Ironfleet Towing And Salvage

Word at this moment is that Band of Brothers is no more. Goonswarm, goes the story … and this word might change … subverted a director, who was able to close the executor corp. Poof, no more alliance.

There’s going to be a shitstorm of epic proportions as the new 0.0 politics sort themselves out.

Will there, do you suppose, be any salvage to be had?

Scavengers of every size will be descending on Delve. Ironfleet cannot afford to miss this party.

Ninety nine chances out of one hundred, I’ll be podded home before Friday. But I’ll see some sights, by damn!

I’ve packed my blockade runner, and a knapsack full of sandwiches. Checked my insurance. Updated my clone. I’ve got nothing to lose but a ship, and a hangar full of those.

Wish me luck!

Jim Bridger here.

Was out today in the Bantam of Doom, looking for excitement.

It found me.

I saw that FTACI Retriever pilot, Kreatus Lucina (the one who was in on the drubbing FTACI gave Marlenus the other day). I thought, hey, an aggressive Retriever is just the sort of thing the Bantam of Doom was built for.

He wasn’t mining into a can, though, so I figured I’d have to be a little bit creative. So I started cleaning up his numerous belt rat wrecks, while ignoring two convo requests from him and also his complaints in local:

Kreatus Lucina > is there a reason your digging through my cans?
RizzLat > yes hes not very respectable
Rikus Cofee > who ?
RizzLat > jimmy bridger
RizzLat > lol
Kreatus Lucina > jim bridger you are about to be on my shit list
Kreatus Lucina > your on my shit list
RizzLat > he wont care man hes a tipper

Right about then I actually found a fairly decent high-meta loot item in one of his wrecks, which I linked into local:

Jim Bridger > ‘Hypnos’ Signal Distortion Amplifier I
Rikus Cofee > wooh
Jim Bridger > Worth more than my ship…
RizzLat > lol

Sadly, this did not inspire Kreatus to start shooting at me. Instead, Lach Danan, the bait Osprey pilot who got Marlenus, showed up in a Merlin. By reflex, I warped away; these are not the combats I was looking for.

In warp, however, I questioned the reflex. Bantam versus well-fitted Merlin is an instant face-melt for the Bantam, true. But, like, dude, it’s just a Bantam, who cares? And the other guy could always screw up, let’s give him the opportunity.

So I warped back.

Merlin already gone.

So I looted another FTACI can.

Merlin returns.

Predictable and very rapid face melt ensued, no FTACI screwups on display:

2009.02.01 18:04:00

Victim: Jim Bridger
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Bantam
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7
Damage Taken: 669

Involved parties:

Name: Lach Danan (laid the final blow)
Security: 3.3
Corp: Firestorm Tactical Industries
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Merlin
Weapon: Modal Light Neutron Particle Accelerator I
Damage Done: 669

Destroyed items:

Iron Charge S, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Hobgoblin I (Drone Bay)
Asymmetric Energy Succor I (Cargo)
Small Nosferatu I (Cargo)
Lead Charge S, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Micro Auxiliary Power Core I
250mm Light Artillery Cannon II
Republic Fleet EMP S, Qty: 36
‘Hypnos’ Signal Distortion Amplifier I (Cargo)

Dropped items:

Republic Fleet EMP S, Qty: 270 (Cargo)
Faint Epsilon Warp Scrambler I
Carbonized Lead S, Qty: 4835 (Cargo)
250mm Light Artillery Cannon II
Cold-Gas I Arcjet Thrusters
Gyrostabilizer II

He took me out with four or five very fast volleys with blasters and rockets, during which I had time for just two arty volleys of my own. They were solid barrages, but the Merlin is a much tougher little nut to crack than the Bantam.

Of course there was the usual post-combat game of rock-scissors-paper. I came back in a Thrasher destroyer, he came back in a Manticore stealth bomber. That’s an interesting game of pass-the-grenade when the bomber is in range of the Thrasher’s guns, but he wasn’t. I couldn’t lock him, so I was gone before the second volley of cruise missiles arrived. His repping buddy in the Scorpion was on scene anyway, so it was clear there wasn’t point in coming back. Match to FTACI.

As mentioned in the last post, I’m increasingly learning — painfully, the way all good lessons are learned — that the changes to blockade runners have changed my ore salvage game in a fundamental way that requires new tactics and fittings on my part.

