Mining Mission Madness

I blame CCP.

I'm getting back into the swing of things in Eve Online after dragging myself away from The Old Republic.  After moving one of my pilot's Iteron Mark V 18 jumps from the Gallente Federation to Rens last night, I decided to look through my inventory to see if I had enough material to build a Claw, a speedy Minmatar interceptor.  I don't know what went wrong, but the assets just wouldn't come up for me.  I was too lazy to look for any solutions on the forums and instead looked to see what else I could do.  Level 4 combat missions?  I tried asking agents with both Rosewalker and Wandering Rose but all I got were missions against the Amarr and the Serpentis Corporation.  I couldn't do combat missions against the Amarr because my status is getting too low and I don't want to anger the Serpentis for the role-playing reason that they are allied with Eifyr and Co. But at the same time I didn't have a lot of time to play so I didn't want to leave the Ani constellation.

Fortunately Eve always presents multiple options so I chose to work on Wandering Rose's Amarr faction.  Having a standing of -2.6 is really bad, and for what I want to eventually do in Ammatar space her -3.4 faction is even worse.  So since the Amarr corporation Joint Harvesting has a significant presence (and more importantly a level 1 storyline agent) in Traun, I decided to run some missions for them to try to improve my standings.

Playing Minmatar pilots, I try to stay out of Amarr stations as much as possible.  The fact that ships are always ejected from the bottom of the station just irritates me and leaves a bad picture in my mind.  But I was going to need to do a lot of undocking because I intended to do a lot of missions in a hurry.  But what kind of missions?  Security?  Sorry, I'm not going to kill my fellow Minmatar.  Distribution?  I get asked to haul slaves way too often.  How about mining?  Ugh, mining!  But they keep asking for useless ore, so that is the most morally upstanding choice.

Actually, doing mining missions to get my faction standing over -2.0 is not such a crazy choice, especially since Wandering Rose can fly a Covetor. So I steeled up my courage and did mining missions for an hour.  To make the trip go a bit faster, I had Rosewalker provide security flying escort in his Jaguar.  By being fleeted, my align times for my mining barge were much faster.  Plus, when the Angel Cartel came out to try to gank Wandering Rose, I got to have a little fun.

I found out that by paying attention to the mining cycles that, including travel time to and from the agent I could do a mission in about 5 minutes, sometime 4.  The Covetor has a cargo hold big enough to carry all the minerals for a level 1 mining mission so I don't have to make multiple trips back to the station.  I did that for an hour.  Ugh! 

I think I'll break down and finally train Diplomacy up to 5.  It is a nice filler skill to put in the skill queue to make my training schedule fit in with my Fanfest trip.  And besides, my standings with the Caldari are -0.08.  I can do some security missions for them.  I've always wanted to do missions with a Breacher/Bellicose fleet anyway.