When I created my alt EVE character, Etha Preve, as part of CCP’s “Power of 2” promotion (have a second account for cheap for six months), I didn’t have any specific plans for her. But I’d always wanted a good hauler to help with the mining and just moving stuff around. Last week, she finally finished the necessary training to fly a Iteron Mark V, a hauler so huge it can nearly carry the contents of an entire jetcan. The PERFECT companion for mining ops, running the trade route from Jita to Dodixie, or picking up buy orders from around the Sinq Laison region.
While doing some missions and some business ops with my main character Saturday, I was running courier contracts in the background with Etha.
There’s a thousand ways to make money in EVE without firing a shot. One of those are by doing courier contracts. People either can’t or would rather not ferry something of theirs from Point A to Point B, so they create a contract for someone else to do it for them. They set the destination, the reward – and the collateral.
There’s two scams revolving around contracts. The first is, someone takes a contract, pays the collateral, then just opens the sealed crates and steals what they find. If the value of what they get is worth more than the collateral, they win.
The second scam is to create a contract to move something valueless a long distance, charge a huge collateral, and then create a route that goes through the most dangerous areas of space, hoping that the courier will get killed, and they get the collateral.
That’s the kind I took.
The systems colored red in the star map are in the lawless region known as nullsec. If you’re part of a nullsec alliance, you might be able to feel safe in territory controlled by your alliance, but non-allied highsec traders like myself have no protection at all. We’re just targets. If I ever wanted to see my 60 million ISK again, I’d have to fly through the most dangerous area of the galaxy, through an obvious choke point, with a valueless cargo, without being killed.
This all could have been avoided if I’d just paid more attention. I THOUGHT I was accepting a two jump contract out of Oursalaert, but it was two jumps TO Oursalaert from where I was… and 22 jumps from my home base in Aunia to Octanneve. I used the EVE Navigator website to plot the course… and it was full of red.
I explained my dilemma to the corp. We all saw the choke point at M2-CF1/97X-CH – a perfect spot for a gate camp. Gate camps are where hostile fleets set up a warp interdiction bubble to drop ships out of warp and into firing range of a hungry fleet. There’s two ways to run this blockade. The first is by being small and fast enough that you can fly out of the interdiction bubble in normal space before they can lock on and kill you – frigates built for this purpose are very hard to catch, and have valuable roles in fleets because of it.
The second is by fitting warp stabilizers to your ship. Each stabilizer you add counters another level of warp scrambler. Then you load the ship with a microwarp drive and huge shields and hope to reach the gate before you are destroyed.
Since the valueless cargo was too large for a frigate (I had visions of my superfast Comet thumbing its prow at gate camp after frustrated gate camp as she flew past at 3000m/s), I chose the second option.
When i first started playing EVE, I was looking over the ships I could one day fly… and that’s when I first met Megathron. He’s a sulky tyrant of the space lanes, a missile ship that stands out of range of the enemy and picks things off from vast distances. Anyone who doesn’t see echoes of Space Cruiser Yamato in its sleek lines has no imagination. When prices had fallen to ridiculously low levels, I bought one – I just had to have it. But it didn’t support my style of play – getting in close and tanking while my drones pick off the enemy a ship at a time – so mostly I just found excuses to fly it every now and then.
A courier mission through nullsec was the perfect opportunity to put its strengths to good use. I fired up the EVE Fitting Tool (EFT), loaded it with shield boosters and extenders, a handful of warp stabilizers, a microwarp drive… and nothing else. I would have 54 seconds to get to a gate and jump away before the power drain would leave me dead in space, and then, just dead.
Etha didn’t have the training to fly a mega, so I put her in a shuttle and took the poison cargo into the Megathron I’d bought so long ago. Etha would fly the gauntlet first in the shuttle, and only when it was safe, would I follow.
Red offered to come along for the ride in a Drake, so we all met up in Reblier and Etha started her run in a Caldari shuttle. I always feel that people target Gallente ships first out of some misplaced prejudice. I don’t have a reason for that, but I tend to use shuttles from the other factions when I travel on the cheap.
Nullsec seemed fairly clear. There was what looked to be an abandoned gate camp at 97X-CH, but nobody troubled her and she made it out of the gauntlet and back into high security space without problems.
Red and I started our runs. Etha’s passing had apparently stirred up a hornet’s nest, because there were now hostiles at the near side of 97X-CH. An interdictor flew at me, but I made it into warp before it could catch me. Red was caught in the bubble and his Drake was destroyed, but he made it out in his pod.
I flew out of there like a bat out of hell and made it back to highsec and safety. Etha and I completed the contract and I got my 60 million ISK back (and she collected the 3 million ISK fee that lured me into taking the contract in the first place). I used some of that to INSURE THE FRIGGIN MEGA. OOPS. I’d just flown an expensive battleship through the most hazardous space in the galaxy – uninsured. I only thought of it then because Red had made a profit from his death – insurance paid him far more than the cost of the ship plus the cost of the insurance.
I had this wild hope that the gate camp at 97 would be in the same place with the same strength I saw it on the way back, even though Red had said the enemy fleet was just standing by cloaked when he came through and saw his target display fill with over a dozen ships and that he’d had five or six ships scrambling his warp drive.
Smart thing would have been to just hole up in a highsec station and wait a few hours for them to leave. But I wanted to test the mega against the gauntlet, and so I headed back.
I sent Etha ahead, and saw that a second gate camp had sprung up at the 97’s other gate. They let Etha through for some reason. I followed close behind, hoping that my warp stabilizers would see me through. They didn’t. I dropped out of warp 15km from the gate. I powered up my microwarp drive, set my shields to their highest power and set course for a nearby planet, but it mattered not at all. Webbed, scrambled, and with a cloud of tech II cruisers and frigates circling me, my ship was taken apart and destroyed and then I was podded. Then they caught up to Etha in the shuttle and podded HER. We awoke in our respective creches back home in Sinq Laison.
And my wallet dinged as the insurance paid out. Total balance WELL over 200 million ISK now? New record for me! Because the Mega had almost no fittings, he was worth more dead than alive, so all in all, a profitable day and a little bit of adventure. And now Etha sticks to the relatively safe Dodixie to Jita run….