There’s no way to sugar-coat this, last night I lost a Crane to a bait-fit Osprey “mining” cruiser:

2009.01.30 07:24:00

Victim: Marlenus
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Crane
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7
Damage Taken: 23831

Involved parties:

Name: Lach Danan (laid the final blow)
Security: 3.3
Corp: Firestorm Tactical Industries
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Osprey
Weapon: Bloodclaw Light Missile
Damage Done: 21814

Name: Kreatus Lucina
Security: 0.2
Corp: Firestorm Tactical Industries
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Ship: Retriever
Weapon: Valkyrie I
Damage Done: 2017

Destroyed items:

Caldari Navy Scourge Heavy Missile, Qty: 230 (Cargo)
Shield Boost Amplifier I
Thunderbolt Precision Heavy Missile, Qty: 186 (Cargo)
Medium Shield Extender I
Caldari Navy Thunderbolt Heavy Missile, Qty: 633 (Cargo)
Caldari Navy Havoc Heavy Missile, Qty: 499 (Cargo)
Warp Disruptor I
Ballistic Control System II
Heavy Missile Launcher II
Medium C5-L Emergency Shield Overload I
Guristas Havoc Heavy Missile, Qty: 299 (Cargo)

Dropped items:

Havoc Precision Heavy Missile, Qty: 258 (Cargo)
Havoc Fury Heavy Missile, Qty: 926 (Cargo)
Ballistic Control System II
Thunderbolt Fury Heavy Missile, Qty: 1000 (Cargo)

All due props to pilot Lach Danan of Firestorm Tactical Industries [FTACI]. I’m even more impressed by the FTACI Retriever pilot, Kreatus Lucina, who engaged with his three Tech 1 drones and stuck in there until he was deep in armor. His contribution, though slight in DPS, made the difference in the end.

It happened like this. I’d cleaned up some drifting ore belonging to another pilot, and while that was going down, Lach Danan made a plaintive request for someone to kill a belt rat, alleging that he’d forgotten his drones. Shall we just say that I found the claim suspicious; in my mind, it marked him as a pilot looking for a fight.

Some twenty minutes later, I returned to the belt with Lach Danan’s jet can on my mind.

Crucial mistake #1: I neglected to count how many mining lasers he was running. EVE Lesson: Overconfidence kills. I still don’t know if he was running one (for show) or a full set; but given how events transpired, I’m guessing he fit two at most.

Crucial mistake #2: I didn’t pay any mind to his corpmate Kreatus in the Retriever, who had been hauling home when full, making him irrelevant to my predatory-salvage calculations. EVE Lesson: Every hull in the game is dangerous.

After grabbing Lach Danan’s ore contribution, which was suspiciously modest…

Crucial mistake #3: I took bait. EVE Lesson (again): Overconfidence kills. A mining cruiser who’s been there for half an hour with no observed hauler (even if I didn’t have continuous eyes all that time) should have more than 1500 cubic meters of ore in his jetcan. I knew that, didn’t care. Should have.

… he was quick to lock me, warp scramble me, and web me. It’s kill or be killed, now.

And then he launched Tech 2 combat drones, which commenced to gnaw at my liver.

By the time I had started a lock on Lach Danan’s cruiser, it was already obvious he had more DPS than I could permanently tank, so I loaded the precision missiles and started locking one of his drones. Killing Tech II combat drones with heavy missiles is kinda like hunting rabbits with bottle rockets — you can get it done, but it’s not fast and it’s not efficient and it’s not pretty.

And I’m not going to have the time, especially because that Retriever pilot has joined the fight with his three drones. I can drive him away with just a few missiles, but do I have the time, or do I have to kill at least one of the deadly drones first?

I chose — and I’m still not clear on whether this was right, though I think it was after looking at the damage logs — to kill the drone I was shooting at first. That took a long time, and I was having to cycle my shield booster by then due to limited cap; the armor was dented.

Crucial Mistake #4: Failure to adapt. If you look at that killmail, you’ll see that my four mids were fitted with shield booster, shield boost amplifier, shield extender, and a warp disruptor. I’ve never fitted a cap boosting solution, as most combat hauler pilots do. If I got in trouble, I always just warped away, and I didn’t get into trouble often, so I preferred to save the cargo space for ore. However, now that the blockade runners don’t get two points of innate warp stabilization, the world has changed. Even a small cap injector would have let me win this fight.

So, after killing the first drone, I drove the Retriever pilot away with just a few shots that took him into deep armor. Retrievers are tissue paper.

