Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

I’ve never made any secret about the fact that this blog is the propaganda arm of Ironfleet. Which means that comments people leave here are subject to moderation. Although I allow critical comments, including some that are quite rude and bitter indeed, I do so only when they interest me. Snarky COAD-style stuff that’s just intended to express empty disdain and establish a false sense of superiority? Nope, we don’t need any. That special flavor of unwarranted arrogance has plenty of homes elsewhere on the internets.

One such comment this morning, though, caused me to reflect on Ironfleet’s relationship to piracy. Among the would-be commenter’s expressions of disdain was the suggestion that my recent PvP efforts in w-space had turned Ironfleet into “boring old pirates”. Which, frankly, took me by surprise. Although I don’t much care what other people think of Ironfleet, we are not now, nor ever have been, self-identified as a pirate organization, and I don’t expect that to change.

It’s true that since I took up with the merry band of ruffians in the TEARS alliance, I’ve participated in small-gang warfare that culminated in pod ransoms being collected by my gangmates. TEARS has no policy on piracy of which I am aware (pro or anti) but if I had to guess, I’d say the alliance leadership approves.

Ironfleet, however, remains first and foremost a salvage operation. It’s just that we’ve got an extremely broad definition of salvage, and sometimes if the salvage won’t stop wigging, you have to nail it to a board and hit it repeatedly with a heavy stick.

I myself have never asked for or collected a ransom. (Although I might in the future if it seemed reasonable. Sometimes there’s no reason to take the goods back to the impound yard, if you can sell them back to the former owner while they — the goods and the owner — are still on the hoof.) It’s my understanding that most of the ransoms TEARS collects while “out roaming around” go into the alliance war chest; be that as it may, I attend those operations because my cooperative combat skills could still use an awful lot of improvement. I do most of my salvage work solo, just as I always have; and it’s rare that I bring enough tackling gear to ransom anybody, even if I wanted to.

Meanwhile, Ironfleet’s other activities continue to evolve with the game. When “canstellations” went away after missions were moved away from the stargates, Ironfleet moved to salvaging jettisoned ore in the belts. That’s become a rare opportunity in the era of the Orca, though, so we don’t get to do much of that any more. Mission salvage has been the Ironfleet bread and butter for a long time, but right now the opportunities in w-space are more lucrative and almost as entertaining. W-space being a brutal and somewhat defensible terrain, we’ve perforce been doing more to-the-knife old-fashioned PvP, which is (a) entertaining and (b) good training. But, at the end of the day, I still consider Ironfleet a salvage corporation.

Other people can think what they like. But if going into lawless space and getting into fights has made the stories on this blog more boring, all I can say is, too bad — because in the doing, it’s been enormous fun.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 1st, 2009 at 4:15 pm and is filed under Ironfleet Info. 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.