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Crucible Coming

On Crucibles Of Change

So in a few moments, the universe as we know it will collapse in on itself in a cataclysmic cacophony of conniptions that we will come to call Crucible. There are changes enough for everyone, including everything from lowly munitions all the way up to galaxy spanning goodies. There are new modules/equipment as well as new ships to put them on. There are old types of equipment with new abilities and properties as well as new paint on old ships.

Perhaps more than with other releases I have been keeping an eye on this update. Regular daily Singularity updates and visits have become a part of my routine as much as my morning coffee. Perusing the differences of the new equipments, ships and visuals has become something of a habit. By-and-large, there is little in the changes that will effect my day-to-day routine significantly [with the exception of corporate bookmarks - which still seem only half of a solution]. There is a bit of internal struggle that coincides with all of this change, mostly centered around the question of, “Why do I care so much?” Bear with my introspective, belly-button browsing as I consider how all of this is affecting me so deeply.

In a bit of confession and disclosure, I have toyed with the notion of hanging up my pilot’s license and settling down into a long stasis. Over the last year has seen some interesting flak and change happen in the universe and not all of them have been useful or happy. There were times and days where I could not be arsed to haul my pod into a ship to do much of anything, let alone fly around, shoot, scan, salvage, explore…. So in the midst of all this malaise, comes a rather expected update to the universe with rather unexpected feelings attached to it.

Where there was apathy before, suddenly there is attention. Where before I felt like giving up, I am tending to feel things going up. I look forward to sliding into my ships and launching forth to interact with the others around me. If nothing else, at least there is in Crucible the concern for quality that derides my contempt and compels my attention. I am ready for change. The world is again before me on a plate of stars waiting to be devoured with the utensils of ships and shots.

I would like to leave you all with a quick Wordle of the patch notes mentioned above. I was singularly impressed with the results and how much it reflects the essence of change.

NOW is not Soon™

Picking Planet Parts

On [Re]-Evaluating the Whole Wormhole Works

Non-Industrialists Must Stop Reading Now and Go Shoot Miners!

For the rest of you – there has always been a small [ok LARGE] part of me that enjoys the industrial side of EVE. I like shooting people in ships, flying around looking for targets, debating how best to fit a ship for a job and if it is even a valid application; however I also like making things. For several reasons I have variously gotten involved in mining ore, making munitions and modules, building ships, inventing Tech 2 items and ships, harvesting gasses, reacting polymers, reverse engineering artifacts, building Tech 3 pieces and putting together planetary colonies for producing various tower fuels, T2 components and raw materials. It is the POS fuels and their production that this post deals with.

There are a multitude of ways to go about this and I will probably forget some along the way, so feel free to point those out to me. In the mean time, the following is a walk-through of how I got to where I am. Remembering how I had started with trying to set everything up in one go I knew that I was going to give it plenty of thought and try and do my homework.

When Penny and I returned to a C4 to live and hunt with a smaller pack, I opted to look at the whole PI process again and evaluate how best to approach it. I opted to see if I could produce enough robotics to keep the tower supplied without having to import them. They are an expensive part of the fuel calculation and would significantly affect what we had to provide on our own. This plan was to use the planets in the system to produce fuel for use and not for sale. The first fuel setup was Robotics as it accounts for about 15% of the total fuel costs and 30% of the non-ice fuel costs. A balanced fuel load [using as much of the fuel cargo space in the tower with all fuels for the same number of days] for our large faction tower means we need 816 units of robotics every 34 days.

In order to do this, we need to be able to produce 24 robotics per day. One Advanced Industry Facility produced 3 [u]nits of robotics per hour given 40u of Mechanical Parts and 40u of Consumer Electronics. This works out to 72u robotics per day if there is sufficient supply of Mechanical Parts and Consumer Electronics. The goal is then to determine how best to go about getting the Mech. Parts and Cons. Elect. supplies necessary to keep the Robotics rolling off the line continuously. The first attempt saw extraction and production spring up on our plasma world for Cons. Elect. and on a Barren planet for Mech. Parts. The second barren planet was then setup to combine the P2 materials into robotics.

