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 Reviewing The Ships That Make It All Possible
I saw Rixx Javix post about what he has in his hangar and naming conventions and thought it was a wonderful idea to review what I had as well. I’m late the party, but likely not the last. I absolutely love naming ships for practical as well as aesthetic reasons. I also have to admit that I’m going to play a little bit loose with the term “hangar” as I live out in unknown space where things are not as well defined and most all of my ships are in a Ship Maintenance Array. Living out of an SMA, reduces the number of spurious hulls we have on hand, but I usually have duplicate hulls already purchased in k-space.
Click on ships to see their descriptions
Buzzard
This is probably where I spend 75% of my time. It’s a tight little beauty that has been a good friend for a long time. Her name is Wrangler, a reference to the popular Jeep vehicle. It is the third buzzard I have owned with the previous two being Jeep and Cherokee, respectively. The fitting it fairly straight forward with covop cloak, mwd, nanos and grav-cap rigs.
Manticore
A very cool ship that I’m only recently getting experience with. I was waiting for a better grasp of bombs and training for torpedoes as well. The ship was originally named Hello Kitty, but is slated to be renamed Penticore after my stealth bomber role model.
Maller
This ship is a dual purpose gas miner and bait ship. When fully plated and resisted out, it has about 60,000 ehp and +70% resists across the board and completely passive. For mining gas, it works well with T2 harvesters as it has sufficient cpu, has a spare utility high slot [hello combat probe launcher] and cargo space. The first iteration was named Gas Man Cometh but version 2.0 has been named Tetris Reject in reference to it’s somewhat more angular shape [at least for a Amarri vessel].
Drake
Even after all these years, it still remains a combat favourite of mine. Everyone debates the efficacy of missiles in PVP, but honestly for small to medium gang roams, camps and hunting, they are fine. The buffered heavy assault missile drake is very nice and has a lot of utility. It makes a great second tackle, brings a fair amount of DPS and gets ignored enough to apply both damage and utility. The biggest problem with any ship is its pilot, and too many pilots are at fault for not adequately fitting this ship for use in a group. I used to name all of my battlecruisers with punctuation, so the first few were named, @, #, :, ., !, et cetra but later started giving them different names. The more DPS heavy HAM setup was Dramage [Drake + Damage], but it died and was replaced by Green Drakes and HAM which was eventually replaced by Baked and then Half-Baked. The second string was Safina Thania [Arabic for second ship] and a proto-type remote shield gang ship affectionately referred to as [] which harkens back to punctuation days. This is the only ship I have multiples of, though they are all stored outside the wormhole with the BPO somewhere.
Nighthawk
All I can say is wow. This ship is everything I ever dreamed it would have been when I was a little Bantam pilot in nappies. It almost makes me cry with delight and it’s just plain beautiful. Her name is Hag and she is every bit as mean as her name. I’ve run a couple level fives in her [where she was massively overtanked], have hunted for ne’er-do-well’s in wormhole space and refit at least 100 different ways. I’m growing more confident in her usage and like the idea of keeping her light and nimble.
Scorpion
I have a tri-mark armor rigged Scorpion in Jita to use in the wormholes, but have never actually flown this one. I’ve borrowed a corp-mates a couple time and have trained to use the full range of T2 ECM skills. At somepoint I’ll get out and get it imported. It’s currently named Sc 2 x Tri 1 x P
Guardian
If the Buzzard represents 75% of my flight time, this beauty is nearly the rest. It is a dream to fly and a nightmare to fit. I’ve written before about my respect for the Herculean effort required to get everything included on it that you want/need, but it is a wonder to fly. It seemingly creates cap out of thin air and makes the rest of the fleet fly with impossible tanks. In tandem with my Guardian buddy, it is a significant force multiplier. The first was named Fers Al Nahr Jo’an and was beautiful. It was lost to what I can only consider CCP mangled warp interface dynamics when the rest of the fleet didn’t warp with me. The replacement, Stop Dying, has been much more resistant and accounts for a lot of our wormhole fleet tank. This was the first ship I started keeping multiple copies of, as it is essential for us running the higher class wormhole sites.
