New beginnings...

Day Zero

Lets say you had decided to try your hand at living alone in a C4/C4 with the intent of making ISK from plexing. What would you bring, and how would you do it? I decided early I wanted to go as light as possible. I did not want to have anything with me that I did not absolutely needed for the task at hand - farming some C4's.

I had two characters that could both fly Rattlesnakes and one of them could pilot an Orca. That would be the basic fleet. The rattlers to kill the sleepers and the Orca to haul my tower in, and of course to roll wormholes with, something I was planing on doing a lot.

Another "must have" was a cov ops for each character to do scanning and scouting in, as well as a Noctis to bring in the salvage and loot the wrecks.

That's really the minimum of ships I needed for my quest; Orca, Rattler x 2, Buzzard/Helios, Noctis.

But since I already had passed the line where I couldn't move everything at once (and put any un-piloted ships into the Orca) I could just as well bring a few extra ships that I knew I would need to make life easier, in particular the closing of wormholes.

Now, I would need to close and roll a lot of 2B wormholes during my stay. I needed to close any incoming K162 to safely plex my ownl, as well as the static, system. But I also would need to roll the static when I wanted to find something better. Wormholes in C4s are closed by jumping an Orca "heavy" (100MN propulsion on) six times and a single battleship heavy twice. I could do that with my Orca and one of the Rattlers if i fitted an afterburner to it, but it would not have been optimal.

For starters, the rattler would need to be refitted each time, and running around 1B each, I figure they are a bit to expensive to risk for a job that a 100M ship can do just as well. Or even better.

Secondly, you sometimes end up with critical holes you want to deal with. The six orca-jumps + the battleships is not enough to close the biggest holes (the actual mass on wormholes varies with 10%) and then you end up just critting it instead of closing it. Other times somebody else leave a WH critical. For these times what you want is a Heavy Interdictor. Thats right, a HIC. The thing with the HICs is that they can be fitted to be really, really light one way (into the critical WH you want to close) but quite heavy on their way back, thus closing the hole with you on the right side. Two bubbles reduces the mass of a HIC to half that of a shuttle, while on the the other hand a 100MN AB makes it more then half as heavy as a battleship. So: Bubbles up on the way in, AB on on the way back.

This made me bring two additional ships; a closing Scorpion and a Onyx for closing critical wormholes.

The covert ops, the Onyx and the Noctis got to ride in the Orca when moving the Rattlers around. That kept the number of roundtrips just to get ships in to a minimum.