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 [...]]]>

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.

Wormhole Mass

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Combat

Industry

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

If I produce for the corporation and/or alliance, the expectation is that [...]]]>

How do I balance my own progress with that of providing for my corporation and or alliance? As an industrial character who has spent a fair number of hours learning to build nice things, how do I remain profitable while supporting  those around me?

If I produce for the corporation and/or alliance, the expectation is that there is some kind of break in prices. As a conscientious industrialist, I am going to tell them how much it costs me and where it’s more than the market, suggest that they obtain it there. Where it is cheaper to build, I want to offer them the opportunity to get it cheaper and be there for the people that help make it possible. I have found that I am quite horrible though at maintaining the balance necessary between things produced for sales [the market] and those manufactured for consumption [the corporation/alliance]. Often then the result is a complete halt to my industrial tendencies.

This is often further complicated by my relative incompetence and disconnect with the sales and marketing side of things. I am quite comfortable in navigating the market, getting the resources I need, etc, but just as equally uncomfortable putting my wares up for sale. Finding holes, navigating gaps, incremental adjustments, market trends all tend to elude my grasp, leaving me with a very real sense of dissatisfaction with the sheer number of things I could be doing to maximise my profits, but are generally left undone. I envy both the selfless industrialist who is able to provide everything her corporation needs as well as the ruthless profiteer who is able to judge the market, jump into the fray and make obscene profits.

As a corollary to the above, there is also a push to be involved in corporate and alliance activities that are somewhat beyond my level. I am fairly competent at combat in sub-battleship roles, but could always use more experience and training in weapon systems. I’m quite happy to spend the time training for better weapons, drones, fittings, but have to balance this with a desire to also be able to improve my abilities to support my corp-mates with industry. Has anyone else figured out to do it all and do it well yet?

It is certainly something to work and think through.

The end is nigh!

The end has passed and off into the night we continue [...]]]>

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.”

So things have been busy and I’m at a bit of a loss where to start. Who knew that managing a bunch of [...]]]>

I know, I know, I said that I would quit
All right, I promise, no more after this
You don’t know how I’ve tried
To forget what it was like – (TMGB)

So things have been busy and I’m at a bit of a loss where to start. Who knew that managing a bunch of raving lunatics with delusions of insecurity could be so much like running a corporation. All that time at the asylum is finally paying off. [Warning, excessive use of <sarcasm> makes my hands overly tired so just apply liberally where you feel it's appropriate to make it interesting for you to read.]

Towers: Apparently you have to keep putting fuel in them. Otherwise minor details like shields, guns, labs all go offline.

Labs: Mostly full of jobs, except for when something happens to a tower.

Wormholes: Much fun. I hope to stop running errands and get back in them.

Combat: I think I remember fitting a ship with something other than cargo expanders once upon a time. It was cool. I died.

Skills: Battlecruiser V was cool and the implications are still settling in. Though it’s nice to be able to jump in all the racial BCs, albeit without being able to weaponise them currently. I can fit a whopper tank to them all, but not so much DPS. I blame the ferrets.

Corporation: Growing. Leaps and Bounds. More people means more annoying opinions opportunities, but also more things to manage. Need to train Delegation [5% workload reduction per level] to level 4 and start handing off some of this stuff.

Organisation: What? Hmm? I filed that here in the stack of papers on my desk back in the tower that went offline. I’ll get back to you January 4th. Some year.

Mining: See combat. [I think I warped to a belt in a NOS Drake. Sadness.]

Invention: Lot’s of invention going on. Need to get some of it finished.

So a little bit everything goes a long way toward getting nothing accomplished. Happy times!

Old Business:

It’s been a wonderful run in the current wormhole [WH] system, but it’s time to move on. We were consistently getting Gallente and Minmatar high-security [high-sec] WH openings that made logistics a bit harder. We found another, very similar system that we are [...]]]>

Borrowing an idea from Letrange, I’ll break the following into some sections.

Old Business:

It’s been a wonderful run in the current wormhole [WH] system, but it’s time to move on. We were consistently getting Gallente and Minmatar high-security [high-sec] WH openings that made logistics a bit harder. We found another, very similar system that we are going to give a try. We had bought a second tower and wanted to switch it out for the medium one to upgrade our processes and home. The best way to handle it turned out to be set the new tower up in the new system and pull the old medium tower down to be a more transient base that moves around from place to place.

On the skills front, I’ve managed to finish up most of the science skills associated with the tech 3 invention and production. I didn’t realize how much I was specializing in science until I noticed that I had 8.5 million skill points. I also did a bit of training in electronic warfare. I have most of my engineering skills finished up and want to work on my electronics skills. I seem to have a real addiction to finishing things up in sets.

On the industrial front, we’ve started amassing a fairly large stockpile of salvage, artifacts and wormhole memorabilia. We’ve started working it over and managed to get our first blueprint copy for a Tengu electronics subsystem. We have a reactor up and are excited about the opportunities to get started.

New Business:

The new WH system has a lot of sites for us to run and we need to get started. One of the things we’ve also noticed about visitors to our systems is that they will often move right along if they don’t get signatures when they scan. So we’re going to wipe the sites out get ready to start roaming to other systems too. The benefit of having a static high-sec WH is that the logistics is greatly relieved. We now have three new [well, new to us!] recruits who bring an extensive amount of combat experience to the system. From the rest of the corporation there is an increased level of interest in the whole wormhole project.

For skills, I’m excited about getting more science skills and increasing my ability to actually manufacture these arcane things we’ve been looking for. I would like to get back to training my electronics skills and armor tanking abilities, but I’m happily putting them on hold for some more science. At some point I will need to get some combat and ship skills, but they seem so very long to complete in comparison to the skills that I’m good at [I have low perception and willpower].

We are looking at starting our T3 production in the coming weeks and getting some of the pieces to market.

So that pretty much wraps up the time to this point.