The Goons have announced Caldari ice interdiction.
What is it? A gank campaign in Caldari space, killing ice miners.
Why do they do it? For fun and for profit:
You might remember that for one month, I was the most effective ganker of EVE, probably also holding the record of solo kills. In that month I killed 659 ships all by myself. 53B ISK damage, 98% ratio, most valuable pod killed and other records. During that week I alone caused 1/20 as much ISK damage as the whole 12K TEST alliance. You guessed it, I was ganking in highsec. I know the ins and outs of highsec ganking probably more than anyone in this game.
It's time to use utilize this knowledge to turn this year's ice interdiction. White Glaze prices already skyrocketed, you can sell it for 1/3M and you can mine a unit in 40-50 seconds depending on skills if you have Orca boost. So 25-30M is achievable while sitting in this:
[Procurer, Interdict this]
Damage Control II
Ice Harvester Upgrade II
Medium Shield Extender II
Thermic Dissipation Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Ice Harvester II
Medium Ice Harvester Accelerator I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Hornet EC-300 x4
Hobgoblin II x1
90K EHP against Catalysts, 108K if you overheat, 130K if you have an Orca with shield harmonizing link. The pricetag of this ship is around 30M, much less than the catalyst horde needed to destroy it. Keeping Orca on the belt is probably not the best idea, because even a max-tanked Orca has just 340K EHP against Catalysts, so a 70-80 Cata fleet can take it out and they cost about the same as the Orca.
If you are a pro miner, in the upcoming month Caldari ice is what you should mine. Keep your boosting Orca next to a station so you can dock up if anyone tries to attack that, and unleash your multiboxed Procurers on the ice. While the smaller ore hold of the Procurer increases docking count, the income is still higher than any other mining. Don't try jetcan mining, they can just steal the cans!
If you want to rack up some kills and/or mess with Goons, you should be in an ECM ship. The gankers go flashy and attackable by everyone. Catalysts don't have too much sensor strength, you can jam several of them, practically destroying them, as they can't carry on with the gank but still die to Concord. To avoid counter-gank or counter-ECM, just make an offgrid safe 6-800 km from the ice, sit there aligned and warp in when you see Catalysts coming on Dscan. ECM frigs are cheap, so even if they can counter-gank you, you still have lot of kills.
All previous anti-gank movements failed because the ice belts were infinite and the ore belts were so numerous that they could be called infinite too. It means that the miners were scattered, so you could camp a belt all day without seeing a single ganker, despite they were very busy in the region. Since the amount of dumb miners is huge, no matter how many anti-gankers were patrolling, vast majority of the belts were always unpatrolled and housed dumb miners where gankers could feast.
The new system made ice belts limited and depleting. If an ice belt is mined out, no idiot miner can go there in his 4x civilian booster fit Mackinaw to feed the gankers. So a mining fleet is needed that eat up the belts and forces dumb miners to move to patrolled belts where the gankers are massacred. Such mining fleet can be formed simply by patrolling that belt. Miners who died otherwise come there by chance and can keep mining safely.
The above operates without coordination. So if you, as a miner move a bunch of procurers to a ganked ice belt, the gankers can't just ignore you and kill untanked Macks, as you are destroying their hunting field. They must waste insane man-hours ganking your procurers that you can easily replace from a few million, practically griefing the gankers. What about AFK? Just set your clone to a nearby system and have your pod empty. You lose the overheating ability, but you are still griefing gankers by costing them more in ISK and man-hours than to yourself.
You can fire up dotlan and check ice belt systems with lot of kills. Move there either as ECM or miner, kill gankers and remove the belt itself, forcing them to pack and move.
What is it? A gank campaign in Caldari space, killing ice miners.
Why do they do it? For fun and for profit:
You might remember that for one month, I was the most effective ganker of EVE, probably also holding the record of solo kills. In that month I killed 659 ships all by myself. 53B ISK damage, 98% ratio, most valuable pod killed and other records. During that week I alone caused 1/20 as much ISK damage as the whole 12K TEST alliance. You guessed it, I was ganking in highsec. I know the ins and outs of highsec ganking probably more than anyone in this game.
It's time to use utilize this knowledge to turn this year's ice interdiction. White Glaze prices already skyrocketed, you can sell it for 1/3M and you can mine a unit in 40-50 seconds depending on skills if you have Orca boost. So 25-30M is achievable while sitting in this:
[Procurer, Interdict this]
Damage Control II
Ice Harvester Upgrade II
Medium Shield Extender II
Thermic Dissipation Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Adaptive Invulnerability Field II
Ice Harvester II
Medium Ice Harvester Accelerator I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Medium Core Defense Field Extender I
Hornet EC-300 x4
Hobgoblin II x1
90K EHP against Catalysts, 108K if you overheat, 130K if you have an Orca with shield harmonizing link. The pricetag of this ship is around 30M, much less than the catalyst horde needed to destroy it. Keeping Orca on the belt is probably not the best idea, because even a max-tanked Orca has just 340K EHP against Catalysts, so a 70-80 Cata fleet can take it out and they cost about the same as the Orca.
