The Geras Scuffle

I’ve spent a few posts lately telling you about the times I have lost ships whilst hunting MTUs, and ths will hopefully be the last such post of this kind for a while.

It would be over 3 years from my fight with Trigger, detailed in this post, that I would lose another MTU hunting ship through PvP, and unlike the previous encounter, I saw this one coming.

On this day, I was graced with the presence of my CEO from my ganking days, Solecist Project, a highsec superstar and someone I’m very proud to call a friend. We were chatting away in the MTU Hunting chat channel, when I spotted 3 MTUs in a mining site in Geras, and so I asked Sol and TonyTiger 57 (another friend we were chatting with at the time) if they wanted to join me in erasing them. They did, and so I formed a fleet, scanned down the MTUs, and waited for them to arrive.

MTUs littered the field.

There were 2 ships near the MTUs, a Covetor and a Retriever, and while waiting for Sol and Tony to arrive, yet another MTU had been dropped at the site. When my friends reached me, I warped us to the site, and we immediately set to work on the MTUs, starting with the one closest to us. At this point I noticed combat probes on scan, made a quick check that they weren’t my own (I’ve spooked myself a couple of times, haha) and made the quick decision to warp out. I’d been a bit premature on that call, which Sol made sure to let me know. I should’ve waited to see what ships were coming first. I warped back to the site along with Tony (Sol had stayed there in his Probe) and we finished off the first MTU.

Kill: Adishi Hemah (Mobile Tractor Unit)

We then turned our attention to the next MTU, some 10km away from the first, and started shooting that too. Whilst shooting this one, there were now 2 ships on scan heading for us, a Catalyst and a Coercer, and they landed 10km from us at the site’s warp-in just as the second MTU popped.

Kill: Adishi Hemah (Mobile Tractor Unit)

It had been a long time since I had been in a real fight, so I made the decision to stay and fight these interlopers. I targetted both destroyers, and the Coercer reached me first so I started firing upon him first.

Kill: Meik Odunen (Coercer)

I then switched to the Catalyst, which had done a huge amount of damage to me by this point. I had him in deep armour, but then a Rupture landed and..

Kill: Pix Severus (Hecate)

Please excuse the bad fit, it was a result of my attempt to pop an MTU in under a minute without using polarized guns! Oh, and The Damsel survived, thankfully!

I got my pod out of the site, and at that point Sol lost his Probe and got his pod out too, thankfully Tony managed to escape in his Ares. While waiting for the weapon timer, I was bouncing around in my pod and chatting with Sol in local when something weird happened.

Kill: Eva Mabuse (Catalyst)

I don’t know how he managed to CONCORD himself, did he try to gank something? Regardless, no gank victim shows on his killboard.

What happened next though was something special, and at the time I had no idea just how special it was.

Kill: Adishi Hemah (Mobile Tractor Unit)

What we are looking at here is an MTU I got on the killmail for, filled with the remains of the ship I used to hunt it. This is a rare scenario, and is the first and only time this has ever happened for me.

In the end, our little scuffle in Geras looked something like this:

Click on image for full size.

I’m relatively happy with the outcome, it was a lot of fun and I learned a few things. If I had to do the fight over again though, I’d shoot the Catalyst first, then go for the Coercer, then hopefully GTFO just before the Rupture lands.

I’ve lost ships in all sorts of ways over the years, I’ve been ganked, lost numerous ships to NPCs, and I’ve even been blapped by POS guns in lowsec. What matters though is that the MTU devastation continues on regardless.

Rats

In a previous post I told you about how I had lost a ship whilst hunting MTUs, after being hunted down by another player. In this post I would like to cover the instances in which I have lost ships to NPCs (rats) whilst out hunting.

Rogue Drones

These are nasty little blighters, dangerous too, something I learned the hard way. It would be my own impatience in the end though, that cost me a ship.

This loss comes from my early days of MTU hunting, back in those days I had just started using my alt in her battleship to take out the rats surrounding MTUs in active missions. The main problem with doing that though is having to jump a slow old battleboat, upwards of 30 jumps at times, across highsec.

I had found an MTU in the lesser-travelled system of Stou that was surrounded by rogue drones. That wasn’t all though, there was also a player wreck right next to it, a cruiser wreck, and I wanted it. Not wanting to jump my alt’s ship a very long way through highsec to meet me, I decided to fit a mission-capable ship in Dodixie, the nearest trade hub, and try to take these things out myself.

