[Fleet] WH money making in LSC

[Budda Sereda]

As I wrote in http://forum.eveuniversity.org/viewtopi ... 46#p850835 we went for another WH money making operation in LSC.

There are some things to learn here, so I would like to share AAR and get feedback from more experienced pilots and FCs.

Form-up was quite ok, we got 4 T1 BC, 2 T1 CR logies (Augurors), salvager, scout, and Forrest joined as in Lachesis for PvP.

Rrand already scanned a WH for us so we went straight to it.

Mistake #1: information about WH we are going to was in public access for quite a while.
Lesson #1: NEVER post information in public. Consider only secure information fleet or personal email communication with FC

After we arrived into the hole we made "safe" BM and started running sites. System was quite big and we could not see all signatures on DSCAN... it was discussed that usually it is a risk to rat in a system where some holes are our of dscan range, I asked scout to scan all signatures that were not scanned yet.
What made me feel relatively secure is the presence of another WH which was marked in mapper as EOL. Another thing which made me relaxed is false believe we have a big numbers (dunno why, but after http://forum.eveuniversity.org/viewtopi ... 2&t=102055 when we had around 15 CR and BC I felt I have a big fleet).

I dropped MTU, we started killing sleepers, scout started scanning, Forrest decided to warp around system .... and learned that hole we thought was EOL in fact was not. I asked him to jump out and see what is there: plan was to keep him on the hole and see if anything appears on D-scan. But...

the moment he jumped out he was attacked by 3-4 ships, among other was Lachesis, Phobos, Moa, I believe some other ships, but I don't remember what. They did not have logies, but my thought process was: they attacked fleet of 4 BC and 2 logies (even T1 CR, but still). So they either they confident they have enough numbers to engage and survive or they had a backup in form of hidden logies or even more DDs.

Later Forrest reported he saw Stratios and Tengu, which confirmed my decision to run away and commanded to warp off back to low-sec. That was not the best decision as Forrest was primaried and was dying... but I wanted to avoid putting fleet of newbies into a hole game with opponent who scouted us.
Luckily Forrest was able to jump through the hole and attackers instead of waiting for his gate-cloak decided to warp on grid ... we successfully run away, but they killed MTU full of BlueLoot: https://zkillboard.com/kill/58347476/

We did not have enough numbers, but still had another hole with 2 combat sites... so I decided to make some ISKs... and when for them.
For some stupid reason, I've asked scout to look for other C3 hole in low sec. Better would be to ask scout to scan signatures and see if there are any other potential attackers.
Another stupid (or I would say, greedy) decision was to run sites even though we have seen probes on dscan. Plan was to have Forrest sitting outside and in case if he sees something we run away again.

In fact, we did make scanner afraid, he jumped out (it was Astero), was pointed by Forrest, but was able to jump back through the hole. My thoughts process was: if he had friends nearby he would not jump off, instead he would wait and give a warp in, so we continues to run sites.

We finished 1st site, feeling a danger I picked up my MTU and asked salvager to collect wrecks, we moved to 2nd site. Here I asked another DD pilot to drop MTU (Tom), and repeat the same: when last piece of blue loot was collected I asked salvager (Aldrex) to drop his salvage to Tom and warped fleet away so we won't be ganked. My thoughts were... who will gank salvager...? and even if it is ganked, it is not as expensive as hole fleet.

The moment we jumped to low sec, Aldrex was pointed, killed, and podded: https://zkillboard.com/kill/58348635/, https://zkillboard.com/kill/58348656/.

Interesting thing, he was killed by Stratios, not by Astero whom we've seen... Another thing: Aldrex, I do believe you should have been able to escape if you pay enough attention: Stratios have targeting delay after been decloaked, so you did have time to warp away. But you essentially had 5 seconds to run. that's why you keep dscanning and be ready to run.

Later, we made safe way back home and brought around 92M loot. Which I don't make looking green as that is not amount of income I expected to get.

Summary:

First about my WH-money-making trips. It looks like they are not ISK effective. To make them profitable we probably need better scouting to find safe holes. But we know that there are no safe place in EVE. Or we should have bigger numbers so when we engage we have more firepower and can stand the ground.
I will think about this. Most likely, format of further event will change.

Second about the fight.

