But still, it would be gentlemen thing to do to anounce in local: "Icefield is about to be raided and everyone there shall be terminated. ETA 5 minutes, have a nice day!"

Ha. Everyone should do that from time to time. Even if he is not going to gank anyone ;) Just announce that there is going to be a bot purge happening and that everyone still in the ore fields in 5 minutes will be dead. Look at the miners docking up, harvest some tears, then fly to the next system with heavy miner presence and repeat.

How did nobody think of that before?

Ah, yes. The story of the boy who cried 'wolf'. We all know how that ended.

I suggest using a Hulk rather than a Mack:
Guide to Fighting Back as a Miner

And don't truly afk.... If you're reading or doing something else on your computer.... Set the shield "warning" level high enough that you are alerted to an attack and can take action before your ship is in dire need.

Defending against a wave of three catalysts should be very easy.... One BB will typically do the trick, but it can't be afk to do the job!

how about using ECM burst? would that work?

He speaks the truth, at a full stop your velocity is zero, and since a zero vector can't have a direction, the direction your model faces has no bearing on align times.

tl;dr - Passive aligning is a LIE

The data covers the 393 exhumer kills during the months of December and January.

...... an alarming 113 of the pods continued to warp back and forth to the station after having their ship destroyed.

Its particularly annoying/noticeable like when you have an industrial at a gate and want to warp to another gate that happens to be behind you (in the position you entered from) as the slow thing must turn around. The time difference taken to enter warp (ie: when you can no longer cancel) seems large in such cases. Unless it's really just a massive mindtrick physics thing. Hm, I could/should check that.

You mean the acceleration vector is unaffected by model bearing, only target destination? That would be simpler (lazier) to code, but somewhat surprising.


If you aren't facing towards say the station, your ship turns around to face it first - some ships can turn fast, but big ones (like mining barges) can take some time to turn to face the direction you are specifying. The speed seems to increase more slowly when doing the turning about thing than when you are already facing the direction you want to accelerate towards.

Its particularly annoying/noticeable like when you have an industrial at a gate and want to warp to another gate that happens to be behind you (in the position you entered from) as the slow thing must turn around. The time difference taken to enter warp (ie: when you can no longer cancel) seems large in such cases. Unless it's really just a massive mindtrick physics thing. Hm, I could/should check that.

Sure you can always warp to something ahead of you, but by definition you're already (passive) aligned to it. Certainly if your ship is pointing away from the station and you try to dock it would take longer than if you were facing it and then hit dock. Unless the ship accelerates towards something at the same rate no matter which way it was facing (wierdonly because the thrusters suggest something not necessarily true in code).

Using ECM burst in hi-sec is EXTREMELY dangerous, and can easily get you concorded. An ECM burst is essentially a smartbomb that rather than do damage, potentially breaks the locks of nearby ships. It's chance based, like ECM, and doesn't actually jam the affected ships, but only breaks their lock providing a small window of opportunity to exploit (warp off). The length of the window is however long it takes them to relock you!

Again, it is Area of Effect (AoE), and its very easy to hit an illegal target (nearby mining vessel or drone or cloaked ship), thereby getting you concorded.

During the pilgrimage I've been keeping some numbers; you honest ice miners might be interested in these statistics.

That's funny... I seriously doubt you care about bot vs non-bot miners, but whatever works for your km wh0ring...

Better to stay passively aligned to your warp out and run when people arrive at the belt if you are not afk.

Another quick question, something I've always wondered about. To warp to something, there are 2 conditions. The component of your velocity in the direction of your intended warp must be greater than 75% of your maximum total velocity. The 2nd part is something along the lines of: The rest of your velocity can't be greater than (Magical Mystery Number). Anyone know that number?

The crap part of this whole thing is all those pilots you reported will be right back in space, probably in the same systems, within a week.

Why does CCP not Perma-ban these people? They just get plex with the ISK.

In this case, the solution envolves explosions! Who can have a problem with that?

YAY to you guys! Keep up the good work! Not sure why people have a problem with this, you sure as hell won't find people that use bots on the forums. Killing bots = more profits for people that don't use bots.
In this case, the solution envolves explosions! Who can have a problem with that?

Hm, you raise an interesting possibility. Alphapodding the bot repeatedly. How far back would it set that character back?

No idea how much damage you need to kill a pod before concord gets there.

Interesting point, but I disagree.

Bots exist because ice mining in high sec is (outside of ganking) completely risk free and exceptionally easy to perform. It is because it only takes ~12 mouse clicks every 10 minutes to make 6m/hr, that so many bots exist in the ice belts. It is so simple, I believe it would be possible to make an ice mining macro on one of those fancy logitech keyboards with the LCD screen. That's just not right.

By increasing the level of risk substantially, we hope to drive them out of ice mining by making it too much hassle.

Furthermore, we are ganking them repeatadly, making sure the cost of their ships is high.

And if you look closely at the link I posted above, that one bot operation is out 7 Billion isk now. With 4 mackinaws, that's going to take him some 10.5 days of non stop mining to make back. That ain't no pocket change, son.

Now you say we are driving out the real miners. I would say that if they are real miners, then they would get out of the belt after the first gank and stay safe. And this does happen. Often after the first gank, some small percentage of people will dock up and wait for us to finish killing the bots that remained in the belt.


We are only doing God's work here, people.

That is why I add a tank to my Mack (as opposed to optimizing) and keep an alt in a Vulture floating in system :).

Do the bot miners use haulers or just fill their hold and run back and forth?

I do ice mine when I spend some time afk/distracted (feeding the kids or cleaning up around the house, etc.), so I could see my pod floating for a while, but probably not more than 10 minutes in an absolute worst-case scenario (i.e. you ganked me right as I walked away from the computer).

My main's mack has 2 invulns, booster, scram, and T2 drones!! And I only go AFK for short periods of a minute or two and a time. I'm just waiting on the day someone tries to gank my main... they'll be upset :/

No ice mining in this toon yet, but will have similar setup when I do.