Bzzt… 01101100 01101111 01101100

Perhaps the fact that another player had already succumbed to these things should have been enough warning, but when it comes to MTUs I can often find myself becoming blinkered. I warped in at range to hopefully pull some of the drones away from the MTU, only to find only some would aggress at a time, purely based on proximity. I took a few out, and took a lot of damage, I actually had to warp out and back in again a couple of times to avoid dying, and on the third warp-in my luck ran out. I had pulled too many, lingered too long, and the damage was too great.

Kill: Pix Severus (Thorax)

After that, I did what I should have done from the start, and warped my alt in her battleship all the way out there to delete those drones. With that done, the MTU was free to pop.

Kill: Clarissia Nai’lo (Mobile Tractor Unit)

You can see the remains of Clarissia’s ship here in this MTU, but not my own wreck, as I died too far out from the MTU’s tractor range.

This was my second-ever ship loss in the pursuit of MTU destruction. Lesson learned?

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The Burner

In this case, I lost the ship I had first started hunting MTUs in, a Raptor named “ur mum lol”, to an elite NPC. I had scanned an MTU down in Inder, and saw that there was a player wreck next to it, this meant that the MTU was most likely filled with the remains of that player wreck, and I wanted it, I wanted it bad.

After scanning it down in my Hecate, I warped to it and when I landed I saw an acceleration gate that told me I could only bring Frigates through. I then knew that this was an Anomic mission, which contains very powerful NPCs called Burners. Knowing how dangerous those things are, I had second thoughts about proceeding, but I didn’t want to just leave it there though. I thought to myself “What if those things don’t start shooting you until you get into range, or make an aggressive move against it?” I grabbed my Raptor and headed back to test this theory out, and I learned the hard way that Burners auto-aggro.

Kill: Pix Severus (Raptor)

Not-so-clever girl.

If I come across any more MTUs left in Burner missions in the future, I will just bookmark the MTU, and make a note to come back after downtime, when the mission should have despawned.

I’m not the first MTU hunter to lose a ship to a Burner, and I’m sure I won’t be the last. If you’re thinking of taking up this profession, consider this a forewarning.

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That covers all my NPC deaths thus far whilst pursuing MTU devastation. From these deaths I’ve learned to be a little more patient whenever I find an MTU surrounded by rats. I’ll make sure to keep you updated on any further costly mistakes I make, as it is all just part of the journey.

MTU Hunter Becomes the Hunted

It isn’t often that your friendly, local MTU Hunter loses his MTU Hunting ship, but it does happen from time to time. In this post I would like to tell you about an encounter in which I was hunted-down whilst out hunting for MTUs.

MTU Hunting is a profession that comes with certain risks, you spend a vast portion of your time in space under Suspect Status, meaning that if you’re in highsec, anyone can shoot at you freely without the intervention of the space police. Also, when you have the yellow flashing skull next to your name in local, it lights you up like a Christmas tree, and it will draw other pilots to you, looking for prey.

There are players out there who specialise in hunting down Suspect-flagged players, and I ended-up encountering one such hunter who was very good at his job. I had scanned down an MTU in Ruvas, warped to it, and started firing upon it. I pulse D-Scan constantly while bashing the MTU, to check if anyone is dropping probes on me, and to see if the MTU’s owner is on his way back to collect his MTU. I saw nothing out of the ordinary this time, and the MTU popped, as they usually do:

Kill: Toha Hinken (Mobile Tractor Unit)

After I’ve popped an MTU, sometimes I linger around in the site to wait out the 1 minute Weapon Timer, before heading to the nearest NPC station to deposit any loot I’d gotten from the MTU. That is what I was doing here, and in fact, I’d set my ship on a course in a random direction away from the MTU wreckage with my MWD active, whilst waiting for the timer. Suddenly, an Orthrus piloted by Trigger Liu lands in the pocket with me, and he sets his long-point on me. With his drones now eating through my ship’s armor, I made a snap decision to burn towards him and unleash my ship’s 800 DPS upon him. It wasn’t enough though, I’d taken his shields down to maybe 50% before my ship exploded.

