down to a science.  Approach the farthest sentry as soon as you land, which for me is really aligning to something in that general direction.  Kill the first sentry while the other comes into range, kill a frigate or two, then the other sentry, then the cruisers to get the next wave.  If you get close enough to the distant sentry all future waves will spawn within 58km, which for me is max Heavy Missile range.  That saves a lot of re-positioning time and with the layout of my solar system I can usually align one way or the other, to a planet or back to the POS, while staying in range.

Of course I didn't quite make it that far, with a cruiser or two to go in the first wave... Probes!  They were of the Sister's variety, so I hoped the person wasn't slow and would get it done and move on.  Clearly I need to stop hoping for things, because it seems to make it worse.

I hadn't scanned yet, wasn't sure if I was going to, running sites was a higher priority.  Rather than sit cloaked in a CovOps I decided to warp around the system in my Claw and be really annoying for anybody trying to figure out what I was doing.  First it was dead wormhole bookmarks, then bouncing planet to planet.  Then I made a warp from a safe near my POS to planet 1 and landed inside the POCO.  The ship sat there briefly, calmly, and then was flung out at over 1km/s like a ship bouncing off a POS forcefield.  That was fun, so I warped to planet 2, bouncing off the POCO in a similarly hilarious way.  And that is how I created POCO Bounce the game for bored people with nowhere else to go.  You see you can't just land inside a POCO with any old warp to any old planet.  Some planets have the POCO's at zero, some don't.  Even when they are you have to come in from the right angle and get the right randomized exit point from the RNG, otherwise the bounce gets missed or is underwhelming.  I bounced back and forth between planets 1 and 2, eventually finding out that the best pattern was starting from planet 9, hitting planet 1 and then planet 2 for what could be two potentially spectacular bounces.

This was fun, but I didn't want to wear it out, what was taking this guy so long?  This inconvenient delay reminded me of something I learned when my youngest son was born.  Somebody told me at that time "sleep when they sleep."  It was brilliant but a sleep deprived parent wouldn't think of that, they would try to accomplish other things while the baby slept.  But if the baby is asleep, you should be too, you can do that other stuff when they wake up.  So I jumped into my CovOps and started probing.

There weren't that many signatures, maybe 10 or 12.  I tore into them, ignoring a gas site, and bookmarking all the wormholes and data/relics.  When I got down to the last few, and the other probes were still, out I was really getting annoyed.  Seriously man, I played POCO Bounce for a while and I'm still faster than you with my T1 core probes.  Then the Helios showed up on scan briefly, I think he warped to a null data/relic site.  It was gone again very quickly, he probably wasn't there long enough to hack any cans, maybe one.

Shortly after that the probes disappeared and things got quiet.  I bounced around the system, cloaked, just to be sure.  As I was getting ready to resume the site my wife walked in the door.  Without going into a multiple paragraph explanation of why, just know that there are times when you can duck your wife and times when you can't.  That moment when she walks in and wants to tell you about her day is not one of them.  Starting to worry about wrecks despawning, I shrugged it all off and went upstairs to chat with her.

A little while later I got back downstairs to find that once again... Probes!  So I continued working on laundry, reading the forums, and finally things went quiet again.  Expecting the original wrecks to be gone, I warped to the site.  They were actually still there, so I hurried and finished it up.  I thought jetcans/wrecks lasted 90 minutes, maybe it's longer or maybe the delay seemed longer than I thought.  It was about this time that a thought occurred to me, my loot/salvage Heron had no prop mod.  Too late to care now, just get this done.

I'm really good at forgetting things until it's too late.  If I'm going to remember to bring in more 1MN prop mods I need to grind it into my head.  Looting a site without one wasn't quite enough and there were several null data/relic sites up, so I got started on that.  The first one was gone, I'm guessing that is where the Helios went.  The rest were intact, with the Serpentis site having cans really close together.  The other sites had them much more spread out, and I slowboated at 502m/s to all of the cans in each site, slowly getting better at the hacking minigame in the meantime.  The Angel site was a jerk and shut me down on 4 of the 6 cans.  After the sites were done it was late, so I warped back to the POS, dropped off the loot from the last site and went to a safe to do some PI and logoff.

This time I did things in the right order, fixing the two planets I messed up the night before.  Things are running at peak efficiency now with one more planet to figure out, but that is something for another day.  I logged off and went to bed, failing to fall asleep right away.  Somehow I feel better than expected this morning on just a few hours of sleep.  I'm sure it will all catch up with me tonight.