Journal entry, , Jita 4-4, Caldari Navy Assembly Plant.
Open Fleet
So here I am in Jita 4-4. No more onboarding, no prescribed next step. That is pleasant. But what was I supposed to do with my newfound freedom? Aura had already listed the next Epic Arc under “Opportunities” in the Neocom. Why not.
The assignment involved ORE. Outer Ring Excavations is New Eden’s largest independent mining conglomerate. It mines ore, but it also develops mining ships and the technology behind them. The assignment began with a missing ORE employee. Apparently no one wanted to explain what had happened to her. Unfortunately, I cannot go into details here — I gave someone my word not to speak about it publicly. It was no routine job, and it was worth the effort.
For the first mission I was supposed to bring a fitted Venture . I still had one sitting in Manifest, so I flew back. It would have been faster to buy a new one in Jita, but I wanted to hold on to my ISK.
The Venture is a mining frigate — the first mining ship most capsuleers get to know. Two mining lasers and a modest mining hold. Cheap enough that I did not need to keep a running loss calculation in my head while mining.
For the second mission I was given a brand-new Pioneer . The mining destroyer has more mining lasers, a significantly larger mining hold, and its own yield bonuses. Compared with the Venture, the difference was immediately noticeable.
I couldn’t even board it yet. I was missing the required skills; until that moment I hadn’t known this ship class existed at all.
The training queue showed more than a day. For someone without a capsule link a single day of training for an unfamiliar ship class would have been absurdly short. As a capsuleer, I can load the necessary knowledge directly through my neural interfaces. Even one day was too long for me: I wanted to fly the mission now. So I used part of the 1,000,000 free skill points from my one-time starter package.
Mining works for me. I already knew that. It is relaxing to work through one asteroid after another. Lock an asteroid, activate the lasers, keep an eye on the mining hold. The steady rhythm is almost meditative, and my wallet keeps growing. I had planned to try other activities. But after being given such a capable Pioneer, I did not want to park it as soon as the arc was over.
In the Fleet Finder I came across an open mining fleet a few jumps away: free boosts, no entry fee, and an Orca pilot organizing it.
I flew there, joined through the Fleet Finder, and warped to a member. Shortly afterwards I was in an asteroid belt among ships considerably larger than mine. Nilja’s Orca made the strongest impression.
An Orca is an industrial command ship. Nilja had placed fully fitted Ventures in the fleet hangar so that new pilots could get started immediately without having to buy anything first. No time lost on equipment runs.
Then there was the mining boost: near the Orca, my Pioneer extracted noticeably more than I could have managed alone. More ore, more ISK.
The most important feature was compression. Normally: lasers on, mining hold fills up, back to the station, unload, return. That costs time. Near the Orca, I could compress the ore to a fraction of its original volume. I no longer had to stop to unload; the mining hold seemed to last forever. In one afternoon I mined ore worth over 20 million ISK with the Pioneer without docking once.
Running an Orca is not free. Fuel, burst charges, tied-up capital: it is a real cost center. Nilja paid those costs herself and charged no entry fee. I was told that ten percent of my yield was a reasonable tip. That is what I paid.
In the fleet chat, experienced pilots willingly answered every new-pilot question. I learned there that “o7” means both greeting and farewell — a stylized salute. Capsuleers also wish each other “fly safe!” when leaving.
At one point someone joined, chatted with us for a while, and mentioned anomalies and wormhole scans along the way. Then messages appeared like “Cheetah in home hole” and “probes out in home hole”. I had no idea what a home hole was, or even what “ Cheetah ” was supposed to mean. Slang from wormhole dwellers? Nobody else asked, so I assumed it was another piece of fleet vocabulary I still had to learn.
When Nilja announced that everyone should recall their drones before moving to the next belt, he immediately asked whether there was a problem. That was when I finally asked whether he was in the right fleet chat.
He was not. “IM IN THE WRONG FLEET!!!” he wrote, followed by “OH MY GOD IM SO SORRY”. He apologized, said goodbye, and left. We got a good laugh out of the whole thing. “Cheetah in home hole,” at least, could wait.
Over the following days I returned several times and trained a few mining skills so I could use better modules.
A corporation would have been the institutional alternative. Application, admission, mutual expectations. The Fleet Finder is something different: you show up, contribute, and leave. No lead time, no long-term commitment. Even so, I spent a few hours working with capsuleers I had never met before.
Open fleets exist for more than just mining. Missions, incursions, exploration — the Fleet Finder lists whatever is currently active. I have not tried any of those yet.
Mining will not be my main activity. But when I want to mine and there is an open fleet in the Finder, I sign up. More yield and no station runs are reason enough.
Fly safe!
— Ariane Quell