PARTOK TOMPSON

In a previous post I told you all about the growth of my corp, Empty You, and our POS bashing adventures together. Today, I’d like to wrap things up by telling you about the culture of our corp, along with some of the corp memes that arose from our activities.

POS-popping was the one major activity that brought all of the corp members together, as we would often be scattered all over highsec doing our own respective thing, whether it was suspect baiting out in Simela, MTU hunting in Nakugard, or liberating drones in Osmon. Whenever we weren’t in fleet to take down a tower, the corp felt more like just a glorified chatroom than anything else, but occasionally one or more of us would find something we needed help with, and that help would be there. Don’t have the skills or ships needed to scan down a ‘Magpie’ MTU? No problem, one of us will be along shortly to scan it down for you and whore on that mail! Need a bunch of ammo at less-than-Jita prices? One of us will make it for you (thanks Niya!)

These conveniences made life a lot easier for those of us living firmly in the grey-area of highsec, and actually made it an attractive alternative to just being in your own solo corp. Aside from having people to talk with about your latest kills and other shenanigans, we had each other’s backs, and it was a good feeling.

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One of the first corp memes that arose for us began when Oyl would start ribbing me in local whenever we got together to bash a POS.

Oyl knew that I very much disliked local being quiet, as evidenced through the Vocal Local series on this blog, and coupling that with me occasionally sending him quotes from people who had recognised me in local, formed the template of his series of casual abuse against me!

It wouldn’t be long before more corp members joined-in on this too, and most POS bashes thereafter would see me subjected to this kind of teasing.

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One thing we liked to do during our latter POS bashing days was to turn it into a fireworks show, we had Mikey to thank for this, he started the practice and always brought along a cargohold filled with fireworks to keep us entertained.

Oooh!

Aaah!

It was during one such fireworks show, while bashing a POS in Hampinen, that someone suddenly dropped combat probes on us!

Alexis Thunderkunt > Probes at 2.5
Oylpann Kumamato > good
Pix Severus > doesnt look like hes probing us, something nearby maybe
Oylpann Kumamato > they can come see the fireworks show also
Mikey G Udan > Switch to end game lights
Pix Severus > ok he is probing us now
Alexis Thunderkunt > Maybe the faction drones?
Solacia Solette > Figured it was the sunesis
Alexis Thunderkunt > It’s likely a sunesis (I can’t imagine the tradeoffs he had to make to get that expanded launcher on there) let’s see him come try to take them

At that point, he landed on us!

Alexis Thunderkunt > Targeted
Alexis Thunderkunt > And he’s gone
Mikey G Udan > Lol
Pix Severus > :D
Oylpann Kumamato > lol
Mikey G Udan > They are probably like WTF
Alexis Thunderkunt > He maybe had a tab with just drones and was all liek “Jackpot!”

It turned out that Alexis was correct about this fellow who had scanned us down, and we finished our activities that evening with a new friend.

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In case you were wondering, the title of this blog post isn’t a mistake, and it’s now time to tell you why. It all began one evening while Oyl and myself were patrolling the Kor-Azor region, hunting for MTUs, we had a POS bash coming up in a couple of days in the system of Ordion, and we wanted to get to know the area a little beforehand.

Earlier that evening, Oyl had killed an MTU owned by a fellow named PARTOK TOMPSON, which resulted in the following conversation in the MTU Hunting chat channel.

Oylpann Kumamato > Kill: PARTOK TOMPSON (Mobile Tractor Unit)
Alexis Thunderkunt > :)
Pix Severus > partok really wanted to make his name loud didnt he?
Alexis Thunderkunt > He seems like the kind of person who might refer to himself in third person. PARTOK TOMPSON does not repeat his name!
Alexis Thunderkunt > So he yells it to make sure you get it the first time.
Pix Severus > lmao alexis
Pix Severus > PARTOK TOMPSON SMASH
Pix Severus > PARTOK TOMPSON LAUGH AT PUNY HUMAN
Pix Severus > something about that name just sounds right
Alexis Thunderkunt > Think he was trying to spell Patrick and hit enter before realizing his unchangeable error?
Oylpann Kumamato > like they say, caps lock is cruise control for cool

A few hours, and a few beverages later, the subject of PARTOK came up again.