One of the things that quickly became apparent when setting up a large scale Planetary Interaction colony was the extreme PG need for a large number of extractor heads. Thus there was always going to be a compromise over the amount of P0 material extracted and the number of basic industrial factories that could convert it to P1. Thus I was able to get about 1,400u each of Mech. Parts and Cons. Elect. This made for about 35u Robotics per day. While this was sufficient for producing the fuel we need for our tower, it was a very depressing return for what seemed like so much work put into clicking, hauling and then clicking again. This also only resulted in 500,000 isk/day in excess revenue which hardly seemed worth the time sink. It is for things like this that I pay people to change the fluids in my planetary vehicle.

The Reluctance of Time

On Scanning, Shooting, Salvaging, Harvesting, Hauling and Helping

In a whirlwind rush, the list of things to get done piles up and begins to look like a impending avalanche. There may be fields of ore just floating out in our system patiently waiting to hear from our barges. There are definitely wormholes that have yet to be found, surveyed, catalogued and stored. There are gases dispersing, hoping to be harvested and stored until processing. There planetary resources to extract, refine, process and export. There are reaction to be run, research to be installed, POS arrays to be unanchored, moved, anchored, onlined and utilised. There are resources to be exported, sold, contracted and traded. There are fuels, modules, ships, ammo and skills to be imported. There are possibly neighbours that would like us to alleviate their shields, scour their armour and generally remove their hulls from them.

And none of that even begins to include the number of people that need to be thanked, congratulated, hailed, ignored, watched, befriended, shot, reshipped, berated and/or bereaved. Throw in some ongoing conversations about the nature of the universe, whether ships really fly in space or swim through it, who did what to whom and where to go to get some good, hard spiked Quafe.

The world we live and fly and fight and engineer in is rich, deep and very, very personal. It takes more than just a passing interest in spaceships and spreadsheets to appreciate it fully. This is not to say it’s perfect. The interface confounds me on a regular basis, my ship seems to occasionally have a mind of its own, the drones only respond 100% correctly on the second Tuesday of each week and occasionally my overview tells me I’m somewhere else.

We are busy little Wormhole Engineers. We like our part and the jobs we do. If you are looking for a stable source of income and relaxed, arm-chair piloting – keep flying. There is none of that out here.

Not Always Shiny

On Making Stupid Mistakes & Learning

As I looked over the last year or two of posts, I realised that I very often only present the upside to the efforts and events that we go through. I don’t often mention some of the accidents, problems and outright stupid mistakes that my colleagues or I make on a seemingly regular basis. To further entertain you, I’ll try to recall some of them and tell you what we’ve learned in the process.

Hmmm…. Nope…. Can’t think of anything.

I’m quite sure I could come up with more examples of our incompetence, but would likely ruin our reputation for flawless execution.

Seriously?

On Waking Up After Being Deprived Of Your Pod

Ouch. Blinding pain. My ship … is, why can’t I feel my ship. And … um … I can’t … seem to focus … on the present. Station … docked? Sleepy … groggy … slow.

Not unlike post-election interviews with the runner-up, waking up after a binge, stepping in it in the park or waking up in a new clone, the process of recovery is sometimes short and sweet and more often filled with emotion, pain and suffering. How you handle losing it all speaks more volumes about you than the epitaphs shouted in comms, kill board statistics or isks spent on your last ride. From an early age people need to learn some important EVE life lessons.

1) It’s a ride. It does not have emotions. It doesn’t care if you are in, on, afk, logged, asleep at the pod, finger in your nose, smiling or frowning. It is quite oblivious to anything you care about. Pets, asteroids, spouses, corp-mates, local taxes, sovereignty fees – they are all irrelevant to the EVE Train.

