I Am Your New Master

Bistot Is Primary!

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.

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.

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 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.”

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…

This last week we got our first concrete look at part of what is coming down the pipe in the near future. In a combined announcement from Outer Rim Excavations and Deep Core Mining, the new Orca was presented to the universe. It has the news wires all in a tizzy about it’s various aspects and roles it can perform. As with any new product, there are both fans and detractors. I tend to remain pessimistic about improvements until I actually see them, but I also have to admit that this really has me excited. It is at the core, a Mining Command Ship.

From the released information the specs are impressive. It will still likely have some tweaks before we see it in production, but the possibilities are phenomenal. I’m not privy to all of ORE’s and DMC’s research and test data, but what I have seen is a good start. The ship is laid out with the following information:
Ship Bonuses

• 250% bonus to tractor beam range [70km means you'll need long range targeting]
• 100% bonus to tractor beam velocity [1km/sec means just over a minute to drag from range]
• 500% bonus to survey scanner range [125km means you can tell what people are mining?]
• 99% reduction in the use of gang mods
• Multiple gang mods can be fit without command processors

Skill Bonuses

• 3% increase in mining foreman links per level
• 5% increase in cargo capacity per level [meaning w/ T1 rigs will hold just over 90,000 m3]

The announcement mentions a material cost of approximately 400 million and a BPO cost of 1 billion. The initial BPO specs could change, but they indicate a total cost to own all part BPOs of around 7 billion. I would expect that the ship initially debuts for about 800 million to 1 billion and eventually will settle down closer to 600 million.

The specs also list a cargo capacity of 30,000 m3 + 30,000 m3 corporate hanger + 400,000 m3 ship maintenance array. It can effectively haul two rigged Hulks, but not a battleship.

The press release has been met with a lot of discussion ranging from cargo space adjustments, the need to buff this and that aspect of the ship and the general “it’s a crap ship that doesn’t meet my needs” opinions.

The ability to fly the ship is based on a new skill called Industrial Command Ships which means going back to school to fly it. Most of the rest of the skills I’ve studied before. If they change the skill requirements, I’ll probably have to get back to hitting the books hard.