The Two Towers

In a previous post, I told you about my corporation’s first POS kill, and the 700m ISK in ice we managed to obtain from one of it’s modules. Today, I would like to continue the story and tell you all about how profitable this activity would become for us.

We now had a solid 3-man team, eager to clean-up highsec one structure at a time, and we wasted no time in getting to work. The next few POS kills after our first one pretty much set the standard though, the standard being that most POSes in highsec were either empty, or held just a tiny sliver of ore left over from whatever process was going-on inside the Compression and Reprocessing Arrays. In fact, you would often get more ore from a standard mining MTU kill. This was fine with us though, none of us were exactly poor, so even if this activity didn’t pay for itself, we still would’ve kept on going regardless. Still, though, loot does add a little more spice to this activity, especially if you’re into hauling and contracting.

It was during these early days of POS popping that Oyl, Niya and myself got to know each other better, chatting long into the night during our long bashing sessions. I obviously won’t go into any detail on our personal lives, but over time we would become accustomed to timing the wardecs and scheduling the bashes around our respective work times and family responsibilities. I remember that during these days we would often link each other to funny videos, interesting killmails, and share old war stories.

Oylpann Kumamato > I tried caldari faction warfare for a bit.
Oylpann Kumamato > Got my first kill out in a small plex
Oylpann Kumamato > i was shaking so bad and in hull when he popped. i warped to station and didnt give a “gf” in local until almost 3 mins after we fought lol
Oylpann Kumamato > eve is the first game ive ever gotten the shakes from

It was also during this time that we would work on streamlining our operation. The first thing we did to this effect was to recruit some of our alts to the corp, to eventually double the number of ships on the field. Secondly, we all began training to use Oracles (Amarrian Battlecruisers) on all of our characters, where needed. This was especially important for myself and Oyl, as the continual reloading required to bash a POS in a Talos became most tiresome after several hours. An Oracle doesn’t need to reload anywhere near as much, so it would eliminate those moments where we would forget to reload for a few minutes because we were too caught-up in conversation, etc. I would just like to point-out that we didn’t choose this ship for it’s AFK-ability, we would still dock-up when we needed to go AFK (remember, James is always watching!)

Gold trim comes as standard on Amarrian vessels.

It wasnt until our 6th POS kill that our faith in the loot gods would be reaffirmed, and we would find ourselves a notable amount of booty (no, not that kind) in the system of Olo. We had wardecced a corp called Brilliant Innovations [BIIN] the night before, and chose to do so because they owned a POS with a small Control Tower, which we were focusing on in our early days because we didn’t yet have the firepower needed to take on the larger towers effectively. The small tower wasn’t the only reason though, they had an Equipment Assembly Array too, something which we hadn’t shot before. These arrays are used to create ship modules, so there was some anticipation that we might find something different inside than the ice and ore we’d usually get from refining arrays.

With none of the members of the POS-owning corp online, we started the bash with no resistance. Oyl got online a little earlier than usual that night, but myself and Niya had already taken the Control Tower’s shields down to 30% by the time he arrived. As soon as he did arrive, we popped the array:

Kill: Brilliant Innovations (Equipment Assembly Array)

After the array popped, a cargo container suddenly appeared in it’s place!

Click on image for full size.

What we were looking at here was around 180m ISK in manufactured T2 rigs, a few of the components needed to make them, and a LOT of blueprints. Just FYI, the blueprints don’t count properly towards the estimated ISK at the bottom of the screenshot. We would need to sell these blueprints via contracts to get the most from them, this was a job that Oyl was more than happy to do, having higher trade skills than myself or Niya at the time. We ended-up getting around 300m ISK from those blueprints, meaning this POS kill eventually netted us almost 500m ISK in total.

After a short celebration, we popped the Control Tower, putting an end to Brilliant Innovation’s structure litter in Olo:

Kill: Brilliant Innovations (Caldari Control Tower Small)

We weren’t done yet though, as I mentioned earlier, Oyl had gotten online early this night, so we wanted to try to kill two towers in a single night, and it totally wasn’t because I wanted to make a blog post with a Lord of the Rings reference, no sir! After stashing our newly-obtained loot at a nearby station, we headed to our next target, another small tower in Tintoh. This time, the tower was accompanied by a whole slew of other potentially-lucrative modules, which included the usual refining arrays, a Corporate Hangar Array, and a Design Laboratory.

Pix Severus > depending on how much time we have tonight, shall we head to tintoh and pop the arrays there?
Tristis Puella > sounds good
Niyalyn > im good with that
Niyalyn > maybe even the tower.. depending on the time
Pix Severus > they have labs and hangars and all sorts of crazy s**t

The corporation that was responsible for this structure spam was Tactical Rabbit Coalition [RUDKL], a 9-man corp that was, once again, inactive. We wasted no time in laying waste to the arrays, starting with the Design Lab:

Kill: Tactical Rabbit Coalition (Design Laboratory)
Kill: Tactical Rabbit Coalition (Corporate Hangar Array)
Kill: Tactical Rabbit Coalition (Compression Array)
Kill: Tactical Rabbit Coalition (Reprocessing Array)

Out of these 4 arrays, two of them dropped loot, the Design Lab dropped around 100m ISK in blueprints, and the Hangar dropped around 12k Nitrogen Fuel Blocks worth around 200m ISK.

Looks like meat’s back on the menu, boys.

We couldn’t believe our luck at this point, and the celebrations continued, but we still had work to do, and do it we did:

Kill: Tactical Rabbit Coalition (Caldari Control Tower Small)

All in all, this was a great night for us, not only did we kill two towers in a single night (a first for us) but we also got paid around 800m ISK for the privilege. This would surely keep our war machine turning for some time to come, but this was not the last payday we would receive. Our wealth would continue to accumulate, and in the next post of this series, I’ll show you the biggest payout we ever received from this line of work.

To be continued.