While I'm not a complete Pirate, I'm not a complete carebear either, I more than often enough, engage in acts of piracy in a low sec belt near you. I can also be found more often than not at the local mission runners station, doing some missions. Now, the only piracy I have ever done is belt piracy and a small amount of 0.0 piracy. I've never seen the attraction of gate camping... well, gate camping 160km off the gate and ganking flyers by.
I just don't get it. You sit off the gate, with a 3 sensor boosters and a cargo scanner, check to see if they guy has any cargo that seems worth while and then gank him, it just seems so inefficient. I mean, surely a better way of going about getting someones cargo, is to sit on the gate, wait for the guy to come through, lock him down, scan him, if there's anything you want, tell him to eject it as well as pass over a small sum of money and then let the guy go on his way? By destroying his ship, with out taking the time to simply ask for what you want, you stand the chance of destroying what you want.
As well as just being generally more effcient, its more fun and thier is more risk involved to you? You also give you're prey a chance to fight back. Take for instance last night.
I've recently become rather broke, so I was heading out to a new sector of space for me, to go do some missions for a new agent, so i didn't have insta's for the area. The station I was heading to was in low sec, not usualy a problem for me, so I don't worry too much. I jump through the gate into low sec and find a flash red megathron and geddon... sitting 150km away. Now, I'm in my mission setup in my vexor, 250mm rails, AB, Web, cap recharger, armour rep and tracking upgrades and what not. I can get about 54km, but not much more than that, I doubt I'm going to do that much dmg, so I think, "stuff it" and I warp to the next gate. They were right behind me, so instead of heading right for the gate, I turned and warped to a planet moon. I had taken a couple hits by the time I warped and was in armour. From the planet, I warped back to the gate I had come in on at 100km to see if they went back there. They hadn't. Now this is possible where I went wrong, I turned around and warped to the other gate at 100km, hoping I could land just about on top of them. I didn't... I was about 60km off from them, and well inside their optimal. I went down to a couple of volly's.
Now all I wanted to do was put up a fight, I probably could have gotten away due to the fact that they left the gate clear on the other side (There were 2 of them, the bright thing to do would have been to split up), but I wanted to at least go down in a fight. I didn't. My loss? 2x T2 125mm Rails, 4x Med Nos, 1x T2 Medium Armour Rep, 1x Fleeting Web (I think), RCU II and some other named mods I can't remember. How much of that was destoryed? IIRC, alot of it.
So this is partly a rant, but like I said, I don't mind loosing a ship, I just wanna put up a fight. So to all your budding pirates out there, please be a proper pirate and ransom your prey and if they don't pay up, then destroy them. You'll be richer at the end of the day.
Swethren
Cleared for publishing by: Ander