Hulk
As a carebear, where would I be without my trusty asteroid obliterator. I’ve lost a fair share of them, but keep using them as it only takes a couple of hours of mining out in the wormhole to replace it. It isn’t rigged, the tank won’t survive a gank, but it mines and mines and mines. And when it’s done mining, it sits in the SMA without making a peep. This is the only ship that has been through so many names that I couldn’t begin to tell you them all. Both because I’ve lost a fair few and I tend to rename it often while I’m mining. The current one is named Banner’s Brain Child and the first one was named Lou Ferrigno
Charon
It’s big. It’s slow. It’s really big and slow. The Luxury Yacht has been with me longer than just about any other ship. She’s made multiple trips from Gallente to Amarr space and back hauling everything from ice and ore to ships and once an entire load of garbage.
Orca
The first Orca was a splurge. I didn’t really have the means to replace it if I lost it and wasn’t entirely sure what I would do with it, but I wanted no, NEEDED that ship. I loved that ship so much I gave it away to a corporate spy/thief. Disaffected and disturbed I tried to be bitter but knew I had learned another lesson I needed to know anyway, namely: Every last one of you are lying, cheating, disgusting scum who deserve to be shot in the back of the head with an auto-cannon. Er…, no wait, that’s a different post – lesson learned – don’t fly it if you can’t afford to lose it. The backstabbing cheating part is only partly in jest. I later bought another Orca, not to replace it, but to defy pirates and sell it in Aunenen for a hefty profit on their scam order. Managed to slingshot the Orca past the perpetual gatecamp with a web and dock at the offending station to find that someone had filled the contract about 15 minutes before. So what do you with a massive, slow ship in a system full of deranged pirates looking for juicy kills? Web it and fly it back out just because you can. Because it survived that trip, I decided she must really like me and decided to call her Keeper. She is.
And that sums up the list of ships I keep. I used to have a lot more, but now I tend to limit them to what I’m using currently and a couple of backup hulls kept in Jita.
Words fail
Buildings tumble
The ground opens wide
Light beams down from heaven
She stands before my eyes
– (TMGB)
Because I’m always a bit distracted and doing 20-30 different things at once, it often means that I hit things hard and hope I get enough to keep the project afloat until I get back around to it again. One of those projects is the ongoing Orca development project that manages to be purely theoretical in nature. All this means, I don’t actually produce Orcas, but I come back and look at their production costs in relation to the current ore/mineral prices. In update to a post of long ago [Orca Production Calculations], the following changes have been made:
An Orca can currently be broken down into its component pieces and then sub-costed into their mineral components. The overall picture doesn’t include any of the manufacturing costs and assumes NO Material Efficiency research. I am putting the picture of the calculations in this post, but I’ll try to summarise the numbers for brevity as well.
To produce an Orca requires 7 component blueprint and one ship blueprint that all average around 1.1 billion each to purchase from the market. Each of the seven components will cost approximately 4 million in minerals on average [3.2 million - 5.5 million]. Combined with the total number of each component, the cost to produce an Orca is currently approximately 310 million. Since I’m not selling Orcas, I feel comfortable in suggesting that market prices ought to be around 350m allowing for profit margins, research costs and capital paybacks.
If mineral costs continue to fall, Orca prices could stabilize as low as 325 million. Adding rigs to them will still push them up over 400 million. The cargohold optimization rigs are still running over 30 million each. The addition of the ore hold has drastically improved the Orca’s flexibility and original role performance.
I’ve been doing some calculations for the upcoming Orca release and trying to get some relatively harder numbers for the mineral requirements. I worked through the BPO’s and the subsequent requirements to total up their costs and arrive and a minimum cost. To produce one Orca from an unresearched BPOs of each piece it will cost 433,439,762 isk. This based on the same weighted averages for minerals that I use to calculate the isk per jetcan values.
I’ve uploaded a screen shot of the calculations, but I’ll try to summarize here a little bit:
- Total Cost of BPOs = 7,906,896,360 ISK [+ Orca BPO @ 1 billion]
- Total Mineral Cost = 433,439,762 ISK
- Cost – Tritanium = 252,301,136 ISK
Conclusions:
It will likely debut for close to 1 billion as people rush them into production and to market. For those manufacturers who already have researched parts BPOs, they will be able to produce them at a significantly reduced amount.
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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. 
