You will hear about players moving out 0.0 space and living out of a can for a few weeks whilst they haul in billions of isk through mining and ratting (attacking piRATes) and you will probably think, stuff this for a lark, I’m going…..

Well my fellow pilots, it ain’t as easy as jumping to a belt and destroying a few pirates (well it can be but there are some major risks). The first thing to consider is what ship(s) do you take? There is no easy answer for this other than all of them, getting them there though is risky and difficult. So the bare basics that you will need for 0.0 is a Battleship (even if you are mining).

The reason for this is simple, the Battleship is the wokhorse and backbone of this game. It can fufill so many roles its unreal. When you are in a fight in a belt in 0.0 against 3 npc (Non-Player Character) battleships and at least 2 cruisers/frigates you will want a battleship. I first went to 0.0 in an assault frigate and yeah ok, I never lost it to pirates but on the other hand I got fed up of spending an hour orbitting a battleship slowly grinding its shields down. Now in my battleship, I can sit back quite merrily and take out a battleship in about 1-2 mins on a bad day…..and still keep my armour intact against all that incoming fire (and trust me it stings a lot).

So what about mining? Well ok, you could go out there in a Mining Barge and make a huge profit just mining and hauling, but again you have the problem of NPC pirates at gates and at belts. Remember Mining Barges are slow and unwieldy you can (and most probably) will be destroyed very quickly without something with some muscle to take and dish out damage. So again we fall back to the battleship, you can fit a reasonable number of tech II mining lasers to most Battleships and with that you will still pull in a fair amount of ore (not as much as the midsized Mining Barge would),though for a one man show it’s still not terribly bad.

So thats the NPC issues of 0.0, now we get into the PC (Player Character) issues, most of 0.0 space is controlled by one faction or another and areas of space in 0.0 can change hands pretty quickly - so far I’ve logged back in to find the station I had docked in had changed hands over night and we were now being evicted! So with all of this turmoil comes a lot of in-fighting. Players will camp (sit at and attack any and all unfriendlies at a given location for several hours) gates and stations making your life hell for travel or just hell for mining. The use of Warp Disruptors is not unheard of, in fact its quite common, I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve jumped into a system and found myself unable to warp away from the gate due to being within the radius of a Warp Disruption field. Its not pleasant, trust me, especially when you see a bunch of red cross hairs coming your way at high speed!

What it comes down to in the end is how badly do you want that extra cash, what are you willing to risk losing for it? The opportunities are there in 0.0 but the cost of getting them (like anything in life) can be exceptionally great and don’t think that being in an Alliance or Corp in 0.0 will make you invulnerable. Yes you will have greater protection, but I have yet to see an Alliance or Corp that has successfully kept all enemies out of their space and managed to safe guard all their ships, hopefully though with all that isk you are pulling in you’ll be able to cover your losses.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, November 25th, 2006 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Ships, Combat, Mining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.