Daily Update #2

A while ago, I promised to do daily updates when nothing really worthy of a full post happened that day.  Obviously, I've sort of failed at fulfilling that promise, but hopefully I can start fixing that now.

Anyways.... what happened to me today?  Really, not that much.

I spent a few hours mining in my Covetor and pulled in about four jetcans of ore, more than I've ever been able to do in one sitting before.  In general, stuff was pretty boring, but after refining the ore, the estimated price was 43 million ISK.  Considering it usually sells for a lot more in the nearest trade hub, I've made back all of the money I spent yesterday.  So, cool beans.

Annoying Loki

I had an encounter with a Loki today that showed me I have no idea what I'm doing with my D-Scan. I was sitting around in the early morning, right after downtime, and a guy belonging to what looks like a pirate corp jumps into the system.  It takes me about thirty seconds to check all his standings and his corp, which is way too long if you ask me, especially since at that hour we were the only two people in the system.

I use my D-Scan, but my settings are messed up and it doesn't work like it should.  It takes me another ten seconds to get it working properly, and I finally manage to see what sort of ship he's flying.  It's a Loki, which meant that I wasn't really in any danger from a gank, but I didn't realize that at the time.

He keeps popping in and out of my D-Scan every few minutes or so.  I know that he can't be jumping in between systems, because his name never vanishes off of local.  I figured he was just docking and undocking from the system's one station, but just to make sure I align to it and put D-Scan on sixty degrees.

He doesn't show up.

In the end, he left, but for the entire time he was in the system, I had absolutely no idea where he was.  I probably could have been dead several times over if he had meant me any harm.  As I later found out from people I was talking to, his ship was far more expensive than mine and posed no threat to me, but if he had had any bad intentions, my Covetor would now be forgotten space debris floating around an asteroid belt.

Lessons Learned

I asked a whole lot of questions about staying safe while mining and about the D-Scan, and I learned some very valuable lessons.

• D-Scan does not show range on objects that do not appear in your overview.  I didn't know that before.
• I should keep the D-Scan window below where I have local chat positioned, on the lower left side of my monitor.  Whenever I mine, I should always be using it.  I like to think of it as a radar warning reciever, the thing that tells aircraft if a missile or other aircraft's fire-control radar is trying to lock on to them.
• I should find a belt where the system's stargates and stations are all further away than the D-Scan's maximum range, and warp out if I see any combat ships show up.  If I can't find a belt that far out, I should drop the range on the D-Scan to be below the distance between me and the nearest gate or station.

Other Stuff

I forgot to bookmark a jetcan and ended up running around nearly every belt in the system trying to find it again.  Part of the confusion is that my corporation has bookmarks in the asteroid belts where they can be mined out without having to move very much.  Since I tend to mark belts by how many slots down they are in the drop-down menu, that means that "the third belt" can be two very different places depending on which menu I used.  I need to remember to save my cans' locations.