That took away a bit of damage, and I went back to shooting at the next drone. By this point my armor has gaping holes in it, and I made my last mistake of the fight: I fat-fingered the missile reloading process, which ended up costing me almost twenty seconds, during which I got into structure.

Finally I killed drone #2. Now, at last, the damage is close to sustainable; if I’d still been in armor, I’d have had time to lock and kill one more drone, and I could have won (maybe; I never tested the Osprey’s tank, and he was certainly fitted with combat in mind.) But the twenty seconds I lost was the nail in my coffin, and I went pop.

Interestingly, the Retriever pilot had time to come back during this process, but I’m uncertain whether he had time to dock and repair and restock drones. However, he came back some 40-50 klicks away and never launched any more drones, so he was out of the fight.

But he was there. And I was in my pod, feeling chagrined.

A nice warm cup of REVENGE would sure taste nice about now. Let’s go see what’s in the hangar.

That Retriever on my mind, I jumped in one of my trusty Manticore stealth bombers. I haven’t really flown these since the missile balancing — some say nerf — but the word is, they aren’t so much fun anymore. Let’s test that theory; if I can’t one-volley a wounded Retriever, I’m going to send this thing back to the factory with a stiff note. But, I’ll bet I can.

Yes:

2009.01.30 07:29:00

Victim: Kreatus Lucina
Corp: Firestorm Tactical Industries
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Retriever
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7
Damage Taken: 2983

Involved parties:

Name: Marlenus (laid the final blow)
Security: 1.2
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Ship: Manticore
Weapon: Caldari Navy Wrath Cruise Missile
Damage Done: 2983

Destroyed items:

Massive Scordite, Qty: 12605 (Cargo)
Small Shield Extender I
Valkyrie I, Qty: 2 (Drone Bay)
Strip Miner I, Qty: 2
Hornet I (Drone Bay)

Dropped items:

Expanded Cargohold II, Qty: 2

Ah, now I feel much better.

How about friend Lach Danan in the crunchy bait Osprey, would he like a taste of my Caldari Navy Wrath Cruise Missiles?

He would! He’s targeting and trying to close to drone range. Cruise missiles away!

I believe it was the second volley that took him into armor, possibly the third; in any case, he changed his mind and left.

At this point, I still had a Tech II wreck on the field requiring salvage, an Ironfleet jet can containing some ore, and a Retriever wreck that needed looting and salvaging. So I went home for the ship I like to call the Iron Crowbar, a Ferox battlecruiser fitted for cleanup work on a hot battlefield.

By the time I salvaged my Crane wreck and emptied my own jet can, Lach was back, in a Manticore of his own. But, he was inside my heavy missile range, and as we traded volleys, he was getting by far the worst of the exchange. So, he left again.

I looted the pair of Cargo Expander IIs from the Retriever wreck, and was starting to salvage it, when Kreatus Lucina returned in his own Ferox, at range. We began trading heavy missiles, but I had superior missile range, and it took him awhile (not long, was he using an MWD on that beast?) to close into his shorter missile range.

Accordingly, I was through his shields and well into his armor when his first, fairly puny, volley of missiles hit my shields. If he had kept that up, he was going to die; but he was still closing and I assume he also had some guns on there. Still, in a one-on-one fight — or even if Lach came back in the Manticore again — it would have been fun to find out.

And THAT’s when a neutral friend of theirs showed up in a Scorpion battleship and went flashy red to me, presumably because he was repping the enemy Ferox. I decided I’d had enough revenge, and docked up.

All in all, a fun run through the asteroid belts, though I’d like it better if I hadn’t lost my beloved Quantum Quagmirer. The boys from FTACI (and their alt or friend in the FTRAD Scorpion) fought well, eschewed all smacktalk, and clearly carried the day, even if I did get my licks in.

Today I thought I’d lost another one of my beloved Cranes. Instead, the enemy fled.

I was out in the belts, when I found a Retriever barge pilot (Bibiss, [L-D-S] ) who had carelessly abandoned some ore. So, I took it.

He immediately warped away.

I went on about my business.

About four minutes later, in a different belt, the guy landed on my head. In a Wolf assault frigate.

It’s taken me some time to appreciate just how painful has been the loss of the innate warp stabilization that used to be built into the blockade runner hulls. Today the lesson was driven home. The Wolf locked me before I could warp out, and he (obviously) has the speed to keep me in lock range.

He began to shoot at me.