If you are a pro miner, in the upcoming month Caldari ice is what you should mine. Keep your boosting Orca next to a station so you can dock up if anyone tries to attack that, and unleash your multiboxed Procurers on the ice. While the smaller ore hold of the Procurer increases docking count, the income is still higher than any other mining. Don't try jetcan mining, they can just steal the cans!
If you want to rack up some kills and/or mess with Goons, you should be in an ECM ship. The gankers go flashy and attackable by everyone. Catalysts don't have too much sensor strength, you can jam several of them, practically destroying them, as they can't carry on with the gank but still die to Concord. To avoid counter-gank or counter-ECM, just make an offgrid safe 6-800 km from the ice, sit there aligned and warp in when you see Catalysts coming on Dscan. ECM frigs are cheap, so even if they can counter-gank you, you still have lot of kills.
All previous anti-gank movements failed because the ice belts were infinite and the ore belts were so numerous that they could be called infinite too. It means that the miners were scattered, so you could camp a belt all day without seeing a single ganker, despite they were very busy in the region. Since the amount of dumb miners is huge, no matter how many anti-gankers were patrolling, vast majority of the belts were always unpatrolled and housed dumb miners where gankers could feast.
The new system made ice belts limited and depleting. If an ice belt is mined out, no idiot miner can go there in his 4x civilian booster fit Mackinaw to feed the gankers. So a mining fleet is needed that eat up the belts and forces dumb miners to move to patrolled belts where the gankers are massacred. Such mining fleet can be formed simply by patrolling that belt. Miners who died otherwise come there by chance and can keep mining safely.
The above operates without coordination. So if you, as a miner move a bunch of procurers to a ganked ice belt, the gankers can't just ignore you and kill untanked Macks, as you are destroying their hunting field. They must waste insane man-hours ganking your procurers that you can easily replace from a few million, practically griefing the gankers. What about AFK? Just set your clone to a nearby system and have your pod empty. You lose the overheating ability, but you are still griefing gankers by costing them more in ISK and man-hours than to yourself.
You can fire up dotlan and check ice belt systems with lot of kills. Move there either as ECM or miner, kill gankers and remove the belt itself, forcing them to pack and move.
9 comments:
You can improve that fit somewhat by replacing one of the Adaptives with a Kinetic Deflection Field II. This raises its EHP against hybrid weapons from around 88000 to 100000.
That would decrease the EM resistance significantly, opening up to Trasher ganking. While Trashers have lower DPS than catalysts, if you push EM/therm resist high and open an EMP hole, they will use it.
Lets face it they are not going to gank a procurer. There will be ample softer targets provide and even orca's are probably better targets (which there will be a lot of).
Also I would also give careful consideration on how you are going to get your products into Jita.
Transportation: Red Frog. They gank it? Not my problem.
I like the first part, it is solid advice for most miners. I'm puzzled by the last part though: Why are you writing lots of paragraphs on how to "rack up some kills and/or mess with Goons" ? It just seems very ungoblinish to encourage behavior that is unprofitable by design.
They must waste insane man-hours ganking your procurers that you can easily replace from a few million, practically griefing the gankers.
You are proceeding from faulty assumptions. The goal of the previous interdictions is to drive the price of ice up so high while controlling the null-sec supply of ice. It is an economic attack against the entire high-sec community. Individual barge attacks don't have to be "profitable" since the measurement is balanced across entire regions of space. When the only supply of ice is from Tribute (or other null-sec regions), you have to either mine in low, or pay whatever it takes to get your ice.
As part of the interdiction, like the war in Fountain, the goal is to demoralize opponents so that they don't log in. Previous Gallente ice interdictions used Dominixes for dealing with heavily tanked miners. With the battleship changes, I suspect they'll use other things like a Talos.
I have about 6 months of ice products in inventory, mostly acquired in anticipation of Odyssey. My PI skills aren't that great, but I can extract everything except robotics faster than my POS consumes them.
I would be interrested in some statistic how much man hours are put into this interdiction compared to profit.
I would bet that it would end worse than L3 missions in drake.
but on the other hands ganking miners might be fun. :D
We use taloses for targets that would require unfeasibly large numbers of catalysts.
Cost is not remotely an issue, given what you yourself noted: our profits from rising nitropes prices will be utterly absurd.
If we want something to die, it will die. There is nothing miners can do about that. However, as long as there are easier targets to bring down this setup will likely not be molested, so I suppose it's useful in that way.
"So if you, as a miner move a bunch of procurers to a ganked ice belt, the gankers can't just ignore you and kill untanked Macks, as you are destroying their hunting field."
No, you don't. You need quite a fleet to do so. If you field such a fleet, chances are good, that you have driven away other people already. So not much hunter either way.
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