Ninja Huffing - Gas Harvesting in Wormholes

Gas cloud harvesting in wormhole space is a doubtful pleasure. Either the sleepers in a gas site are weak and the gas valueless or you have to bring expensive ships to defeat them and get access to the more valueable gas clouds. Who ignores the sleepers and makes compromises in terms of total earnings is able to make fast ISK without risking a lot.

Venture - Outer Ring Excavations (ORE) had great success with this new ship designed for gas harvesting (image: http://leiharper.wordpress.com/)

What means Ninja Huffing in detail?

Ninja Huffing describes the gas cloud harvesting in wormhole sites until the appearance of sleepers. 
Therefore you have at most 20 min time.

In all considerations we take a huffing performance of 160 m³ per minute (Venture with Mining Frigate V and T2 Gas Cloud Harvesters). Even new capsuleers are able to perform on that level within several days. Without T2 Haversters you don't even have to think about ninja huffing!

Mirror, mirror on the wall, what is the most valuable gas off all?

All gas sites exhibit two different kinds of gases. At first, for ninja huffing purposes, we ignore the less valuable gas (with regard to the ISK/m³ value). Therefore I prepared a small table with the recent market data from Jita for you.

The most exciting on ninja huffing is not the 32 to 128 mill ISK/h you can earn in w-space but the great risk-rewad-relation. A complete fitted Venture shall cost around 5 mill ISK and the usage of expensive implants in wh space is not recommended at all. Also there is the possibility to quickly generate some ISKies what for you normally have to bring much more effort (time, skills and ship costs) in wh space.

But who is allways farming alone?

Clearing an instrumental site with 10 pilots at one - a dream with 400 mill in 20 min

Ninja Huffing as a crowd
Per Venture you are able to harvest up to 3,000 m³ Gas until sleeper ships arrive. So you don't want to jet-can-harvest or even fly back, drop your gas and return. In the case you are facing a valuable gas site with more than 3,000 m³ there is only one solution: bring your friends!

A (small) advantage against cloaked hostiles you can get positioning your ship in the middle of the cloud you are currently huffing. That provides the chance that the enemy is decloaking himself before getting close enough to takle your ship and you may get the time you need to escape.

As a basic literature i can recomment reading the Uni Wiki article "Gas in w-space".

Tl;dr

To get the maximum out of ninja harvesting you have to scan for vital and intrumental gas sites in C5 and C6 wormholes. Just concentrate on huffing the C320 until the sleepers arrive.

This arctile was translated for BlueBux.

137 jumps and (not) a new home

In the search for a new home I started my journey today in the morning. A C5 with a static C2 connection shall become our new homeland. C5 wh systems have NullSec connections from time to time. So it should be easy to find one making a route of 137 jumps trough 0.0 and checking every single system?!

view from neighbor region at the region "the ring"

Because of arguable honor to be allied with the Goonswarm Federation the NullSec space where I can move freely is amazingly large. So I setup a route constisting of 137 jumps trough the whole north west of the known star systems.

The only real harassment...

...was a Sabre which sat on a gate to intercept pilots like me. When I saw her I took a deep breath, took my wing and activated my cloak module. As I saw she draw nearer to me I noticed the try to decloak me (just come cloaser than 2.500 m) and made a sidestep. In a distance of 3.900 m she flew past me - not that bad.

the most intresting on my way - what kind of cloud is that?

My journey brought me deep into Goonswarm territory, trough Syndicate, where a lot of hostile pilots were hanging around, passing the systems of Sisters of EVE and back to Tenal in the north. Around 8 h travel. I was surprised that it was so fast and much more surprised that I reached the home system of Oberon in my ship and not in a fresh clone.

I found a lot of wormholes, but no single one with a static C2. My first contribution to find a new home in w space is made. Maybe we will buy this time again a wormhole for our corp. Let's see what the future brings... hopefuly me back into my old/new homeland.

I lose, but we win

There are worse things than losing a battle. One can be on the winning side but be the first to get destroyed and end up sitting in a pod, unable to even watch how it plays out.

All alone in w-space and the neighbor system was getting really hot.

The whole year had been rather mediocre up to now. We had arrived in defense of one of Eve University's POCOs at New Year's Eve 129 pilots strong, though not one pilot of Transmission Lost dared enter the system when the reinforcement timer was about to end.

Yesterday we'd spent four hours scouring the infinite vastness of w-space, only managing to kill a Retriever. Today then, we'd found a small and juicy corp: two Dominix, one Raven, two T3 cruisers but either we had too little in the ways of logistics or other things put a wrench in our plans. This meant we'd only be getting a Corcerer piloted by a rookie, which left us unsure whether to laugh or to cry.

Could've saved me – our logi pilots.

Third time did end up being the charm: the corp had just begun running anomalies and we were poised to strike as soon as they would switch back to their expensive T3 cruisers and start killing sleepers – that would've done it, but things turned out very differently...

One of our LFARM colleagues switched TS channels and asked about our state of combat readiness. At that point we were battled completely: T3 cruisers, battlecruisers and anything you could ask for in regards of logistics and EWAR. Thus, our fleet commander gave the order to turn around and support LFARM.

We even got a HD video from the fight, but our victims stopped recording shortly before we defeated them totaly.

Admittedly, that fight ended up being way bigger, but I would not see much of it. After the first few minutes of switching targets I was the first victim in our ranks and ended up missing out on all the excitement while seeking shelter on the other side of the wormhole the fight was going on at in my pod.

|Battle report|

19,3 billion ISK destroyed for 3 billion ISK lost

Oh well, at least we have a Ship Replacement Program...
Thanks to Sirinda for translating. 

09.01.2013 - Update
Destroyed ISK updated