It’s possible his weapons skills suck, because it didn’t hurt very bad.

I began to shoot at him, with some precision heavy missiles. I was hitting him, but not very hard.

My shields went down a lot faster than his.

When my shields got down to about half, I turned on my shield booster. They crawled back to full before (just before) I ran out of cap. And then began to drop again as soon as I turned off the booster.

By this time, he’s down to about half shields, but to all appearances, holding. Of course, I don’t know whether he has cap issues, or what they might be; but I haven’t seen any sign of active shield tanking. The Wolf is Minmatar issue, so I’ve never flown it and have no idea how or whether it tanks, or what its fitting issues are. But isn’t it supposed to have plenty of DPS to kill a hauler?

He’s in a corporation, I can’t get away and I’m not killing him, he’s obviously having trouble killing me. But surely he has friends incoming?

This time, by the time my shields get below half, my cap isn’t fully regenerated; so I can tell that he can eventually break my tank if I don’t do something. It will take him a long long time, though. How much ammo is he carrying?

He’s not orbiting me at any great speed, just chasing; so after I shoot my launcher dry of precision missiles, I decide to load some regular ones to see how they hit him. He’s still just below half shields, and looking awfully stable there.

Just as my launcher finishes reloading, he … warps away?

Well, all righty then. I guess it’s time to go home.

I’ve studied the logs. In four minutes of combat, I hit him with 23 missiles, that mostly hit for 15-20 points of damage each, call it 375 points max.

In that same time, he hit me with 165 rounds of ammo, damage ranging from a low of 14 to a high of close to 40, with a strong cluster in the high 20s. At a guess, let’s say 4500 points. If he could have carried on for another four minutes, he’d have been close to having me.

Maybe he lost his nerve, maybe he ran out of ammo, maybe he despaired of breaking my tank. I guess I’ll never know. But I’m happy to have “driven him off”.

There was a guy in local yesterday who was pretty aggressive to Jim Bridger, but never quite got up his courage to engage Jim’s rifter. I spotted him in local again today, and decided to see if he’d go for the “helpless hauler” routine.

He did, and all it took was to relieve him of the two units of ore he was using to keep his jet cans open:

2009.01.17 22:38:00

Victim: Heaven’s Feel
Corp: Center for Advanced Studies
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Vexor
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.7
Damage Taken: 3573

Involved parties:

Name: Marlenus (laid the final blow)
Security: 1.2
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Ship: Crane
Weapon: Havoc Fury Heavy Missile
Damage Done: 3573

Destroyed items:

Co-Processor I
Scordite, Qty: 6632 (Cargo)
Miner II
Mining Drone I (Drone Bay)
Hobgoblin I, Qty: 2 (Drone Bay)

Dropped items:

Expanded Cargohold II, Qty: 3
Miner II, Qty: 3
Mining Drone I, Qty: 2 (Drone Bay)
Survey Scanner I
Hobgoblin I (Drone Bay)

Note that all he had on that ship of military value were his drones, so he must have thought my Crane was helpless indeed! Pretty nice drops for a mining cruiser, I can’t complain about that.

Do you ever notice, on all those forum threads about mission salvagers, how the mission runners in their big fat carefully-tanked battleships like to talk about how unfair it is that there is “zero risk” to the people who probe down and salvage their missions?

Well, that hasn’t been my experience.

It seems like every time I go mission probing in a covert ops ship (for the probing speed bonuses) I lose the damn thing and swear I’ll use cheaper ships next time.

Yesterday, I lost a Buzzard to lag in Dodixie.

I’d jump-cloned down that way because my alliance peeps were having a big operation there, but I was too late for most of the party. So I fitted out a covops with cheap gear and started on an ordinance survey of the system; if I’m going to play there, I need a set of probing bookmarks.

My early work with long range probes got me several good hits on mission runners well away from the ecliptic, so the project was a smashing success; with the bookmarks I got, I can now reach almost anywhere in the system that a mission runner is likely to be.

Unfortunately, in the process I found a Dominix battleship sharing a deadspace with a bunch of wrecked Amarr Navy battleships, and three that weren’t wrecked yet. In fact, it looked like the last three were “way over there” and not woke up yet.

I couldn’t ignore all those lovely armor plates, so I started salvaging. And heck, if those battleships wake up, I’ll have plenty of time to warp out when they start targeting me, right?

I forgot I was Dodixie, a mission hub every bit as notorious for lag as Saila was back in the day.

