25/08/10 15:39 PM
| Jaspet | 55.92 |
| Omber | 55.99 |
| Hemorphite | 62.18 |
| Pyroxeres | 68.21 |
| Hedbergite | 74.04 |
| Veldspar | 65.77 |
| Kernite | 88.68 |
| Plagioclase | 84.13 |
| Scordite | 68.17 |
| Spodumain | 75.94 |
| Dark Ochre | 95.49 |
| Gneiss | 95.24 |
| Crokite | 172.65 |
| Bistot | 216.26 |
| Arkonor | 270.56 |
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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.
Borrowing an idea from Letrange, I’ll break the following into some sections.
Old Business:
It’s been a wonderful run in the current wormhole [WH] system, but it’s time to move on. We were consistently getting Gallente and Minmatar high-security [high-sec] WH openings that made logistics a bit harder. We found another, very similar system that we are going to give a try. We had bought a second tower and wanted to switch it out for the medium one to upgrade our processes and home. The best way to handle it turned out to be set the new tower up in the new system and pull the old medium tower down to be a more transient base that moves around from place to place.
On the skills front, I’ve managed to finish up most of the science skills associated with the tech 3 invention and production. I didn’t realize how much I was specializing in science until I noticed that I had 8.5 million skill points. I also did a bit of training in electronic warfare. I have most of my engineering skills finished up and want to work on my electronics skills. I seem to have a real addiction to finishing things up in sets.
On the industrial front, we’ve started amassing a fairly large stockpile of salvage, artifacts and wormhole memorabilia. We’ve started working it over and managed to get our first blueprint copy for a Tengu electronics subsystem. We have a reactor up and are excited about the opportunities to get started.
New Business:
The new WH system has a lot of sites for us to run and we need to get started. One of the things we’ve also noticed about visitors to our systems is that they will often move right along if they don’t get signatures when they scan. So we’re going to wipe the sites out get ready to start roaming to other systems too. The benefit of having a static high-sec WH is that the logistics is greatly relieved. We now have three new [well, new to us!] recruits who bring an extensive amount of combat experience to the system. From the rest of the corporation there is an increased level of interest in the whole wormhole project.
For skills, I’m excited about getting more science skills and increasing my ability to actually manufacture these arcane things we’ve been looking for. I would like to get back to training my electronics skills and armor tanking abilities, but I’m happily putting them on hold for some more science. At some point I will need to get some combat and ship skills, but they seem so very long to complete in comparison to the skills that I’m good at [I have low perception and willpower].
We are looking at starting our T3 production in the coming weeks and getting some of the pieces to market.
So that pretty much wraps up the time to this point.
I’ve finally been able to get some time to sit down and actually play, write and most importantly fly! The second stage of wormhole operations [WH 2.0] has been proceeding at full steam. I sincerely apologize to anyone wondering what was going on. We managed to find a nice little class three wormhole system with a static, high-sec, regenerating wormhole. I’m hoping to be able to use this as our staging ground for further wormhole operations and production ventures. In effect, the wormhole space gives us a small, portable pocket of null-sec from which to operated out of, without the associated hassle of carving said bit out from some existing alliance death-grip.
It is exciting to think and dream about the future possibilities of T3 production and supply, but at the same time we need to remain grounded in reality. We’re trying to work out what our needs are as opposed to what we’d merely like or want. Do we need that large faction tower? [probably not.] Do we need the ability to manufacture the full range of T3 hulls and subsystems? [Maybe as many as we can get, but understanding that we probably can't compete with the larger alliances.]
We have for all intents and purposes created a mini-alliance with in the corp. We have a dedicated group of wormhole engineers [what we're calling the people doing everything in the WH] and another group that are still in high-sec. We’re not opposed to a full fledged alliance, but currently don’t see the benefits outweighing the costs. Perhaps in time my views will change.
In news unrelated to WH’s, I noticed that I am nine days away from celebrating my one year anniversary with the Engineers. It has been an interesting and fun time, and it is neat to look back on all of the things we’ve accomplished and learned. I’ve moved from barely flying my Retriever to being a proficient ABC miner in a fully tricked out Hulk. I’ve expanded my personal BPO collection to include most all of the other ships and modules that I like to fly and use. The corporation has moved from selling a variety of T1 modules, ships and ammunition into an ever increasing number of T2 items and ships. I know there is still a lot of things we could do and improve upon, but we’ll get there. Step by step.
