22/02/10 10:55 PM
| Jaspet | 43.86 |
| Hemorphite | 49.76 |
| Omber | 54.21 |
| Pyroxeres | 62.98 |
| Hedbergite | 64.65 |
| Spodumain | 74.14 |
| Veldspar | 75.97 |
| Kernite | 80.27 |
| Plagioclase | 86.08 |
| Scordite | 92.41 |
| Dark Ochre | 99.29 |
| Gneiss | 105.88 |
| Crokite | 191.13 |
| Arkonor | 220.85 |
| Bistot | 230.63 |
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On Scanning For Wormhole Space
So you are reading all of the wonderful posts about living the adventurous life out on the edges of uncharted space. You might have heard some enticing tales about the bountiful harvests to be had from slaying Sleepers and easy access to high end ores. The main thing is, you’ve heard about all the inherently cool things about living in a wormhole, now you’re ready to make it a reality. In order to help you, here is some information from the Wormhole Engineers [né Dark Star Galactic Engineers - Wormhole Division] as we learn from our wormhole operations.
The decision to explore in wormholes has a very low barrier to entry. Skill-wise, all you’ll need [theoretically] is Astrometrics trained to level 3, an astrometrics frigate [Heron, Magnate, Imicus, Probe], an Expanded Probe Launcher and some Core Scanner Probes. While these are the minimums really for finding a wormhole, you’ll likely benefit from training [should go without saying]
- Your racial frigate skill higher or a Covert Ops Frigate [Tech 2 astrometrics frigate]
- Astrometrics to level 5 and picking up a couple of additional scanning support skills
- Astrometric Rangefinding will increase your probes scan strength which is essential to finding the harder sites
- Astrometric Pinpointing reduces your scan deviation which makes your scans more accurate
- Finally, Astrometric Acquisition lowers the amount of time each scan takes which adds up when locating a specific site will take 4-7 scans
You are looking for ‘Cosmic Signatures’ in general and specifically the ones of type, “Unknown”. These represent the wormholes that you are going to kill you later. I’ll skip explaining exploration because it’s been done several times over by better scanners than I. For a start, check out CCP’s own video on the process. You’ll learn how to better position your probes with time and experience, but it will get you started. Google is your friend for finding some other videos and tutorials on scanning, so I’m not going to bother trying to explain it.
Before I go any farther, let me recommend that you go read Blake’s post about how to survive in a wormhole. It doesn’t do you any good to find the wormhole only to turn around and have it beat you senseless multiple times. Never mind, strike that. If you spend any time at all in wormhole space, you ARE going to die. Repeatedly. It is still a good idea to read the above post. Don’t worry if you don’t understand everything, you will come to understand it as you wake up in your clone the next couple of times. While you are at it, update your clone.
Take some time and get to know the scanning interface and it’s quirks and foibles. You are going to be spending a lot of time using it and won’t want to have to learn it while under fire in an emergency. Get in the habit of cloaking to scan. I’ve seen way too many people out scanning in wormholes in an uncloaked ship and most of them managed to get popped. If you survive, you will hopefully be left with a set of warp-able points that you can bookmark and explore. Sleepers love to uncloak ships and they will vaporise astro-frigates faster than you can click a target to warp out. I’ll try to put together a rough look at various ships and how they perform in wormholes in another post.
I once had a dream of a gleam, of a gleam in my eye
And I’ll have it till the day I die
I had a thought bubble of trouble, of trouble and strife
And I’ll have it for the rest of my life -(TMBG)
- It Sucks
The warm fluid surrounds me. The merest thought engenders actions that serve only to indulge the slightest whim of my fancy. The only thing missing is euphoria of human contact – and that is easily overlooked in lieu of the near omnipotent control available via my synaptic pathways. I am the capsuleer. I am immortal.
And good thing too – when a capsuleer falls asleep in their pod, bad things™ happen. Take for instance the most recent escapades while harvesting gas. It’s not a difficult job and sometimes your mind wanders. This time it hasn’t just wandered, my mind has set out on full scale expedition to calculate the inertial energy involved in blinking. My mind was gone, Gas Gone, as it were. Fortunately, my partner, the estimable scanner extraordinaire and EFT mogul, Mick was along with me, happily sucking in his own share of gas. [With his Tech 2 harvesters and the ability to mount 5 of them, his share is larger than my share.] So at least one of us is on guard, paying attention to d-scan, watching for probes/ships and generally preparing for anything.