Pix Severus > roles are such a pain
RockBusta Rhyme > ive had some weird ones throughout the years.
Oylpann Kumamato > You know who never messes up roles?
Oylpann Kumamato > PARTOK TOMPSON
Pix Severus > lmao
Oylpann Kumamato > thats going to be a new eve meme
Alexis Thunderkunt > Lol
Pix Severus > nearly spat my drink out oyl
Oylpann Kumamato > I should rename my ship His name is PARTOK TOMPSON!
Oylpann Kumamato > Probably wouldnt fit though
Pix Severus > fight club reference?
Alexis Thunderkunt > I’m still chucklling about that. Epic timing!
Oylpann Kumamato > nope could just fit “His name is PARTOK T”
Pix Severus > my next ship will be named PARTOK TOMPSON

The night came for our POS bash in Ordion, and I spotted PARTOK in local when getting set up, so of course I let Oyl and Alexis know this as soon as they came online later that night. During the bash itself, we had to explain who this guy was and why we kept talking about him to some of our bemused corp members who were yet to be let-in on the joke.

Over the next few weeks, PARTOK would continue to be name-dropped at random during our conversations, and eventually we would begin using it in local during our POS bashes.

“Rats on D-Scan” was another corp meme, which came about due to a random pilot shouting that line in local whenever Oylpann undocked in a particular system.

Over time, the meme had evolved into the format of the old Chuck Norris meme.

Unfortunately that video link doesn’t work anymore because Youtube has become a massive bag of wank lately, so here’s a gif for you.

I was actually kinda glad that the whole PARTOK thing started, as it took the heat off me for a while in local! The Corp MOTD was also changed to PARTOK TOMPSON, and even today it is the first thing new members of the corp ask about when they join.

This image is linked in the Corp’s MOTD.

I did plan on sending an EVEmail to PARTOK TOMPSON about all of this, but for some reason I never got around to it. To this day, he probably has no idea that a strange bunch of POS-poppers and MTU-touchers had been engaged in some sort of weird pseudo-worship of his character. After I publish this post, I will send him a link to it in a mail, I just hope he doesn’t disapprove, knowing what he is capable of!

Bonus meme!

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That just about covers Empty You’s POS bashing days, and it was all so much fun. I hope you enjoyed reading this series, I’m glad I finally got around to writing it. The next series will be a prequel of sorts, in which I’ll detail my personal history with EVE right from the beginning, and tell you everything that lead up to me becoming an MTU hunter.

Going POStal:
1. A not-so-Empty You
2. What’s in a Name?
3. The Two Towers
4. X Marks the Spot
5. Strange Times in Lower Debyl
6. A Definitely-not-Empty You
7. PARTOK TOMPSON

A Definitely-not-Empty You

In previous posts, I told you about the early days of my corporation, Empty You [EMTU], as we embarked on a mission to remove as many POSes from highsec as possible, alongside our usual MTU removal service. In this post, I would like to summarise the growth of my corp thereafter, leading towards the eventual end of our POS-related activities.

Shortly after the events of the last post, we popped one more POS, and then that was it, we had well and truly burned ourselves out. We had started bashing POSes in mid-May 2017, and concluded operations mid-June of the same year. Less than a month after we had begun this activity, it was now time for a break. We had popped a respectable 28 Control Towers, and 127 starbase structures in total, not counting the vast amounts of unanchored POS modules we’d scooped and stashed in stations. Highsec was a little cleaner, but I now understand that there is a fine-line between providing content, and not burning-out.

It wouldn’t be until March 2018 when corp activites would finally begin ramping-up once again, and the POS-popping would resume. We began slowly, taking our time to ensure we wouldn’t burn-out again. With most POSes in highsec completely stripped of loot-bearing arrays at this time, we shifted our focus somewhat, opting to take down Control Towers we had never killed before, in a sort-of “pop one of every type of tower” minigame, rather than focusing solely on arrays and loot. This worked for us, and we would find other minigames to enhance our gameplay in other areas too. There is still an ongoing competition within the corp to pop MTUs using as many different types of ship as possible. I believe Oyl is currently far in the lead on that one!

Pix Severus, Carnivorous Swarm, Oylpann Kumamato, and Niyalyn.

At this point the corp still consisted of just myself, Niyalyn, and Oylpann Kumamato, but soon we would find ourselves inundated with fresh applications to the corp. The people applying would usually be friends of ours who we chatted with regularly in the MTU Hunting chat channel.

The first person to join us was Kogen in late 2017, he was a man who had taken to the MTU hunting profession quite well. Unfortunately he joined us during a period of downtime, and the corp wasn’t active and/or stimulating enough to keep him around. I wish he’d joined us later, or had stuck around for just a little bit longer, when things started to pick up.

