Before I am going to write about my experiences running my camp, I want to give you a brief explanation of the two fits I am going to use. As mentioned in the previous post, I will fly a Svipul as fast tackle, a Gnosis for additional dps and a cloaky scout to watch the high-sec side of my gate.
The Svipul Fit
High Slots: 4 280mm Howitzer Artillery II and a single Rocket Launcher. The Artillery Guns have a good optimal range of around 11 km and do an overheated 370 dps. The Rocket Launcher adds another 20 dps, but only applies damage if the target gets closer to gate. With this setup you can nicely hit anything that decloaks on your gate.
Mid Slots: 2 Sensor Booster II with Scan Resolution Scripts to increase Scan Res to 1600 (1800 with heat). This is good enough to lock anything down to T1 frigates. Only thing you won’t be able to lock are interceptors but these mostly instawarp anyways. A Tracking Computer to increase your applied damage against small moving targets, since you only have 2-3 shots to kill your target until gate guns will tear you apart. Finally, A Warp Disruptor II ( 24 km range) to point your target.
Low Slots: 200m Steel Plates, an Adaptive Nano Plating and a Damage Control II for tank. This gives you 12k ehp in Svipul defence mode, which should be enough to be hit by gate guns for around 30 seconds. A Gyrostabilizer to increase the damage of your guns.
Rig slots: A Kinetic and Thermal Armour Pump I to increase resists against the gate gun damage. The gate guns are most likely the greatest source of damage, so I prefer to tank specifically against them. A Small Projectile Burst Aerator II to further increase arty damage.
Ammunition: Republic Fleet EMP/Fusion to shoot at shield/armour tanked ships. Usually you won’t have time to switch ammo before engaging, but I doesn’t hurt to be able to. Also carry scripts for the Sensor Boosters and the Targeting Computer and some Nanite Repair Paste to repair heat damage on your modules if needed.
How to fly it:
You basically sit in sharpshooter mode and all mid-slots running 0 km from the gate. When your scout sees a target land on the other side you overheat and pre-activate the Warp Disruptor II and your guns. By this, as soon as you lock anything, they will activate automatically on the target. When the target jumps through and decloaks, you lock it, shoot once and switch to defence mode to increase you resists and ehp against the gate guns. From now on you have around 30 seconds to kill your target, align and warp out to a bookmark further than 150 km away from the gate to avoid gate guns. If you caught a big target, it is a good idea to switch the Svipul to a bigger ship at a citadel to bring more dps to the gate while the Gnosis (see further down) keeps your victim tackled.
The Gnosis Fit
This fit is conceptually very similar to the Svipul fit above, only one size bigger.
High Slots: 5 x 720mm Prototype Siege Cannons with good range (28.8 optimal) and dps (513 dps with heat). A Information Command Burst II to further increase the scan resolution of the Gnosis but also of the Svipul which should be in the same fleet.
Mid Slots: Sensor Booster IIs and a Warp Disruptor II. Additionally the Gnosis has a Stasis Webifier, a Warp Scrambler II and a MWD. By this, the Gnosis can get close to the target fast and apply the web and scram to pin down a target and preventing it from jumping back through the gate.
Low Slots: A heavy armor tank (54k ehp) with 1600mm Plates, 2 x Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II and a Damage Control II. A Gyrostabilizer II to further increase arty damage.
Rig Slots: a Medium Projectile Collision Accelerator I for more damage and a Medium Trimark Armor Pump I for more buffer tank
Ammunition: Republic Fleet EMP/Fusion against shield/armor tanked ships and Sensor Optimization Charges to boost scan resolution with the command burst module. Finally a set of Warrior II drones and some Nanite Repair Paste.
How to fly it:
The tactic is very similar to the Svipul. However, since the Gnosis cannot lock small ships fast enough, it depends on the Svipul to get initial point and then takes over to point the target if the Svipul needs to leave the grid because of gate guns. As soon as the target decloaks, you start to burn towards the target with MWD switched on. When in range, switch on the warp scrambler (10km with heat) and stasis webifier (13km with heat) to pin down the target. Since the Gnosis has much more tank, it can resist the gate guns a lot longer than the Svipul. Don’t get too close to the victim because the arty guns will not be able to hit anymore. Stay between 8-10 km off your target if possible.
How did it go?
I fitted my ships in Jita and shipped them over to Nonni, the last high sec system before my target system of Aunenen. I also bought a bunch of other ships like two Brutix, a ENI, a Megathron and an Armageddon to switch into if more dps was needed. From there I flew the ships over to Aunenen when the gate was not camped by another party.
The first thing I noticed was, that the gate is very frequently camped by the local pirate group SEV7N-SINS, that were usually camping it in a bunch of Gnosis. Looking at their killboard, these guys do not much other then to camp the three major high-sec/low-sec gates in the region (Tama, Mara and Aunenen). However, with a little patience I was able to find free time slots when my operation could take over from theirs.
I spent about 8 hours camping the gate in sessions of 1-2 hours. In general, the gate is quite busy with 50-100 ships passing through per hour, of which maybe half are travel interceptors that are impossible to catch with my setup. This still leaves a healthy 25-50 ships jumping through per hour that were possible targets. Many of these guys seem to be high sec players who just just pass through the system without any idea that they are leaving the safety of high-sec.
Within these 8 hours I managed to kill 27 unlucky guys worth 2.3 billion isk in total. Some highlights of these were this ratting Gila that engaged my Gnosis on gate, this brawling Brutix that gave a really good fight and finally this badly fitted 1.3 billion isk Badger. Many of the other kills were more badly fitted Industrials, explorers and the odd cyno ship that was passing by. However, additionally to these kills I had a bunch of good fights against target that I couldn’t kill. There was a Armageddon that was playing games with me for a while and there was even a guy jumping his Rorqual to the gate to brawl with my two backup battleships. Strangely, there are quite some mission runner battleships that jump into Aunenen that a bigger camping party could destroy.
Now to the bad part: the losses. As I said, SEV7N-SINS camp Nonni gate frequently and tried to kill me a couple of times while I was on duty. They tried different tactics from brute force Gnosisis warp to me to a cloaky Stratios pointing me after I aggressed a target. That is how they eventually managed to kill one of my Svipuls. In the end I simply did not camp whenever more than three of them were in system, which looks like it is the critical number for them to be active. One other loss happened when I engaged a ship and while I was fighting my victim a hostile fleet landed right on top of me killed my Brutix.
So in total I lost 140 mil isk (120 mil after insurance) in ships during these 8 hours. However I was able to loot 1.3 billion isk from the wrecks of my victims, mostly from a single Excavator Mining Drone dropped by one of the haulers. But even without that drop, the remaining 300 mil in loot easily replaced my 140 mil in losses. Even without the lucky drop this would result in around 19 mil isk / hour after losses, which is not bad considering most people think PVP activities cost instead of earn isk.
To sum things up, I think low-sec gate camping is a very nice activity to do with a few friends or even alone if you have at least two accounts available. With an active gate like the Nonni gate in Aunenen this can sometimes even escalate to challenging small gang PVP. Since I have all my gear in place now, I am sure I will revisit Aunenen again to see if I can score another lucky drop from a high-sec care bear.
Disclaimer: No Excavator Drones were killed for this blog post.
