Slash & burn

One of the things I've been doing recently is running the anoms in Vanaheim. I had over three dozen of them built up, and since it was ISK just sitting there waiting to be collected, I fit out a Gila and started running the sites when I had the spare time. It's not hugely lucrative - I'm in a C1 after all - but it's easy enough to do. After taking into account salvage, it's probably about 15-20 million ISK per anom.

I'd worked the number of sites remaining to just over a dozen, with most of those being ore sites (that I wasn't really sure what to do with), when a new signature popped up.

For those who haven't done this, anoms are typically run by warping your ship to zero, dropping (and orbiting) a mobile depot, and deploying a mobile tractor unit. The depot lets you refit on the fly to get your balance of tank and dps right (although for a C1, you just want max dps), and the tractor means you don't ever have to move off the depot.

However, this is a high risk set-up, because nobody needs to scan you down, and anyone warping to the anom will land right on top of you. So you only do this sort of thing when your wormhole is on lockdown, or virtually so (ie, your static is open to Aridia). When the new signature popped up, the fun was officially over until I made sure it wasn't a new wormhole.

Seeing probes on D-scan immediately after the sig told me beyond any doubt that this was a new wormhole, but I could also see that the newcomer was an Anathema. I decided to try and finish up my current site before docking up. I was extra alert, though, constantly refreshing D-scan.

Which meant that I saw the Stratios when it jumped into the system. That meant the fun was over right now. True, I had warp stabs that I could fit via the depot, but the Gila can only run three of them, and any experienced w-space pilot plans for warp stabs. For all I knew there was a Sabre waiting to jump in on me and launch a bubble. I warped out, leaving the depot and the tractor unit behind in favour of assuring the safety of my ship

Reshipping to a Purifier, I decided to check out my visitors. The Stratios had been joined by a Confessor, and they were clearly camping the tractor unit while trying to look like they weren't camping the tractor unit.

Visiting their home system, I found a C4 that had been completely stripped bare. No sigs (besides wormholes) and no anoms. I think they had put up a stick on every single moon, and had citadels as well. A serious operation, then.

Without giving me an opportunity to isolate anyone (despite trying several times to do so), or any soft targets, they proceeded to strip-mine Vanaheim, clearing out all the remaining anoms (I'd not left them any sigs) over the course of the day. It was well practiced enough that I'm certain this is their MO. 

Roll the hole until you find something with resources. Then take it all.

Once they realised I wouldn't be coming back for the tractor unit any time soon, they put it to the sword, and put my depot into reinforced mode, although that I was able collect after the connection closed.

Most of my pvp has been in k-space recently, so it was interesting to run into an active w-space corp. Makes me miss my time in Chaos. I've been back a few times, but the Tuskers, in general, are going through a quiet patch, and my visits have been uneventful.

Still, it makes me realise that I've not done any actual w-space hunting in quite some time.