The first person to join us after POS-related activities had resumed was Alexis Thunderkunt, also known as “The Drone Whisperer” due to his penchant for finding ridiculous quantities of expensive drones laying abandoned throughout highsec. You might remember Alexis from the blog posts Finders Keepers, and Empty You Empties 1000 MTUs. Just a few days later we were joined by a long-time friend of the corp, Rosov Aulmais. The first I had heard of Rosov was through a friend, he told me that there was this guy going around killing MTUs in an ECM-fit Scorpion, at that point I knew that this man meant business. You should recognise Rosov from the post The Holy Grail? Again? if you’ve been a recent reader.

Alexis Thunderkunt, Rosov Aulmais, PI Tool1, and Mr Chili Palmer.

The next person to join us was PI Tool1. If you’re a long-term reader of this blog, then that name will probably look familiar to you as he features in an old post named Vocal Local 2. I had met PI during my early days of MTU hunting, but it was years later that PI found my blog, and decided to join the corp. Shortly after PI joined us, we were joined by another long-time friend, Mr Chili Palmer. Chili was a man who had dabbled with MTU hunting in the past, and also did a lot of wormhole PvP. If you recognise his name, you might remember him from Return of an MTU Hunter and MTU Mailbag 4.

Some of the latter additions to our corp were Solacia Solette, a dedicated MTU hunter and drone collector, who was also the brainchild behind the corp’s slogan “You drop ’em, we pop ’em.” Mikey G Udan, another dedicated hunter, who preferred using a Tengu for his hunts, and Deep Choad, a PvPer who wanted to try something a little different for a while. All three of these fine fellows are featured in the post Back For More, which is about one of the few corp competitions we ran around this time. The last person to join us during this period was Emrald Rayne, an MTU hunter and PvPer who did highsec, and MTU hunters everywhere a great service, by removing vast quantities of Mobile Depots from space.

Solacia Solette, Mikey G Udan, Deep Choad, and Emrald Rayne.

If I wanted to, I could write an entire blog post about each member, but a general overview will suffice for now. Some of them have also moved-on from the corp, but thankfully most of those who have left still remain a part of our little community through the MTU Hunting chat channel.

There are a few memorable POS-bashes we had together during this era, mostly because something new, or weird, had happened. I’d like to cover those events now.

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The Disappearing Act

One notable event was what we sometimes refer to as “The Bash that Never Happened”. We had wardecced EVE BUSINESS CAREER GUIDE CORP [EBCGC] belonging to a pilot named Roge Alt One, because they owned a tower with a few desirable arrays. When researching this corp, I followed the link in the corp’s description, which was supposed to be some guide on how make ISK in EVE, but instead I found a very poorly written website that was filled with nonsensical cult-like ramblings. If you have ever read something written by a schizophrenic, then you’ll know just how incomprehensible this site was. The site is no longer up, and unfortunately I couldn’t find anything using the Wayback Machine to show you what I mean, but it was clear that English wasn’t his first language at least. After that, I looked up Roge’s alt/main Roseta mallard, and found that he’d had some trouble with CODE. in the past. Expecting something fun, or at least a little bit weird, I was excited to declare war on this.. entity.

Well, something a little weird did indeed happen, but it didn’t exactly provide us with any fun. Just before the war went live, Niya sent a scout into the system as usual, to check for war targets, or to see if the POS had been fuelled, only to find nothing. Yes, absolutely nothing. They had packed-up their POS completely and had shipped it off god knows where. This was the first time we’d ever seen someone do this, and hadn’t even considered it as a possibility to be quite honest. Our primary purpose with these POS bashes was to clean-up highsec from the large amount of signatures that POSes put-out though, so our purpose had been fulfilled, albeit in a way we weren’t expecting. Well played, Roge/Roseta!

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The Legacy of DiaRosCris

While hunting for MTUs in the system of Eiluvodi one evening, I spotted a POS on scan that had a couple of arrays, so I decided to add it to our list of potential targets as usual. When I add a target to the list, I note down the name of the corp that owns the POS so I can easily wardec them when it’s time, I also look up the corp’s members and killboard for anything interesting. The corp that owned this POS was called Agram Interstellar [AGRAM] an inactive 1-man corp owned by DiaRosCris. I recognised the CEO’s name instantly because it is rather unique, and that person had been featured on an old Minerbumping post I’d read years ago.

We’d had a few drinks that night, and corp chat was indeed rather silly at times. Old stories of battle, and Alexis’ home-brewed banana wine were the topics of choice that night, along with my usual flavour of bad jokes. The POS bash went by uneventfully, but I always remember it because we were the final cleanup crew that removed the last remnants of DiaRosCris from New Eden. It was also Alexis’ first POS bash with the corp, a time to remember indeed.

