Morning glory

Finding a pinata party

Pinatas are relatively uncommon in w-space. In several years (of varying levels of activity, admittedly) of living in wormholes, I've only come across two. A pinata in this context is a tower whose force field has dropped and there are several arrays left behind, hopefully with oodles of goodies inside. Cashing in on a pinata is uncommon for two reasons: with fuel blocks, PI, corp fuel notifications, and most recently buffs to haulers, it has never been easier to keep your tower fueled. The second reason is that some other w-space d-bag will likely find the pinata before you can capitalize on it, leaving you with naught but a dead tower and maybe some pos mods to shoot for free KMs. My last pinata was over two years ago, but was quite lucrative.

A few days ago I logged on for morning scanning, as did some other zombies/Australians. As we scouted through the chain, we discovered the telltale signs of a pinata - a tower with arrays but no forcefield, and no ships on dscan. So simple and yet so exciting. A few of us went over to trash it and met with no resistance - wherever the owners were, they weren't around to defend their freshly unprepared tower. Happily, it was not a trap in the form of a "bugzapper" POS, i.e. a tower that is online but has not yet had a force field activated. Bugzappers appear to be pinatas from a distance, but will target and shoot enemies on grid.

The first array to go down was a component assembly array, followed by an SMA, some CHAs, and an x-large. The dry goods were mediocre at best, with no blueprint bonanzas or piles of nanoribbons to be found. While the nightmare in the SMA was destroyed, we made off with some t2 haulers and BCs. The BSs and mining barges were too large to exit the class 1, so they were self-destructed for measly insurance payouts. As the SMA killmail illustrates, some of the ships were fitted with very nice faction mods, not all of which were destroyed. They were presumably used for carebearish pursuits, as the corporation's KB isn't exactly a hotbed of pvp activity. So, while it was a small take, it was absolutely worth an hour of work.