Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

I’ve seen the whining on the forums ever since Trinity about the general increase in loot sizes, but (what with the wars and all) I haven’t had a chance to do much mission salvage. So, I’d noticed that my cargo holds were filling up faster, but it wasn’t a huge deal for me.

Today I was surveying a system in my survey vessel when my probes showed me a Cormorant above the ecliptic and far from any asteroid belt. That usually means a mission salvager, so I warped in to see what the pickings looked like.

And my crappy internet connection picked that moment to die.

By the time I got back online and finished my warp, I found myself looking at about thirty widely-spread loot cans in open space — pretty clearly the remains of a turned-in mission by somebody who salvaged the wrecks, but left (or cherry-picked) the loot. Some of the loot cans were named to indicate poor quality loot, so I assumed a cherry-picking — but when I sampled the first can, it had named gear for laser-battleships in it, more than would fit in my frigate.

Time to inventory my regional vessels.

No hauler within several hops. No Badger II available in system. But there’s a creaky old Badger in the junkyard around Moon 10, she’s cheaper than the first item of loot I just looked at. She’ll do.

Buy the Badger, any afterburners in system? No, but there’s a frigate microwarpdrive, she can run that thing all day and it will double her speed. Duct tape that bad boy to the stern and let’s go salvaging!

And that’s when the true horror (well, horror for mission runners, it’s really a dream for a hauler-pilot like me) of the size of Level IV mission loot began to sink in. Large lasers, large armor repairers, torp launchers, large armor plates, heavy cap gear, the usual assortment — my gut tells me it would have been two or three trips worth in my well-fitted salvage destroyer pre-Trinity. But I tell you what, I was beginning to fear it wouldn’t all fit in my Badger before I finished cleaning up that canstellation — in fact, I wound up with nearly 4,500 cubic meters worth of loot, out of a single stage of one mission.

Clearly my days of speed-looting in a nimble kestrel are over. And the salvage destroyer concept is getting long in the tooth. Unless CCP finally coughs up a specialized salvage vessel, the humble hauler clearly has a bright future.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2008 at 6:09 pm and is filed under Salvage Notes, Today In Ironfleet. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.