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The Dark Path

I remember this next one because we didn’t encounter online targets all that often. One night, after making our way to the Kador region, we were setting-up to hit multiple POSes when I noticed 4 war targets docked-up in Khafis. These guys belonged to DarkPath [DKPTH] and owned one of the POSes we were due to hit that night. While waiting for the rest of our corp to get online, we started bashing our first target in the system of Gonan, right next-door to Khafis. As soon as our first POS target went down, and with more of our corp members now online, we headed-out to Khafis and the surrounding systems to see what was going on with these war targets.

With Oyl in a cloaky ship, he popped-into Khafis first to take a look at what they were doing. They had all formed-up behind the bubble of their now-fuelled POS, which already had plenty of guns around it, that were now online. They had also completed their setup with a slew of ECM modules and shield hardeners that they had added in the meantime. They’d got us, we simply didn’t have the ships needed to take on a POS this well defended, and following Rosov’s advice, we just moved-on to continue bashing our next target. Well played DarkPath.

We did have the last laugh though, as a few days later, when Rosov was roaming through the area, he managed to catch one of them on a gate flying a PVE-fit cruiser.

Kill: Deltagram (Caracal)

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Eventually, our bashing days came to an end, in much the same manner that most things do in EVE (at least for me). A few corp members take a break, a couple leave the corp for better things, and before long you find yourself taking a break too, leaving things to fizzle-out. To every member of Empty You, past and present, it was fun destroying Starbases with you. We did some solid work together, removing 50 Control Towers from highsec, and totalling 201 Starbase Structures destroyed. Job well done.

This may not be the end of our shenanigans with POSes, as I am exploring options in regards to continuing this activity in the future, now that I’m back in New Eden. With POSes supposedly being removed from EVE soon (I hear CCP are having some trouble in that regard) if you’ve ever wanted to try out POS bashing yourself, take my advice and do it now before it’s too late.

There were more events surrounding our POS bashes that I haven’t covered in this post, but I’ll save those for another time. The next post in this series will be the finale, and will cover our corp’s culture.

To be continued.

Strange Times in Lower Debyl

In a previous post I detailed my corporation’s largest payday from POS bashing, in this post I will tell you about an incident that occurred just a couple of weeks later, in what was supposed to be just a routine operation.

The first time I ever saw the name Lower Debyl, I’ll admit I chuckled to myself, it is a strange name as system naming conventions go, and the fact that it has a sister system called Upper Debyl makes it all the more unique. This system is located just-off the back route between the trading hubs of Amarr and Rens-Hek-Dodixie. As an aside, that route is the best way to avoid ganking hotspots such as the Niarja pipeline, and the Uedama crossroads, if you have no intention of hauling to Jita.

Lower Debyl, in the Devoid region.

At this time, our little 3-man (6, with alts) operation was running quite smoothly, we had become quite proficient at this kind of structure removal, and taking down more than one tower a night was now not uncommon for us. This night was to be yet another twin-tower bash, as I had found two targets in Lower Debyl a week or so earlier whilst hunting for MTUs. Oyl and myself had moved our ships to the system the night before and we’d docked-up in a random NPC station, shortly after I’d wardecced the POS-owning corps, so now all that was left was for Niya to make his way there just after the war went live.

With Oyl still offline, I logged-in and immediately noticed a war target in local, a pilot named Sraoshra Dallocort, who was the owner of one of the POSes we were due to bash that night. We had encountered an online target only once before, a corporation that had fuelled their POS very shortly after the war declaration, and then stayed docked-up and offline for the duration, but this time it was different.

Pix Severus > ok our wartarget is online in Lower Debyl
Niyalyn > ooo
Niyalyn > you have anything cloaky?
Pix Severus > nope
Pix Severus > he is outside our station in a capsule, apparently
Pix Severus > he is asking me to kill him
Niyalyn > lol

With Niya just a couple of jumps out in his trusty Retribution, I decided to just sit tight for the time being, lest our target had some kind of elaborate and tedious station games planned. I did wonder if he actually was in a Capsule though, so I took a brief peek outside, to find him in his pod 30k from the undock, but sat on top of the station within docking range. This had to be some kind of setup, surely?

Niyalyn > going to stop 100km short and see what he is in
Pix Severus > capsule last i checked
Niyalyn > we’ll find out
Niyalyn > then again… today is a good day to die
Pix Severus > yes it is, Worf

When Niya arrived in the system, our target was flying a Succubus, a fearsome and nimble pirate frigate. So, it would seem that my earlier caution was very much warranted? Well, not quite. You see, just before Niya had arrived in system with me, Sraoshra had opened-up a private convo with me..

