Mission Tourism

So, will you please say hello
To the folks that I know
Tell them I won't be long
They'll be happy to know
That as you saw me go
I was singing this song
Vera Lynn - We'll Meet Again

So, I decided to delve into Ninja salvaging over the last week. I figured it was good to do something new and different, to keep things fresh. I outfitted a ship that is faaar to expensive for it's job, but I think it does it pretty well. I like to set minimums for ships I'm going to use, and then try to meet them in EFT. For the Ninja Salvager, I decided I wanted this:

1. A cloak.
2. An Expanded Probe Launcher.
3. At least 4 Salvagers.
4. Afterburner.
5. Cap Stability.

Now this turned out to be more difficult than I originally thought, as that expanded probe launcher takes up a lot of CPU that you need for other things. Eventually I figured a destroyer wasn't going to work. So I took the next logical step, and looked into an Interdictor. Turns out that works fine:

[Heretic, MissionTourist]
Co-Processor II
Co-Processor II
Co-Processor II

1MN Afterburner II
Cap Recharger II
Cap Recharger II

Salvager I
Salvager I
Salvager I
Salvager I
Prototype Cloaking Device I
Expanded Probe Launcher I, Core Scanner Probe I
[empty high slot]
[empty high slot]

Small Salvage Tackle I
Small Salvage Tackle I

So I had my ship. Pretty fast, meets all my criteria. Now to test it out.

You'd be surprised, from how the blogs seem to highlight the angry people, just how many people out there do not care in the slightest that you're in their missions. Most of these don't salvage at all, some don't have player ships on the overview, and some are AFK. Regardless, the vast majority of the people you meet won't care, or won't notice you.

But not everybody. There's always one or two guys that think it's worth their time to "disrupt" you. Blowing up wrecks, warping in and out of the mission(which made my cloak pretty useful), locking you up and hoping you try to steal from them... which is beyond stupid on their part. The list goes on. It's enough to make me hang around just for the disruption it causes to you.

The most fun I had was when I busted a mission of some Swedes(at least I think they were Swedes). For some reason, they were running a level 4 with 2 Domi's, 2 Hurricanes, and a Prophecy. At least one of the BC's was salvager fit, but I digress. So I come out of warp on the acceleration gate while just the one Domi has gone into the mission. The rest are sitting outside, scared I suppose of the 8 rats inside.

Ok.

So I burn off, and cloak up, waiting for the rest of the guys to burn through. They wait until I'm off the overview before they go, but that's alright. I decloak, and go through as well. Coming down inside the mission, I was amazed at a couple of things. First, there were only 8 rats, as I said earlier. Second, only one of them was dead. As soon as they saw me inside, they all warped away. I guess they assumed I'd have to do the same, but I just cloaked, and waited for them to come back, which they did. When I decloaked, they had a message for me:

gumha3 > hallo bums kommer til randers så skal du få fuck up hallan turrek

After this was all over, I did some digging. Kommer is a swedish word, so I looked for a translator. The result was garbled... but I'm guessing it means roughly "Hello! I'm about to blow you up if you don't get out Hallan Turrek!" So my reply of "Hallan Turrek > Love you too." wasn't that far off base.

You have no idea how long it took these guys to kill the rats. I had enough time to run up to each rat before they finished it off, and get a cycle of salvagers off before they even got the wreck tractored. I was even waiting for a decloak delay during some of that, until they got wise and started keeping me locked. After the first 4 cruisers were salvaged by me, they started to blow up the wrecks before I could get to them. Which didn't matter, cause they only blew up the 3 frigate wrecks. The battleship wreck I salvaged first.

Once we were done, I said my goodbyes...

Hallan Turrek > Thanks for the salvage. ;)

... and burned out of their targeting range. Then I cloaked and went to look what they'd said in local. When I got back, they were gone, but I had a little message saying I'd been set to terrible standing by Mr. Gumha3. Too bad I suppose.

So after a couple of hours of mission tourism, I've got one pissed off Russian guy, a bunch of pissed off Swedes and about 20 million isk in salvage. Not to shabby.

Edit: Apparently they were Danish with bad grammar.

Special thanks to Marius for the literal translation:

Hello bum, comes to randers then you'll have fuck up hallan turrek

And Tralk for a good idea of what he was trying to say.

"Hey bum, come to Randers then you'll get beaten up"

Still funny to me.