It's gonna be a new approach

So let me start this post by telling you how I wrapped up my adventures in my last WH. As you know, I had a small POS with no defenses as my only POS in the hole. Only a little protection, but only a little risk. When I logged on this morning I had two DED mails. The first telling me that someone had taken some pot shots at my POS. The second, that my POS's shields had gone below %50. Great....I warp in on a reinforced small POS.

Fortunately, I followed the cardinal rule of POS managment. Make sure to have plenty of strontium in the tower! Unfortunately, I found that while the POS is reinforced, you are unable to access anything in your corp hangar. It was at this point that I found out just how awesome it was that I always log off with my valuable sleeper salvage in my cargo hold. I was able to access the ship maintenance bay so I decided to make a break for it.

Yes, I made the extremely difficult decision to leave my small POS behind.

Along with all of the modules I had in the corp hangar, I'm estimating that I have abandoned about 120 million isk in w-space. That's a lot of isk. Not an easy decision. But, that's what they say about W-space, it's only a matter of time before you lose stuff in there. I'm happy that I made almost a billion isk with this one :)

Escaping the WH turned out to be an adventure in and of itself. I entered and scanned down the adjoining static C4. From there I moved into another WH and scanned it down. And another. And another. I couldn't believe my terrible luck. I went at least 4-5 WH's deep and didn't find an exit to hi sec or lo sec anywhere along the way. And I was VERY thorough. I actually reached a dead end where the only WH's left to go through were about to collapse due to time and I was not about to risk leaving my ships in W-space.

Next option...close the WH. As some of my readers will know, I've been on the wrong side of a closing WH before. Not fun. But a capsuleer's gotta do what a capsuleer's gotta do. So I bring out the domi and begin collapsing the WH. To finish it off I close it off with two jumps with the orca. A risk, I know, but I really really wanted out of that WH.

The next WH opens up. I scan it down and find........a Hi sec exit!! Very close to Jita at that. Perfect escape. So about 45 min later I have everything out of the WH not attached to the POS and I bid a sad farewell to Antioch...it served me well...

Needless to say, I wanted back in W-space, and quick. But before I just jumped in, I decided to take the next step in escalating my w-space effectiveness. Thanks to the 482 million isk I made from the loot I carried out with me, I was able to buy.....

Can you guess?

Yeah...it's a Tengu.

(awesome name pending)

So I'm gonna consider this an escalation of the Boblakov vs. sleeper war. It's gonna be good.

So, what it looks like now is I'm gonna be looking for a C2 or C3 that has a static C3. This would seem to be the best option at this point for making the most isk. Especially since I am having a friend join me for this next stint in w-space. He will also be bringing a Tengu. We'll see how a gang with two Tengus and a Domi does vs. how I did with one drake and a domi.

If I find the WH described above I believe that I will set up the med POS. A WH like that has the potential to be a much more permanent home. Wish me luck in my search...

That was quick!

So last night I pulled out of my WH with the intention of shorter stints in W-space. Probably taking in only a small tower so that I could remain very mobile and move when I found a greener pasture.

I log on today and find a WH 3 jumps from my staging system leading to a C2. Not very many sites but I find a C3 WH leading from it. Jackpot.

This C3 has over 20 sleeper sites and about 15 sigs. I haven't even taken the time to scan them all down yet. Even more interesting, there's two abandoned medium towers. One still has guns anchored to it. The other one is alone. Both from different corps and different alliances.

So I decided to setup the small POS and bring in the orca with the medium POS setup in its hold. I'm here to stay for a bit.

I would love to hear from you, what can I do to profit from the abandoned towers? That's at least 400 million isk floating in my WH.

Looking for the next oppurtunity

So I logged on to find that yet another gang was in my WH running my sites. I decided that the exits that I had simply yielded too much traffic. It seemed that almost everyday since I moved in there was a gang I couldn't scare away, running my sites. Oh well. So I decided to pack up and leave.

There was a K162 leading to hi sec. It just so conveniently let me out 5 jumps from my staging grounds.

So while my indy char was offlining, unanchoring, and gathering up the defenses, I sent bob in the cov ops to go sell off the loot I had accrued in this hole. While I was there, I really only spent a few hours running sites. Made it through:

• Oruze Construct x 3
• Fortification Frontier Stronghold x 8

Just these sites made me over 429 million! Apparently my short stint in this WH was well worth the effort. Made way more than the cost of the items I brought in.

All in all, I was able to take everything out without problems and moved back to my staging grounds. I'm not leaving WH's for long...

Tomorrow I will start scanning for the next WH. Just due to the amount of time it took to get my pos out of the WH, I think that I will simply take a small pos setup into the first decent WH I find. And if I find a great WH through a static or something I'll call on the orca to bring in the the Med POS setup to make a more permanent home.

Another great WH experience. Gets me well on my way to being able to buy and fly a faction fit Tengu. Yeah. I'll post about that soon.

What a DAY!

