There's always a bigger fish

I didn't expect last night to be anything exciting.  My wife had to go to her work Christmas party so I picked our youngest son up from school after I got off work.  When we got home I made him a chicken/spinach/cheese tortilla and went downstairs to log in.  I wasn't hungry because my co-worker bought us a metric ton of sushi for lunch and we ate all of it.

Having just played the night before, I had plenty of bookmarks that were still active signatures.  I went through the list and cleaned out the dead ones, then narrowed down the active signatures in the scan window.  There were 2 new signatures, but they weren't my statics, somehow those were still up from the day before and nearing the end of their natural lifetime.  The new sigs turned out to be a frigate sized wormhole to wspace and a null data site.  Looking at what was available I noticed there were 5 gas sites up.  One of them was a Sizable Perimeter Reservoir which looked tempting. C84 gas has been a good seller for me so far.

Figuring it was best to get right to work, I jumped in a Venture and warped to the site.  I knew something was wrong as soon as the grid loaded, because the rats were up.  With a few quick clicks I was prepped to warp again as soon as I landed.  Before the rats could even start to lock me up I was in warp back to the POS.  Right before the grid disappeared from my overview I saw that the C50 cloud was missing, and I suddenly knew what had happened.  Somebody had been ninja huffing, cleared the C50 and possibly some of the C84 and when the rats spawned they bailed.  That meant they couldn't have gotten more than 1000-1500 m3 of the C84 and there would still be 4500-5000 m3 left.  That was good enough for me.

It's almost like cheating, using the Drake to kill gas site rats, unless it's sentries in an Ordinary Perimeter Reservoir, then it's appropriate.  Six dead Sleeper frigates later I came back in the Heron for cleanup duty.  Minutes later I was back in the site, in the Venture, huffing that sweet gas.  This blissful experience only lasted about two minutes, because Probes!

They were Sister's probes, from what I eventually found out was a Buzzard.  Not being in the mood to wait around and see how long it took this person to probe down the wormhole, it occurred to me that now would be a good time to do some PI on an alt.  Both alts had started training the skills, and one of them had actually put up an installation, so I decided to put up a second installation to improve my Enriched Uranium and Mechanical Parts output.

After a quick character swap and a game of "where did I leave that cloaking device?"  The alt was in the Osprey with Cargo Expanders, and coincidentally that was where I had left the cloak.  Eyes 1, Memory 0.  With the probing Buzzard still hard at work, I warped to a Lava planet and got to work setting up a new installation.  I won't bore you with the details of setting up the PI installation, it happened, clicks were made, yay me or something.

Eventually the probes disappeared, that's when the Buzzard showed up on scan and then disappeared, never to be seen again.  I swapped characters, back to Niskin, and bounced around the hole.  All clear!  So I resumed the blissful gas huffing, taking in exactly 4960 m3 of gas before warping back to the POS to drop it off.  C84 doesn't fit neatly into the 5000 m3 Ore Bay of the Venture, so I had to stop it a cycle early to avoid waste.  Back at the POS, I hit scan to find a Drake and Ferox somewhere nearby.  This part is a little fuzzy for me, but I do know I warped back to the site and landed as the Drake and Ferox were warping off.

I thought they were after me so I warped back to the POS again and got into a CovOps.  After warping to a safespot in the middle of the system I proceeded to play the 5 degree scan game.  Recently I've had some frustrating issues with getting things down to 5 degrees, and last night it hit me as to why.  The signatures on the overlay, the ones that appear in space, are not positioned exactly where they really are in space.  I knew this, but hadn't translated it over to how that affected d-scanning.  Anoms are exact, signatures are not, which is why sometimes I could get 5 degrees no problem and other times I'd lose them below 15.  Major duh!  But this led to me getting the Drake and Ferox on 5 degree scan, 0.6 AU away in a Frontier Perimeter Reservoir, just sitting there.

