The first couple of weeks

We've been in the wormhole for a couple of weeks now. For the most part it's been uneventful but we have had a few incidents. The first night after we set everything up we started doing some mining. Within a few hours a group of reds found our hole and started harrassing us. We made it to the POS before they tracked us down and they left shortly after. They found us because one of our members was messing around in the adjoining low sec system. We were tipped off by some of their actions so we had a covert ops ship stationed at the entrance. That's probably the only thing that saved us. Oh well. Lesson learned. Now when we need to conduct business outside of the wormhole we get in and out as quickly as possible and we don't do anything in the adjoining system.

We have two static wormholes in our system. One is a C2. The other goes to low sec. We've had no luck with the adjoining class 2. Every single system that's opened up has been settled and they're always cleared of sites. Unfortunately, ours was crammed with about 30 sites when we first settled it. I say unfortunately because for the first few days we always seemed to have other people from the adjoining wormhole in our hole going after our sites. We've got good friends in our alliance who like to pvp so getting enough ships there through the low sec exit to chase people off hasn't been a problem. We've lost two covetors because of this, though. I lost one the second morning that we were in there. My CEO lost one a few days later. Both times we were mining solo. Both times the aggressors came through our C2 exit. Both times we were checking our directional scanner at least once a minute. Someone with good skills who knows what they're doing can have your ship scanned down and bm'd in under a minute. Make sure that probes show up on your overview. Scan constantly. Be aligned and ready to get out of there fast. We use covetors because they're cheap to replace, they mine almost as fast as hulks, sleepers don't respawn in wormhole space after you take out the initial spawn and we have hauler alts so the extra cargo capacity doesn't matter.

We've had a few other interesting encounters. One day I ran across a mining op in the adjoining C2. With no one else around I decided to leave them alone. A few hours later I hopped back on and went to check on them again. This time my CEO was on so away we went. The op was gone but now there was a scorpion and a bc (can't remember what it was) flying around. I launched some probes and waited. Sure enough, within a few minutes they warped to the wormhole where I was probing from. I fleeted them and they turned out to be nice enough. After a short conversation I offered to take them to a high sec exit that we had in our wormhole. So I warped to the wormhole and the guy in the bc followed me. The Scorpion pilot, on the other hand, decided to follow my CEO....who had warped to our POS. Somehow my CEO managed to offline enough stuff before she warped in that she made it out OK. After that little scare we got everyone out of there safe and sound. The high sec exit closed behind the scorpion and everyone was happy.

So far this little venture has turned out to be pretty profitable. Now that we have the spawn triggers down we clear the sleeper sites easily. With the hole mostly cleared out besides the 2 or 3 sites that spawn daily we seem to have fewer neighbors bothering us. Now we're talking about trying our hand at reverse engineering, invention and t3 manufacturing. Having our defenses online 24/7 seems like a waste of fuel since no one ever bothers our POS.

Introducing...me

I've been playing MMOs since '98 when I was first introduced to UO. Over the years I've tried just about everything. I've had very successful crafters in multiple games. I've always loved PVP even though I've never been that good. I've always been good enough to compete but never good enough to excel. Exploring has always been what really captures my interest, though. I had runebooks full of runes to anything that was even remotely interesting in UO. I'd spend days running around aimlessly in Asheron's Call just to try to find interesting and unusual landmarks. Back when SWG was a new game I spent most of my time surveying and harvesting and ended up with a collection of the best resources possible up until I quit. I learned how to wall jump in WoW just so that I could get to places that I wasn't supposed to get to. I've always been the type that loves to push the limits of a game and find ways to excel at things that others can't be bothered with.