It would seem, then, that our war target friend had a bounty on himself, and he wanted to use the opportunity our war had given him, to try to clear it? I tried to explain the bounty mechanics to him, but all I had succeeded in doing was getting him to bring out his frigate so we could pop it. With Niya now in-system, I undocked and burned towards Sraoshra, who was yet again atop the station, this time in his frigate. A Hecate with a MWD closes the gap very fast, and I had him tackled just as Niya landed at the station. We wasted no time in exploding his ship:

Kill: Sraoshra Dallocort (Succubus)

Seeing this completely empty ship was the first confirmation we had gotten that he wasn’t trying to bait us into some kind of trap, so we held his capsule in position whilst I continued talking with him.

With that said, we podded him too:

Kill: Sraoshra Dallocort (Capsule)

I always do my best to remain polite with other pilots in New Eden, and this exchange was no exception. I expressed my sympathies that he only managed to shave off 7m ISK from his bounty, bringing it down from 55m, to 48m, and even offered him his corpse back, which he declined, so it went to Niya in the end.

Something still didn’t feel right about all of this though, and it wouldn’t be until we went to take a look at the POS that we would realise why. It would seem that Sraoshra had fuelled his POS, but had done it a little late, and his shenanigans up to this point had been his attempt at buying time for the POS bubble to regenerate!

Niyalyn > it has a shield now
Pix Severus > really?
Niyalyn > yes
Pix Severus > he fuelled it lol
Pix Severus > the cheeky..
Pix Severus > any guns there?
Niyalyn > no
Niyalyn > shield at 52%

We still had a chance though, if he hadn’t put any Strontium Clathrates in the POS, he wouldn’t be protected by a timer when his bubble went down.

Sraoshra had returned to the system after we podded him, but had now gone offline inside an NPC station, so myself and Niya got into our bashing ships and started shooting the bubble with our fingers crossed. We were still hitting the bubble when Oyl came online, and we also had quite the story to tell him, as you can imagine.

To bring down the bubble, you need to shoot the tower.

Pix Severus > we are currently shooting a bubble at pos 1
Oylpann Kumamato > shooting a bubble?
Pix Severus > story is in the mail
Pix Severus > its been a very strange evening
Niyalyn > it has

Thankfully, Sraoshra hadn’t put any Stront in the POS, meaning that we were able to take down the bubble, leaving the juicy innards for us to feast upon. Sraoshra had kept coming online during the bash, warping to it at 100km in his pod to check on it, and then warping off, so we were glad to finally be on the home stretch. We’d had enough of his shenanigans that night, and we were also pretty sure he had emptied the arrays, so we weren’t expecting any loot either.

Kill: Equilibrium 16 (Caldari Control Tower Small)
Kill: Equilibrium 16 (Reprocessing Array)
Kill: Equilibrium 16 (Compression Array)

Nothing dropped, as expected, but that was still quite the experience, so I consider it worthwile. For me, it was my first time actually shooting a bubble, and for Niya, he got a weird story to accompany his first ship kill in EVE.

That just about covers the main events surrounding my corp’s early days of POS bashing, although my memory might be a little fuzzy. I’m sure Oyl or Niya will remind me if I’ve missed anything important though! I think we did pretty well overall, considering we were just a motley crew consisting of a PvEer, a suspect baiter, and some guy who touches your stuff when you’re not looking. These nights I spent popping POSes and chatting with Niya and Oyl were some of the happiest memories I have of EVE to this day.

The next part of this series will be a collection of other smaller events that occurred during our latter POS bashing days, along with chronicling the growth of my corp, Empty You, as new members began flooding-in to take part in the action.

To be continued.

X Marks the Spot

In the last post, I told you about the early POS bashing days of my corporation, Empty You [EMTU], and showed you what kinds of profits we had received from it. Today, I’d like to continue the story of our treasure hunt, and tell you about our largest haul to date.

May 2017 would go down as perhaps the most important month for our corporation, it’s the month where we started cleaning-up POSes for the first time, giving us a solid activity we could do together, rather than just doing our own thing on different sides of the galaxy. It was also the month where we received the vast majority of profits we would ever receive from this activity. Indeed, it was the 2nd-to-last day of this month that our largest payday would finally arrive.

