Most people don't mine in 0.0 without some sort of defense. Lots of corps bubble dead end systems to give miners time to POS-up. Most alliances and coalitions have incredible intelligence channels that warn miners long before hostiles ever make it to the deep parts of their territories. Lastly some corps just plain have pvp characters around to protect miners. For some reason most wormhole habitants are perfectly satisfied with mining lacking any of these defenses. I guess wormhole inhabitants dont realize that they are effectively mining in 0.0 without the one thing that gives you any chance of survival, local chat.
You can read all the holies, as I call them, on the forums talk about how religious they are on the scanner or that they keep alts cloaked at the entrance holes or they keep combat probes out to detect other probes at long ranges. Well I’m sorry, but all that stuff just doesn’t work well enough. The vast majority of my kills are done without ever putting probes out and the few times I do put them out they are within scan or combat probe range for approximately 10-15 seconds. If you hit scan that often, you are one paranoid dude. My combat ship is uncloaked twice, when I enter the hole for about 2 seconds and when I uncloak to lock you, which takes about 1 second in a hound. In a realistic world there is just no defense for a miner against a stealth bomber in a wormhole.
Does that mean all these people are complete idiots… certainly not, because if it wasn’t profitable they wouldn’t be there doing it. I check the kill mail logs of almost everyone I kill to see how often this happens to them and it is surprisingly infrequent. Retrievers and Coveters are relatively cheap and insurable and the occasional loss just seems to be part of the cost of operating in worm space. For this I’m grateful because I pay for my activities off the tech II modules they drop. That’s right I make enough off the tech II module drops from my kills to more than make up for the occasional bomber I lose and the ammo I shoot. I don’t run missions anymore and I don’t do normal exploration unless I want a change of pace, I have finally hit pvp bliss. I will end with the people who I do find disturbing. If you mine in a Hulk in worm space with no protection I hope you are making a lot of money, because unlike mining barges they are not cheap or reasonably insurable.
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As a wormhole resident I enjoy his blog more than any other I read. It is a fact that getting popped in mining mode is a matter of fact in WH life. It is a cost of doing business and the statements about those who mine with a Hulk are so true. I could never justify the cost vs production of the hulk over the covetor so i mine in disposables. I average an operation loss once every 2 weeks or so. My mining income averages 500 mil per week...I'll accept that trade off!
ReplyDeleteI guess if it's a net gain more power to you. You probably made out better than the guys who got ganked in Hulkageddon II.
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