2) It is independent. It goes where it will. You are able to affect its direction to some extent, but more than likely it is less Butterfly Effect and more akin to Clear Skies or Carebears Attack in the ability to affect the larger picture. You look out for you and yours and things go swimmingly.

3) You will die. You will lose a lot of ships if you are actually playing the game with any level of interaction. It doesn’t matter if you are in high security, low security, null security or wormhole space – you and your ship will soon be parted. Today’s Headlines: Death Coming. Tomorrow’s Forecast: Mostly ganky with an increasing chance of podding. The only unknowns are when, where and everything except how well you handle yourself.

This is not some HTFU rant about people who can’t hack the harsh, kill-or-be-killed world of New Eden. It’s a realistic gut check for pilots who think the worst thing that can happen is getting your current clone senselessly splattered on the nose-cone of a Terror Assault missile or perforated by Repulic EMP. It’s all senseless and it will continue to happen as long as there are people flying other ships. There is always someone bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, wealthier or prettier who is able to relieve you of your capacity to be in a ship.

I’m not saying don’t be upset about losing a ship. I cry over every last one. Most of them I built. I fit them, flew them, trained them, repaired them, crashed them. All of them I loved. My ships are my life and every last one of them is important to me, from the disposable frigates to the disposable battlecruisers. They surround me, they hold me, they give everything they have to me – could I give them less. And as for my pod – that rather frail hunk of metal filled with snot and keeping my clone from feeling the effects of strenuous accelerations and combat – it too serves its purpose and no more. I have bought several clones. I will buy several more. God willing, I will not forget to buy one when I die tomorrow.

So when an overwhelming force of pilots gank you, get up, get back in a ship and keep going. Or not. Either choice is valid. The people who shot you out of the sky won’t really care one way or the other. Ranting – not likely to get you much response. Wild and derogatory remarks – again not likely to help put implants back in your head. Best case scenario – ask if it was them in the reverse situation, what would they have done. They might offer useful suggestions. The worst case scenario is they might just laugh and say, “Die.” Either way, use it to get better at flying your spaceships.

To put this in more of a personal context – the Wormhole Engineers have been attacked, off and on, since they first started living in wormholes. Mining maulings, hauling hijacks, gratuitous ganks and overt overkills have been the norm and not the exception. We learned important lessons all along the way. We first learned how to hide better and then we learned how to run away better. We learned how to be better aware of the situation not just around us, but beyond our little corner of the world. We began to learn how to resist and tank and eventually even how to shoot back. We learned how to take ammunition from out tower and distribute it more effectively on the hulls of other pilots. We haven’t had a lot of kills and we’re still not afraid to back down. However; if we shoot you, it isn’t personal and we’re not out to bully the pilots we see around us.

One of the lessons we learned the hard way was there are no innocent people out here in the wormholes. Letting an unknown covops pilot buzz around in plain site is a sure way to buy a new clone and it is still worth getting an overwhelming force out to catch and pop them. Sending the pilot back to known space is the only way to assure they aren’t scouting for a larger party. The larger force may still be there, but they’ll have to survive with one less set of eyes. They may only be scanning for exits, but that’s what we were doing until we saw someone else’s probes.

Old Blood, Part 3

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2…

In an attempt at trying to remember things honestly, I will try to mention when things went well or failed miserably so as to present as clear a picture as possible of the reality of flying with a random collection of fruitcakes, nut cases and loony birds. We’ve pulled people in from all over the place and from time to time it has happened that they were of a lower quality than we would have preferred. It’s inevitable I imagine as there are all kinds of pilots looking to be all kinds of ship captains involved in all manner of endeavours. It would be extremely naive and a bit arrogant to assume they all thought like we thought, flew what we flew or were interested in the same thing via the same approaches. Oddly enough, just knowing that doesn’t seem to keep it from happening. Many corporations [ours included] often take far to little time to evaluate a potential employee and his fit with the organisation as a whole.