The way we would find our targets was quite simple, we would fly through systems (in my case, along one of my MTU hunting routes) and we would run D-Scan to look for POS modules. Once we’d found some interesting modules, like Refining Arrays and Assembly Arrays, we’d probe them down, bookmark the tower and then note down the system name along with the corp that owned the POS (click “show info” on the POS tower to see who owns it). After we had done the above, we would add the POS to our list of targets, and we would work through this list, wardeccing the POS owners one day at a time. This meant we always had something to do that night, and if we didn’t have time that night, we still had a week to go and shoot it, so it was all good.

One such target I found was nestled snugly by Moon 14 – Planet 4, in the system of Vasala, and it was owned by a 9-man corporation called Galactic Brotherhood of Violence [GBOV]. This POS looked juicy, very juicy, with a whole host of exotic-looking arrays anchored around a medium tower.

Oylpann Kumamato > wow this is beautiful
Pix Severus > you shouldve seen my face when i found it

Look at that structure spam.

Whilst researching this corporation, I had found that they were already at war with another corp named Estrellados con Estilo [ESCES], a 6-man team that persued similar activities to us. I say “team” but it was just one of them who was doing the bashing at that time, he would leave the Control Towers intact, and just blow-up the modules instead. He had destroyed most of the modules around one of Galactic Brotherhood’s other POSes in Hampinen, something I didn’t even know was there due to the way we find our targets. Clearly, though, our Estrellados counterpart didn’t know that the Galactic Brotherhood had a second POS either, or he would have surely shown-up in Vasala to take down the loot-bearing arrays, and get the most out of his 50m ISK wardec fee.

This presented us with a potential problem though, if this POS-popping fellow were to check the war reports of the POS-owning corp, he would see that we have wardecced them too. A quick check of our killboards would show him that we do the same activity, and at that point he could realise that there must be another POS, and all it would take is to run a locate on us to see where we had parked, and investigate the area for that elusive second POS. A long shot, I know, but I didn’t want to leave it to chance, so I asked Niya and Oyl not to park their bashing ships and characters anywhere within 8 jumps of Vasala until the war went live.

Niyalyn > just an fyi… there is a storm system south of me.. (impressive lightning show atm) i may have to bail if it moves north
Pix Severus > no problem

It seemed like it took forever for the war to begin, and the fact that I was off work that day probably didn’t help matters much, but eventually the time did come. As usual, myself and Niya were online first, and Niya sent a scout into the system to look for war targets, and to check if the POS had been fuelled or not, thankfully it hadn’t. We moved our bashing ships into the system and began plinking the tower while waiting for Oyl to arrive (standard practice at this point!) As soon as Oyl came online and moved his ships into position, we started on the arrays:

Kill: Galactic Brotherhood of Violence (Ship Maintenance Array)
Kill: Galactic Brotherhood of Violence (Large Ship Assembly Array)

Empty, not even a single metal scrap, but then:

Kill: Galactic Brotherhood of Violence (Component Assembly Array)

Some containers appeared this time, what could possibly be inside?

Pix Severus > component assembly
Pix Severus > x
Niyalyn > x
Tristis Puella > x
Oylpann Kumamato > oh
Niyalyn > containers
Pix Severus > ok loot first
Oylpann Kumamato > lots
Tristis Puella > going for hauler
Niyalyn > thats alot of stuff :)
Aniyatriss > Capital Cargo Bay x2 – Capital Armor Plates – Capital Shield Emitter
Aniyatriss > Capital Armor Plates Blueprint – Capital Cargo Bay Blueprint – Nitrogen Fuel Block Blueprint x9
Tristis Puella > wow
Tristis Puella > are they researched?
Pix Severus > we hit a capital ship builder?
Aniyatriss > fully researched
Aniyatriss > originals..
Pix Severus > oh my

Unfortunately, in the excitement, we didn’t get a screenshot of the loot sat in a hangar, so let me break it down for you. In this array we had just gotten 2 fully researched Capital Construction BPOs worth 1.2b and 900m ISK respectively, 9 fully researched fuel block BPOs worth around 180m, and another 150m ISK in fuel blocks and assorted capital components. The grand total sat at just over 2.4b ISK, we had finally found some of that long-forgotten treasure.

Oylpann found a buyer within hours.

Of course, we still had work to do, there were a number of arrays still unpopped, and a tower to chew through!

