Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

Greater Mars was quiet today, so after some desultory probing in a couple of adjacent w-systems, I decided to take a holiday at home, visiting my home base and fittings hangar to play with my stealth bombers and my ECM ships, since they all need refitting after the recent patch.

Well, after a long day of that, I decided to do some high-sec probing, since I’ve been in w-space pretty much constantly since Apocrypha released. I was curious to see how the new probing system would work for finding salvage opportunities.

Pretty soon I picked up the spoor of a whole swarm of drones and battleships at a moon, which is an odd thing to see in high sec. So went to have a look-see. What I found was about a dozen heavy ships from the Habitat Against Humanity alliance, with members from The IMorral Majority [BADD] and Squirrel Horde [NUTSS]. They appeared to be having a long and happy POS-stomping party; there was a Dread Gurista tower going down and a whole lot of shooting going on.

What caught my eye, though, were a number of Giant Secure Cans scattered about; several of the battleships were snuggled up to them, and they had names like “Antimatter L”.

Now, it’s unfortunate that ever since Apocrypha gave secure cans their new graphics, it’s no longer possible to tell whether a can is anchored or not unless you have functional color vision (which I don’t). But there was such a chaos of ships and drones, I thought it highly unlikely that anybody took the time to anchor their ammo cans. So, off I went for a cargo vessel.

I chose the humble Badger — not even a Badger II — because I thought there was some chance somebody might be willing to suicide me in a fit of pique, and I wanted to deny them any satisfaction for any such berserker insanity. And besides, it was funnier that way.

First load, I got two Giant Secure Cans, with no sign that anybody saw me. By the second load, the tower was down, and they noticed when I scooped can #3. Suddenly I had two battleships targeting me.

You go, boys! I love a good Concord show. Meanwhile, I steered toward can #4. Unfortunately, it was in the process of being scooped by Klendaxor in a Bustard. (He was a BADD member until yesterday, so it looks like he dropped corp so he could supply today’s operation with impunity from any tower defenders.)

Back at base, I checked out the contents of my cans. One was empty — no surprise since I came along near the end of the tower shooting. But the others? One of them had twenty five thousand large anti-matter rounds in it, which is a cool three million ISK in anybody’s book. The other was even better: 16,000 Bane Rage torpedoes, worth about eight million ISK on the current market.

There having been a lot of loose unclaimed drones floating around, I went back in a fast scooping frigate. This attracted a lot of blinky yellow boxes from assorted battleships, but they were cleaning up drones rapidly, and all I got was a single Hammerhead II.

Finally, reasoning that they might have taken this tower down in order to put their own up, I went back in my trusty Prowler and prowled for a while. But in the interim, they’d already anchored a small tower, and (though I watched carefully while they onlined it and got the forcefield up, writing this blog post in the meanwhile) they didn’t show any inclination to drop anything else for an ambitious salvager to scoop.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 17th, 2009 at 10:58 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.