Um, no.
Ripping a hole in fabric of time and space, two cocky jockeys in significantly powerful ships step appear right next to us, locking us down and shredding what little is left of our ships, pods and dignity. I know they had to have cheated because sure an alarm would have went off in my head [if I had been paying attention] and no one can sneak up on Mick. Unless of course we happen to be mining gas. I am more convinced that some of the fullerenes either leaked from the cargoholds into our pods, or messed with our sensors.
In a heart and frankly hull pounding few seconds, I am relieved of a small Gallente cruiser with 4 gas harvesters and some expanded cargo modules. Mick is in a similarly equipped Dominix and well insured. In the interminable few seconds that it takes for the foes BS to lock our pods, we are desperately and simultaneously trying to exit the warp disruption bubble the Onyx has thrown up, spamming the ‘warp to’ button and praying that something would go horribly wrong with their systems in the meantime.
The last thing I happened to see before waking up somewhere else is my pod flying through Mick’s wreck and thinking, “It should be bigger for a battleship”. I honestly feel a bit dazed and confused, not unlike waking in an unfamiliar room after traveling and having to remember that you even made a trip. It begins to filter back in bits and pieces. Gas. Exequror. Onyx. Domi. Megathron. Pods. Flash. At first it seems strange to be in a station, having flown so long without docking. And where is my ship? My pod? “Oh, look, someone left a selection of ships for me to chose from. How thought of her.”
So now I get to start over. The ship and modules were relatively cheap and no great loss. I have other. I lost some expensive implants, but frankly I considered them lost soon after I plugged them. If I was worried about losing them, I would have never undocked, let alone fly around in a wormhole. I managed to somehow remember that I had a jump clone somewhere in the universe with some old ‘plants in her head and after running into every conceivable error managed to repeat the whole unpleasant wake up in an unfamiliar place routine of a few minutes ago.
This station turns out to actually be quite far away from anything, which I think maybe why the clone was out here to begin with. I have also neglected to leave a ship in the hangar resulting in a hurried search of the market for an appropriate shuttle or frigate to get out of the system in. A few moments later I am busy flying a Gallente shuttle across seventeen jumps back home, 11 through low-sec. Why choose the low-sec route? Well, I just lost my ship and several million in implants, who really cares if I lose a few more low level implants. Besides, the 29 jumps through high-sec was more likely to kill me.
In a final twist of irony, I had been trying to get out of the wormhole for a couple of days to get some manufacturing jobs installed for some of my corp-mates. Using this fortuitous depodification, I zip over, put the job in the oven to bake. Carpé Diem.
Sensing that enough adrenaline has finally burned off to allow an attempt at sleep, I decide to call an end to flying and dock up for interim. I am immortal, yes, sleepless, no.
When the hands that operate the motor lose control of the lever
When the mind of its own in the wheel puts two and two together
When the indicator says you’re out of oil should you continue driving anyway? -(TMBG)
[caption id="attachment_441" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Turkish Gas Rooster"]  [/caption]
I’m not sure what to make of the fullerene gasses that we harvest in the wormholes. They are by and large fairly low revenue items, plentiful to locate and annoyingly mundane. I have to admit upfront that I am a compulsive miner. I didn’t start mining because it was a “quick revenue stream” early in a missioning or PVP career. I’m a miner because I really hate rocks. Or because I am good at it and like to keep track of rocks and what is going on with all the systems in and with my ship.
Gas on the other hand in mundane. Even for an especially hardcore mining carebear. The cycles are blessedly short, but so is the yield and the satisfaction of filling your cargo hull is just not the same. The effect is compounded by the amorphous cloud that you are working it that varies from too bright to look at to obscuring your view of the heavens around you. I feel like a waitress at a very stodgy gentleman’s club full of cigar smoke and nearly dead investment bankers hoping to die before they have to go home.
Having said all this, I’ll continue to harvest gas and clear out ladar cosmic signatures.
