Right Place at the Right Time

I lost my most expensive ship to date the other night due to a stupid mistake on my part. It was a T2 fitted Drake Navy Issue worth around ~220mil isk. There was a fight about to happen in low between some Frosties and some Tuskers. I was listening on comms and it sounded as if we were going to engage. However, at the last second the decision to not engage was called as I had just entered warp. The whole thing could've turned out different if I had said, "hey, I'm bringing a Drake" on comms. But alas, I said nothing at all, warped in, got pointed and slowly died to the five Tuskers.

http://frosty.eve-kill.net/?a=kill_detail&kll_id=19202490

So lesson learned: COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE, COMMUNICATE.

I was following the cardinal rule of EVE however: Don't undock in something you can't afford to lose. 220mil isk is a big hit, but not devastating. Now if I do that 4 or 5 more times, that might put a damper on things. I only used my DNI for level IIIs anyways, and I've grown tired of grinding rep, so it was just sitting in a hangar anyways. Oh well, you live, you learn.

However, as luck would have it, sometimes when the EVE gods taketh away, they also giveith. I have a habit of logging in when I wake up in the mornings before I start my day and staying logged in throughout the day. That way when I'm home, if I decide I need to check my mail or look up something on the market or just generally see what's going on, I don't have to log in, I'm already there.

It was just a few minutes after uptime when I logged in and immediately was hit with this convo in corp:

[11:23:15] Joffy Aulx-Gao > Estria Del can you use probes?
[11:25:03] Joffy Aulx-Gao > It's important
[11:25:32] Estria Del > yes
[11:25:42] Estria Del > i have a buzzard right here
[11:26:31] Joffy Aulx-Gao > Can you probe some Cyclops in Adirain?
[11:27:10] Joffy Aulx-Gao > 20 of them idle in space
[11:27:10] Estria Del > omw

I was still half asleep but I scrambled together to get my Buzzard. I was only 4 jumps away from Adirain but as I left the station I realized I had a Sisters Core Launcher equipped and not an expanded launcher. So I scrambled back to base. Shit, no expanded launcher in my bay. I check my assets and notice I had one in Ran, one jump away. So I zip over and refit. For the record, expanded launchers take a LOT more cpu than core launchers.

I'm afraid I'm taking too long at this point. I've wasted precious minutes but at least I'm on my way. I drop into the system, launch my probes and cloak up in a safe to scan. I'm not the best prober in the world, I've not been doing it for very long and I only started when Odyssey came out. However, after a couple minutes I manage to get a lock on the drones. I call in Joffy who has a Bustard waiting to scoop the drones up. I'm sitting cloaked fervently hitting d-scan and Joffy is keeping watch in his ship as his alt scoops up the loot. I'm nervous that the carrier that lost the drones is going to show up at any moment. It takes him a couple trips because these drones are pretty big at 5k m3 each. However, he manages to get them all scooped up and I sigh with relief as I head back to base.

Joffy gets in touch with the carrier pilot and finds out what happened. He had the drones out when downtime happened and didn't know where they were when he logged back in. After some negotiation, he sells the drones back to the carrier pilot and we get to pocket the loot. My cut was 200mil isk, not too bad for thirty or so minutes of work.

I have two Buzzards so now, after learning how much CPU expanded launchers use, I'm going to fit one for exploration and one for ship scanning. One is named Lana Kane and one is named Sterling Archer.

DANGER ZONE!