Ore theft

After breezing through more than 20 missions I wanted some excitement. I headed back where I started to see if there was anything interesting. Someone had left a container at the station so I checked inside. Some loot, nothing fancy, but why not take it? There was a popup explaining that if I did that it would be stealing and thieves could be dealt with. Overview told me the station was at docking range so I took the loot anyway and docked immediately. I got free stuff, but there was a 15 minute aggression timer. If I undocked the person I stole from could start shooting at me without CONCORD intervention. I had seen corpses around the station before, could I share their fate for this? I spent the next 15 minutes reading EVE Knowledge Base while feeling a bit like a criminal, but not at all in a bad way.

Now that wasn't exactly what I would call exciting, so after the timer was up I undocked and warped to an asteroid belt. As this was in the high end of high security space there were no NPC pirates to be found. Just a couple of miners in there drilling the rocks away. Most were newbies like me. They were just snailpacing onwards on their path to prosperity while I intended to find the fastlane to fame and glory. I even found a hulk in one of the belts, stripping the asteroids bare with it's huge beams...

I continued to go through the belts until I saw another container, right next to a mining frigate. I was curious so I looked inside - there was more veldspar in there than I could possibly squeeze into the rifter I was flying. The container was owned by the guy right next to it, the one flying the the measly mining frigate. I bookmarked the can, took some of the ore and then quickly warped back to station just to be sure. It wasn't much, but stealing it was a bit exciting. I went straight back to the bookmark to take some more. The guy stopped mining and warped off. He wrote to the local chat that there was a scary pirate flashing red at the belt he just left. I wasn't sure what was going to happen so I headed back to the station and stayed in there for a while thinking about the whole thing. Stealing in a frigate wouldn't be profitable. I would need a vulnerable industrial ship to commit the Grand Theft Ore and that could be risky. A full load of dense veldspar on a wreathe would be worth around half a million ISK. Would that be worth ruining the day for a complete stranger? Could I do that all day long? Probably not.