It’s not all explosions and glory in our little corp, and part of my job is housekeeping.

Being a Typhoon and Raven combo, we tend to get through a horrendous amount of Heavy and Cruise missiles, and while these are plentiful on the local markets, I tend to regard buying in ammo as a sort of failure. However, our primary business – pro-active salvage – does tend to generate a huge amount of, for want of a better term, space junk. Whole bits of Gurista spaceship, conveniently self-packaged into floating barrels, and me with the kind of obsessive compulsive disorder that means I’d rather travel 130km at 180m/s than simply leave a single loot barrel behind, all adds up to a pretty huge pile of scrap metal at our local office.

While some of it is indeed useful, for the most part, we’ve got our ships equipped with everything we need now, save the more expensive and uber Tech II equipment, which isn’t found as loot anyway. So rather than piddle about with a hundred speculative sell orders for arcane modules that few people even know, let alone use, I tend to just throw the whole lot in the trash compactor, press Reprocess and am left with some quite substantial mountains of basic minerals, suitable for manufacturing. Some of this goes into making new missiles from blueprints we’d previously bought in, but most of it needs carrying back to our HQ, some jumps away from our current agents.

This is slow work, using the larger, and effectively defenceless Industrial hauler ships, but it’s safe space (or the next best thing), and often I’ll just read a book, or watch DVDs. It needs doing, and I don’t mind. Lately though, I’ve developed a rather unsavoury habit. The Badger MkII is my hauler of choice, and it comes with far more equipment slots than you can helpfully use for hauling, so I was experimenting with a junk-loot favourite, the ‘Passive Targeting System I’. It’s a device that lets you target lock another player, without them getting yellow and red reciprocal flasheys on their Overview to warn them that you’re doing so. They see nothing. Then I use my ‘Ship Scanner I’ and ‘Cargo Scanner I’ to look inside their ships. These two devices are not counted as ‘Hostile Actions’, so I don’t get killed by the police for using them, and the people I’m scanning have no idea it’s happening.

It’s a guilty pleasure that alleviates long slow trips, but quite fascinating too – seeing what loadouts everyone else uses, and what they’re carrying in their holds. It’s also the first step in a textbook suicide bombing – determining if the target is worth losing your ship and a bit of security status over. Sometimes it can be...some of the rarer Tech 2 blueprints are easily worth more than a fully equipped Raven, and are occasionally moved about the galaxy, unprotected but for the threat of police execution. Those Ravens you see sat at the gates in the hub systems, with the blue rings flying out of them are doing just this, only with a ‘Sensor Booster’ active – the rings – to help them lock targets faster.

But I’m not a pirate, you understand…I’m just curious! It was a fascinating trip that mostly impressed on me the fact that in spite of myself, I do seem to know how to fit a ship better than most players around me…certainly for mission work anyway. And I managed to answer another long running question of mine – what is so important a cargo that you need a Freighter for? Freighters in EVE are huge cargo ships, many times larger than the Industrial class, and cripplingly expensive to buy, and train for. Turns out, they use them for exactly the same things as the rest of us…moving junk and minerals from place to place. Just they have less return trips. Somewhat dissapointing really.

I was almost sad to finish the hauling run, but on the plus side, we’d managed to gather enough junk to make a whole new battleship out of, as well as the missiles we needed. Very satisfying.

But my idle hobby is now a compulsion, and I can’t help peeking in every ship I see. Choose your fitting carefully, or face the knowledge that one of the ships passing you at the gate is me, and that I’m quietly giggling at you. More importantly, choose your cargo with care, as your cargo hold is not a private place, and less benevolent eyes than mine can also see it…