I've identified some mistakes made already.
Forrest later advised that I should have engaged that time, or wait people to drop on us: we did have 2 logies and they did not, and even if we lost things, we would kill 1-2 ships, or maybe even won the fight.
That sounds about right.
From the other side, they had 3 pilots on my MTU, Forest also saw Tengu and Stratios. So theoretically, they could project around 1200 dps. If I was in command of that fleet: I would kill 1 logy first, I do believe 1 augoror can't handle 1.2k income dps. Point 3 DDs, and kill them later.
So, I don't believe we had serious chances to come back alive.

From the other side, we had our ships insured, PvP equipped so we could back around 50M insurance and 20M SRP for each BC.
So we probably should engage? Also, having a fight is not about losing a ship, but about having a fun?

For some reasons, been an FC I'm motivated to win a bring fleet alive back.

I'm interested to hear opinion of those who were on grid: would you guys prefer to secure the flight and avoid fight if there are high chances to lose? Or you better take a risk and take the fight?

Also, other FCs and pilots: please do share your feedback!

[Mattikus Pathfinder]

Keeping intel about where your fleet is going to be private is a good idea. Having said that, unless you were shouting about it in the hole itself, that probably wasn't what got you caught.

Even if a hole is EOL doesn't mean it is at all safe. Just because you don't know when a hole is going to die doesn't mean that noone else does. Someone else may have rolled their static to get that hole and know exactly when it spawned, which would tell them if they've still got enough time to push ships through. Also, wormhole dwellers tend to carry probes, so being "trapped" in a C1-3 with a K-space static isn't necessarily terrible for them.

I'm not sure how Forrest jumping through the hole and being engaged means that they engaged a fleet of 4 BC and 2 Logi - unless Forrest was seriously multiboxing.

It isn't clear from your description, but having all of the signatures in a system scanned down should be considered mandatory when running sites. You should also then ignore all of the scanned signatures so it is obvious when a new sig appears.

Someone in an Astero running away doesn't mean that he doesn't have friends, it means that he doesn't want to take the fight at the moment. You don't know whether that's because he's solo or because he doesn't think he'll survive until his friends get there.

I hope your next event goes better

[Zeerse Solaris]

If you're day tripping, I would say it's more an opportunity activity rather than a scheduled one, it reads as if you were trying to force it somewhat because it was organised in advance.

I'd suggest ideally you would have your regular explorers understanding the requirement you want to run in and when they find something suitable, a ping goes out, then you organise something, with a few hours notice if it's not primetime. You'd want that explorer to have thoroughly scouted the hole and get a view of the connections before you even go in.

What you could do is incentivise that explorer with a share of the isk, they're probably ideally suited (cloaky) to sit on a connection you might feel worried about.

As to engagements, I'd say in my experience, which isn't great in fighting in WHs, a WH corp is going to engage you if they're confident of winning, and they can upship/reship as they like, if you find ratters already in there that's slightly different as you can make that assessment.

[Ounar Zanok]

I'm interested to hear opinion of those who were on grid: would you guys prefer to secure the flight and avoid fight if there are high chances to lose? Or you better take a risk and take the fight?

I wasn't on grid, but I think it was a good idea to extract. In most situations I would try to avoid pvp when flying a pve-fit ship.

[Budda Sereda]

I'm interested to hear opinion of those who were on grid: would you guys prefer to secure the flight and avoid fight if there are high chances to lose? Or you better take a risk and take the fight?

I wasn't on grid, but I think it was a good idea to extract. In most situations I would try to avoid pvp when flying a pve-fit ship.

I forgot to mention, but we were all in PvP fit. I do realize that is not optimal for pve, but that is a compromise I took to be ready to fight in case if we find content.

[Rose Alice]

I live in a wormhole day and we usually have a designated isk making day in our c5 static, and then a "content day" on Saturday, for either isk or pvp

We have rage our c5 hole 5x an hour (including scanning, bookmarking, realize its a horrible wormhole then collapsing it). And after 5 hours found nothing,
then other days the first wormhole we find have 20 sites and 5 signatures with only its static for a wh and make 3-4b in a few hours.

as Zeerse Solaris has said, if your not living in a wormholes, its a opportunity activity, if you think you found a good wormhole, send a ping out and start prepping it, bookmark all the signatures and roll away all the other WH's leading into it.