Science & Industry

Gas!? I like gas! I pass a lot of gas. I'll try answer your questions, not necessarily in order of asking, and also some questions you haven't asked :-)

If you're new to this then it's not terribly likely that C320 or C540 are gonna be part of the equation for some time yet. You will only find those in C5 and 6 w-space systems.

In lower level w-systems the best gas sites you will find are 'vast', containing C28 and C32. It's been a while since I've checked but I think a 'vast' is worth 100 - 150M isk ... and the high-end ladar sites are worth five times that.

Those fullerene gases are found in ladar cosmic signatures in w-space. Each site is guarded by a spawn (sometimes two) of sleepers. The sleepers do not spawn immediately, but wait until 10 - 15 minutes after the first warp onto-grid is commenced. The one exception to this is the 'ordinary' site that is guarded by Sirius 'platforms' - they're there from the start.
Sometimes I get a second spawn, during or immediately after, my clearing of the first. I have never had another spawn happen later, in a delayed fashion, even if DT has occurred in between.

Each ladar site contains two gas clouds, roughly 100km apart, and the WIP is approximately mid-way between them.

In general terms the more valuable ladar sites have smaller scanning signatures, are guarded by nastier sleepers, and are slower to harvest - makes sense really. You can choose to harvest only one of the gases, if you wanted, but there's not much point. Once someone has commenced a warp onto the grid of the ladar site it will despawn, usually in 3 days, even if you do not harvest the gas. If you harvest the gas the site will despawn shortly after all ships have departed the grid.

I haven't checked for a longtime, but when I started w-space gas mining it was pretty clearly more profitable to sell the polymers rather than the gases. That may have changed but it doesn't make much sense to me. Anyways we always react the gases and take the resultant polymers out to hisec. If nothing else this results in a bigtime reduction in the volume of stuff you're having to haul to empire.

Skills?

Taking the gas harvesting skill to lvl5 is, IMO, the best return you get on levelling-up any skill in eve. It lets you fit five harvesters and it lets you fit T2 harvesters ... that's almost double (15/8) the rate of gas harvesting from your ship, for one measly skill-level jump :-)

Ships?

I use hurricanes, but any ship that can fit and run the five T2 harvesters and has a reasonable hold space, will be fine. Hurricanes (MWD) are reasonably fast between the clouds, relatively agile for GTFO purposes, can carry a few security-blanket-psychological jammer drones, and are relatively inexpensive to lose ... which hasn't happened yet.

I usually have two harvester hurricanes at the ladar site and a booster/hauler orca in the POS. Gas harvesting is not for the attention-span-challenged, it's slow, so every little bit of a harvesting speed boost is usually appreciated.

Method?

Everyone is different but here's my approach.

- Bookmark ladar sites as they arrive, but don't warp to any. Keep the bookmarks until I feel like harvesting gas.
- warp my scout / scanner guy to each site in sequence - to spawn the sleepers.
- sort out fleet and ships etc.
- send a combat ship around the sites to clear the sleepers, and follow with a noctis to pickup the pieces (you can sometimes get decent amounts of melteds ... although ratting the grav sites seems to be better). Combat ship grabs corp bookmarks for each gas cloud as he goes round.
- setup orca and get boost modules running.
- warp hurricanes in and start gas harvesting. Jet-can the gas and make corp bookmark. When cloud is finished power to the other one and repeat process.
- while hurricanes moving to other cloud orca uses corp bookmark and warps-in to empty the jet-can.

The hurricanes aligned while they're harvesting and close enough together to fill the one jet-can. Some clouds sare mall enough volume to be held in the cargo-hold of the 'canes, so can be dropped in the can when you're clearing the second cloud.

I then stockpile at the POS until I have enough to warrant starting up the gas-processing assembly. For me that involves offlining a couple of POS-defence modules to provide the necessary powergrid. I then run this for a few days and store the polymers in the POS until my next logistics runs to empire space.

w-space gas can generate a reasonable income boost but IMO it's third or fourth in isk-per-effort, after ladar / mag signatures, and cosmic anomalies. It is better than w-space mining ... which is pretty darn good as mining goes. Not sure where I'd rate it against PI. PI is more income but way more click-fest tedium.

