15/05/11 08:39 AM
| Arkonor | 285 |
| Bistot | 217 |
| Mercoxit | 192 |
| Crokite | 187 |
| Hedbergite | 171 |
| Hemorphite | 168 |
| Jaspet | 152 |
| Dark Ochre | 147 |
| Pyroxeres | 118 |
| Kernite | 106 |
| Veldspar | 99 |
| Scordite | 93 |
| Gneiss | 90 |
| Plagioclase | 88 |
| Spodumain | 82 |
| Omber | 81 |
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On Getting Lost Without Losing Your Way
Recently I managed to end up on the wrong side of a wormhole. Many of you read about Penny’s side of the story and search to find a safe passage for me back into the wormhole system we call home. In a multi-part series she recounts how over several days it was necessary to scan, scan and scan again. For those of you who might have missed it:
 Well, the reality is that I often end up on the wrong side and often without it being the end of the world. It is a regular occurrence to see “20:33:35 Notify As you pass through the wormhole you realize that it collapses behind you.Have you become trapped?” in my logs. I was going to get a picture to illustrate, but sadly my fingers have not been cooperating quickly enough to generate the screen shot as I jump through the last time. New image of what you see when you close the hole now included.
As residents of a class 4 system with a static class 3 wormhole, it takes 2,000,000,000 Kilogrammes to close the hole and force a new static wormhole to spawn. For the sake of protecting my zero key and facilitate a slightly faster representation, I will be abbreviating that number as 2,000M(illion). It is also relevant in that ship masses are all larger than 1,000,000 Kilogrammes [shuttles and pods excluded]. Thus as we scan, haul, hunt and pew in and around our various wormhole connections, it is often essential to maintain fairly accurate accounting with regard to both the type and number of ships we have pushed through the holes.
Frigates tend to hover around 1M Kilogrammes, destroyers are about 1.5M, cruisers are about 11-13M, battlecruisers are 13-15M, battleships are around 100M and an Orca is 250M. To these values are then added afterburner [AB] or micro warp drive [MWD] effects if they are active on the ship when jumping. 1MN AB/MWD adds 0.5M Kilogrammes, 10MN AB/MWD adds 5M and the 100MN AB/MWD adds 50M Kilogrammes. There are a few anomalous ships in this schema like the Caldari black-ops battleship Widow which tips the scales at a massive [for a battleship] 150M Kilogrammes. Together these ships can form quite a variety of mass combinations to push though and close a wormhole with ships arriving on the same side at the same time as planned.
Thus for our situation, a typical closure [which we refer to in-house as "rolling the hole"] will look something like:
| Beginning WH Mass |
Ship Transit |
Direction |
Mass Used |
Remaining WH Mass |
| 2,000M |
Orca with AB/MWD |
Outbound |
300M |
1,700M |
| 1,700M |
Orca with AB/MWD |
Inbound |
300M |
1,400M |
| 1,400M |
Orca with AB/MWD |
Outbound |
300M |
1,100M |
| 1,100M |
Orca with AB/MWD |
Inbound |
300M |
800M [WH should indicate change] |
| 800M |
Orca with AB/MWD |
Outbound |
300M |
500M |
| 500M |
BS with AB/MWD |
Outbound |
150M |
350M |
| 350M |
BS with AB/MWD |
Inbound |
150M |
200M [WH should indicate critical] |
| 200M |
Orca with AB/MWD |
Inbound |
300M |
-100M [WH should collapse] |
There is one final issue to consider – the fundamentally unstable nature of wormholes. They can vary by as much as ±200M Kilogrammes which is slightly less than an Orca, 2 battleships, 10 AB/MWD cruisers… et cetra. This also means that if the hole is on the light side [closer to 1,800M Kilogrammes] then you will likely find yourself sitting in a fairly expensive ship in a system that is not quite friendly. Thanks to a good deal we brokered with Mr. Murphy, this most often happens under perfect conditions when the system I end up is:
- Full of Hostiles
- Null-Security Static Exit
- Approximately 5 minutes before they all come online
- Smaller than 14 AU across in diameter
These perfect storm conditions are surprisingly easy to come across and account for a surprising number of incidents for getting trapped outside of the system I call Home.
