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.

How to Win Friends and Influence Pod Pilots

One of the complaints commonly made against us wormhole colonists is that we're unduly antisocial, that we've cocooned ourselves from the rest of New Eden's civilization out of greed and selfishness. It's funny how the people who usually say this have an icon of a flashing red skull next to their name, along with a less-than-friendly relationship with Concord.

They also have a point, or half of one anyway. It's certainly true that the sense of ennui that initially pushed me and the rest of APHID through the wormhole was antisocial in nature. And, to be sure, there are also those who go to great lengths to maroon themselves in w-space. But our experience over the last few weeks in J124654 has been anything but a lonely one.

Excepting occasional dry spells lasting 24 to 48 hours, visitors have shown up in this system about once a day. Most commonly, it's a covert ops frigate from the low-sec static wormhole exit, whose probes are the first things I pick up on scan. Occasionally, a K162 exit pops up from a neighboring w-space system and disgorges a complement of pod pilots seeking to mine this system's Sleeper sites for T3 parts and salvage.

In all of the above cases, APHID follows the same standard procedure:

1. All mining ops are immediately ceased.
2. All non-essential personnel immediately disembark from their ships and pods, or warp in their ships to a safe spot and engage a cloaking device.
3. A designated pod pilot (usually the one with the best scanning skills) endeavors to quickly scan the solar system for new or undetected wormholes.
4. Said scout then quickly scans down the newcomers and warps to their location at range.
5. Once we've evaluated the situation tactically, we then have to make a decision: ignore them and hope they go away, or initiate a conversation.

Some would say that a small, three-pod-pilot corporation like APHID should take the former course, hoping that our visitors either don't notice our HQ or don't care about it. After all, if they're not plundering our asteroid belts, then isn't a "live and let live" policy the wisest course?

The Posse, Part II

The convo was from a pod pilot called Tiger Cub of the LurkerZ Corporation, a sub-fifty-member outfit I had never heard of before. Tiger and I were the only ones in Nani local.

No point in being rude, thought I. I accepted the convo and we introduced ourselves, though I remained wary of revealing any details about myself or my w-space operations in the area. He didn't seem the piratical sort, but one can't be too careful about revealing operational details.

Much to my own surprise, Tiger Cub made me an offer:

"Why don't we set each other's corps to blue standings?"

It a sign of the paranoia that unknown space cultivates that my first thoughts about this offer were: What's his angle? After all, if you can't figure out who are the wolves and who are the sheep, then you're the sheep.

Maybe he's looking for hints about APHID's wormhole operations. Maybe he's trying to set me at ease before he and his gang drop in on my operations unannounced. Better to give him as little information as possible.

"Sure," I said, "but I don't know how useful standings would be to you; APHID tends to vagabond all around New Eden. In fact, I think we'll be moving out of this region in the next day or two", I said. No need to tell him how we'll be moving (that is, via a collapsing wormhole).

"Ah, I see", he replied. "But it never hurts to have allies, right?" True enough, I thought. So I set the LurkerZ to blue and he did the same with respect to APHID.

About an hour later, Tiger Cub was gone and Amber was back from her Jita-run. We jumped through the wormhole together and warped ourselves to APHID HQ, basking in the warm glow of the ISK we had just netted from the mineral sale. While consciously I was busy feeling very pleased with myself; quite unconsciously, I had initiated a system-wide scan. The results were as follows:

Scan Results:

• 
  

  Rook

• 
  

  Hulk

• 
  

  Hulk

• 
  

  Bustard

In a capsule, up to the gills in a bath of warm nutrient goo, a pod pilot customarily has all his motor neural functions temporarily switched off to prevent him from jerking an arm or a leg and disconnecting one or more of the numerous control wires jacked in to the skull. Aura later informed me that these safety protocols had temporarily (and quite harmlessly, in this instance) broken down, allowing me to silently mouth a single word: Fuck.