After several abortive and/or unsuccessful attempt to get all of our stuff moved in to our new little circle of space that we are calling home, one of our most adventurous combat pilots found a wormhole. As Letrange mentioned recently, sometimes the best place to look is in the wormholes that connect you to other wormhole systems.
- It was only 6 jumps from where we started.
- It was in high security space.
- It had a local station.
As we’re quickly learning, there were things that obviously needed to be weighed in the balance, namely:
- The high-sec wormhole had less than four hours of life.
- The high-sec wormhole was over half depleted due to some other group exploring it.
- The only ships we had to move stuff was an Iteron Mark IV and an aging Iteron Mark I.
 So at approximately 18,000 m³ between us per trip we started taking bites out of the supplies we wanted. The modules our pilots had been requesting to refit with for encountering sleepers was fairly easy to fit. The real challenge was definitely the defensive tower arrays that had not made it in the first round.
After five or six trips, our other non-industrial, combat-oriented pilot had to head out and I decided to make as many more trips as I could. I managed about five more before the wormhole decided that it has been awake long enough and in a final surge, expunged the last of its cosmic energy.
This time though, I was on the unknown side and headed toward our tower.
I’ve decided to take the plunge and jump on the wormhole bandwagon. Several corp-mates and I are going to try to make a go of it and see if we can’t make some isk, have some fun, shoot some Sleepers and generally do some things we haven’t done before.
We planning to take a tower, fuel, ships, modules and ammo with us to see what all we can find. We’re still working on what exactly that will all look like when we actually jump through. I’ll try to post some of what we’re taking and why.
I’ve updated the ore-values-by-jetcan listing on the left sidebar. These values reflect relatively current buy-weighted, market rates for the refined products, assuming a 100% rate of refine and 0% taxes. The relative distance to market is not compared, nor are low-sec regions included. I realize again that this doesn’t fit everyone’s needs, nor does it take into account the value of Omber/Kernite on contract for mission runners. That said, it does offer a quick metric to see how profitable a certain ore is/isn’t going to be. I tend to just hit a belt or a deadspace site and work on everything from Veldspar on down. To each his own.
I also want to take this time to remind all of my industrial friends that CCP has pretty much stolen the old Doritos slogan, “Mine all you want, we’ll make more.”
Well, there’s been a complete dearth of posts from myself as I’ve had a very busy two weeks. Though I’ve been able to fly around a lot, I haven’t had much time to sit down and compile a coherent thought. [Those of you who are reading this, stop laughing at the last statement about coherence.]
We removed a couple of no-shows from the corporation. It’s always a tough decision to make, but after only popping in once after joining, you begin to wonder at their future potential. We’re about as laid-back as you can get in an industrial corporation, but we do prefer at least some warning that you might be scarce for the next couple weeks, months, years. On the flip side, we’ve had three new people join us that are shaping up nicely to be good support for the corporation.
In a comment to a previous note, someone asked about the exact difference that the training skills made in terms of skill training. I’m working on adding all of this up and will try to get a more complete answer calculated. I know for instance that training your learning skills can reduce the time to get into a Hulk from over 90 days to slightly less than 60 days [including time spent on the learning skills. Similar calculations are true for PvP, PvE and Market Mavens. I'll try to have a more complete answer for you in the future. Have to spend some quality time with my trusty calculator.
On a related note [calculations], I’ve managed to rebuild my spreadsheet [with kudos to Letrange for an interim sheet while mine was reduced to electrons] to a pre-crash state. It’s a good thing that the School of Applied Knowledge trained me well to handle this sort of thing before I started piloting around the rest of the galaxy. I can now reliably pick various BPO’s that we own and run the numbers to see if we will make a profit on them. Given that we mine almost all of our ore, the manufactured products are technically all profit, but realistically only if we make more off the pieces than we make off selling the minerals outright. We could undercut a lot of markets to move merchandise, but would only be hurting ourselves. By giving the inventory full market value, we cut into our profits as well as weaken the overall market by potentially providing a cheaper source of refinable ore. I’ve done the same thing to others by buying large quantities of items that were more profitable when refined and either resold or manufactured into to more valuable items.
I’m working at slowly rebuilding my wallet as well after spending a lot of getting some production underway. I’ve got a fairly decent supply of various T1 drones on the market and they are providing a steady [if somewhat low] amount of income. I’m also working on doing a lot of jobs for the FedMart corporation out in Everyshore. I need the ability to refine my ore out there more than I have loyalty to my Caldari upbringing.
