I accidentally your PI ship

As every good industrialist knows, to make something good, you need the basic materials. And no matter where you are in EVE, if you do Planetary Interaction, at some point you actually have to go to the planet's custom office and pick up the materials to transfer them to a destination of your choosing, be it a station to sell the raw materials, or another planet to continue refining it into better selling items. This leads to one small problem, especially if you live in security 0.0 and lower. That problem being, of course, the dreaded cloaked hunter.

In the movie Predator, you all remember the scene where the Predator just drops in on the Marines, all cloaked and stealthy, and then quickly killing them and cloaking back up. Well, in EVE, that's something you can do to other players. It works best if you do it in null security space and wormholes, mostly to avoid losing security status. You can do it in low security space and high security space, but you'll lose security status in low and your ship in high. But I'm explaining things that are obvious to most. Way to go, Captain Exposition.

Anyway, cloaky ships. They drop on a target like the Predator, and just shred them. It's not even polite. It's mean. It's a dick thing to do. But you know what?

It's easy.

It's easier than stealing a chubby kid's ice cream. Which is easy to do; they can't run after you and you know it. Although the idea of dropping on a industrial and letting them run is counter-productive.

So, today's story. I was doing my usual thing, bombing across space looking for something to entertain me, when I landed on my old corporation's tower in a wormhole. I still know some, but others I do not. I'm ok with this. Not my corp any more, so I'm not gonna feel guilty about anything that goes down. I'm sitting and staring, trying to size up the pos, and it's a mess. 4 online defensive modules, lots of anchored defenses, and a reaction silo going. Easy pickings if I were to drop my dread on top of it. But I'm not in my dread, I'm in my cov ops. So I'm still sitting and staring, when all of a sudden I see a Badger mk. II pick up speed and warp off to a planet. That's just something I can't allow. So, time to be reckless.

I follow the guy to a poco and let him do his thing, and then check his alignment. He seems aligned to planet 1. I know they have a pos at P1M1, but they look more aligned to the planet. In my infinite wisdom, I let it warp off to planet 1, and then warp at 10 km to the Customs Office. I land, and....

Jackpot.

He's sitting about 12 km off me. I knew a lot of the people in the corp, but that guy didn't ring a bell. Not guilty at all. I drop cloak and burn at him, locking him while he starts aligning out to a distant planet. He didn't quite get there though. He was scrammed, and I had a feeling he had no warp stabilizers on. So I open fire with...

My single, lowly, tiny 150mm Light Autocannon II.

What? I couldn't fit a missile launcher on. Leave me alone.

So I begin my vicious assault, bearing the full dread and terror of my cherry tapper upon his ship. 30 seconds go past. He's at 25% shield. I'm getting the combat shakes. A full minute has gone by now. 50% armor. Note to self, put better weapons on next time. A minute 30. He hits structure. I'm spanning d-scan, asking myself, "Am I really getting away with this? They have other pilots on..." Two minutes in...

He pops. He goes down harder than a sack of concrete dropped off a skyscraper. I'm amazed that no one showed up. Out of about 30 people on, they just let him drop. I start locking his pod, but it manages to get out. I start to go for the wreck of the badger, but it's right about then that one of the people from the corp I actually knew showed up. I was not having any of that. I cloak up and warp off, not even allowing him to try and lock me. I bounce around a bit until my aggression timer went down. Upon reflection, had he had a shield tank or any tank at all, he would have lived. But he had nary a module in his highs or mids. Guess he felt safe.

From there, I logged off and celebrated with drinks at a friends house. I'm surprised I haven't gotten any angry mails yet. You'd think they'd be mad I killed one of their guys. Oh well.

So that's today's story. Tomorrow looks to be shaping up to be even more gank filled, with bigger targets that might shoot back. I suppose I'll leave you with a quick lesson.

If you decide to pick up your PI, no matter what part of space you're in, put a tank on. It could literally mean the difference between your ship living and your ship get embarrassingly killed by a buzzard with an autocannon.

Blue probes out.