It’s widely known at this point that the Goonswarm Federation has Delve solidly fortified. With Fortizars in nearly every system and a large helping of Keepstars to boot, you’d be pretty hard pressed to find a quiet corner in Delve at this point. Those quiet corners do exist however, and if you look hard enough you’ll be surprised at what you can find.

What’s a Rorqual like you doing in an empty space like this?

The bad thing about systems that are quiet to mine in is that they are also far away from backup that can help you. Vulrin Ashtor and Za Space Pope (who we can only assume are actually one person) decided that 5-CQDA would be the ideal spot for some AFK Rorqual mining. It’s not uncommon for people to go completely AFK while mining in a Rorqual, but it’s a risky move to do so in a system like 5-CQDA. With 5-C being on the outer reaches of Delve’s borders, it often can see traffic from many different entities not allied to the Imperium. Some of them will be just passing through, whereas some of them will be looking for careless miners or mission runners.

Brothorn and Diequietly STFU from DARKNESS. were simply passing through looking for stray MTUs to blow up when they noticed some excavator drones on scan. Upon investigating the drones, they happened upon a pair of Rorquals. Much to Brothorn’s surprise, they were at a perch far away from the asteroid belt. Without any lockable objects nearby, they would be unable to initiate their PANIC mode. Not being the kind to pass up a good opportunity, the MTU scavengers quickly attacked the Rorquals. Surprisingly, they went completely uncontested by either the Rorquals themselves, or any backup from outside systems.

“We sat in the system for 1 hr 40 mins with multiple people jumping in and out of system and noone decided to have a look until the last one was at 3% structure when a niddy hopped in” Brothorn tells us. The pair of Rorquals took so long to kill that they “had to get a couple intys to fly from Deklein to bring us down ammo and a mobile depot to change drones out for more DPS.”

We’ve reached out to Vulrin Ashtor for his side of the story, but have yet to receive any response. The morale of this story, of course, is that AFK mining is bad. If you must, you should at least be nearby while your Rorquals are undocked. Otherwise you might wind up on Imperium News in your very own ALOD!