 Oddly enough, the most recent exclusion event happened as a result of properties unknown and unknowable with regard to wormholes. I took a picture of the situation as it manages to baffle me to this day. I returned to this bookmarked [former] wormhole and it remained just like this for several hours. As Penny mentioned, one of the highlights is the fact that I trapped some tourists from high-security inside the wormhole and got a cool picture of an apparent illusion or apparition. It is logically impossible to prove an absolute negative. But one thing I can state absolutely, there was no way back the way I came. Oddly enough there never was a message about the wormhole closing behind me.
In retrospect, the whole situation reminded me of a quote that will probably live in infamy for those poor pilots living in the USA during the reign of Bush the Younger. His senior hounds-of-war-master issued the following statement about not really knowing if things were true or not:
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” –D. Rumsfeld
So in the end, I guess we will never know if we know or not.
On Finding and Using a Common Reference Point
While working in space has its perks and for the most part is a wonderful experience, we are in part hampered by the interface built into our ships. I firmly place any and all blame on the Jovians as part of their desire to maintain a position of aloof superiority over us by seeding small technological wonders attached to inane and sometimes incomplete user interfaces. I could probably wax eloquent over multiple examples, but would only be “preaching to the choir” as it were. None of the pilots I fly with or talk to would recommend the user interface we use on a regular basis for any purpose other than masochism.
Having written all of that, we are flying around in a multi-dimensional space with the only real point of reference being a false horizon given to us by the tactical overlay. Flying around planets, suns, moons, et cetra are all inconsistent measures of location and often difficult to describe in a place where concepts like UP, DOWN, STARBOARD, PORT, AFT, BOW are rendered meaningless in light of both the interface and third-dimensional travel. [As an aside for those who might have flown a spaceship in a "twitch" type of environment, a barrel-roll really loses it's meaning without a horizon, but that doesn't negate it's usefulness.] So how can you organise yourself and others [especially fleet commanders] to use a common point of reference without everything going down the drain in confusion over directions and terms.
REALITY – You can’t. There will always be someone to misunderstand any given command. “Warp to 30km and hold,” will invariably be understood as, “Get to the gate and jump. Jump! JUMP!” by aforementioned schmuck. In another life, we had a fleet-mate who always turned up oriented 180˚ degrees vertical to the rest of the group. Ultimately it didn’t matter as she would at least be facing the right direction. The best we can do is develop a consistent point of reference and be insistent that people reference it for direction. Anything else will largely just be lucky, random happenstance.
Something reminded me the other day of how we were taught to find reference points in fleet operations while giving a new corp-mate the grand tour. Dazed and confused by the overwhelming flood of information coming at him upon joining our little patch of home, he queried, “How do you all know where you are going?” Admittedly he was referring to finding and keeping track of the ever shifting network of wormholes, but it was a good reminder about getting oriented and one that I had completely forgotten in moving into a wormhole. The point of this is to get everyone a common frame of reference that they can use to describe position and interpret directions.
[caption id="attachment_754" align="alignright" width="230" caption="Finding North"]  [/caption]
The method is fairly easy and refers to an arbitrary direction that we will call, Norbert. To find Norbert and get oriented to Norbert, you simply full up the otherwise useless system map [via the F11 key unless you've remapped it somehow]. In the lower right hand corner will be a map of your current system complete with relative planetary orbits and the star in the centre. Somewhere on this little map will be a red circle that represents your current position. extending outward from this circle is what can best be described as two overlapping, semi-transparent triangles. These indicate the current horizontal “field-of-view” of your camera drones. The direction your ship is facing is irrelevant as is your vertical declination above or below the plane of the tactical overlay horizon. Remember Norton? It is this field-of-view that we use to define Norbert. Norbert is arbitrarily defined as the top of the little system map. Everything else can now be defined relative to Norbert. You warp to a wormhole at 10 o’clock knowing that your cloaked stealth bomber buddy is 30km 6 o’clock. Stealth Edit. 
For the more observant readers [both of you], this is no surprise. For the rest of you, this wonderful piece of elocution is a wonderful guest post from a frequent partner in Sleeper related homicides and other nefarious asteroid related crimes. Please welcome and read, Penny Ibramovic, author of the wonderful Tiger Ears –Kename Fin
I sit docked at a station, keeping an eye on business. I open up the market interface to see how my orders are selling. I check if stations have received new deliveries and I am being undercut, modifying my prices if necessary and sustainable. Based on the market information, I instruct my production facilities to install new manufacturing runs, hoping that my mineral stocks allow it. If not, I hit the market again to buy more processed rocks. During all of this, my Crane floats serenely in the hangar as I conduct all my affairs through interfaces connecting directly in to my pod.