But more about that later, first I wanted to take a closer look at some of the potential recruiting methodologies and comment on their relative effectiveness. The first method we’ll dub the “Passive Method” and requires the least amount of effort and energy on the part of the recruiter. This can usually take several forms and can be a combinations of vectors. Some of the possible implementations include placing a note in your corporation’s information window to the effect, “We are recruiting,” or “Sign up now,” to let passer-bys know that you are open to members. Some slightly more involved passive recruiting efforts might be a forum post on EVE Online or some of the other frequently populated sites. And finally there is the recruiting advertisements within EVE itself.

All of these passive methods rely on the individuals seeing and responding to your information. The motivation and initial moves belong to the other pilots and are theirs to make or not.

The second type you might guess is the “Active Method” where you are going out of your way to target, engage and draw specific individuals into your corporation. This can be an intense and involved process with multiple personnel working to illicit a favourable move from an already known pilot. This involves ongoing conversations via both public and private channels; overt recruiting and posting in the forums; targeted EVE mails to the pilots in question; active referrals and contacts with other pilots of the corporation and alliance. This targeted, active recruiting is all about going after either a specific individual or a specific skill set that your organisation realises that it needs.

All long the spectrum from Passive to Active is any combination of the two. Often experience, necessity and effectiveness will require a combination of the two methodologies.

Finally, a quick word about making sure the “new prospects” and “potential recruits” are the people that you’ll want in your organisation long term. In addition to any thoughts and dreams you might have about a role and the people that will fill it, so to do the people who are possibly coming to work for you. They see themselves as gaining something out of the transaction and rightly so. If they can’t learn, grow, build wealth and generally prosper in the position and corporation, then they really need to be somewhere else. It’s not rude or arrogant to show someone the door, offer suggestions about other places they might flourish or generally pass them over and keep looking for the right person. It would however be wrong to stuff them into a role that was antithetical to who and what they were and where they were headed. And while it may temporarily solve a staffing issue, it isn’t going to help your corporation out in the long run either.

Happy Head Hunting.

Old Blood, Part 2

In continuation from the previous article…

Recently I found myself discussing the bygone era of naivete with regard to flying ever bigger, faster, deadlier, efficient, specialised and ultimately more expensive ships. We have all come a long way since our Ibises and Velators. The time since we’ve used civilian weapons [if ever] is far away and mostly gone are the days when the fittings and ships are limited by the skills we haven’t trained or isk we haven’t earned. We still flounder a bit on the first few times we do something new [ship fittings and how to effectively use a Stealth Bomber], but by now we know where to look for the information and make fairly educated choices and decisions based on that information.

Given that we are now what I would consider Intermediate level pilots, we are probably prime for various and sundry problems brought on by our decent into madness [Is linking to your own posts rather akin to talking to yourself? If so, I also have posts whereby I comment on my own posts thus creating a dialogue. Sadly, I'm probably going to end up posting a comment on one of my posts about a link to a post or comment of my own thus degenerating into complete insanity. I apologize to myself in advance.]. Having nearly gone off the deep end one too many times, it occurs to myself [and others, I'm far from unique or inspired], that fresh meat is needed to halt the rapidly encroaching madness. Either that, or we’d like to begin drafting some people so that we at least statistically reduce the number of insane pilot actions.

Actually, we’re debating bringing on a few newer members that we can ultimately train into effective capsuleers according to our own images while exploiting their current skills for our gain. We’re probably going to start with some dedicated salvage/mining personnel to help offset our tendency to let the mining sites in our wormholes degrade to uselessness as well as help accelerate the speed at which we can work over the various anomalies and signatures there-in. Having employed all manner of recruiting means in the past, I thought we might also benefit from some of the other blog readers/personalities out there who might like to take a chance on wormhole mining and salvaging.

I am hoping to wrap this up with a segment on some of the other recruiting methodologies and their relative effectiveness.

