EVE-Mag.com

Log Entry: 6.26.2008

Published on 26. Jun, 2008 ... written by Sam Guss, Tags: Diary of a Caldari Rookie

Well I had some success, and then a massive failure. Went to 1.0 space to begin my mining operation, where I had previously moved my hauler and my mining cruiser to and laid out my secure cargo cans and set the password. Filled the two up plus the cruiser’s cargo hold and did my first haul and sell. Not too badly, from start to finish, the run took about 45-60 minutes including setup and selling and made around 750,000 ISK. My mind is already speculating what I can bring in with higher tech mining lasers and a mining barge.

My second sojourn though wasn’t as successful. As I was finishing loading my second secure can and starting to fill my cruiser’s cargo hold, I get slammed by another ship and suddenly my cargo can is gone and he warps out. I didn’t catch his name but had the feeling he would be back, so that way I would have his name and could go get one of my more offensive ships and come back and blast him from the stars. Sure enough, he came back and suddenly my remaining cargo can wasn’t there and…. He wasn’t flashing red. Or yellow. Or orange. Or nothing.

Apparently you can scoop a cargo can and it not go down as a crime with CONCORD. I was furious. An hours worth of work, 750K ISK worth of rock plus another half a mil ISK gone – just like that and I didn’t even have an aggression timer to come back and shoot this guy with. I went back to my home base and bought a Caracal and started outfitting it for a quick hit and run on the SOB that stole from me. I knew the consequences I was taking – being shot at by CONCORD and a loss to my security rating, but all I could think of was how I was not going to let some smuck come and take what I had worked hard for.

As I outfitting the Cruiser and talking to other employees at Corp though, I calmed down somewhat and one thing was said that stopped me in my tracks. Doing what I was about to do, while they would of supported me, if I was seen doing a suicide run like this could be mistakenly seen from outsiders that PGGB was a pirate gang versus the Corp we are. I thought about it a few minutes later, hoped into a shuttle and returned to my mining operation and proceeded to move all my gear over to home base.

I did get out on the public communications though and alerted the system of the Ore thief, so at least I got that much satisfaction. Some people came back with information though how to work avoid this next time. So what are my lessons for all of this? If, you’re going to use Giant Secure Cargo containers in your solo mining Ops, be sure to be in a system that you can anchor them to and be sure to password protect them.

Them’s the breaks in running your own mining business though and I am sure I will only profit all the more in the future because of this incident.

- Gustav Malori