Ships & Modules

I thank you for your wisdom.

Also I already conceded this point and it has nothing to do in particular with the survival of your Hulk as you demonstrated now let's move along. If you just run around to flame posts for the miniscule reasons get a life.

I think Reina has made some good points. Many of you are not active miners and are making some very broad assumptions. An example of this is that you can just warp out when you see a bad guy warp in to the roid field. For those of you not actively mining, the class of gankers has improved considerably. We now get an alt from a newb corp in a cov-ops ship fly in cloaked who bookmarks your position. Your position is then given to one or two gankers who enter the system and warp directly to you.

Seeing one or two people show up in the system is usually not cause for alarm and many of them are using alts in newb corps or switching between newly created corps to keep off gank lists. A good ganker can enter the system and be on your hulk in less than 30 seconds. Your only defense is to watch local and stop mining anytime ANYONE enters the system. Hardly worth my play time if I am doing that.

I like the ECM drone idea. I had not thought of that.

Miners getting ganked happens because the time to skill up an alt and the isk investment to create a gank setup Catalyst is so low that it's laughable. Considering the low price tag and the nearly non-existant training time, people are simply using the alts on their accounts that they can't really train anyways as CCP only allows one character per account to have active training. It's pretty much become a sport to pull an alt out of your hat and gank a random miner in a belt.

They aren't after your mods, or your ore. They are bored or just want you to get irritated and annoyed so they can laugh at your raging in local chat.

A hulk worth 350 mill can be blown up by a 1 week old alt in a 2 mill worth Catalyst.

Now, suicide ganking does happen, and there is no reason for it not to happen. If someone REALLY wants to blow up your industrial, transportship, battleship or freighter in high-sec they can and will do so. The only thing that matters is how many characters (pilots) are willing to sacrifice their standing and how much ISK is everyone willing to invest in order to destroy a ship.

Now, considering it takes 1 week and 2 mill investment to blow up a 350mill worth ship that takes weeks, if not months to train up, there is something really broken about the whole suicide ganking. It should cost the gankers more ISK and training to gank something of that value.

However, those issues are (probably anyways) being fixed this winter in the overhaul of the ORE ships in respects to mining yield and EHP.

Does that mean your Hulk will be impervious to suicide ganking? Of course not, it simply means the gankers will have to invest more time (read: skills) and ISK, or possibly more pilots, in order to destroy your mining ship.

What you can do is beef up your tank to avoid it as has been suggested by the OP. That does require spending time training up shield skills which most straight-up miners haven't trained at all. Also, the tank you can get out of a Hulk without outside help (shield transporters and fleet bonuses) is around 25k EHP, unless you start using "bling" modules. That might help against a single suicider... which in most cases is what you will meet. Rarely I met more than one suicider entering a belt at same time. As mentioned above, people do it because they are bored or just want some tears, so it's very rarely organized suicide attempts.

Granted, if you withstand their first attempt at suiciding on you they might, just out of spite, start to work together or get more alts just to achieve their goal... blowing your mining ship up.

The best way to avoid the suiciders, besides tanking your ship up, is to find a system that's away from the main shipping lanes and also not near the main mission and newbie hubs.

Another good way to avoid it is to train up exploration skills and find Gravimetric sites. Most explorers don't care to even track down Gravi sites, and they usually contain huge amounts of ore with better quality than what you normally find in the systems. Just yesterday I found a site with 70 roids containing Golden, Silvery and normal Omber as well as all 3 types of Kernite, in a 0.8 system. Mined for hours without seeing a single person comming within 1.000.000 on the Directional Scanner (which I use quite often to detect anyone approaching the grid I am on).