Into The Pink

There are many factors involved in the success of a W-space operation.  You can have great people, good skills, a terrific hole and a generous helping of luck, but in the end you still need numbers and you have to maintain motivation.

With the northern summer plus various work, personal and other commitments, we simply couldn’t maintain the rate of effort needed to keep Bonkers productive.  No blame, it’s simply the way it is.  Into The Pink was always a boutique corp, and always prioritised RL over Eve.   So after our latest fuel scare, we decided to wrap it up.

It’s amazing that wrapping up corp operations in a wormhole actually seems like more work than starting it up.  In the early days I guess you’re all giddy with anticipation, but in the teardown it’s just industrial logistics and autopilot.

It was a shame that our biggest single financial loss occurred during the teardown, though I’m glad it was me, the CEO, as I can take full responsibility for it.  I had been shipping my Mammoth all over New Eden picking up the various corp assets that had been dumped at stations around the galaxy over the previous two months, and especially during the exit.  I’d mostly been autopiloting, though once I picked up the tower I decided I should jump manually for safety’s sake.  Unfortunately however, with young kids and a wife, that’s not always possible when you’re jumping 36 gates to Jita, so I occasionally flipped on the AP in highsec while I took care of a short-term domestic issue.

One of these, as it turned out, was very poorly timed.  Triffid Systems corp had set up camp in Jark (0.8) and liked the look of a Medium Minmatar Tower and a Hangar in a presumably weak industrial.  I had just walked away, but heard the shot from the next room and ran back in to see most of my shields gone – and being a long way from the gate with a long align time, all I could do was flip on the hardeners and pray to Concord.  I think the Triffid guys weren’t expecting quite such a tank, so there was quite a gap between the first shot and the eventual killshots.

I’m a little amazed that they threw a Tempest (68M plus fittings) at the kill along with two other ships, all of which would have been concordokkened in short order.  If the tower hadn’t dropped they would have barely broken even, but I guess they probably saw the two GSCs and expected that I was hauling some good stuff in addition to the POS.  I don’t think there was much there TBH.

The rest of the teardown went smoothly, and we’re currently in the process of returning shares.  ITPNK paid almost 2Bn ISK over the course of the op, which though not a lot, was still decent for a corp that had only 6 active players at its peak, and only 3 for the first month.  We researched a lot of BPOs, upgraded our ships, did some good PI and learned a lot about W-space that will do us well in future.

The future?  Some are migrating back to E-Uni, others considering PvP corps (Agony and Noir. Academy), others staying in ITPNK as a tax shelter.  Whatever happens, we’ll be keeping a weather eye for Triffid Systems and Zarena Family who are officially on my shit list.

Thanks to all the members of the ITPNK Bonkers expedition, and I hope you gained something from your time in the hole. o7

1. INT. FOOD COURT – DAY

EVE PLAYA stands in the centre of a luxurious food court.  Though the decor is rich, the food varied, there is  a mustiness to the large space.  Litter has been kicked into corners, some of the food is only half-cooked, and most of the furniture is stained.  On each table sits a small, perfectly formed origami swan. Eve is approached by the CENTRE MANAGER and a SECURITY GUARD.

MANAGER
Good afternoon miss.  Welcome to the Sandbox Food Court.  Have you heard about our free offer?  With every Monthly Meal Pass you get a free, absolutely unique and irreplaceable origami swan!

EVE PLAYA
Thanks, that’s very generous.  It’s a lovely swan.  What should I do with it?

MANAGER
(chuckling)
Why, wipe your mouth with it of course!

The Manager and Guard look at each other and smile proudly.

EVE PLAYA
But didn’t you say it was irreplacable?  It’s so beautiful, I don’t want to ruin it when a regular old napkin will do the trick.  I was gutted to lose my reindeer napkin at christmas.

GUARD
But it’s… free!

EVE PLAYA
(looking around)
Well, not really.  The time you guys spent folding these napkins could have been spent… well… tidying up this place a bit.  The chicken curry is half-raw, and I don’t even want to know what that hump under the big rug is.

MANAGER
(proudly)
Well ma’am, you’ll be glad to know that we’re planning something big for the end of the year.  You’ll get a whole new dimension to your food court experience.

EVE PLAYA
(sighing)
Look, I appreciate the swan and all, and I’ve been eating here for years, but I’m going across the road where they fully cook their meals.  Let me know when you clean up your act.

MANAGER
(muttering)
Ungrateful customers, don’t understand the business of food courts.

(shouting to Eve Playa)
We pride ourselves on excellence ma’am!

GUARD
Shall I get back to folding swans sir?

MANAGER
Yes please, then get to work on the bunny rabbits.

We’ve had a good week in Bonkers.  We doubled our corp membership, mined a hell of a lot of rock, had a nice payday and hauled in a shed-full of PI structures, which we’re busily beavering away at installing on our planets.

PI is interesting.  It appeals to the tweaker in me, fiddling with balancing resources and reactions to automate a production chain to make useful stuff.  Simpler than proper blueprint-based industry, damn useful (POS fuel ftw) and sortof fun, what’s not to like?

Well…

My biggest beef is that it destroys any illusion of reality because building the colonies is instantaneous.  There are similar things e.g. insta-assembling ships and containers that are similar in nature, but how does that Command Centre get down to the surface?  Magic?  One minute it’s in my hold, the next it’s thousands of kilometers away all set up and chugging away on a gas giant.

I get that the other structures are made on the planet, so don’t require hauling (quite how the residents of a gas giant build pipelines is beyond me, but I’ll suspend disbelief there) but how can a planetwide colony spring into existence in the blink of an eye while it still takes my POS Refinery 30 minutes to online?