My thoughts naturally drift to wondering what it will be like when Walking in Station (WiS) becomes a reality, when I am flushed out of my pod goo and set free to explore stations beyond their hangars. Instead of staring at my admittedly beautiful ship behind several windows of information, I could be watching people, probably other capsuleers, from a table in a café, sipping on a cappuccino, albeit still from behind several windows of information. It would make quite the difference to see capsuleers come and go. Individual privateers will get new mission briefs to be completed, or groups of pilots all leave the area at once, boisterously heading off for a scheduled mining operation, or maybe quietly sneaking away to roam local low-sec systems for easy prey. Still daydreaming about the possibilities, I check my current station to see who also is currently docked.
 Space is big, and not just the parts with nothing in it. There are thousands of stars, hundreds under the umbrella of Concord in high-sec. Each system has several planetary bodies, many of them have stations in orbit, and a few planets more than one. Even if a system looks busy, with maybe twenty capsuleers present, the choice of place to dock means you are unlikely to find more than five or so capsuleers in the same station at any one time. Some of them may probably be shaking off a clone jump, or worse, and not feel in the mood to be seen in public. WiS sounds like an interesting idea, until you realise how lonely it is out in space.
Even the wretched hive of scum and villainy that is Jita probably won’t be interesting more than a couple of times, after dodging scams and pushing through crowds to finally get served or find someone you know. And unless you dock in the navy station at Jita IV, moon 4 you still may struggle to find others to talk to. If it weren’t for intricate communication relays, allowing for real-time conversations across the galaxy, many capsuleers could go days without speaking to another person. But maybe that’s the problem, the universality of some channels meaning there is little need to gather in specific stations, so capsuleers don’t. It’s a slim hope, but maybe when it becomes possible to meet outside of our pods more capsuleers will be more likely to dock somewhere specific.
[caption id="attachment_404" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Capsuleers getting drunk before Angel Extravaganza"]  [/caption]
It’s a slim hope to expect pilots to congregate, if only because navigating systems can get tedious. Jumping across several systems is seen as a necessary means to an end for most tasks, but it is yet to be seen how many capsuleers are willing to jump five, six, or maybe a dozen systems to meet face-to-face, for a corporation meeting or a simple chat about ship fittings, when a simple communication channel could be opened instead. Indeed, it needs to be seen how WiS communications are handled before this can be properly gauged. Speech bubbles floating above capsuleers’ heads could make the air crowded quickly, and whilst the ephemeral nature of the conversation may appeal to some shady characters, the necessity of continually having to repeat yourself will annoy others. If WiS relies on the same communication window as other channels, I am sure many pilots will question the wisdom of spending half-an-hour flying to a station only to monitor a chat channel that would be identical ten systems away.
None of this is to say WiS can’t, or won’t, bring new aspects of capsuleer life to New Eden. Personally, a change of background whilst in a station will be welcome, even if it is only me and the waiter in the VIP room. I won’t get so desperate as to mingle with my crew or other civilians. And there is definitely one feature that would make docking in a particular station enticing: PvP. It would really add to the atmosphere of a station and lead to more interesting social dynamics if it were possible to spike a rival’s drink, start a bar fight, or stab a dastardly pirate. And I think this is the real purpose behind Dust 514. It may begin with ground battles for planets and moons, but Dust 514 must surely soon be revealed as the prototype system for WiS. You can leave your pod behind, but don’t forget your weapon.
Crimsoneer, over at Pods And Pills has let fly with a recent article following up on some forum posting about the efficacy of the learning skills in EVE. I had started initially to comment on it, but decided that given the sheer length of the comment and the thoughts I had, it was worth of a post in and of itself in response.
tl; dr; The game is full of choices. Everyone thinks their choices are right. Everyone else is wrong.
To begin with, full disclosure – I have all of my learning skills maxed. It was and is something I chose to do, fully cognizant of the the time, effort and results of such a decision. I have another character that doesn’t have the learning skills to find his way out of a wet paper destroyer. Both of them are more fun than a Minmatar in a leotard in a traveling Gallente circus. Ok, on with the show…
There is a lot of posting and controversy and heated words flying around about the status of carebears, game changes, felt/perceived needs and I really have to sit back and chuckle. The same people who routinely say, “It’s just a game, lighten up.” also seem to want everyone to “HFTU” at the same time. This is not directed at Crimsoneers article, but applies in the sense that we all have preferences about how we want thing to be.
