Ship Graveyard

The dust was settling in TDE, indeed in Geminate, and we had been given leave to go earn some ISK. And I needed it after the purchase of the carrier, skill books and modules. After a couple of days of killing the hapless Guristas pilots in the TDE belts, I was getting bored. My Drake was setup specifically to deal with their type of damage.

I had left the carrier in lowsec, and clone jumped to TDE, now I clone jumped to a different system in hi-sec, which was far far away from my favourite mission agent. Although I found running missions for agents almost as tedious as killing belt pirates, it did pay well. Good job it wasn’t for long, it could drive a pilot mad.

I hopped in the rather cool Apotheosis shuttle that had mysteriously been delivered to every pod pilot a month or two ago- no-one saw who delivered them, they just ‘appeared’ in people’s hangars. Caused quite a fuss at the time, all these shipping crates turning up in hangars. No complaints of course. They were Jovian looking in design and handled really well. They were also selling for upwards of 10m ISK these days!

Anyway. A 27 jump extravaganza lay before me, so I got on with it. Empire was very busy, more than I had been used to recently. As I jumped into Algogille from Kassigainen, my overview registered a mass of wrecks and structures about 250km away. It looked like Gallente BS wrecks. Ever curious, I warped to them and took the above picture. Something big had happened here. I spent some minutes scanning the news archives… and had to go back some way. Found this:

breaking news: caldari navy task force crosses federation border, invades gallente space

2008.06.10 21:26:47

Algogille - *** This is a breaking news story *** A Caldari Navy task force has just crossed the Federation border in what is unmistakably a large-scale invasion of Gallente space. Numerous Federation Customs patrol ships have already been destroyed as Caldari ships continue to stream across using the Kassigainen stargate and at least two jump portals. This is a breaking news story that we will continue to update as information becomes available.

I spent a moment of quiet respect, then moved on.

A couple of jumps over, I was about to jump into Hek when I saw a Curse and Brutix belonging to a corp called Malum Crisis attack an Iteron V belonging to a corp called Bountyhunters. I thought I’d grab a picture just before the Iteron was destroyed. I found a couple of things odd about this. Firstly, you can see it was close enough to the gate to jump through, yet it didn’t. It got bumped 8km off the gate and killed. Secondly, the corps aren’t at war with each other, nor in any militia. Unless there was some can flagging going on, which I doubted, I didn’t understand. I mentally shrugged and continued my journey with no further incident.

~ by ombeve on July 10, 2008.