Family-run corporations are one of the most fantastic ways to play Eve. You have the safety and security of knowing your family will take care of each other while gaining the low tax rate, shared corporate hangars, and other benefits of being in a player-run corporation. In bigger corporations, activities such as mining can be boosted quite significantly by way of multiple alts and specialization. However, in a corporation of only two, little of this is realized.
The story starts with Mining Industries and Items Manufacture Corp, a highsec start up from two brothers: Nalexander and Oleg Litvinchuck. Their goal was to make it rich mining, a goal they appear to have achieved remarkably well considering their small number. One day while mining Veldspar in Fricoure, Nalexander fell victim to a random gank in his Mackinaw. Now, the fit is certainly subpar: empty midslots with no Damage Control makes for an easy target. Adding an extra Adaptive Invulnerability Field II and replacing a Mining Upgrade with a Damage Control II nearly doubles the EHP, however the fit as it stood is certainly not ALOD-worthy.
With fresh kill rights available on the gankers, Nalexander decided to take action against these scourges of the belt. Hoping in his Confessor, our hero located, closed with, and destroyed two of his no good gankers. Caring not what the pirates were flying, the brothers considered the matter settled; the gankers would certainly not want to tangle with a corp who seeks revenge such as them. As you can imagine, the pirates were not discouraged by their loss of two unfit rookie ships.
Oleg Litvinchuck undocked in his rather pricey Retriever two days later in the same system and began to mine his favorite rock: plagioclase. Starting in a Venture, plagioclase is what had earned him this much ISK, and it is what he intended to mine for even more. Unfortunately, he had not learned the lesson of his brother earlier and found himself the target of Oruze Cruise corporation. Given his complete lack of tank, it took just three ships to bring down this four hundred million ISK Tech One mining barge. As with any ALOD, this outcome could have been avoided.
The best tank that you can fit is situational awareness. After the previous encounter, a negative corporation standing for Oruze Cruise would have gone a long way to bringing attention to the potential gankers. Unfortunately the hubris of believing the matter settled prevented this small change. However, the second line of defense would be noticing unusual activity, such as destroyers landing on grid in an asteroid belt. This is particularly true since the introduction of mining frigates: if you see two or more destroyers on grid, warp out.
Your next line of defense is your fit, and this is one place that the Retriever falls rather flat on its face. Even with perfect skills, a Retriever does not fit a strong tank. A Damage Control II with Reinforced Bulkheads and Transverse Bulkheads would give you 27k EHP, a large sight better than the 9k EHP the ship comes out of the box with a second added to your align time. Conversely, fitting the Medium Higgs Anchor and Low Friction Nozzle Joints to the current fit would have allowed him to mine aligned to a station or safe spot at 19m/s for an instant warp.
Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, you shouldn’t run such an expensive fit on a ship that has little ability to fit a tank. The extra range of the ORE Strip Miner does not offset its cost in the least. By the same token, if you have the skills to fit a Tech Two Mining Laser Upgrade, your skills should be sufficient to fit three Mining Laser Upgrade IIs instead of fitting a 31 million ISK Meta 1 upgrade for a smaller mining yield upgrade. If for some reason they are not, a Tech One CPU rig is far more economical and practical given the three empty rig slots and the intention to min/max mining output.
The number of things that could have been done to minimize the risk of mining were almost blatantly ignored. However, these were not the most awful of losses we have seen in our long history of ALODs. The brothers took the losses well and we wish them a speedy return to the belts, though hopefully in some more practically fit barges and with a careful eye towards danger.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Set’s Chaos.