Pix Severus > we havent even hit the labs yet, i thought those were the ones that contained blueprints?
Tristis Puella > maybe they do also ^^

Kill: Galactic Brotherhood of Violence (Hyasyoda Rsearch Laboratory)
Kill: Galactic Brotherhood of Violence (Design Laboratory)
Kill: Galactic Brotherhood of Violence (Compression Array)

All empty, unfortunately. We then took out a bunch of the defensive arrays (which, FYI, never contain loot) before taking down the tower:

Kill: Galactic Brotherhood of Violence (Caldari Control Tower Medium)

Job done. We had just removed one big ol’ collection of signatures from this system, future MTU hunters looking for prey in this system would have a much easier time of it. I returned the next day to pop a few of the defensive batteries that were left over, before realising I could just scoop them and dump them in a station. I then went to Hampinen a couple of days later to look for Galactic Brotherhood’s second POS, to see if there was anything that needed mopping-up, and there was, a few defensive arrays which I took down myself.

I had created a medal some time ago, in case this situation ever presented itself, and I took great pleasure in awarding it to all of our corp members:

We wouldn’t find any treasure that matched this in the rest of our POS-popping days, but that’s fine, we were amazed that we actually got any kind of loot from doing this, as late to the party as we were. This POS kill came less than a week from the events in the last post, so at this point we each had a fair chunk of ISK, and for me personally, it was more than I knew what to do with.

Our POS bashing story doesn’t end here though, oh no, we have more adventures to come. In fact, once our structure removal business had gotten off the ground and became almost routine for us, things would start to get a little weird.

To be continued.

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.

What’s in a Name?

In a previous post I talked about the early days of my corporation, Empty You [EMTU], and some of the people who helped to shape it into something other than a lonely one-man operation. In this post I would like to continue the story from where I left off, and tell you about how the pieces began to move, resulting in fun times for all involved.

My relatively new corpmate, Oylpann Kumamato, had suggested to me that we could try POS bashing alongside hunting MTUs; it would be an activity we could do together as a corporation from time to time, providing a break from what we usually do.

A POS Bash, the Marmite of activities in EVE, some love it, some hate it.

It sounded a little like MTU Hunting itself to me, both activities involving removing abandoned (or not) structures left behind by players, that could contain any amount of loot inside. Any MTU hunter from this period could tell you that POSes were also a major annoyance when it came to scanning, this was because MTUs used to be classed as a “Structure” in EVE’s scanners, the same category as POSes, so when scanning down MTUs you always had to work harder to find the MTU amongst the large amount of extra scan signatures that came from a nearby POS. For this reason alone, I was very interested in the opportunity to take some of them out.

With my interest piqued, I asked Oyl for more information; How would we go about this? Did we have the firepower to take one of these bases down in a reasonable amount of time? What are the highsec mechanics regarding this? These questions rang around my head as I remembered a story I read a while back about a player who travelled around New Eden destroying POSes, claiming 10s of billions of ISK in loot from some of these long-abandoned structures. This was treasure hunting on a galactic scale.

Oyl sent me a link to the EVE University Wiki about POS Warfare, and I got to studying. POS stands for Player-Owned Starbase, and it is exactly as the name suggests, a base owned by players. A typical POS setup consists of a Control Tower (the “core” of the base) and will be surrounded by modules such as Refining Arrays, Assembly Arrays, Labs, Hangars and any number of defenses including sentry turrets, and the like. After some time, I would find that most POSes in highsec would consist of just the Control Tower, and a Reprocessing Array and/or Compression Array, for the purpose of refining/compressing ore. The info I wanted the most though was about the big blue shield that surrounds these bases, and I found that if the POS isn’t “fuelled” there would be no shield, leaving the structures within open to attack without any of those pesky timers that CCP seems to love so much. I would later find that the vast majority of POSes in highsec are unfuelled, therefore abandoned and ripe for the picking.

We had a plan, but how to get started? Well, Oyl had that covered, he told me in corp chat about a potential target in Hentogaira:

Oylpann Kumamato > Hentogaira I – Moon 10 take note. if you want to pew this stuff.
Oylpann Kumamato > might be something in there, might be nothing, but there’s lots of modules and a tower to crack.

After a quick discussion, we wardecced the corporation that owned the POS in Hentogaira (you need to be at war with a corp before you can shoot their base in highsec) and discussed the types of ships we were going to bring to the bash the following evening (you also have to wait 24 hours after declaring war before the war becomes active). The corp we declared war on was called Whats in the name [WITNC], a 2-man corp that seemed inactive. Their POS consisted of a small Caldari Control Tower, but more importantly, it had both a Reprocessing Array and a Compression Array, which had the potential for loot. Just FYI, Control Towers drop nothing, but modules such as refining/assembly arrays, labs, and hangars have the potential to contain items.

Oyl wouldn’t be on until a little later that night due to work, so he said I should probably start shooting the Control Tower as soon as I got on, to get a head-start on what could be a long grind. After a night’s rest and a long day at work, with the upcoming activities on my mind throughout, the time eventually came for me to logon and start this thing.