More to follow…
I finally finished up what I considered a fairly good set of mining skills for a high-sec carebear-ette. All I’m lacking is the full set of T2 mining crystals. Additionally I thought I would start working on getting started on some production skills. I finally got that rolling along and realized I should be inventing as well.
I had decided at about three to four weeks into my pod-pilot career that I should focus on running any missions with one particular NPC corporation. I looked around at what I wanted and decided I like what Lai Dai had to offer. They covered a spread spectrum of endeavors and didn’t seems to rule anything else out. I wanted to fly for them as well, but it seems their rigorous application and acceptance procedures excluded me because of a technicality of my Achuran heritage or some such nonsense. I liked their spread of stations and coverage as well as the offerings from their LP store, not the least of which was the much vaunted ‘Highwall’ HX-2 mining implant.
So after specializing for a long time and even catching some flak from my then corp mates about not using ‘their’ corp and agents, I managed to get enough standings for a perfect refine. A couple of weeks later I was able to get a jump clone. And finally last week was able to afford my much coveted implant.
All of this to say, I have a lot of standing with them and was curious if there was a way to continue to leverage that to my benefit. Well, it goes back to one other reason I had selected Lai Dai originally. There are a lot of research and development agents within the Lai Dai corporation and they cover a large area of space and range of research endeavors. I looked at the spread and realized I have access to all off their R&D agents and was only lacking the prerequisite skill areas to begin earning research points for datacores. The datacores are requirement for invention of all kinds of various modules.
I started with Hydromagnetic Physics. Why? Well, my study of Ice Processing had required that I gain more than a passing familiarity with Hydromagnetic Physics and so I could immediately access high level agents by training Research Project Management. On a side note, RPM is a charisma heavy skill in the science field that for an Achura is painfully slow to get trained. I’ve stopped training it after four rounds as it will take another month to maximize it. In the mean time, I’ve also picked up Caldari Starship Engineering so that I can possibly work on some of the ship invention as well as sell some extra datacores.
The final skill endeavor has been to get some exploration work done. I had learned enough Astrometrics to use all the various exploration probes and some of scanning speed training, but knew that at some point I would need to move into a tech 2 ship to take full control of exploration. So I embarked on a journey to train Electronic Upgrades V I could train for a Covert Ops frigate. On a somewhat related side note, it turns out I need that for something completely unrelated. Manufacturing. Really, Manufacturing? Apparently you need various encryption methods for invention which require some skill at hacking which in turn relies upon… Electronic Upgrades V. So coming full circle, I’m training for scanning again so I can invent the T2 mining crystals so I can train for level IV of the various ore refinement skills to be able to use them in my modulated strip miner 2′s. Whew. I sure hope I don’t need to train any other skills along the way… 
Quick update to the price per jetcan of mined ore. I’ve dropped Morphite from the list as well as sorted it from least valuable to most valuable. Kernite has edged slightly back in front of Veldspar for value, but Omber is still lagging. Low-sec and 0.0 miners can still make a mint from picking up the truly massive Veld-roids that no one else bothers with.
Still scanning for some more gravimetric sites.
Gah! Argh! Crap! Good Grief!
It all runs through my head and makes my want to scream at all the little wires coming out of my head. Surely in this modern age of reason, enlightenment and more importantly interstellar, faster-than-light space travel, we could avoid something small like a software glitch. Right? Wrong.
As is more often than not the case, when something goes wrong, it goes Completely, Utterly Wrong™. This happened when I was working on my lists and calculations for mining, research, manufacture and what-not. I was merrily bouncing back and forth from my research data to the calculations and all of a sudden. Poof. The calculations were gone. Gone as in no apparent trace of them being open. Logs weren’t helpful as it merely said, “Something has gone wrong,” and no other details.
So, I started over from semi scratch. I had a backup from 3-4 months ago and some data from Letrange to begin building with. I’m no so terribly upset about losing the spreadsheet as it can be rebuilt. I am terribly upset, however with myself for not having a more current backup of it and for losing all the BPO information I had just hand keyed. I’m sure there is a way to automate the process and just have to note the current ML/PL on a given BPO and have it spit out the mineral list and costs, but I’m just not up for that. Hopefully I’ll get something sorted out in the next couple of days and be back at work.
In the interim, I’ve been running some missions for my R&D stand-bys, Lai Dai. They’ve been good to me and I try to repay the favor when ever I can. Note: I’m not all that fond of running missions, but they help generate a little side income, some LP for the store and increase standings.
[EDIT: This didn't get posted when it was written on 13/1/2009 for some reason. Apologies to those who might have been wondering what happened to me in the interim.]
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