Well, that sucked

I lost a Bestower trying to get out of Jita.

This is why I've been trying to train up to a T2 industrial (I'm currently 6 days out). Until recently hauling was something I could ignore. At most I was shifting some T2 modules and frigates; anything bigger I could contract to Red Frog.

But since moving into Vanaheim, I've had to make regular fuel runs. These are non-negotiable, and the windows of opportunity are too small to contract the work to haulers. So I end up doing them myself. In fragile little T1 haulers. It was an accident waiting to happen, and I just had to hope I could get lucky long enough to be able to sit in something with a better tank.

Normally, I try to get this stuff done in the mornings, when it's quieter. But this past weekend didn't give me a good connection until Sunday night. You can say with the benefit of hindsight that I shouldn't have put the clone tags in there - I made up my shopping list before I knew when I would be hauling, and it just didn't occur to me to change anything - but the ganker doubled his money on just the fuel, so I don't think they made any difference.

This isn't a whine post, by the way; I'll make up the loss with a couple of day's worth of PI. No, it's more that this is my first time being suicide ganked, and I was impressed at just what a slick operation it was.

It starts with me undocking from Jita. Like every good little pirate, I have an insta-undock, which I used, and as soon as I hit 'warp' I also activated my Adaptive Invulnerability Field II for max ehp.

But somebody had parked a freighter across the undock point so I, and many other people, were unable to get into warp because we were crashing into this freighter.

A more experienced hauler would have redocked immediately, but I was already around the worst of it, so in another second or two I would be in warp.

Except, actually, I was sitting in my pod. And this guy was getting CONCORDed.

Circumstances change, but explosions are one thing I'm used to in this game, so I immediately understood what had happened and redocked. I then reshipped to a Sigil, to scoop as much of my loot as I could.

Except it wasn't there. Nothing was there. In the time it took for me to dock, reship, and undock, my loot had been scooped and my wreck destroyed or salvaged. Ditto for the Tornado. Within, what, 20 seconds, there were absolutely no signs of a suicide gank that might warn their next target to stay docked up. Even the freighter running interference had docked up or warped out.

Pretty slick, you have to admit. But it gets better.

I now have a kill right. I make the kill available to the public, and set the cost to 1 million ISK. I'm not trying to make any money here; I want someone to use it.

And they do. Almost immediately this happens. But the killer is not actually the person who activated the kill right. That would be this fellow. What immediately jumps out at me is how these guys seem to keep running into each other, and always in very cheap ships. I suspect this guy is a friend who activates kill rights when the ganker is in a cheap ship, sometimes making the kill himself when nobody else seems interested.

And like that, the kill right is gone.

Very interesting.