I certainly did not know when I logged on today how much adventure I was going to have. Some good. And some not so good.

Let's start with the not so good. Needless to say, I had my first WH experience with PVP. I have had my fair share of fights in K-space, but it certainly feels like a different animal in a WH.

So I log on to find a Tengu and a bunch of wrecks showing up on d-scan. Start looking for him. Within a minute or so the Tengu dissappears off scan. A few minutes later a Drake shows up and the wrecks start dissappearing. Fishy. Nobody in there right mind uses a Drake as a salvage boat. I finish scanning down the ship, which I really need to get better at btw, and find him slowly flying towards the last wreck....at 50 m/s. Fishy. I in my cloaked cov ops open up a convo with him. After a few minutes of talking, and playing tough guy, I fall for his I'm-an-ignorant-WH-noob routine. I basically tell him to leave my sites alone and he flips me the proverbial space bird.

So I BM'd the wreck he was moving to and when he was about 20 km away I warp back to my pos (having already logged Ant in the Domi) and switch out the cov ops for the trusty ol Drake. I then fleet warp to the wreck. When I show up on his wreck...my first sign that I had made a stupid mistake was that he didn't warp off. No. Instead he sped up. Right at me. And out of the ether uncloak 3 buddies. Eff...

The Domi got primaried and both of my ships were ecm'ed by the Falcon they had brought along. They also had a vagabond and the drake plus one other ship I didn't mark down. They scrammed the domi right away and I was able to warp bob in the Drake back to the POS. But while watching the Domi tank like nobody's business...I started to get my hopes up. I WARPED BACK!! (p.s. that was the second mistake) I was very impressed with the domi's ability to tank and I don't know that they would have been able to break it but it just so happens that I got disconnected. Yeah. It's all about timing right? First time in weeks that I DC'd and it had to be then. So it takes me at least 2-3 min to log back on and by that time the domi was done and the drake was on the way out. When I DC'd the domi's reppers had shut off. Kinda hard to tank with no repping AND no buffer. I quickly warp Ant's pod back to the pos and decide there's no hope for the Drake. So I eject and warp to the pos before they can lock me.

Scratch one Domi and one Drake.

So after I run back to the POS to cry inwardly, I continue my conversation with the pirate. Turns out that he's a 'nice' pirate. He even gave me some tips on how to gank ppl with my POS. What a nice guy. hehe

After they ganked me and took all of the loot from my ships they left the system..never to return.

So, instead of emoragequitting I decided to hit the lo sec exit and see where it came out. Turns out it was within 10 jumps of Amarr so I ended up taking the time to take both ant and bob out to replace their lost ships. Much isk and *sighing later, one new drake and one new domi back at my POS.

So let's get on with the good adventure for the day. I mentioned in a previous post how I was going to explain my next venture soon. Here it is. I've decided to upgrade to a Medium POS. While the small POS offered me the ability to not care too much if I lost it, I felt vulnurable. After the encounter with the pirates I could only hope that they wouldn't come back to completely wipe me out of the system. Fortunately that wasn't their game.

Over the course of the last few days I've been collecting items for my new WH kit. This one wouldn't fit in an Itty V so I've decided to involve my Orca in this venture. I wouldn't normally risk it in W-space but I can now afford to replace it if it is lost (thanks WH :).

So after I flew my new Drake and Domi into my WH I went back out with my cov ops to scout for Roblakov in the Orca. Got it in np. Was a little frightening waiting for the huge thing to make it into warp at the lo sec gates though...ughh...

I actually just finished setting up my POS and am almost done disassembling the small. My POS is a version of the classic 'dick star' and is certainly more of a detterent than the small ever was.

So tomorrow will be a day of site clearing and hopefully I will learn from the mistakes of my fail pvp actions and benefit from the added feeling of security from the Med POS.

The big move

Well, I finally did it. I moved out into my own hole. Props and thanks to the members of Stack All for their hospitality. We will certainly run into each other again.

SO.....my new home. It is a class 3. When I entered it had 3 WH's besides the one I came in. One led to a Class 1 WH, one to a class 5, and one to lo sec. It will be interesting to see which exits are static. Kinda hoping the class 5 isn't.

I was able to offline, unanchor and reinstall everything into my new home in about an hour. Not too bad. I almost had a heart attack while I was anchoring the tower as a Buzzard appeared on my scans. I warped my cov ops around to the different WH's trying to find which one he had come through but never had a visual. He appeared and disappeared from my scans so I now assume that he was just going between the lo sec WH and the c1 or c5.

After I had the POS online and all of my ships moved in, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief. Made it. I was finally able to relish the glory of my situation. There are about 15-20 sleeper sites which are more than enough to cover the cost of my upcoming venture. I will explain more on that in the next post.

I was also able to run my salvage from the 4 sleeper sites from last night out through the lo sec entrance. I sold it for a total of 173 million isk. Not bad for 1.5 hours of solo C3 work.

So begins the adventures in my own WH!