I’m salvaging, three un-agroed battleships on my overview. There’s a noise, as of lasers firing. My screen refreshes. I’m in a pod.

My client, apparently, didn’t bother alerting me to the whole “you’re being locked” part of the process.

It wasn’t really a problem, long run; I got in my free Ibis, put salvagers in the top slots, came back for my loot, salvaged my wreck, finished salvaging the mission, and came out with an Ibis-load of the mission runner’s loot on top of that. In fact, I got so many Armor Plates, I think I may have paid for the ship I lost. But it was annoying.

I had a little bit more fun with the diplomatic contact that resulted from this combat the day before yesterday. You’ll remember that I wasn’t quite sure what the Retriever pilot had done to start flashing red. Well, I got this convo:

Careos Ordo > Hail sir.
Marlenus > Hello, what’s up?
Careos Ordo > I understand we had an incident between our corps in the last few days.
Careos Ordo > It appears to be a misunderstanding, I didn’t want any ill feelings.
Marlenus > Did we? If so, it’s news to me
Careos Ordo > Its on the front page of your site.
Marlenus > Oh. That’s not an incident, it’s just normal business.
Careos Ordo > Not the way we operate.
Careos Ordo > Your ship was accidentally attacked by a drone.
Marlenus > Hmm, I do not believe so. “The logs, they show nothing.”
Marlenus > And the drones were not in space.
Careos Ordo > Well, my pilots assured me whatever happened they meant no aggression.
Marlenus > Hmmm, I must agree that scooping of the drones would seem to support that story.
Careos Ordo > If you loot, that is your way, I will not judge you for that…I just wanted to let you know that there was nothing from our side. I don’t want to start a war.
Careos Ordo > They had kill rights on your man because he had looted a wreck earlier.
Marlenus > No worries, I’m not in the diplomatic loop for my alliance … there’s zero risk of war to you guys from the incident, I’d say
Careos Ordo > They might have been worried the drones would attack, or they did on accident…something.
Marlenus > And I never take offense at getting shot at
Careos Ordo > Interesting business you guys run there.
Careos Ordo > I still don’t know how your indy was able to take out a mining barge.
Marlenus > Heh, that’s actually no secret
Careos Ordo > it is to me, obviously
Marlenus > The blockade runner is not an indy, it’s a transport…
Marlenus > …and it has fitting for a heavy missile launcher
Careos Ordo > oh, my guys reported an indy
Marlenus > It’s basically a cruiser with one gun
Careos Ordo > gotcha.

There was more, but that’s the gist. A perfectly civil, careful diplomatic contact that’s a credit to their corporation. Why am I mentioning it here? Because it underscores what I love about flying the blockade runners. There isn’t an industrial in the game that can launch heavy missiles, but when people see me coming, all they can see is “harmless indy” and it’s an impression so strong, it colors their perceptions even after they’ve flown home in a pod.

Of course, that Retriever would have died just as fast to a well-fit BattleBadger or your basic Iteron-of-Doom; I’m not trying to slight those time-honored (and funny as hell) combat platforms. I’m just saying. People see what they expect to see.

It’s amazing what I find in my hangars, sometimes.

I was down in Nourvokaiken, cleaning out a hangar full of “old junky stuff”. This stuff came from two places. Some of it’s ancient mission loot that I salvaged for a friend in another corp — he’d run the missions and I’d do the loot/salvage duty. Usually I dumped the melty junk into his hangars via contract for his industrial people to refine, but after his corp went moribund, I found a few station containers full in various places that I consolidated in Nourv while I was based there during the early days of Faction Warfare.

The rest of the junk is stuff I hastily salvaged during Faction Warfare. As you can imagine, salvage during battles is very tricky — often I’d just grab the stuff out of wrecks that went floating by, while trying to maintain fleet formation and not be the last guy to warp with the bubble. Usually I inspected the stuff with great interest, but sometimes, I was busy.

So, I was sorting junk tonight. And guess what I found, in an old wooden crate full of miscellaneous battleship guns and broken shell casings?

1x Domination 1200MM Artillery.

In two and a half years of playing this game, I’ve accumulated precisely four faction modules. And yet, somehow I managed to bung this one into my hangar without ever noticing it?

Mind you, I’ve got no current use for this. Maybe Jim Bridger will shoot large arties someday. And I can’t tell how much it’s worth; right now there are two WTB contracts for one up for minor millions, and one guy wants to sell three of them for 225 million total. So that’s the brackets on the price range, somewhere between 15 and 75 million. It’s not a gamechanging find, or anything.

