Hauling can be dangerous business in Eve. Not only are you warping around in some of the least agile ships in the game, there’s also a good chance someone is aiming to blow you up for your cargo. That being said, there are a number of things a space trucker can do to reduce their appeal as a target and survive a ganking attempt. For instance, make sure your cargo isn’t valuable enough to gank you over. And if a ganker does try for you, fit a buffer tank so that you can survive long enough for the ganker to be killed by Concord. As simple as these tips are, there are still those lazy or ignorant enough to ignore them. Such is the case with this ALOD.
So you can all follow along, here’s the killmail in question. Unfortunately for us, it seems that zKillboard doesn’t have the most up to date prices for all of the blueprints in this loss, so the actual ISK lost is significantly lower than listed. After looking up all of the prices in the in game contract browser, the total value of all the blueprint comes to around 9.4 billion ISK. In either case, our victim was carrying far too valuable cargo given what he was flying in. This cargo would make him a good target even if the pilot, Product search, was hauling with a freighter.
In addition to the cargo, the fit of this Iteron was far from ideal. Not only does the fit provide very little tank, there are a number of pointless modules. The ECM in particular provide little value to the fit. Although in principle the idea of breaking a ganker’s lock sounds like a good idea, in practice the Iteron takes far too long to lock a target in order to do so. Product search would have been much better served fitting some shield extenders. There’s also the problem of all of the rigs and modules that increase cargo capacity. Given that all of Product search’s cargo only amounts to about 1500m3, he would have been better off fitting some rigs and modules that would decrease his align time. If that had been the case, he may have been able to escape before Vito locked him and fired.
Hauling doesn’t have to be a death sentence. Just don’t make it easy and don’t make yourself a target. Also, best wishes to Vito as he tries to sell off his loot. Hopefully he doesn’t let them go for too little.
This article originally appeared on TheMittani.com, written by Lioso.