Thx alot for the long helpful response.


I have talked to some corpmates and they say that I can warp to a Ladar site in a pod or whatever ship i can get away with to activate the site, then warp away and wait 30min or so and all sleepers have despawned.

Is this true?


I live in a C5 atm usually there should not be a problem to get help clearing a site but u never know. Or is every site doable solo in a T3 or tanky pve drake?



Zifrian thx I have IPH great tool!

Subs post is good. Only thing I would add is that if you don't have an orca boost you could train and fit for the mining ganglink on your BC and fleet with someone to get the bonus. It all helps.

If i could i would make löve to that one. Good stuff thx m8 :)

Gas site sleepers don't despawn unless you kill them or the whole site despawns. They only spawn 20 minutes after the first warp in anyone does after downtime.

No, the sleepers will hang around. I believe they despawn at down time but will pop up again following the regular mechanics. You can cause the site to spawn by just initating warp and cancelling, but to scout it going in a pod works.

The high end sites were made way tougher recently and your drake or tengu will probably be popped solo.

No.


No. C5 LADAR spawns will spank you hard.

I used to do them with two remote rep Tengu fitted with passive resists (ship cost: 1.2b each), and a third max skill and siege warfare mindlink booster also in a Tengu. I could have easily lost a ship, but my strategy was enough to counter them: warp in first Tengu and get agro, then warp in second Tengu and start repping the first Tengu. All the Sleeper neuts would be on the first Tengu long enough to kill about half the spawn. Getting both Tengu neuted would have been disaster.

That was before LADAR site spawns were made harder! They are much tougher now. I wouldn't do them with less than 3-4 ships.

LOL. I guess there is always someone who will say something like this, and reckon that suggestion derives from Ty's imagination more than anywhere else.

W-space gas harvesters are not terribly attractive targets. We are flying not-very-expensive ships without costly equipment, and operating inside cosmic signatures 50 - 100km from the WIP. To catch us you hafta firstly want to, kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel there, and then you either need a pre-scanned BM to the sig or you need to deploy some probes. If the w-space gas harvester is not asleep or entirely brain dead then they're gonna see the probes and safe-up for a period that exceeds the wannabe PvPers attention span ... like about 30 seconds.

Truth is likely more along the lines that Obax suggests. Someone asks a vaguely sensible question, in S&I, and ppl trying to be genuinely helpful. Thankfully S&I still have a reasonable proportion of helpful folk with not-way-too-many trollers ... unlike some other regions of the forums.

Hmmm, ninja-harvesting ladars via your static. Do many people do this? It's not something I'd be likely to recommend ... factoring the time required and the volumes that need to be shifted into any risk:reward considerations would, IMHO, just blow it out of the air.

Before I settled in w-space I tried mining raids into w-systems from hisec. I think we came close to 100% incidence of getting caught. Luckily quite a few of the T3s that tackled us just laughed at our brash idiotic noobness and sent us packing back to hisec ... a few killed us.

If I were to ninja-harvest gas I would setup my scanner-dude, with a deep space probe deployed, near my chosen exit WH. He'd tell us if any other ships entered or logged-on into the system. As soon as a stranger's ship appeared I guess we'd hot-foot it to our near-WH approach point and then thru the WH back to the (relative) safety of home.

The chance of a single hostile ship discovering us, and our entry K162, in time to bubble the wormhole and display hostile intent ... before we GTFOd ... is quite miniscule. We would see his ship in system, and then his probes, well before he was able to actually do anything. Even if a hostile PvP fleet jumped or logged in they would still come to our notice quickly and it'd be a while before they found our K162. By that time we'd be back at our home POS telling war stories about how bravely we ran away.
Despite that, I still don’t think I'd go round recommending ninja-harvesting.