A few years ago I was introduced to Eve. Several old friends were just getting into it. It was a cool game. The universe itself was huge. I loved the idea of the game only having one server. The sheer number of things to do was overwhelming. I started out the way that a lot of people do....by mining. It wasn't long before I got a second account to train a hauler alt. It was going great until mining started getting old. I tried some missions but it was the same thing over and over and they didn't pay much. I made some money hauling but at the time there was no "warp to 0" so it took forever to get anywhere. Ratting was a joke. My ventures into low sec always had the same result...with me in my pod. Finally after a few months of doing little more than burning rocks my online time had basically dwindled to nothing more than learning new skills. It didn't take long before I just gave up. I popped in during a couple of free trials to update my skills, burn some rocks and run some level 4s with friends but the game just never caught my interest again. Until a few weeks ago.

I had tagged along on enough level 4s that I could do some level 2s. My occasional skill training had paid off with one character who's just a couple of weeks away from flying a Tengu and another who can fly a hulk (even though I can only afford a Covetor) and build/refine efficiently. Within a couple of days of being back an old friend gave me a makinaw that had been sitting in empire for at least a year. Another old friend shot me 40 mil so that I could get into a drake. Soon I was ice mining on one account and running missions on the other. The level 2s were a snoozefest in the drake and after just a few days of that I still couldn't pull level 3s so I got sick of it. Then I discovered probing. In no time I was getting faction loot in complexes, hacking radar sites and exploring wormholes. At the same time I had joined Sardeukar Enterprises. With Hulkageddon going on I didn't want to mine in empire or semi afk mine ice in my mak so I hit a couple of grav sites in wormholes. I made some good money there and was lucky enough not to run into anyone else. Then my CEO started talking wormhole exploration. He told me what he wanted and luckily I had already found us one that fit the bill. Unfortunately, we couldn't set up the POS until the next day. So I volunteered to stay inside and scan down a new hole the next day without having any clue that there might not be another high sec exit anytime soon.

So the next morning I logged on. There I was in my drake fit with a probe launcher with barely enough skill to use probes in the first place. This was only the second or third wormhole that I'd been in and besides the tutorial video on how to scan I had done very little research on the topic. My exit was gone and I didn't expect to see anyone on until the evening. To pass the time I cleared a couple of sleeper sites but I quickly ran out of missiles. With nothing better to do I finally decided to start scanning. No one had told me how bad of an idea it is to try to scan down a wormhole in a drake with next to no probing skill. Usually I do my scanning in a heron but I figured that I'd be better off in a ship that could handle some combat.

So I launched a probe, set it to 32 au and let it fly. Nothing. Hmm.... After moving it around a bit I finally found a spot where I got a few hits. I started scanning down one of the sigs. It was a grav site but by the time I got my scan radius down to .25 au I could only get it to about 80% or so. Oh well... I didn't need a grav site, anyway. So I started scanning down the next sig. By the time I got THAT one down to .25 au I knew it was a wormhole. Unfortunately the max signal I could get was 75%. Now I was sweating a little. It was at that point that it occured to me that the heron has a nice 50% scan probe strength bonus. So I started asking questions in alliance chat. That was also the first time that I'd bothered doing any research online. I was not reassured when I realized that I might not be able to scan my way out.

By now my probes only had about 20 minutes left before they'd go poof. Worried that I might not be able to pick up the signal again I started messing around with the probe positioning. Scan...70%....scan.....78%.....scan....80%. Now I was getting somewhere. Scan....no scan signals detected. Shit. Eventually, I managed to scan it down to two dots. Crossing my fingers I rolled the dice, picked a dot and piled the probes on top of it. 99.9%. Hrm. I tweaked my probes around a bit...99.9%. Damn. With just a few minutes left on my probes I was already trying to figure out how much it would cost to replace my drake and my implants. Then I nailed it...100%. YES! I quickly recovered my probes and went to check out my exit. It ended up spitting me out in .4 space within a few jumps of Dodixie. From there I bmd the low sec side and booked it home to start packing.

Long story short everyone got on that night, it turned out to be exactly what we were looking for (a C2 with a static low sec exit that occasionally opens to .5) and we moved in immediately. That was a week ago. We've had a few adventures since then and I'm sure that there will be plenty more in the future. I'll be sure and tell you about them later. IB TLTR