The Shiny is Sparkly

Ok, I admit it. I am in awe, struck dumb by the sheer enormity of what has transpired. In case any of you missed it:

Dominion has come.

And it is good. At least every little bit that I have seen from with in our little part of the unknown space we live in. With all the little things that have happened in the client, it really does feel a lot like EVE 3.0 instead of just an expansion. The marketers missed the opportunity to really push this as a major update to many of the parts that make EVE feel like EVE. With all of the updates to the UI as well as the actual graphics used for the systems, it is much more apparent that things have changed. And after one measly day in, I think it’s wonderful.

I’m sure there are a lot of little things going on around 0.0 involving sovereignty changes and support/logistics for them. There are some nitpicks, glitches and annoyances [hide windows?], but on the whole, I think it is a great update.

And finally – I can easily update this from inside my pod. Beware.

Posted from J130554, deep in the heart of nowhere and using the browser in EVE.

Along the Way

Now listen all you swingers, don’t you try to tag along
I know monkey see, but monkey’s dead, for you it would be wrong
Put a dime in my jukebox, you’ll only hear this song
And it won’t be fun for long -(TMBG)

The end is nigh!

The end has passed and off into the night we continue swimming past planets, moon and stars. Wormholes open and close and wars and rumors of wars are left in our wake. All and all, everything continues on as it did before, so what is different?

Training for the Damnation has been completed. Mostly. Sort of. There are few days left to fit the armored warfare links, but everything else is fit and fine. I should be jumping for joy, holding parties in low-sec pirate filled dens of iniquity and generally announcing it to every stray passer-by I meet. Instead I’m merely looking at the next couple of weeks of training and thinking, “Now What?”

The whole trip to Damnation has been a grand adventure. It marks the third, major, long training plan I’ve completed. The first plan was learning skills, which can be debated ad nauseam both on the forums and in various other postings. They were long, arduous and imminently debatable, however I have never once regretted doing it. The second was maximizing my asteroid warfare potential, including a few weeks on Exhumer V, Cybernetics V, and a host of ore specific refining skills to level IV for tech 2 crystals. Again, there were parts of it that I probably could have cut corners on, but I haven’t regretted being able to field a really sweet Hulk, that can mine about 27 m³ of ore per second without being in a gang and significantly more with a good Orca pilot boosting.

Finally, the trip to the Damnation, which has been a slightly longer journey than the others. Over all it was uneventful and all the skills that I have picked up in the interim have been useful across the board. In the beginning it started with the look for a decent armor tanked missile ship to swim alongside my remote armor repairing corp-mates. The Sacrilege was an option, but wasn’t really able to fit a decent remote rep fitting. The Damnation could do that, had enough tank to be able to use ballistic computer systems without sacrificing tank and could still theoretically fit a RR with it’s missiles. The DPS worked out to a similar end as the Drake with the added benefits of helping the whole fleet’s tank.

Now that I’ve reached the Damnation, I have to admit I’m feeling rather blasé about the whole thing. I love flying it. It corners like an Orca, tanks like a very large plated battleship and hits about like a Drake, but from slightly farther away. This is all well and good, but my eyes were taken by something else shiny that had cropped up along the way.

Somewhere along the way I realized that in and amongst the skills for a Damnation, was hidden the skills for a Guardian logistics ship. So on a whim I began to research them, ask questions and look at fittings for them. I got to looking at just how the efficiency of remote repair modules compared to their ‘local’ counterparts. What did it take to use them and or abuse them. Since the Guardian is also bonused for energy transfers, I threw that into the mix as well, looking at how that could be used to the best advantage. I began to develop a real sense of respect for 0.0 fleet logistics pilots and the work they do. Flying a logistics ship well takes a fair amount of capacitor savvy, shrewd targeting and really tight fittings. Tried and true skills like weapons upgrades and advanced weapons upgrades have no effect on RR’s and Xfers, so it’s down to rigs, reactors, PDU’s and CPUs to make it work.

