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.
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 IIConjunctive Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array I
Conjunctive Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array I
Conjunctive Magnetometric ECCM Scanning Array IGas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester II
Gas Cloud Harvester IIMedium Cargohold Optimization I
Medium Cargohold Optimization I
Medium Cargohold Optimization IVespa 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 IIMedium Shield Extender II
Medium Shield Extender II
Heat Dissipation Amplifier IIGas Cloud Harvester I
Gas Cloud Harvester I
Gas Cloud Harvester I
Gas Cloud Harvester I
Core Probe Launcher I, Core Scanner Probe IMedium Anti-EM Screen Reinforcer I
Medium Cargohold Optimization I
Medium Cargohold Optimization IHammerhead 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.
I’d love to see what your “shopping list” for a decent stay in W-space would be.
You’ve covered your ships in the past, and that you’ve scaled down what you actually take as far as hulls are concerned…but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a true list of what sort of POS and modules for it are good to have for whatever needs doing in the WH for a small corp.
Not asking for any info that would sacrifice your op-sec of course, just in general.
Hmm. I think I can do that. 🙂 Look for something this week.
Fullerene gas clouds in w space don’t react like gas in empire. Once the sleepers have been destroyed the only threat is boredom and interlopers.
They don’t?
That’s… weird. *I* had never had them react on me, but I’d assumed they did in higher-end wormholes.
So… hmm. The battlecruiser-class harvesters are just there because the sleeper spawns are worse?
IIRC we use battle cruiser hulls for grid and CPU to run five gas harvesters II. Typically, you clear the sleepers in a battle cruiser or T3 then move in with dedicated harvesters. My harvesting ships are essentially empty with 5 x Gas Harvesters IIs a or scanner and a MWD.
Gas harvesting is really a non negotiable skill to train to V for w space living. It only takes a week and the difference is remarkable.
I agree; the vexor build I listed is more of an interim fitting. Ultimately, level 5 should be the goal.