Zkillboard Data Mining

There are 2604 wormholes and you still end up killing the same people over and over again. While on a small roam with a couple of my corpmates, I entered a C2 wormhole from another C2. Bob works in mysterious ways. It was J110316 and I've returned there after almost a month. I was having a deja-vu. Quick inspection of the killboards of that system yields:


Talk about coincidence. It was another Magnate kill, but this time by a smartbombing Legion, and the Legion pilot was from the same corp and still online. Locators report that the pilot is in a wormhole. I scan the system with my Stratios and find some relic and data sites. Perfect! Even though the kill was over a week ago, I take my chances and login my bait, an Imicus pilot, and start making my way over there.

This bait wasn't as juicy as the one from the previous Proteus kill, but, judging from the killboards, the Legion pilot is interested in T1 frigates, also. Although the bait had a reputation of a spy (joined a corporation and bumped a Dread out of the forcefield), it did not show on the killboard, which were very credible by having some explorer losses already. This time I wasn't going to leave this to chance, so I've fitted a warp scrambler on the Imicus with a relatively decent EM tank, although I could've done better.

I was pretty certain that the Legion didn't see my Stratios on the way in. He was the only one online from that corp at that moment. I entered from an incoming C2 wormhole at the edge of the system and I suspected he was either watching the highsec static or was sitting at a tactical at one of the sites.

My corpmates provide a warp-in for the bait in the neighboring C2. After the Imicus is in, I start scanning the system again, but this time with the bait, to make things credible. The Imicus warps to the site and my blood already starts pumping. I start hacking and soon after I hear the sweet sound of pulsing smartbombs. Imicus initiates tackle on the Legion. GOT HIM! I warp my Stratios and take over the tackle. Legion pilot logs off in the middle of the fight, but his fate is sealed:


https://zkillboard.com/kill/50821642/

While logged off, his capsule e-warps because we didn't have any dictors. While my corpmates wait at the logoff spot, I refit to a combat probe launcher and proceed with scanning. I'm not actually in a rush, capsule still has a 15 minutes combat timer. We destroy the capsule and, soon after, ex-Legion pilot logs back in. We had a friendly conversation and some funny comments were written on Zkill:

After scooping the loot I was thinking: "hey, this is profitable, I wonder who else likes hunting explorers in smartbombing T3s". With this idea in mind I started doing something very autistic and wrote a python script to scrape Zkill and extract explorer kills in wormhole space which were done by T3 cruisers using EM smartbombs. I'll spare you details, but if you're interested in the source code, here it is:
https://gist.github.com/farshield/0b525fac05b39d4415d9

I came up with this list for the last couple of months or so:

Tandail 19
AlienFury 14
Apex Bex 13
Padme Naberie 12
PostOp Transexual 8
Deadly Maneuvers 7
Arjar Ammar 7
nakedbulldog 4
MRS BIRCH GREGSBITCHER 4

Congratulations to all the above pilots who made it to the top, even though the list might not be accurate (because not all of them post to Zkill). I'm interested more in the pilots who hunt in the same system. Two of them I already killed and I was looking at MRS BIRCH and Apex Bex, but I'll need to find their home systems first.

I have stumbled upon MRS BIRCH's home system by pure accident later, but the bait operation failed. I made a couple of mistakes and he was too cautious, but we had a friendly convo and now we're friends. Sigh, I really should stop befriending my targets.

Anyway, my attention moved towards Apex Bex and the name sounded strangely familiar.

To be continued...