A few nights ago, I decided to do some trading. I wanted a bit of ISK to buy my first battleship, a Raven. I found lots and lots of good deals, and proceeded to get involved in all of them. By the time I was done, I had just under 1B of goods in my cargo hold (in market price).
Now, the rule in trading is that you don't fly with more than a few hundred million in a hauler. Haulers are weak and slow, and they don't offer much protection. But would-be gankers still need to spend a hundred million or so to be able to fit a ship that can kill you before Concord shows up, so they won't attack unless they can make a profit. And since only half of what's in a destroyed ship can get looted, the ship needs to carry several hundred million.
That means my 1B in modules made me a very, very juicy target. Yet, I undocked anyway. I knew I shouldn't. I know I was pressing my luck. But I've flown that route dozens of times in the past, with cargos of up to 500M. "I'll be fine" I told myself.
One jump out of Jita, a frigate targetted me. I knew a frigate couldn't kill me, but I was a bit worried that it could pin me down until someone else arrived to help. Fortunately, I managed to warp away before he got a lock. In flight, I thought "Maybe I should stop at a station, and dump some of my cargo". Again, I shook it off, and said to myself "nah, I'll be fine".
I then jumped into the next system, and saw what every hauler dreads: a red bar in the overview, with "Tornado" in the ship type column. Red means pirate, and Tornados are the premier ganking ships in EVE. Sure enough, within a second of hitting the warp button, the Tornado locked me and fired it's massive 1400mm artillery guns. The result was predictable:
http://eve.battleclinic.com/killboard/killmail.php?id=16873981#mail
Total loss is around 954M, while the total loot value is around 500M. A very profitable kill for the pirate, assuming they had someone ready to loot my wreck. I'm not out of pocket quite that much, because I obviously paid much less in order to make a profit.
It's not to say I can't recover. In fact, I've already made up the ISK. Still, it's a loss, and it does hurt, not in the pocket book as much as the ego. But I've learned a good lesson, which is to not fly with that much cargo in an unprotected ship.
With this new found knowledge, I've started working on a better, safer way of transporting goods. That will be the subject of another post.
