Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

The deep space transport is not normally seen flipping cans. It’s slow, and it’s expensive. However, it does have the virtue of being able to empty a jet can in a single trip — a virtue when one has the element of surprise sufficient to take advantage of it.

But I get ahead of myself.

Tonight I was buzzing about in my covert ops frigate, looking for safe spots and war targets and poor lost drones and whatever else might be lurking in the unknown spaces between the planets. It’s one of the most relaxing ways to play eve for me, and is the reason I have yet to purchase a drone in this game.

After one of my scans, I noticed a strong signal for a mining drone, a long way above the ecliptic in a place one would not normally expect to find a mining drone. Probably abandoned by a mission miner, let’s go have a look.

Warped to 10km and found myself right on top of a Hulk, snuggled up against an Omber roid, mining into a jet can. He’s got a full cloud of mining drones out, the sky is full of Thukker Missionary wrecks, and he’s got two buddies in a Drake and an Arbitrator. By some miracle, I did not get decloaked, so I steamed gently out towards open space under cloak while contemplating the tasty tableaux.

The Hulk pilot was in an NPC corp, so I didn’t need to worry about his buddies, unless… could they be playing can ownership games? Nope, the jet can belonged to the Hulk pilot. This should be safe enough. It’s theoretically possible he has a second set of combat drones, plus a warp scrambler, plus a web (to keep me from outrunning his scramble range in the time it takes his drones to eat me), but I’m not too worried. I’m thinking, he’s in deadspace, he’s got friends who cannot help him, he’s probably complacent and half AFK. With good salvage technique, he’ll never ever even get a chance to react.

I had to think this through very carefully, because the only hauler inside of five jumps was one of my expensive Bustard deep space transports. I usually try to avoid getting a criminal flag in that thing. But this setup was just too juicy to ignore. A fully expanded Bustard is a sluggish pig, but this should be doable.

And indeed, it was a picture perfect operation. The Bustard’s warp to “zero” was, as always, at about 2,000 meters, so I approached the can for a few seconds to get within the 1,500m transfer range. As soon as the open button lit up, I used the shiny new “align to” option on the right click menu to align to station. While I waited to align, I opened the Hulk pilot’s can.

Bingo! Nearly full — 29,927 units of Omber. Sweet! Ore goes into the Bustard’s hold, mash the warp button, make a cup of coffee, take a satisfied sip as the Bustard lumbers into warp. Nobody even tried to lock me.

If these operations were always this smooth, I’d be a richer man than I am.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 27th, 2008 at 2:22 am and is filed under Salvage Notes. 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.