Security Status Treadmill

Within hours of raising his security status Starwalker was doing his best to reduce it again. Initially it was a Test pilot that insisted on relighting another cynosaural beacon despite his cyno-ship having just been destroyed. Indeed, the next cyno-ship was destroyed with the pod and then repeated only a few minutes later. Starwalker's security status had fallen from -3.7 to -4.5 and he hadn't even visited Hek yet.

So Starwalker had to do some ratting and then handed in another security tag to reduce his security status back down again to -4. It was not fun and Starwalker realised that he had been too hasty, he had increased his security status without fully realising that he was putting himself on a security status treadmill. Every time he killed something he would need to kill one or more rats, or buy the requisite security tags on the market, primarily Transporter tags.

The big issue for Starwalker was that each act of combat aggression had a bigger impact on his security status than each act of law enforcement. On average he would need to kill four low security system dwelling battleship rats for each act of aggression and each podding would dramatically increase the number of rats (~40) required.

The alternative would be to buy Transporter tags, which was around 40m ISK each at current prices, in short, it would be very expensive to maintain a security status above -4.5. Traditionally null-security system rats (battleships) had a bigger improvement to security status but Starwalker could not be bothered to check it.

Starwalker was completely unsure that he had either the will or the desire to maintain his security status above -4.5 and so he decided that he needed to move his Megathrons from Hek to Hadozeko immediately. He put together a simple battleship fit to make the short journey. He had not yet completed Large Hybrid Turret V training, so he fitted some medium blasters as a temporary measure rather than waste ISK on meta level large blasters.

He felt that the chance of being tackled on gate was quite small and so he took the risk, especially as a non-flashy pilot. The two battleships were successfully moved to Hadozeko without incident. Starwalker had also purchased a Hyperion in Evati and since he was moving battleships he decided to move that one too and it was shifted to Gultratren. That short journey was also similarly uneventful.

Whilst he had every intention of losing these three battleships he was not quite ready to fly them yet, he still wanted to complete Large Blaster Specialisation to at least III or IV and perhaps one or two other skills before letting them die in a fire.

Given that the battleships had been moved out of Hek there was no particular reason for Starwalker to be concerned about maintaining his security status above -4.5. Indeed, whilst he was flying backwards and forwards moving some battleship equipment he had three separate fights (Slasher, Rifter and Incursus) in Hadozeko and he even managed to pod the Slasher pilot. Strangely his security status decreased but it did not seem to reflect a podding.

In hindsight, Starwalker should have considered his security status more deeply, to avoid unnecessary repetition of increasing security status he would need to stop shooting other pilots. That was not going to happen. So, using security tags was useful for a quick one time increase in security status but given that Starwalker would continue to shoot ships and pods it was not a good solution for him. He should have paid Black Frog Logistics or similar to move his battleships, that would have been a more effective use of time and ISK.