[Editorial Aside]:

I tend to scoff when I see CPUs, PDUs and Reactors on a lot of fits. They are mostly used to compensate for a severe lack of real fitting skills or to ‘tide one over’ until their skills catch up to their hulls. [I still maintain it would be an interesting study to compare the number of killmails between the pilots having 'helper' modules like CPUs/PDUs/Reactors versus their opponents.] I fully understand that even given max skills and an expensive implant, occasionally you still run into a fit that just won’t. I myself have used these modules to great success in the past and will continue to do so in the future and even recommend some fittings that do so.

All of this to say, “Congratulations logistics pilots for making it all fit. Large remote modules on a cruiser hull with a tank that survives and makes things so much easier for the other pilots to just shoot things.”

How To Fail

Hip, hip, horrific are the words we sing
Hip, hip, horrific is our thing -(TMBG)

As I look around and back at the posts I’ve written for the last year or so, I am reminded how well things have gone, but also how spectacularly I’ve managed to fail. If you are looking for pitfalls to avoid – you’ve found them. If you want to see how not to train for something; look no further. If you would rather have less isk at the end of the day, then this is your lucky blog!

Seriously, the posts that inhabit these pages are filled with the heartache and misery of a pilot bashing her head against the same asteroid day after day after day. At the end of the day there is a hangar full of veldspar and tritanium, some trash modules and a ship that desperately needs a tune up. Along the way the pilot has learned that you shouldn’t trust another pilot but you have to trust the other pilots until they fail you. You can’t put 4000 m3 in a GSC and there’s no way to get a station container out of a station. Overheating missiles is not so effective and skilling up adequately for boosters is going to be very expensive.

There are a few bright spots along the way. Namely, the ships and modules that have been opened up through a varied training programme that includes tech 2 mining equipment, logistics cruisers and some command ships. This is easily countered by the fail combat skills that barely allow for named heavy missiles on a Drake and some lame, unsupported rails on a Moa. It’s rather comical sometimes to be able to fit a full Tech 2 tank on every ship in the game, but then realize you still only have the equivalent of light weapons for armaments. Fear the fail firepower of 150mm rails on a Ferox! My heavy missile Drake of Dewm causes fits of laughter when people can safely orbit at 55 km and pick off my drones and then me.

Other suggest that I should be proud of the fact that I can invent nearly anything possible on the market, but even that seems to fall flat. I have consistently managed to lose money or break even on Tech 2 invention and production. My volume approach is low and slow, so as to be moving backwards in appearance. I can train people to use the towers, labs, production facilities, but seem to fail in doing so myself. What was I thinking! Science is for smart people. Production is for people who are actually motivated.

So what have we learned from all of this:

Train all the skills you possibly can [let's start with 231]
Train a wide variety of skills to level 5 [53 is a good number]
Science skills help you store lot’s of SP [9.6 million and counting]
Collect ships [So you can collect dust]
Every 3-4 months spend everything you have on one ship setup and then poke a pirate.

And I think I’ve rambled on enough for all of us today. And that is how to fail.

Drakes and Maelstroms EVE Online Pictures, 09/Feb 00:04
Redesign Eagle Contest - Results Inner Sanctum of the Ninveah, 08/Feb 17:43
Executing an ambush Tiger Ears, 08/Feb 17:13
Some Italian Vomit, A huge gate camp, and lots of alcohol Flashfresh - The Pirate., 06/Feb 16:28
Guardian Letrange's EvE Blog, 01/Feb 20:12
Vanguard Incursion Farming K162space, 20/Jan 23:30
So long, and thanks for all the fish The Travels of Black Claw, 05/Jan 23:08
Rockets Revisited Rifter Drifter, 07/Dec 14:20
The Last Loose End Life in Low Sec, 04/Nov 02:39
...And pushed out of Tenerifis EVE Online Wormholes, 19/Sep 22:14

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