Suitcase Challenge Day 71/90: Bye bye Porpoise
stargrace 
It was bound to happen sooner or later. I was mining in an anomaly with a retriever & porpoise combo on (what was until then) a quiet day – and suddenly someone showed up on d-scan. Normally, I don’t constantly run compression on the porpoise because it makes the ship a sitting duck that cannot move until it’s out of siege. I turn on compression only when I have to, and I check first to make sure for the minute or so that I can’t move, all is well.
This time it was just bad luck on every front. First. I attempted to warp off to a safe, but I didn’t confirm anything and instead was looking at my other monitor moving the retriever to a different safe. Turns out, the porpoise might have been out of siege, but I didn’t actually warp her off grid, so when the attacker showed up, I was basically already dead – but it didn’t have to be that way. The porpoise is tank fit, with 97k EHP, and drones. There was just 1 person on me, and it was taking them a LONG time to do any damage, in the meantime, my drones were hacking away at them (warrior II), and I thought if I could just swap the retriever to another ship, I might make it.
Unfortunately, it did not happen the way I wanted it to, and I lost the porpoise. Thankfully, this ship is really not THAT expensive, and in a bonus event, the compression pieces both dropped as loot, and those things are HUGE, so unless you have over 3500m3 of space, you can’t just haul them away. The attacker even left my frozen corpses behind so I grabbed those. I flew in with a hauler, grabbed 80m worth of loot that they had to leave behind (including my compressed ore) and aside from the loss of the hull, it still ended up being an ISK positive day. For now I’ve decided not to bother replacing the porpoise, I know I can compress with the Orca, but I rarely uncloak it these days because I’m terrified of the ISK loss. The cost just seems to keep going up – when I bought my first one it was 450m and now they’re well over 2b just for the hull.
Compression is a big deal when you’re mining out in space. Ore is huge and awkward, and ideally you want to remain out on the grid as long as possible. It was only a matter of time before I lost some ships, I’m just glad it wasn’t any worse than it was.
Fly your way o7