14/06/10 11:39 PM
| Jaspet | 47.03 |
| Omber | 47.14 |
| Hemorphite | 55.62 |
| Pyroxeres | 57.70 |
| Hedbergite | 66.18 |
| Veldspar | 66.67 |
| Kernite | 70.01 |
| Plagioclase | 72.02 |
| Scordite | 75.25 |
| Spodumain | 80.33 |
| Dark Ochre | 98.81 |
| Gneiss | 100.86 |
| Crokite | 185.46 |
| Bistot | 232.34 |
| Arkonor | 288.02 |
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Greetings from the past. I have arrived here to continue what was begun with a previous post on perspective. I wanted you have some background as I looked back at some of the things that have been going on lately, as well as what will happen in the future.
To some extent, we are all fellow time travelers. We do not exist here and now, independent of our previous self or actions. No matter how much we would like to be unassociated with what we might have done, or reconnected to a prior success, we are temporal creatures, bound by our own definitions and limitations of time. Now that was an incredibly long way to say, we can’t change the past and must proceed to the future while living in the now.
I have made some questionable decisions in my past. I live with the ramifications and know that my ships will someday all swim with a captain that has made those same mistakes in her past. But the ships all keep swimming. They have no mistakes made, no past memories, no baggage brought forward. Her Abbadon swims in the same space that her Burst does. Thankfully your Typhoon doesn’t regret not getting the mission time bonus any more than my Drake does.
I studied long and hard to learn how to invent things and do it well. I managed to pick up a few ships along the way, but not nearly like others have done alongside me. Most of my corp-mates can fly battleships [and a few of them even know how to fit them], while I am very happy in a battlecruiser sized hull. I don’t have much ability to deal damage, but most every ship I fly can soak a lot of it up. I have a lot of my training invested heavily in science and I have loved every minute of it.
From an early age, listening to my parents wax eloquent about the physics behind their Micro Warp Drives and the best way to insure success when inventing various tech 2 ships, I was hooked on science. I received my first home-datacore set when the rest of my playmates were still tinkering with frigate models. I was far from the only Achuran to be born to in Inventor enclave, nor the only one to like science and pursue that as a career. But on the other hand – I also had a great passion for the way the universe was knit together and was determined to understand it all!
I quickly graduated with advanced degrees in a broad range of science fields related to capsuleer endeavors and knew that to continue to learn and explore I would need to get out of Saisio and be able to visit the stars. I managed to barely scrape through training and prepare for the transition into the life of a “pod-pilot.” Don’t let anyone lie to you, the necessary pseudo-suicide, transneural burning scan to jump into the waiting pod-clone was painful [and it still is]. However, now I was free to swim through the stars in a super-massive space fish.
My parents, through good investments with and years of working for the megacorporation, Lai Dai, had managed to accrue a significant sum of interstellar credits and fitted me with a modest Bantam frigate and some direction to pursue. I headed for the stars and began working toward my dream as a free-lance inventor. I left the construction details to various station-side facilities, sales were done by other representative and I left the ship in the care of the knuckle-draggers. I knew how to fit a mean scanning ship or mine with the best of them, but even the thought of combat was something that was endured as a means to an end. To that end, I was spending every last ISK that I could generate on buying the skills to train and learn.
We successfully dismantled the POS from our little corner of wormhole space and got everything moved out and back into high security space. There was one little hiccup as a bunch of fuel was exported to an island [group of high-sec space surrounded by low-sec/0.0 space] that required a bit of scouting to extricate.
We’ve learned a lot about the whole procedure and how to approach wormholes which makes the operation an overall success. The main drawback was the initial investment was probably overkill for the returns, but in terms of knowledge was likely priceless.
Personally, I have a very low wallet and need to seriously rectify that. As we are also looking at moving into more permanent tech three (T3) production, the capital investment costs are still accumulating [labs, reactors, component bpos, reactions, skills] and will need to be factored into the final evaluation. We saved all of the salvage from our time in the ‘hole as a precursor to production, but are considering putting it up for sale as a support for future wormhole expansion.
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.