I waited a while, they weren't warping around at all, just sitting there.  I wasn't sure why at the time, but it would become clear later.  I took this opportunity to reflect on the sad PvP situation I kept finding myself in.  There were two of them, which severely reduced my chances of having any success killing them.  But even if there were only one, it would have been a tough call.  Taking a Battlecruiser in the Claw would require it to be fit poorly for small ship opponents, and would take a while.  The Hawk (I have a Hawk, I just never mentioned it before) would be the same thing but even slower.  Even my assumed next PvP ship upgrade, a Bomber, would be a dicey proposal.  A Loki could certainly take one of them, not sure about two, again it depends on fits.  But that didn't matter, I didn't have a Loki yet or the skills trained properly.

Having successfully thrown myself a pity party, I decided to go AFK and see what developed.  About 20 minutes later I got back and found d-scan empty again.  Yay, they were gone.  Time to finish this gas site.  By the time I got back to the POS it was Probes! all over again.  This time I said screw it.  There had to be less than 1000 m3 left in the site based on my calculations.  I was going for it.

Landing in the site, which was located near the center of the solar system just like everything else, I started playing with d-scan ranges.  The probes were within 5 AU, but not 4 AU, no biggy.  I dialed it down to 2.5 AU and spammed the scan button.  A few probes showed up at times but never the full set.  It wasn't long before the last 600 m3 or so of C84 gas was in my hold, the cloud popped and I warped back to the POS.  The probes disappeared shortly after.

I still had some time left, the wife had left her Christmas party and was finishing up Christmas shopping.  I picked out a gas site that I hadn't seen the Drake and Ferox in and warped to it.  Rats, again!  So now I knew what was up.  They had been warping to gas sites and sitting there waiting to kill the rats.  This site had both clouds so it wasn't a ninja situation.  Once again I did the dance of Drake and prepped the site for huffing.  That's when things got interesting.

While I was clearing the rats in the Drake my wife called, she was on her way home and once again we needed to play driveway car shuffle.  I had to work the next day but she didn't.  Since 2x frigates and 1x cruiser don't last very long, I finished the fight and warped to the POS.  The next few minutes involved car swapping and chatting with the wife.  Then I ran back downstairs to finish up.

Swapping from the Drake to the Heron I warped back to clear the wrecks.  D-scan was hot, showing a Cerberus and a Venture.  "I wonder if they are working together?" D-scan again, Cerberus and Capsule.  "I guess not."  I went into panic mode, scooped the loot and the MTA and left the wrecks to rot.  Noo, not my potential Nanoribbons!  But it was time to get into a CovOps and see what was up.

Warping back to the middle of the system things had gotten even more interesting.  The Cerberus was still on scan, and the Drake and Ferox were back.  I tried to narrow the location down, but watching the situation develop was more interesting.  You never know what you are missing while you are trying to isolate the next tightest degree.  So I set it back to 360 degrees and tried to imagine what was happening.

Next on scan was the Cerb, two warp disrupt probes, the Drake and the Ferox.  No sign of what dropped the warp bubbles.  The Drake eventually disappeared, but no pod so it must have escaped.  One warp disrupt bubble popped and then the Cerb's backup arrived.  Cynabal, Curse, Rook and a short time later a Scimitar.  The Ferox didn't last long at that point.  Then the remaining ships slowly left the scene, and things got quiet again.

My curiosity was peaked, who were these visitors?  It occurred to me that I could just search zkillboard for my J-ID and find out really easy.  Up until now I've kept my wormhole identity secret on this blog.  Anybody who has followed the blog and knows where to look could have found the J-ID by now.  For the purpose of finishing this post properly I'm going to let the cat out of the bag.

What I had witnessed on d-scan was a Lazerhawk drive-by on the guys I had just wished I could take on myself.  Bob works in strange ways it seems.  I got to see the big guys at work without the prestigious but unfortunate case of being the target.  With that all figured out I did a little PI management and logged off.  It felt like I didn't accomplish much, but it was still one heck of a night.

Fly safe everyone, have a good weekend, and watch out for bigger fish!