[caption id="attachment_418" align="alignleft" width="64" caption="I Am Your New Master"]  [/caption]
[caption id="attachment_421" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Bistot Is Primary!"]  [/caption]
Quick note: It looks like Bistot has edged Arkonor out as the mineral of highest refined value. Due in large part to the fact that Zydrine hasn’t fallen in price as much as Megacyte.
Which describes how you’re feeling all the time
Which describes how you’re feeling all the
Feeling all the time – (TMBG)
Who knew, but apparently the lack of postings has something to do with CCP and the immanent release of the newest expansion Dominion for EVE. We’re all on pins and needles wanting to know what is going on and how it will affect us and where it will all lead. This fascination/ apprehension over the coming changes is responsible at least in part for the lack of verbage being generated by yours truly.
Or it could simply be, we’ve been busy with our projects and are trying to keep them all afloat. On the training front, the pursuit of Amarr Command Ships continues apace, but my arch-nemesis has managed to beat me there. I’ll have to settle for being the gal who keeps her alive when the DPS pilots all get ganked. Of course that is assuming my Guardian isn’t the primary anyway. 
Probably needless-to-say, but the coming changes have people screaming their heads off on the forums about gimping this and nerfing that or buffing the other guys stuff at the expense of ignoring their own personal needs. Let’s just be honest with each other, what we all really want to see are faction Destroyers and Battlecruisers.
I know, I know, I said that I would quit
All right, I promise, no more after this
You don’t know how I’ve tried
To forget what it was like – (TMGB)
So things have been busy and I’m at a bit of a loss where to start. Who knew that managing a bunch of raving lunatics with delusions of insecurity could be so much like running a corporation. All that time at the asylum is finally paying off. [Warning, excessive use of <sarcasm> makes my hands overly tired so just apply liberally where you feel it's appropriate to make it interesting for you to read.]
Towers: Apparently you have to keep putting fuel in them. Otherwise minor details like shields, guns, labs all go offline.
Labs: Mostly full of jobs, except for when something happens to a tower.
Wormholes: Much fun. I hope to stop running errands and get back in them.
Combat: I think I remember fitting a ship with something other than cargo expanders once upon a time. It was cool. I died.
Skills: Battlecruiser V was cool and the implications are still settling in. Though it’s nice to be able to jump in all the racial BCs, albeit without being able to weaponise them currently. I can fit a whopper tank to them all, but not so much DPS. I blame the ferrets.
Corporation: Growing. Leaps and Bounds. More people means more annoying opinions opportunities, but also more things to manage. Need to train Delegation [5% workload reduction per level] to level 4 and start handing off some of this stuff.
Organisation: What? Hmm? I filed that here in the stack of papers on my desk back in the tower that went offline. I’ll get back to you January 4th. Some year.
Mining: See combat. [I think I warped to a belt in a NOS Drake. Sadness.]
Invention: Lot’s of invention going on. Need to get some of it finished.
So a little bit everything goes a long way toward getting nothing accomplished. Happy times! 
No, no, baby I ain’t convinced it ain’t so bad as you paint it
There’s plenty more heads of hair for us out there – (TMBG)
In case you don’t regularly look at minerals on the market and in case you might not noticed the prices of ore across the board have fallen sharply. In some cases, the minerals are lower than they’ve been in over a year. Things like tritanium are now abundantly available and no longer cash cows that they had become. Even the high end minerals that have historically been expensive are coming down. I don’t have a picture for the greater market as a whole as I just don’t keep up with everything, but I do keep a fairly close eye on minerals [the ore chart keeps getting updated].
I’ll refrain from speculating on the causes. Causality is a slippery slope that eventually leads to politicians philandering and your milk turning bad.
The results have not yet begun to filter down, but a cursory analysis [scribbling on back of an Al Abd picture in my pod] indicates that it could affect Tech 1 production costs by as much as 15%. While this good for the producers, I doubt we’ll see a corresponding change in consumer prices anywhere near that much, if at all. Maybe it will finally pay off to make T1 things again?