Kill: Pix Severus (Hecate)

After I died, I warped my pod out to a nearby planet, only to find Trigger’s alt sat there on the planet at 0 waiting for me, thankfully I was alert, bounced to another planet (at 100 this time) only to find yet another one of his alts sat there waiting too. This man meant business. I did eventually get my pod back to station, I have at least one docking bookmark in the vast majority of highsec systems, and it’s a good job I had, because he had yet another alt there waiting for me. Sheesh.

If you remember, I had set myself MWDing away from the MTU wreck, and was still burning away when Trigger landed, if I had continued burning away, it is possible that I would have pulled range on his point and escaped with my ship intact. Hindsight is a useful yet cruel mistress.

A few days later, my corpmate, Oylpann Kumamato also ran into Trigger, but thankfully managed to escape his clutches.

Trigger Liu
From: Oylpann Kumamato
Sent: 2017.05.30 07:17
To: Pix Severus,
The guy that got you with the Orthrus the other day landed on grid with me. I was in a safe in Kappas.
I was lucky I wasnt scanning or he would have got me. As soon as he landed, I turned and warped out.
I’m guessing he has a hard on for us.
I messaged him and told him he’s got a quick scanner alt and gave him props for killing my CEO (you lol).
No replies yet but I’ll let you know if he does.

Needless to say, this Trigger fellow is now set red to the corp, so that we can try to avoid him in the future!

There are a number of other suspect hunters out there that I have had near misses with, and it certainly adds a lot more excitement to the risky pursuit of MTU destruction. I learned a lot from this encounter, but I’m very sure I will lose a number of other ships as my journey continues!

Hecatetastrophe

I mentioned in an earlier post that one of the ways I like to hunt MTUs is to roam along the outer edges of highsec, along the border with lowsec. MTUs are rarer out there, but when you do find one it feels a lot more special than popping your nth MTU in a busy Sisters of EVE mission hub.

On one such roam I made a series of mistakes which ultimately cost me my ship.

The first mistake was made before I had even set off on the hunt, when I was sat in station planning my route for that night. I was to head to the Khanid region, an area of New Eden that I seldom visit. I had set many waypoints so I could cover the majority of systems in that region, but it seems that at one point I had inadvertently set a course through lowsec. Normally I wouldn’t have an issue travelling through lowsec, but not knowing I was going to be there was the actual problem. When you spend so much time in highsec, you can become complacent, and often find yourself doing things you wouldn’t do in lowsec.

The Khanid region.

I set off on the hunt, scanning every system as I went. It had been particularly uneventful, with only a couple of empty MTUs found on the way, but I pressed on regardless. Later on in the night, having found absolutely nothing, I entered a system which had no one else in local (not atypical for this area of space) and parked myself at a random moon, as central to the system as I could get. I launched my probes to begin the routine of scanning for MTUs, when suddenly, horror.

Kill: Pix Severus (Hecate)

What happened? One minute I’m happily scanning away, the next I see my shields turn red, quickly followed by my armour and structure. The surprise of it caused me to fumble the controls, and by the time I realised what was going on, my ship had exploded and I was ejected in my pod. After moving my pod safely away to a nearby planet, I took a deep breath and began to assess the situation. It wasn’t until I closed the solar system map (which I keep up almost 100% of the time while I’m hunting MTUs) that I realised I was in lowsec, because the map was always positioned in the top-left of my screen, obscuring the system’s security status. This was my second mistake. The third mistake was not having POS guns on my overview, and that, along with having sound disabled in-game, meant that when the player-owned structure next to the moon fired it’s guns at me, it came as a complete surprise.

The Amarrians are solely responsible for the scarcity of gold in the universe.

After I had regained my composure, I checked the killmail and saw that 50m ISK worth of mods had survived my ship’s explosion, including my expensive probe launcher; I had to get those items back. I warped back to the scene of my demise, bookmarked the location of my ship’s wreck, then set off to find the nearest station with ships for sale. In the system of Badivefi, some 10 or so jumps away, I found a Magnate for sale, along with a surprisingly wide array of ship mods and other items, this system turned out to be a well-stocked market hub, one I’d never visited before. Once I had given the Magnate a decent fit, I headed back to my shipwreck, and thankfully no one had looted it in the meantime. I then headed back to the nearest trade hub, Amarr, with my tail firmly between my legs. It was time to buy myself a new MTU hunting ship.

An embarrassing loss for this MTU hunter, many mistakes were made, and a decent chunk of ISK was lost. Thankfully, EVE is a game that allows you to make such mistakes, which in turn lets you learn from them and become a better player as a result.