That aside, and putting aside my concern whether I’ll be able to produce any sort of truly useful amount of planet goo, it’s a fun addon.  If nothing else, Bonkers is likely to be quiet for awhile, though we’re being as vigilant as ever on the scanner for those sneaky Russians.

… to Bloody Roadkill and Bloody Sidekick, our newest members!

We’ve lived in W-space for a month today.  Life in Bonkers has had its ups and downs, but it’s been a fascinating and ultimately rewarding experience.

One thing we have come to appreciate is just what a tremendous hole Bonkers is.  I’ll attempt to break down the qualities so that you can make your own decision about a hole you’re considering making your own.

Read the rest of this entry →

Every couple of weeks in W-space, you get an itch down the back of your neck.  Something’s wrong, you just know it.  You also know, after you’ve lived in W-space for a bit, that any itchy neck episode is usually fuel related.

So you realise you only have two days of isotopes left, and get into a bit of a flap.  Out come the scanning ships.  First the bookmarks, then any leftover sigs.  Of course, the very last sig you scan will be the lowsec exit you’re looking for.  It’s just always that way, deal with it.

Then again, sometimes you get a surprise.  Like a K162.  Almost brand new.  Mass stable.  From highsec.

Your heart’s all a-flutter with joy.

Then you see that it comes out 6 jumps from a major trade hub, all highsec, and you go into an apoplectic fit of retail therapy joy.  Civilisation!  Repairs!  A veritable super mall of new toys to buy!  A few jumps to that home system you haven’t seen in a month, where your spare battlecruisers are gathering dust!

Well, it happened to us last night and we went on a shopping spree worthy of that slapper from Sex and the City, whatsername now?  Anyway, we shopped.  Shaz upgraded the original Thunder Child ‘cane hull to T2 passive shield specifications (see if it fares better than the ill-fated Thunder Child III) and brought a stripped Cyclone in for funsies, and Bruce got his EWAR cruiser in for any pee vee pee that we might encounter plus a big rack of bombs of every flavour.  We even hauled out a big chunk of our ore with the kind help of a friendly E-Uni freighter pilot.

Of course we WOULD HAVE picked up some command centers, but owing to the ongoing shenanigans around Tyrannis that won’t be possible for another week or so.  Still, the heroic capsuleers, all grubby from a fortnight in a POS without a shower, freshened up and even remembered the fuel.

It was all…. too… smooth.  What will go wrong?  Stay tuned, fail fans…

Scan down bookmarks and signatures – 30 minutes.

Scout out new C2 – 10 minutes.

Organise a combat buddy, fit ships, and enter the neighbor’s hole – 15 minutes.

Clear and strip-salvage 3 combat sites – 1 hour.

Return to POS and check loot – 10 minutes.

Number of Melted Nanoribbons: see post title.

Wtf.  My new rule is this: if you end up with more money in tags than in ribbons from a night of combat sites, it was a bad night.

Sigh.  Life in bonkers goes on.

So, we’ve had some shenanigans in the hole.

• Visitors from lowsec ganked Q’s Badger, and then sadly his Raven and his pod.  He hasn’t been heard of since.

• Visitors from lowsec reinforced one of the resident POSes (thankfully not ours).  Looks like it was just a stront check, because there was no concerted effort to take it down after the reinforce timer expired.  We did get some opportunists, but it looks like they couldn’t muster the DPS.  We were starting to organise a PvP crew to take them on, but it seems they had an end-of-life hole to contend with and bugged out.

Good lesson in the power of POS guns to deter casual stront checkers.  Our next one will definitely be a dickstar with teeth, and a bigger one than we currently have.

We were getting pretty settled.  Into a routine, bookmarks sorted, fits tailored to our black hole’s peculiarities.  No visitors for a few days.

I’d scanned down a lowsec exit to Ualkin, deep in Metropolis pirate territory but less than 10 jumps to Hek.  I’d also been EFTing up a Hurricane fit, just to see if I could make soloing the combat sites a little quicker.  My ‘phoon is great and safe as houses, but nobody would accuse it of being a capable frig killer, and it’s pretty slow with cruisers too. Swapping to the ‘cane would make things go a lot quicker, even when the swap delay was taken into account.

So I picked a quiet time of day and podded out to Hek.  Built the ‘cane, fitted 6 WCS’s into the lows, and raced home.  No incidents.  She performed admirably in the C2 combat sites, though needed a warp-out to swap for the ‘phoon against sentries and battleships.

Settle back into routine, albeit slightly more efficient.

So, the very next day, we hit our last Mag site.  Abaddon and ‘cane in a C2, no worries right?  Of course not.  With a second pilot in the site, I could warp out, wait till he hugged the BS, and then warp back in and speed tank the BS while I pwned the frigates and cruisers.  The first BS was violated quick smart.

When the second and final BS appeared 75km out, I should probably have warped out and got the ‘phoon.  But I wasn’t targeted, I had a 44% speed boost putting me well over 500 m/s  in AB, and I thought I’d see how it did at a spiralling approach to speed tank.  I said to myself: as soon as that BS targets me, I’m out.  No worries, I can tank 10 seconds of damage right?

Pow.  Yep OK, I made it to 30km.  AB off, second repper on, warp to POS.

Blam.  Align, damn you.

Zap.

BLEEEPP BLLOOOOOPPP BLLAAARPP

OK you little beeyatch, you can warp now.  Anytime.  And just for this, I’m not going to rep your hull later.

I think you can guess what happened next right?

So I warped back to the POS in my pod to get my ‘phoon and make that BS pay for my 50m brand new ‘cane.  He got it in the face alright, and most of the modules and faction ammo survived, but it was a hollow victory.  Pwned by a sleeper in a combat ship in a C2.  Fail fail freaking fail.

So, Thunder Child III: here’s cheers to you, you slow aligning piece of shite.