Operation Passive Income

In games, there’s generally two kinds of income: Active and passive. Active is, say, running a mission or killing ten wild boars, while passive incomes are essentially investing your pile of money in something and coming back after a certain amount of time to find a larger amount of money.

After losing the PoS Calculated Risk(Again, if anyone sees it, take a potshot at it and I’ll convo you from the “pos under attack” message), a friend pointed out to me how incredibly stupid it was to have a PoS running reactions in a C6, which was both difficult to access and was under impending doom from a carrier or dread, as well as having no moon mining ability, essentially making it nullsec in terms of risk but with none of the supplemented costs of moon mining.

So, I locked myself in a few gravs for a few days and managed to scrape together about 500 mil and enough self esteem to not shoot myself after spending a few days mining. After talking with a friend, he loaned me about 200 mil for starting up my idea and I started training an alt to manage the thing. This original hauling alt was followed by a combat alt, an emergency scan alt and a trade alt, so as of now all of my characters are involved in WH space in one way or another.

The origonal “Plan Awesome” went as follows:
1. Buy a PoS, silos, reactors, materials.
2. find/go into a WH you found previously
3. Setup the PoSes and get the reactions running
4. Forget about the entire thing for a week or so.
5. Come back, get the products to jita
6. Profit!

Unfortunately, since I needed defenses on the towers, I was only able to use coupling arrays, meaning that instead of my projected “once a week” screw with, I had to manage these things every 14 hours. For the sake of my sleep schedule, I screwed with them every 12 hours.

Anyrate, the first revision of Plan Awesome came when we scanned a route to highsec that went through a C1. I logged a scan alt off in it, waited a few days to make sure it was unoccupied, and scanned an exit 3 jumps from jita at the same time we got a highsec exit from our C6 10 jumps from jita at the same time our freighter alt finished hauling my pile of PoS equipment crap to Jita.

Now, anyone with half a spinal column will tell you that you need a fleet of battleships and/or a dread or two to take down a large pos. Assuming, yaknow, if they could stop screaming long enough to form an opinion. A C1 has the nice perk of only allowing a BC or smaller inside, so on paper my PoS was practically immortal…assuming I didn’t get someone so pissed off at me that they built a PoS inside my WH, built a dread at it and used that to take down my PoSes, so I was able to completely forget about defenses and anchor reactors and silos to the large towers, meaning that I now only need to screw with these things every few days.

Anyway, the first PoS went up with several small, unimportant incidents that were all managed eventually and I was able to get a scan ship, an emergency scan ship, a second emergency scan ship and an emergency scan alt in his own scan ship logged off just in case I lost all three, which seemed impossible. Murphy’s law is an asshole.

Anyrate, remember how my main corp got wardecced?

To avoid getting my newbie char ganked, I made a corp and moved all parties involved into it. Well, at some point, unnoticed by me, one of the members of that wardeccing corp found his way into my WH and logged off.

Let me reiterate, there is absolutely no link between my main corp and the alt corp. Unless the dude was somehow in our private chat channel, there is no way to connect us. Anyway, my first day in the C1, I warp to where the static was yesterday and start scanning for a new one in a tech one scan frig. An arazu decloaks and starts shooting at me. I’m so surprised that he manages to get a lock on me and kills my less-than-a-mil scan ship, but I still get the pod out, get another scan frig, fit it, fly it to a different safespot and through a series of coincidences lose that one too. A bit unnerved, I log the scan alt on and scan a static, warp to it, warp my combat char to him, and head back to empire and buy more scan ships.
Over the course of the next week he kills four more scan ships and three salvage boats, culminating with me, sitting in a cleared anomaly while my salvage char zips around in a tristan picking up wrecks when the arazu warps in and starts locking the tristan. I tell the combat pilot, in a drake, to lock the arazu while telling the tristan to run his stupid ass off. He gets out, and the Arazu scrambles the drake. Then jams it. No stranger to ECM, I check my cargo for FoF missiles(damnit!) and keep trying to get a lock on him, waiting for the inevitable triple-ecm-fail that’s screwed my ECM ships over so many times. The jams fail, I get a lock, I launch one salvo of missiles and a falcon with a name suspiciously similar to the Arazu’s name warps in and jams me. They both launch drones and start pecking away at me. My only offensive option at this point is to launch my three hobgoblins(lost 2 during the anomaly) and hope I can eliminate enough of their DPS that they don’t break my passive tank. Surprise surprise, they’re 30km away and pop all my drones. I run through my options, and I’ve got none. Wait, no, make that one. One extremely stupid one. I log on my hauling char and head to my static to buy some FoF missiles.

I get to the static at about the same time that he starts getting past my tank, when I notice that he’s stopped scramming me. Trying to look as combaty as possible, I align to a planet and warp out just before my tank goes to armor. He posts in local:

“I’d kill you, but IRL issues. Bye”

I think I’d feel better if he had killed me…

Anyway, after a few days he leaves my WH and I get back into the swing of things, managing the PoS, running anomalies and selling stuff in jita. I manage to make it to jita with three days of products and nanoribbons and profit about 200 mil, so I switch to a more expensive, but higher profit moon goo reaction. That’s where I am now. The revised plan awesome now involves expanding this operation to every moon so that no-one can build a PoS of their own and attack me with a dread or something. And maybe to anchor some guns at some point.