Life in a Wormhole: It's a Gas, Gas, Gas #eveonline

It's been a few days since our Proteus kill, and we're done messing around in the home system for a little while -- Planetary Interaction colonies have been set up by Bre and Berke, and in addition Berke is taking a bullet for the team and setting his Leadership-focused training queue on hold for a few weeks so he can train up the ability to control and fire the Tower guns. It requires a lot of very boring module-anchoring skills as a prerequisite, but being the guy who pulls the trigger on the Death Star does afford you a certain rock-star status, and it's that admittedly faint hope that steels his resolve. While he pokes at the controls for our tower, I go looking for trouble.

Scouting the connected C2 shows me 11 towers on d-scan, all owned by a capable PvP corp. Normally, that would be something of a red flag, but the corp looks more like a corpse, with virtually no activity of any kind in the past few months. Given that no one seems to be home, our pilots decide to do a little Sleeper shooting, with Bre, Ty, CB, and Ichiban in combat ships, Em flying overwatch in her cloaked-up Falcon-class force recon cruiser, and Shan sweeping up the mess in a cloak-equipped Thrasher-class destroyer. It's a good sized group, geared to expect trouble, but we find none: six sites are cleared inside an hour, netting the group 135 million in loot.

Bre's not quite ready to be done just because everyone else is wrapping up, however. After some wheedling, she talks Ty into revisiting the system in cruisers fitted out for Gas Harvesting.

Space. Where the skies are full of money.


Gas Harvesters are kind of tricky -- in higher-level wormholes, that damage can be pretty severe, so cheap(ish) battlecruisers like the Ferox or Prophecy (both of which have more than enough room for the harvester modules and a good, high-resist tank) are often used, but in a C2 the sleepers are relatively weak, so we use plain old cruisers, which give us enough tank to weather sleeper frigate attacks when they materialize.

That's assuming we bother with the frigates. We are being particularly lazy about the harvesting tonight, in fact: we can fill up our cargo hold to the brim in about the it takes for the Sleepers to wake up, so when their frigates warp in, we simply warp away, return to the tower, dump off our load, and proceed to the next anomaly, leaving the old, Sleeper-invested cloud behind, incomplete. Since it's not our system and we're only doing this for an hour, we don't really care: for our purposes, this is the most efficient way to run the sites.

We've been spending a fair amount of time on these kinds of zen-like activities lately, but there's a good reason -- sixty million good reasons, actually; all collected in about an hour.

And now, money made, sleepers riled, and ships intact, it's time for bed.

---

I don't fly Battlecruisers for gas harvesting, but for those looking for gas cloud mining fits suitable for a C1 or C2:

[Thorax: Calrissian]
Expanded Cargohold II
Expanded Cargohold II
Expanded Cargohold II
Expanded Cargohold II
Co-Processor II

Conjunctive Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array I
Conjunctive Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array I
Conjunctive Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array I

Gas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester II

Medium Cargohold Optimization I
Medium Cargohold Optimization I
Medium Cargohold Optimization I

Vespa EC-600 x5

This Thorax build is fragile, but gets the job done. The hold fills in about 5 minutes with Gas Cloud Harvesting V (or 12 minutes if your skill is 4 and you're using tech1 modules), and the ECCM modules make it a bit harder for an enemy ship to scan you down, meaning you may get a bit more warning.

If you don't want to train to level 5, however, you may want to go for a slightly different ship. This Vexor fitting assumes a level 4 skill, fills up the cargo bay in about 14 minutes, fits enough drones and tank that you might be able to just kill any sleeper frigates that bother you, and leaves you with with ECM drones to sic on an ambusher while you escape.

[Vexor, Tibana]
Co-Processor I
Expanded Cargohold II
Expanded Cargohold II
Expanded Cargohold II

Medium Shield Extender II
Medium Shield Extender II
Heat Dissipation Amplifier II

Gas Cloud Harvester I
Gas Cloud Harvester I
Gas Cloud Harvester I
Gas Cloud Harvester I
Core Probe Launcher I, Core Scanner Probe I

Medium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Cargohold Optimization I
Medium Cargohold Optimization I

Hammerhead I x5
Hobgoblin I x5
Hornet EC-300 x5

Focus on the gas types that end in 50 an 72, by the way: in the low-end wormholes, nothing else is really worth the time.