Unknown Space

One month ago, I thought I had reached the end of my travels in New Eden. My strip miners had cycled millions of m3 of ark-bist-crok through the cargo holds of hulks and into the holds of waiting haulers. I had made billions more isk as a T2 inventor and shipbuilder. I had thrashed backwater null-sec markets for billions more in trades. And I had fought and died with some of the best (and worst) corporations, militias, and alliances—everything from one-on-one frigate fights to massive battleship fleet fights.

There was only one problem with all this. I was bored out of my skull.

In response to such a confession, you'll often hear the capsuleer's refrain: "If you're bored, you're doing something wrong." Yet I truly believed I had seen all New Eden had to offer, and, though I hadn't been the best at any role (not by a long shot), the drawbacks of each and every profession had been turning pod-piloting into a chore. My litany of complaints will no doubt seem familiar to many:

• Mining—In null-sec, you run and hide if anyone shows up in local. In high-sec, you pray you haven't been spotted by Jihadswarm or its imitators. Result: ISK and boredom.
• Manufacturing—Buy, make, or mine products at low prices. Bake products in oven. Sell products in market at higher prices. Rinse and repeat. Result: ISK and boredom.
• "Ratting", "Plexing", Agent Missions, etc.—Worse than mining, in that you look like you're a big tough fighter by shooting at things, yet the pirates are so dumb and predictable that they might as well be rocks. Result: ISK and boredom.
• Gang PvP—Spin your ship in its hangar for hours upon endless hours while you wait for everyone else to get their shit together, then gang warp 20+ jumps while your fleet commander gets his shit together, and then, if you're lucky, a few minutes of "pew-pew gf gf" in local, and 20+ gang warps back home (unless you're podded, that is). Result: Overall, loss of isk, and hours of boredom, albeit punctuated by moments of sheer terror and fun.
• Solo PvP—Fly 20+ jumps in null-sec hoping to find some ratter, miner, mission-runner too stupid to warp to a safespot when local goes +1. Result: same as Gang PvP.
• Null-sec Alliance Politics—Don't even get me started. Just ask Hurley what he thinks about the Mayberry Machiavellis running most corps. Or consider what I call TheMittani's Law: The quality of his columns is indirectly proportional to the degree of self-regard he displays therein. Power attracts vainglorious nitwits.

TL;DR version: I was considering turning in my pod pilot's license and giving myself up to the biomass recycling tanks.

But then something sparked in me; call it the spirit of the frontier. Whatever it was, it was telling me to pull up stakes, gather up all my meager worldly goods, and strike out for the Unknown in search of fortune, glory, or bust. And these days, the "Unknown" means only one thing: W-space.

If I went, I wouldn't be bringing any road maps or guidebooks promising surefire ways to maximize isk profits for minimum risk. That would be missing the point, which was to make my own mistakes, learn my own lessons. So much of what had bored me to tears over the past couple of years was the fact that once you read up all of the FAQs and tip sheets there only seemed to be one way to do anything: The Right Way. To hell with that. To paraphrase another starship captain, I aimed to misbehave.

Frontier spirit thus awoken, I took stock of my tools:

• two fellow pod pilots in the Applied Physics Institute (APHID), with mining, refining, and hauling capabilities shared between us
• six Coveters with T1 strips, upgrades and scanners
• some gas harvesters
• one Anathema with scanning rigs
• a couple of Iteron Mark V
• one Apocalypse battleship, haphazardly fitted
• one Zealot, combat ready
• one Viator
• one Orca with all the trimmings
• lots of core scan probe launchers and probes of all kinds
• one medium Gallente POS, with 8 small railguns, 2 medium railguns, 2 webs, 2 scrams, corp hangar, ship maintenance bay, medium intensive refining array, and a partridge in a pear tree
• enough POS fuel to last about three months

It's not much, but it was all I had to hand. (Besides, I wasn't about to bring in any more gear with the Obelisk; the verifiably dullest thing in all of New Eden is watching the fat hindquarters of a freighter align for warp after warp.)

A wormhole was surprisingly easy to find. In the Maut solar system of the Placid region, one jump away from APHID's HQ in Osmeden, my Anathema's scan probes chirped to let me know that they had found a shimmering portal to "unknown space."

What would I find on the other side? I had no idea—and that's just what I was looking for.