Wormhole Adventure: The Tower of Pain

The end was near. All ships marked for evacuation were now safely stored out of the wormhole. All that was left was to finalise the sale of the wormhole and hot foot it out of there. We pick up the story with Duke, just as he is dismantling the POS.


I don't know where to start... I guess for POCOs it's really easy. There's a button you push and it transfers ownership. However, this is not the case for POSs. There is really no easy way to transfer a POS. You have to unanchor the thing and let the other guy anchor it for his corp. Easy enough right? Not so much.

Just as I was about to log off and take a nap (i'm nursing a flu at the moment), I get a convo from a guy interested in purchasing our system and tower. We negotiate and after a second buyer backs out this guy wins the deal for 1.8b. We begin discussing the transfer process and as I explain it to him I'm thinking this shit sounds way too easy for EVE's standards. I offer to begin the proceedings if they pay 50% upfront and then the remaining 50% after the tower is theirs. 900mil is a lot of isk for their financier to risk so they contact Chribba to facilitate the deal.

While they are waiting for Chribba to respond I begin poking around in the POS UI to figure out how I'm going to do this. I know I cannot unanchor the tower while other things are anchored so I start unanchoring things to be ready when this deal goes down. Defenses aren't necessary since we don't have anything in the POS anyway. Then I get a message saying I can't unanchor the lasers because they have crystals in them. Now it let me load the lasers while sitting at the tower but it won't let me unload them the same way. I have to go to each one and unload them manually. Thanks EVE, I guess you don't give a shit that the whole reason I'm selling this tower is so I didn't have to go to each module and scoop shit up. After a couple of these lasers I decide that it will be easier to mess with the other mods for now.

Earlier I noticed I could power down the tower so I click that to see what happens and a popup informs me that if I offline the tower, all the mods around it will offline too. Sweet! That makes it easy. So I do it. Everything shuts down... Then I try to unanchor the mods so I can unanchor the tower when the time comes, making the transaction as simple as possible. NOPE! You can't unanchor mods with the tower offline... Why the fuck would you even give the option to offline the tower then?

So there I sit in the middle of offlined mods with no force-field protecting me from the bads out there. The tower is onlining but its gonna take 30 min... Yeah. The ships people didn't want, Ibis noob ships, Iteron V, MB's Catalyst and Shuttle, are just floating there so I start popping them with my Atron. Got a nice bounty payout for popping MB's shuttle... hehe. I already know I'm going to have issues when I try to unanchor the POS with fuel still in it so I leave the Iteron because I might need it.

Watching the timer for the tower onlining tick down... All of a sudden one of those new SOE frigs is on grid. My grid is a mess... I have all the pos mods showing so it is complete chaos. It takes me a second to realize that isn't one of our ships. Then another second to realize I'm in an Atron and not a scanning boat. OPEN FIRE! I tackle that bitch and lay into him. He dies pretty fast but a Rapier and Proteus have joined us and my Atron is soon space dust.

I tried to talk to the fellas in local as they probed for my implantless pod but they take that no chat in local to extremes in W-Space.

I then log off for a bit.

Later ...

I logged my scout in and the tower and all the mods were still there. They just popped the shield hardeners, SMA and CAA looking for loot. Funny thing is, they were offlined and unanchored meaning they had to be empty and they themselves were the loot. The SMA is worth like 20mil or something.




To be continued ...


MB.