Thursday, December 10, 2009

Low Sec Mining and Probing Gravimetrics Sites

So in the spirit of preparing people to move into or at least make use of low sec, I decided to try a few thing I hadn't yet done. This is a justification, not a howto. I have linked two sites below for good tutorials on how to do this.

One of those thing to do is mining. Well when I ran the numbers, I realized it made no sense to mine in low sec. I could make slightly more money in High Sec, for far less risk. Wait, did I just say that? I did, and it bothered me a bit to say it.

But wait...

Astrometrics, the science of cartography helps you find better stuff right? Better rats, better complexes, all sorts of things. Well what about asteroid belts, after asking around a bit in my favorite channels, I got a good amount of data about astrometrics and probing, but no one knew a whole heck of a lot about scanning down asteroid belts. So I reviewed my skills, and luckily I already had the basic requirement to start scanning down deep space sites. I did a little bit of reading on http://rift.chromebits.net, and some stuff written by ccp greybeard on the eve online website. I hoped into a covops ship I already had (a Helios) since they are given astrometrics role bonuses, and fitted it with all t1 gear for scanning.

Since it was my first time, I did some practicing I. High sec and learned the basics of making the system work, then in an hour or so I headed out to low sec.

I systematically probed out each system in the region. Let me tell you what I found. I found null sec ores. Yep, I found crokite, dark ochre, and gneiss. Wow, that's the stuff that alliances work really hard to protect from foreign miners out in deep null sec, and it's already right here in empire.

Now before you ask, no you can't find this stuff in high sec, I looked. In high sec, if you successfully scan down asteroid belts, you'll find they will be higher quality high sec belts, and some of the standard low sec asteroids that don't warrant scanning down in the first place since veldspar is worth more than low sec asteroids, and it's the same stuff that made going out to low sec to mine really stupid.

So this means that if you are willing to hunt down some belts in lowsec, you too can mine some 20 million isk an hour asteroids with joining or paying a null sec alliance to do it.

You do need to spend a couple of days training g to be able to scan grav sites. You'll find them, but with only the basic skills, you'll not be able to pinpoint them enough to actually bookmark or warp to them, but it's worth it to be able to mine stuff worth 4x as much as the best asteroid belts in high sec.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone, so deal with any mispelling, grammatical errors or strangly out of place words caused by mis-autocorrection.

2 comments:

Helicity Boson said...

Side note for other readers that may be new to this: if you DO decide to go mining in low sec, pay very close attention to your scanner. set it to a reasonably close range (1-3 AU) and -untick the use overview settings box-

This will allow you to see any combat scanner probes near you, which will give you enough notice to warp out before any nasty pirates like myself decide to blow up your mining vessel.

Also, never ever jump your mining barge into low sec without a scout, for you are slow and squishy.

Arrhidaeus said...

I probe these out in Metropolis all the time and they drive me crazy! (I'm generally looking for a wormhole that hopefully has battleships running a sleeper site that I can ransom, not rocks).

I didn't realize the asteroids in them were actually so valuable. I might have to take advantage of this easy money in the future.