Working harder not smarter

Your mission should you chose to accept it:  "I Lost My Stuff (2 of 2)". 

I do far too little PV anything.  For me so far; Eve has been farmville (a crime according to some).  Well, time to get involved in blowing things up apart from the Iterons (or even the Orca's) that I fly.  And by blowing up, I actually causing the blowing up rather than receiving it.

It's a mission from a level 1 agent; should be easy as.

The rewards : some crappy blueprint copy, 160K ISK as a bonus, but most importantly "1.725%" Caldari faction standing (or about 0.1 for me at the moment).

I do some web searching and the cosmos missions are not as well documented as other missions.  I do however find "Hint: This item is a random drop in Contested Plagioclase Field within the Contested Caldari Lai Dai Refinery"

So; it's a level 1 mission; can't be that hard.  I know I do very little combat; and what I do have is the larger ships (recently got Battleship 5 - woo hoo).  However, battleships don't fit. The acceleration gate restricts you to cruiser and below.  

Ok; I have spent some time in a destroyer doing career agent missions.  It is a level 1 mission; it will be fine.  I actually swap out the spare 'detritus' (Career missions need mining lasers; repairers and very little DPS), and head in.

This room is the toughest fight I have experienced.  Many waves of ships, 8 or so to a wave; each wave 50 k apart.  I clear out three groups, and the first one has respawned already.  Bless it.

Finally an unrelated ship turns up.  I primarily fly in wormholes, so unrelated ships mean bad things. However, this one clears up a couple of waves of ships, and finally the wave is cleared, and I race off to the acceleration gate for the Plagioglase field.

This next wave is tough. I clear 1/2 of the wave at range, then get both scrammed and webbed, and ... well I didn't really want that ship anyway - it obviously had a crap fit!

Mmm.

I grab a logi pilot and a DPS pilot and put them both in cruisers; a Scythe and a Moa, and refit my baby pilot into an Algos.  This will blitz it.

Room 1 clears easy enough and off to the Plagioglass field.  About waves of Wave 1 down; Wave 2 down; Wave 3 happens and the Scythe gets targetted and is down into armor and warps away. Grr.  Our Moa and Algos continue on.  We take some additional damage and decide to warp squad out and repair up.  Except the Algos *now* gets a web and is scrambled seeing the Moa warp to safety.  A valiant fight down to 2 remaining 'rats' before it pops.

Anyone spot the deliberate (ok maybe not so deliberate newbie) errors.  Well I do.  Fight together or warp together folks.  Look after your healers.  Work out who is scramming you and get them first. ... Fit a ship properly already.  L2P.

However, this was a Level 1 blessed agent.  How hard can it be?  There is next to nothing on the web for this mission, well at least not what I find from google.

By now hours have gone past, but it gives storyline level standing and I will not give up!

I call on yet another pilot.  This time someone who has shot things before and knows what he is doing (I hope).  I invite him to bring along 3000 units of Isogen to do the prequal mission.  It will however take until after downtime for him to get to the system (Airmia).

So; fleeted up; Once more unto the breach; and we absolutely blitz the first room.  A cake walk.  sigh.  (self confidence not too great just now). Then I notice 2 other ships in the room again; clearing crap out.  The plagioglase room goes pretty much the same.  The NPC's are downed in short order, with a whole lot of ships killed by our fellow visitors. 

Loot the wrecks, and nothing interesting.  I ask our fellow visitors what they are up to; and they are here for some reports.  We chat some more and says he thinks he might have my drop (Kusan Niemenen's Missile Launcher).  While chatting the NPC's respawn and we again clear up quickly enough; this time I get my drop.  Woo hoo.

The fellow visitor says he has found them, has 5, and I offer 1M each (someone else surely wants to buy these for cheap faction rep or maybe an alt of mine),  he offers them up on contract.  I accept.

Facepalm.  Not at the accepting the contract; that's fine.  It was that I bought cruisers (not our preferred class); spent hours, when I could simply have looked at this.

250K, in my station, as a contract.

Working harder and not smarter.