When Success Breeds Failure

Minigzen at K162space has discovered the trend that has finally pushed the Applied Physics Institute out of the wormhole mining business and back into the tender embrace of hi-sec space for the time being:

After Mr. Wizz-bang-shooty-fun had essentially reduced the sleeper population into little flying bags of ISK with Hadoken beams, Mr. Industrialist perked up his ears at the mentions of ABC. And so the miners who were given a choice between working for peanuts and working for nullsec alliances chose….rapture I mean WH mining. . . .

Unfortunatley, the WH miners, being unable to focus on making ships because of lack of stations, safety, ectera, couldn’t make ships, so they carted their mega and zydrine to Jita and sold it, possibly more than the market could handle . . .

In other words, that noise you've been hearing over the past year is the sound of megacyte and zydrine prices plunging off the cliff of abundance. (Pyerite, meanwhile, has been riding the rocket upward.) When we first started this business several months ago APHID was raking in about 50 million ISK/hour from our twin-barge mining operations. Today those same operations net us only a bit more than 30 million ISK/hour—an unhappy 40% drop in income.

Deliverance

It seems I spoke too soon the other day about never having the need to hurry on Ahambra. Only a few hours after I wrote the last post, a treacly chime and flashing icon signaled the arrival of a message on my datapad. It was a DED mail: AEOS HQ was under attack by two members of a corporation called The Last True Socialism named Gameboy4ever and FitzTavi. It was pretty obvious from their profiles that these guys were outlaws in the business of preying on unsuspecting wormhole colonists and their facilities.

This turn of events shouldn't have really bothered me that much. I had already made more than a billion and a half in liquid isk for not all that much work. There was nothing of immense value there other than the structures themselves. No ore or minerals in the refinery; no Sleeper salvage in the corporate hangar. And before my vacation, I had unloaded the vessels stored in the ship hangar and re-loaded them into the Orca's ship bays. Amber had then parked the Orca, cloaked, in a deep safe spot.

Nevertheless, I found that I just couldn't let it go. Hour after hour, the Neocom chimed to alert me to the arrival of another DED mail—control tower at 75% shields, now 50%, now 25%, now in reinforced mode. Would they come back in two-and-a-half days when the shield reinforcement generators ran out of strontium clathrates? Somehow, I had a feeling they would.