I like to be able to quickly evaluate a set of asteroid choices and decide what I want to mine. It can be confusing to me to have to get out the spreadsheet and calculator to figure out how much it’s worth to mine such-and-such if I refine it and sell it. To that end, I started the Isk Per Jetcan calculation that were originally posted on the front page. I’ve modified that a bit now to just be the Isk Per M3 calculations and then to know how much I can get relative to the others.
The combined Isk Per M3 and Isk Per Jetcan table is listed below. I try to keep these updated on a weekly basis for my own usage, but you are welcome to refer to them as you like.
| Omber |
61.83 |
1,700,364.81 |
| Jaspet |
63.20 |
1,737,866.53 |
| Hemorphite |
76.66 |
2,108,249.00 |
| Pyroxeres |
85.09 |
2,339,987.41 |
| Scordite |
93.35 |
2,567,046.59 |
| Hedbergite |
95.51 |
2,626,552.05 |
| Plagioclase |
103.01 |
2,832,832.01 |
| Kernite |
103.60 |
2,848,914.30 |
| Veldspar |
105.10 |
2,890,386.05 |
| Spodumain |
176.06 |
4,841,549.30 |
| Dark Ochre |
183.82 |
5,055,147.06 |
| Gneiss |
196.46 |
5,402,750.49 |
| Crokite |
363.37 |
9,992,732.56 |
| Bistot |
492.13 |
13,533,464.57 |
| Arkonor |
504.03 |
13,860,887.10 |
In complement to Penny’s post about Drake fittings and changes, I thought I would post my own fit about how I have been flying it for maximum possible tanking. It currently tanks about 736 dps and it capacitor stable. There are other fittings that are also cap-stable with higher resists, but much lower dps tanks that I’m curious to try as well. I’ve dropped the Caldari Navy Launchers for the WH as I’m none to keen on replacing them.
High Slots:
7x Caldari Navy Heavy Missile Launcher (Scourge Heavy Missile)
Mid Slots:
Heat Dissipation Amplifier II
Magnetic Scattering Amplifier II
Invulnerability Field II
3x Large Shield Extender II
Low Slots:
4x Shield Power Relay II
Rigs:
3x Core Defence Field Purger I
Drones:
5x Hobgoblin I
[Statistics]
Effective HP: 64,578
Tank Ability: 735.29 DPS
Damage Profile – (EM: 25.00%, Ex: 25.00%, Ki: 25.00%, Th: 25.00%)
Shield Resists – EM: 66.62%, Ex: 70.25%, Ki: 64.30%, Th: 72.35%Capacitor: Stable at 55%
Volley Damage: 1,539.62
DPS: 195.40
This is one of those posts that doesn’t write itself. It doesn’t leap from your hands to the page [or fingers to the keys] with synaptic firing of ideas and thoughts that must be recorded quickly. It is quite frankly, the hardest post I think I have ever had to sit down and commit. It would be far easier to just walk away from it and try to ignore it, the pain and passion stuffed under the covers. Hot chocolate, ice cream and bon bons can only go so far before it must be dealt with. And dealt with is must be, or else there is no future and nothing more to move on to.
Lou Ferrigno died.
It was quick and painful. The Manticore uncloaked off the after impeller drives and locked and pointed my valiant Hulk. Almost immediately his friends were dropping out of warp, locking and firing. It was over before I could really do more than announce it on our com channels. Our hauler had just warped way, one other Hulk pilot lost his life as well as his boat and a third got back home easily.
A quick jump into a combat ship [any combat ship] and return warp, but they had already salvaged the wreck and cloaked or moved on. We chased the ghosts of combat past around the yard for an hour or so, never quite connecting or confronting our losses. It was probably for the best, as the taste of blood was fresh in my mouth [I bit my lip] and I was likely to have made even more mistakes and lost more ships. I am not, have never been, and likely won’t be a combat pilot of much renown.
And so it ends, the faithful friend of over a year, passing into the night of stars. There were many happy moments we shared together and I am choosing to remember them as well as the loss. I have already purchased and refit another ship in Lou’s absence. It’s not a replacement, but in time I will grow to love it just as much as I love my other children. I’ve been out and active in both the wormhole [WH] system we’ve set up in as well as flying around high security space. I’m coping and manage to contain my crying to the cargo hold of Luxury Yacht.
.On a related note, I’m learning Russian… Там будет кровь.
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