Science & Industry

Or you can move to nullsec and not have to worry about 95% of that. Get better ore, better minerals, and make more isk.

Thank you for these excellent tips!

Excellent thread and tips!

I'll add a few more from my own experience:

- use dscan to find what ships are in system, bail if you see more than one destroyer (thrasher, catalyst) as these are current favorite gank ships.

- a quick way to clear a path is to move above or below the belt, not away from it. As pointed above, the collision detection are not just weird, they are unrealistic and comical as you can find yourself stuck for no reason or find yourself propelled at 600m/s, especially if you collide with something as you warp in. You don't need any of that when you try to bail.

- setup your own warp-to points by using a fast frigate and scouting the belts first. In your scout, warping to a belt and then move around away from the initial warp points. Be mindful that there are several warp to points depending where you warped from, so test your new waypoint to make sure it's not close to a default warp-in point by warping in from several gates and stations. The ideal spot you want is near ore, but 70k to 120k from the possible warp-in points into a given belt. Most gankers will warp in at the default points, and the idea is that they need to get fairly close to you because their guns have limited range. This can mean the difference between life an death as you get more time to bail as they close in.

- along those lines, setup a wp 160k or so away from any belt - this gives you a nice observation point to let you know what's happening. Don't obvserve in your hauler or your barge, use something no-one pays attention to. If you see wrecks or concord ships around, that means a recent gank.

- If you have an orca, fit a good PVP ship in the hold. Switch your ships for a nice surprise, but get your timing right. Most ganking ships are not tanked as they are all about max dps for as cheap as possible. They tend to go poof easily with the right PVP fit (see crime and punishment forum for ideas). Never shoot first however.

- use Dotlan and lookup ship/pod kills in the system you want to mine in. Look at the ship kills on the statistics page for the last week, and find out where the roaming ganks tend to occur. There are usually patterns you can find which correspond to "gank ops". Not all ships die to gankers but after a while, you get the idea.

- Belts with lots of miners are actually good, because there are more "choices" if a gank arrives.

- Don't fit your miner or hauler for max yield or max capacity if you expect trouble. The max yield or max haul fits really slow you down and use slots that coud otherwise get you a moderate tank and help hasten your escape. Train navigation skills that increase your speed and agility as well.

- use drones only for rats and haul them back in when done. This does two things: first, you won't agro by mistake by having your drone attack, second, I have a natural tendency of wanting my drones back before I warp, and that adds a few precious seconds to the bail time.

- In settings, make sure you don't have auto-target enabled. That usually just brings trouble.

- Do no exhibit any behavior that makes you look AFK. That may dissuade some attackers if they know you are in fact in the ship as there are some who are not after miners, they are after botters, so don't look like one.

- If you are a bot, make sure you check in with the GMs first to let them know so they can give you extra protection.

Cheers,

z

+1 for the OP and Zoni, both of whom offer great advice for reducing the risk of falling victim to a suicide gank.

If only more highsec dwellers would listen to and then follow through with advice like this. Unfortunately, the way mining works now supports the belief that mining is a mostly AFK profession. There is another poster who talked about mission mining as an alternative, and got me thinking about mining agents. What would the long term effects be if regular ores were added to the sites spawned with the otherwise useless mission ore?

Very small pockets of ore. Would it have an impact on the number of ganks that occur? Would it have an impact on botting. The reverse, would it be too much like an instanced environment, even if players could still be probed down much as ninja salvagers do with missions currently?

Don't particularly advocate the above idea, but curious what those who mine think of the long term benefits/downsides.

Thats why any mining corp worth thier ore owns more than one mining system, Class 4 and higher systems with lots of belts help, specially in F class regions where ark shows up in local belts at class 4 and a class 7 can have named ark in roids that size from 5-9k in size.

As I understand it, ECM drones would only be really useful against ships that rely on a sustained rate of fire to put out their damage. If you're worried about the high alpha from an Arty Tornado, say - You'd be popped by the first volley before your drones have a chance to break the target lock. And you can't sic your drones on a ganker preemptively, for obvious reasons.

If you're going to put shield mods in your mids, go for a good buffer tank, and remember to shore up your resistance holes. You wouldn't be using the mid slots anyway, and while you may not survive a sustained ganking effort it could make all the difference in surviving a solo ganker. You could also go for one of the super - tanked Hulks that are also rigged/low slot fitted for the purpose, but that's a choice you'll have to make for yourself.

I would say the best defense is not becoming a gank target in the first place. Choose your location well, preferably an area with little to no traffic, get to know who are the neutral locals, and dscan when someone new shows up. If it's one of the typical gank ships, immediately get out of the belt. Consider also mining in mission belts and grav sites. The time spent scouting around for good systems/sites is more than worth it.

The webs is something I hadn't thought of. I currently have an orca with a remote shield rep and medium shield drones and a semi decent tank. I'm mining with covertors atm with ecm drones and have them targeted on the orca so I can rep them. It's not going to stop a battlecruiser but it will hopefully put off a destroyer.

I *could* store the barges in the orca I guess but I'm not sure how quick that would work out in practice.

I d-scan at around 200,000km which gives me some idea of what's nearby without pulling in loads of other ships.

I am a ganker and I do not like thehelpful tips you give. Please stop. Esp. Tau

Also, if you were really smart, you'd set your barges to follow a straight line from one end of the belt to the other and back, like a sentry walking his route. set your speed 1m/s over your warp start speed. Set warp offs at each end (500k +). Now you're aligned, at speed, ready to warp. Speed = less damage. Movement = difficult warp in (orbiting roids means i just time your cycle til you're aligned away from station). When you want to change direction, you can turn back, but if you fear getting caught in that moment, just warp to the safe and back. Assign 1 dscanner who should be scanning no less than every 15 seconds if there is lots of people in system or anyone you don't know well. Cycle this task through your fleet in 15min increments. Maintain a minimum 10k distance between you and any other ship. If you can, use a single gate system, post a scout alt on the gate, and mine in the belt furthest from the gate (i.e. the last place i can dscan you down). The scout should report all covops, destroyers and BC that enter the system and note their direction of warp. Combat probes on scan should trigger immediate warp off to safes and then back to station.

BTW there are counters to about 2/3 of the suggestions here, but they do increase the gankers work and make you a less tasty target.

edit: those of you using the orca swap trick have to stay close to the orca, very close, meaning you're at risk for disco ships.

Just remove drones from your D-scan overview-settings. That's what I do. I keep a seperate overview for D-scan, which holds the same as my General and Kill-overviews combined, only without cans and drone, because they're annoying on D-scan...

I especially like this one, because it's so true. What's the capacity of a jetcan? 27,000m3? What's the capacity of your typcial can flipper ship? 300m3, tops? Oh gosh, he stole 1% of my rocks! Whatever shall I do?

How long does it take for a suite of strip miners to refill that 300m3 loss? Ten seconds?

If you're tanked and not AFK then can thieves are just fleas. Yes, I know you're target locking me because you assume that I'm going to launch a drone at you or something any second now. Have fun being more bored than the miner, pal, 'cuz that ain't happening. But hey, if you want to sit there and watch me mine for a while I'm cool with that. Tum de dum.

Shooting back is just what they want, and while going back for a proper warship to shoot them down with may be satisfying, it's actually more satisfying (for me at least) to perform the most unglamorous, most aggravating, most downright insulting thing that you can possibly do to these misbegotten wankers: Completely ignoring their very existence