Sometimes I get home from work at a decent hour and get a chance to play Eve. Last night not only could I play but I found six signatures to scan down in a nearby system. Good thing I had time to spend more than a half hour logged in.
I wasn't interested in wormholes or combat sites, so that left me with one radar and two gravimetric sites to visit. And while gneiss is nice, I decided the small gneiss site I found didn't warrant any attention because I also found an Average Crokite, Dark Ocrhe and Gneiss site. But my first target was the radar site.
Radar sites are nice. I can just pop into the site with a stealth bomber, pick off the initial rats from long range, then bring in a ship equipped with a codebreaker and a salvager and clean up the site. So far in low sec I've used a Jaguar to do the dirty work with a Hound on overwatch. Why a Jaguar? Because sometimes opening a container with the codebreaker spawns rats and they are barely able to scratch the Jaguar. Speed tanking FTW.
The big problem with using an assault frigate is the lack of cargo space. I ran into that problem last night as lots of items dropped for me. In addition to some tasty salvage from the rats I killed, including an Angel Brass Tag, the first two containers gave me a one-run Cryptic Tuner Data Interface blueprint copy and two Calibration Data decryptors. Those are nice because they give a +10% probability multiplier to invention attempts as well as giving a +3 ME and PE modifier to tech 2 blueprint copies. I filled up the cargo hold of the Jaguar so I ran back to the station to drop off the load.
Perhaps I should have uncloaked the Hound first. Because the site despawned before I could get back in the Jaguar. I really hope that meant that the other 4 containers were empty because I would hate to think I lost a bunch of ISK just because I didn't decloak. But the wrecks I hadn't salvaged were still present so I finished that up before moving on to mining.
The gravimetric site promised riches in a nice safe location. I actually needed to use seven probes to scan out the site, which was a first for me. I figured I would have plenty of time to warp off to a safe spot if I saw probes on the directional scanner.
The one thing I didn't count on is that someone would find the site before I did. I was alone but all of the crokite was already mined. So no piles of zydrine for me. I had to settle for the dark ochre which contains massive amounts of nocxium. Darn.
I stayed up a little later than planned to finish scooping up all of the dark ochre and then headed back to the station. I learned that I need to get another ship to run a code breaker or analyzer. Right now I'm leaning toward the Muninn because of its cargo hold and tank. I just like the tech 2 ships and their resistances against the Angel rats I run up against, although on second thought maybe a Minmatar armor HAC is not a good choice. Perhaps the time has come to finally break down a buy a Loki. Or maybe I can wait a bit until my hauling alt can fly a Viator. That would solve a lot of issues.
The more I play Eve, the more I learn just how much I don't know. That is part of why the game is fun.
Have you thought about an arbitrator as you can also fit tractors and salvagers in highs and use the great drone bay as your dps for any can spawned rats. I regularly salvage class 3 radar / mag sites using miy arby :-)
ReplyDeleteUgh, the despawning thing. It affects Radar, Magnetometric and combat sites. The way it works for mag and radar is as soon as you open one can, if you leave the site it will despawn after a few minutes, regardless of whether the other cans had something in it. This also happens if you leave a character cloaked in the site.
ReplyDeleteFor combat sites (at least ones with a faction rat that drops loot) As soon as you kill the faction rat the site can despawn if you leave or cloak. I've run into this in nullsec or lowsec when I've killed the faction rat but had to cloak due to someone scanning me down and then the site despawns. Bonus points if you were in a different room from the loot wreck and didn't bm it >.>
So yeah, gotta watch for that
I was about to suggest something around those lines.
ReplyDeleteUse the cloack alt in a cov ops for scanning and the one with salvagers, codebreacker, etc in a cruiser. This way you can take on respawns, and have a sizable hold for loot.
No need to warp back and forth, gives you more autonomy as you can have one scouting ahead while the other clear the sites,etc..
In my old days, I used a Harbi for LS scanning.
ReplyDeleteA cloak, probe, salvager and the rest guns in highs, mwd, analyzer, codebreaker in mids, and lows for armor tank.
Good enough scanning strength, decent tank/dps, enough cargo for several sites.
Surely not the best, but that was the cheapest / most reliable self-sufficient ship I could fly back then.
Lost only one, when I was ignorant of the Wolf bouncing in the system and waiting for me on the last radar's warpin point afterwards.