Circuit Training

Over the years the size of Z3R0 Return Mining Inc. has shrunk to become dangerously small. Those of us left are good friends and many of us have met in the real world. This makes the prospect of closing down Zero unpalatable for us all; moving as a group to another corp would dilute the friendships. Plus we'd be at the whim of people we neither know nor whom would understand our seven years of collected in-jokes (beep, beep). The upshot of this is sometimes we need to find innovative ways to entertain ourselves on an evening of EVE.

A couple of weeks ago was one such evening. We'd encountered a fleet of at least a dozen pilots who were taking heavy advantage of a hisec connection very close to Jita. They had a guard on the hisec wormhole but it was still very tempting to trigger a suicidal fight - a temptation which increased as the evening went on. In the course of scanning our chain in the other directions, I found a second hisec connection which was also one jump from Jita. This second hisec was a single hop from the first hisec! If we can't fight them, we might as well troll them.

I hopped into my pod and headed out to their cloaky camp on the first hisec. My plan was to look like I was going shopping and would be coming back with something juicy for them to shoot. I parked my pod on the hisec connection, waited until I saw a Flycatcher on D-scan, then jumped out. Rather than head to Jita, though, I took myself to the other entry to our chain and headed home to dock back up. After 10 minutes or so I did this a second time, and then a third. All the while scouting desperately with my other account for something more suitable to actually fire some ammo into.

On comms, we were having a good old laugh assuming they were utterly confused how I was only ever heading out in the same direction and never returning. I have no idea whether the scouts on the hole had any idea what was going on. I don't really care either; my corp is all I'm interested in keeping entertained. And in the wasteland that is wormhole space, one needs to take entertainment where one finds it.

Daftly Doings

Okay, folks, it's a new year and time to do some daft stuff. I realised over the past few years I've managed to spread a  lot of ships and random junk around most of New Eden. For sanity's sake, and for something random to do, I needed to collect it all in one place and sell the ships I don't fly anymore. This took the best part of three days and resulted in six billion ISK worth of unwanted ships.

This isn't even all of them!

Of course, there's always some random crap in a random location far away. In this case, there was a very Expired Cerebral Accelerator in a Blood Raiders station in Nullsec. To get there is 42 jumps from Jita. The item is worthless. The only sensible thing to do here is trash the item. But where's the fun of being sensible? It's much better to pour myself a whisky and fit myself up an uncatchable interceptor. Let's see what Nullsec has awake today.

More a Gatecamp than a gate camp

The first 20 jumps of Hisec were completely uneventful. Once I got away from the local scam-chatter of Jita there was absolutely nothing to distract my attention bar the profusion of anchored structures in almost all Hisec systems these days. Lowsec was entered at Vehan with a pilot called Vehan Gatecamp on the outside but no sign of an actual gate camp on the inside. In Hier, there was a small gate camp of four ships - nothing exciting - and this theme continued until the end of Lowsec and my entry to deepest, darkest Delve.

A gate camp was 'Hier'

I've never lived in Nullsec. I never fancied the ring-kissing, safe-ratting lifestyle. This means Nullsec still maintains an air of mystery for me, and with mystery comes the fear of the unknown. My first jump, Goon-inhabited 1-SMEB, had a Nereus and Machariel sitting on the gate. An interesting combination that smacks of confidence. Use your bait for looting the field! The rest of the gates in were clear, but every system had someone somewhere. Much more active the average deep Lowsec system.

I docked and collected my Expired Cerebral Accelerator then began the return journey. The route home was even less eventful. In A-ELE2 there was a Hurricane sitting at the entry gate. As I flew through the systems I kept track of the numbers in local. It was interesting to discover that Nullsec is more populated that Lowsec. For my small sample size, there were 1.5 pilots on average per Lowsec system compared to 4.5 per system for Nullsec. It's a really small sample and I'd love to know if this holds true for more areas of space. Has EVE truly become Hisec and Nullsec only?