In response to Crimsoneer, it seems a bit of fallacious to say on one hand,
No matter which tough choices you make, who pops you, who you get scammed by, where you get your PLEX from, every choice is designed to promote you having fun.
and then turn around and say:
Forcing you to make the choice between training your learning skills now, and thus boring yourself to death now, or training your skills later and getting bored then, isn’t a choice between option A and option B: it’s a choice between sucking now or sucking later.
It seems then you want there to be hard choices in EVE, but you don’t want there to be hard choices. I realize you said hard choices and ‘suck(y)’ choices, but ultimately isn’t that a matter of perspective? To play the advocate for a moment, how exactly does choosing someone to pop me or scam me promote me having fun? Isn’t boredom a relative concept as well? To me it seems like the learning skills fall squarely into that hard choice category. Thus you end up asking yourself the difficult question, “Am I willing to do this? Is it worth it for that extra skill point I earn?” If the answer is no, move along, nothing to see here. However, some people might actually think it’s fun to train the learning skills. Sure, they’d take them free if you were giving them away, but the same could be said about Heavy Assault Cruiser level V.
There is nothing to force you into training those skills. No guns against your head. If you wanted to just ignore them, you are certainly able to. Heck, it will even save you money so that you can buy another cruiser or four.
I can understand that it might seem/feel/be boring to train something that doesn’t seem to/feel like/be able to give you another ship or module or combat edge in space. I am worried where reasoning that such-and-such skill is boring will lead to. What about Science skills, will they be next? Many of them only let you earn datacores more quickly from agents and are a legacy to a former time. Is it really worth it to have them in the game? What about social skills? They only increase the rate at which you increase your standings or loyalty points with a corporation. Surely they should be eliminated too.
How about we replace it with two skills that are mutually exclusive [if you train one the others are blocked]:
Then we still have a really hard choice and you don’t have to mess with anything that doesn’t make the game fun for you.
And so it happens. There is the past that is always with us. There is the present that is always running away from us. And finally there is the future that never quite manages to get here. There will always be another ship to build, another system to swim, another skill to train, et cetra. From my past I have trained to be a good scientist. For the present I am working on a few small projects, but the future draws my eyes to the misty veil of time. What then shall I do and where shall I go? Do I need this or that skill to get it done and how best to proceed in that direction? The future is always full of questions.
One of the things that has changed radically within the universe that we all swim through is the way new capsuleers join us. As technology has improved and the cloning and pod-pilot technology matured, we arrive at our current place where not only can you improve yourself towards any desirable end, you can also improve and train in what would seem like no direction at all. Now a pilot can not only improve her ability to learn skills that improve her ability to pilot ships that improves her ability to learn/earn/kill/thrill, but that same pilot can utilize the new technology available to rearrange the very fabric of the brain to enhance certain basic attributes or reduce others.
The veil around my own future has grown quite thick, and I am left without real pictures of what it will look like. There have been some things that I have always wanted to do, but given the lack of direction, I let them wander. I also know that sitting here in this present and expecting to get a clearer view of the future will never cause the past to go away or said future to become clearer. I have decided then, to walk off into that veil of mist. I have been to the new technology, and drank deeply of its mind altering draught. I am now as balanced in ability as any and only break down and cry a little about my slightly slower skill training in science on days that end in “Y”.
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.
I found myself mining some ice to fuel our wormhole tower. As it was an off-peak time, there wasn’t anyone else from the corporation, so I was flying back and forth. The Hulk can hold three cycles with the cargo optimization rigs, so every 13 minutes or so I would make the round trip.
As I was getting several dock/un-dock cycles, I was able to catch one of the persistent display issues I’ve been having with my camera drones. A couple of them seem to have gone rogue and I get some very odd views. The net result was the following picture:
The effect is more interesting that upsetting. Any adjustments to the cameras’ vector, and they immediately self correct.
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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Well, the reality is that I often end up on the wrong side and often without it being the end of the world. It is a regular occurrence to see “20:33:35 Notify As you pass through the wormhole you realize that it collapses behind you.Have you become trapped?” in my logs. 