But still, you should have seen my face when I scraped the old grease crust off the nameplate with my multi-tool and saw what I had.

Sometimes the simple pleasures are best.

I was in a system where I don’t have a cloaked Prowler yet, so I was prowling the old fashioned way, in one of my beloved combat Cranes. Found an old-school Covetor mining barge, mining neatly into two numbered jet cans.

They consolidated nicely into one full jet can plus the hold of my Crane.

Covetor pilot left quietly, presumably to get a bigger meaner ship.

So I left too. Came back in an ugly Ferox I like to call the Iron Crowbar. It’s fitted for belt bullying work, to be honest, so it’s a bit LOLwhut for combat. But it looks real mean.

When I got back, the Covetor pilot had returned in a Caracal.

While he was thinking about what to do (in his shoes, I’d have blown the Ironfleet can and left) I put the Ironfleet can on the tractor and began relocating it away from any likely warp-in points. I guess he was too attached to “his” ore to do that.

Instead, the Caracal pilot left, then shortly thereafter logged or left the system.

I went home for a Bustard, which made one quick trip of bringing home the ore. Neat, clean, and profitable!

So, as you know I don’t mission much, but I’ve got a Cerberus fitted for that purpose that I used during my one big push to get jump clones before Faction Warfare. And lately I’ve been messing about in the Cosmos mission complexes.

Well, the mission Cerb is not well fitted for salvage. It’s slow and only has one salvager aboard, no room for a tractor beam. Which means, I do sometimes leave wrecks behind.

After docking to stow the cargo from the salvage project in the previous post, when I returned to the complex front door area, there was a Kestrel flashing red to me.

Now, I’ve got nothing against an ambitious two-month-old character in a salvage Kestrel. Been there, done that, have several tee-shirts.

But: there is a food chain. And I, scavenger though I may be, am higher up it. Commence firing!

This, basically, is an alertness test; the Cerb doesn’t lock frigates particularly fast, I’m shooting standard Scourge heavy missiles at a small target, and today I’m packing no tackle gear fitted whatsoever. This guy could leave.

This guy should leave.

This guy probably doesn’t have the reactions or the reflexes. Perhaps his fear is insufficient. Whatever, he fails to leave. He blows up.

It took three volleys of missiles:

2008.12.27 20:00:00

Victim: BURBALKIN
Corp: School of Applied Knowledge
Alliance: NONE
Faction: NONE
Destroyed: Kestrel
System: [redacted]
Security: 0.5
Damage Taken: 1079

Involved parties:

Name: Marlenus (laid the final blow)
Security: 1.2
Corp: Ironfleet Towing And Salvage
Alliance: Tear Extraction And Reclamation Service
Faction: NONE
Ship: Cerberus
Weapon: Scourge Heavy Missile
Damage Done: 962

Name: COSMOS Caldari Destructor / Unknown
Damage Done: 117

Destroyed items:

Foxfire Rocket, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Bloodclaw Light Missile, Qty: 97 (Cargo)
Outlaw Spur, Qty: 5 (Cargo)
Hobgoblin I (Cargo)
Medium Shield Booster I
Standard Missile Launcher I
Piranha Light Missile, Qty: 100 (Cargo)

Dropped items:

Expanded Cargohold I
Bloodclaw Light Missile, Qty: 28
Firefly F.O.F. Light Missile I, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Target Painter I
Thorium Charge S, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Cold-Gas I Arcjet Thrusters
Sabretooth Light Missile, Qty: 100 (Cargo)
Bandit Spur, Qty: 4 (Cargo)

There was a Drake present, of similar name, who locked me immediately while I looted and salvaged; I thought perhaps he’d Concord himself, but alas, no such luck.

I’ve been told that salvage in most complexes is nerfed and sucky, and that’s been true in the lower-level ones I’ve seen. But I was in a 3/10 today where the salvage was excellent.

At least, excellent if you count the player wrecks. Most notable was a Minmater Elite Frigate wreck, with Russian name, that gave me nine million ISK worth of T2 salvage (including an incredibly rare Intact Armor Plate) plus three T2 guns and some more useful T2 fittings and ammo. Dude was fitting T2 Power Diagnostics to keep those guns fed, but he was mixing 280mm howitzers and autocannon. Is that ever a good idea?