With the plethora of skills, ships, modules, options, directions, et cetra available in the galaxy, I am constantly torn between heading off one direction and then another. I’m sure you’ve all face similar decisions: choosing to train for a little bit more missile damage; ship agility; drone speed; construction efficiency; mining yield; scanning speed [eek]; better tank. The list goes on and on forever! An acquaintance of mine has focused on frigates and frigate related combat skills since he started playing three years ago. He estimates that in another year, he’ll have all Tech 1 and Tech 2 frigates and their associated skills trained. He is looking to possibly move into cruiser level skills then for the next 3-4 years. His comment, “What other option in the galaxy even allows for a 5 year plan?”
This got me to thinking about what I wanted to do for the rest of this year. I began by looking back and taking stock of how far I have come since first hardwiring into the capsule as well as where I am currently. Corporately I’ve managed to be part of a dead and dying corp, a new alliance and finally a solid industrial corp as part of a silent, unspoken alliance. Job-wise I’ve transitioned from a mainly mining pilot to one that also does a fair amount of research and manufacturing, scanning and hauling, missioning and mining. I love the jack-of-all-trades mentality I’ve developed and really want to pursue that.
So in reflection, I’ve come across a goal of sorts: Everything. I like being utilitarian and having efficacy. I wonder what that will look like. In looking ahead, I have some more general goals like keeping my training rate high [another 20,000,000 skill points], earning money, having fun and flying ships. Given that it looks like you will be able to change your skill point specifications for the new update, a whole world of possible career options open themselves up to exploration. The more specific goals about which I might have are proving a bit more elusive. So, I wrap this up with a quick question about your goals for the year?
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… 
In the midst of some time away from the ol’ pod, there is often a lot of time to spend thinking. The problem with being out of my pod and not flying my ship is that I miss the constant stream of information coming to me through the ship links. There is no tactical info, no camera drone feeds, no comms buzz. I am therefore forced to actually hear my own thoughts. I have to recognize I feel a certain way or that things affect me and I cannot just shut them out or drown them in the informational deluge.
Having said that, I’m forced to acknowledge some of my ambivalence about the changes that have been announced in the universe. I like to be able to mine more and look forward to the impact that the Orca will have on both my personal and corporate operations. On the other hand, there are a lot of announced changes that aren’t really anything at all on second look. So ships are getting speeds changed, missiles are moving differently, modules are looking to get together and have little party groups are all things that don’t really mean that much.
Maybe I’m missing the bigger picture. Maybe there is a cumulative effect to the coming changes that will just blow our pod tops off. My personal wish list keeps getting longer but I work with in the established system and keep flying.
As a carebear industrialista, I am extremely excited about the flood of production communiques that are coming out of major research and development corps all over New Eden. New industrial command ships and reactions for moon materials are coming as are changes to some of the blueprint manufacturing amounts. One thing that has caught my eye and caused me to nearly get goosebumps was the seemingly innocuous announcement that ship equipment that have activation times would soon also have little countdown gauges to tell you how far along in the cycle said equipment has gone.
Oh wonder of wonders! Now we will be able to see how long until the next activation of any repeating module takes place. On one off, non-repeating equipment, the change is only mildly useful. But on the equipment that is set to auto-repeat, the change is monumental. Finally, modules can be planned around and taken into account. For us, the way this plays out is with the mining lasers and strip miners. No longer will it be necessary to overspend time whittling away at a roid that can easily be half-cycled or less. It will be easy to see how much ore you pull in a full cycle and then cut off the beam at a fraction of the cycle close to it’s final amount.
For example: Say your Hulk can strip a modest 1400 m3 per cycle. There is a Dense Veldspar rock floating 12 km off your port stern that scanners indicate has 9000 units left. At roughly 2/3 of the cycle you can cut if off, finish the roid and be ready to move on to roid number 2. While is isn’t new functionality in and of itself, it will now be so much easier to see. Miners, watch your timers. Keep them close to the final cycle you need. Any miner worth her morphite will be able to tell you how much ore they are able to pull from any given roid in a cycle.
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