I got myself into a Talos, a Gallente Battlecruiser, which was pretty much the only ship with large guns that I could fly at the time, filled my cargohold to the brim with ammo, and then made my way to Hentogaira. Once I arrived at the POS (I had created bookmarks in the system the night before) I targetted the Control Tower and began blapping. It turns out that I’d perhaps not brought the best gun/ammo combo for taking on a Caldari tower due to it’s resists, seeing as it took around 30 minutes just to take the shields down 10%, with the 1117.3 DPS my Talos could pump-out! These things I would learn as time went on though, and for the moment, I stuck to my guns as it were, and kept on blapping.

My Talos was named “Please be Offline”.

Whilst shooting the POS, I noticed Niyalyn had come online, and was in the MTU Hunting chat channel. After a quick greeting he asked me what I was up to, and I told him that I was shooting a POS and that it was taking a very long time to grind the shields down. This immediately interested him, and he offered to come along and help shoot it, something I was not expecting due to him being purely a PvE player up to this point in time. I had also mistakenly thought that someone couldn’t just join a corp that is at war and immediately take part in it, I don’t know where I got this misinfo from, but I’m very glad I was wrong. I accepted Niya’s aid, he joined the corporation, and then wasted no time in flying some 20 or so jumps to join me.

Note: When I told Niya about the shields, I was referring to the Control Tower’s own shield, not the big blue one that usually surrounds a fuelled POS. All POS structures still have their own shields, just like ships do.

Niya arrived in a Retribution, a small but powerful Amarrian Assault Frigate, probably so he could get here faster to see what was going on, but perhaps he also didn’t completely trust me at this point (I wouldn’t blame him, what with my ganker past and all), and didn’t want to turn up in something big and blingy only to lose it in some kind of elaborate double-cross. After shooting the tower for a while though, he decided he would bring a bigger ship after all, and went to fetch his Nightmare, an even more powerful laser-based Pirate Battleship. While Niya was off fetching his new ship, Oyl came online and joined the bash.

Oyl had previous experience with bashing a POS, something he had done with The Devil’s Warrior Alliance a while back, so I was somewhat relieved to see him there. He suggested we take down one of the arrays before Niya got back, assuring us that Niya would get on the killmail for it regardless of him not being in the system with us at the time, and so we did, and he was right:

Kill: Whats in the name (Compression Array)

The array was empty, but this was a first POS structure kill for me, and for Niya it was the first ever slice of green on his killboard. We decided to wait for Niya to get back before shooting the Reprocessing Array, and continued shooting the tower until he returned. When he returned, we blapped the next array:

Kill: Whats in the name (Reprocessing Array)

After this array went down, we noticed lots of cargo containers had spewed-forth from it, which, as it turns out, contained ice, lots of ice. How much ice you might ask? Over 700m ISK of it! Oh, and just FYI, loot dropped from POS structures don’t show on killboards. Oyl logged-on his hauling alt and began ferrying the ice from the POS to a nearby station while we continued shooting the Control Tower, and it wasn’t long before it, too, fell:

Kill: Whats in the name (Caldari Control Tower Small)

Boom!

During the evening, we spent a lot of time chatting with each other about all sorts of things, from our favourite drinks, to current events. Oyl linked us this killmail at one point, an Itty V worth over 100b ISK destroyed. Apparently the pilot wanted to quit the game for good, so he extracted all of his skill points, loaded them into his paper-thin hauler, and then asked to be killed on the Jita 4-4 undock.

After the tower died, we took out a couple of defensive arrays and a battery before calling it a night, as it had gotten quite late. I went to bed that night with a smile on my face. The next day I returned to the scene to mop-up a few of the left-over batteries, as I had nothing better to do. Oyl got the ice hauled to a market hub via a courier contract, and sold the ice shortly after, splitting the ISK evenly between us. I had suggested to him that he should take a larger cut because he paid for the wardec, but he refused, telling me that this was how he’d done it in the past, and we should do it way too. I agreed, and from that point we would split the wardec fees and share all loot evenly between us.

So there we have it, our first POS kill as a corporation, and not only did the wardec pay for itself, we actually made a nice profit from it! More importantly, though, we were now back up to being a 3-man corporation again, thanks to Niya joining us. We also had a purpose, we had found an activity that was relatively fun, easy, and profitable, it was also a nice way to pass a few hours while having a good old chat with friends.

In terms of profit, we had earned enough ISK to pay for the next 14 or so wardecs, the question is, though, would it stay profitable?

To be continued.