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 Crucibles Of Change
So in a few moments, the universe as we know it will collapse in on itself in a cataclysmic cacophony of conniptions that we will come to call Crucible. There are changes enough for everyone, including everything from lowly munitions all the way up to galaxy spanning goodies. There are new modules/equipment as well as new ships to put them on. There are old types of equipment with new abilities and properties as well as new paint on old ships.
Perhaps more than with other releases I have been keeping an eye on this update. Regular daily Singularity updates and visits have become a part of my routine as much as my morning coffee. Perusing the differences of the new equipments, ships and visuals has become something of a habit. By-and-large, there is little in the changes that will effect my day-to-day routine significantly [with the exception of corporate bookmarks - which still seem only half of a solution]. There is a bit of internal struggle that coincides with all of this change, mostly centered around the question of, “Why do I care so much?” Bear with my introspective, belly-button browsing as I consider how all of this is affecting me so deeply.
In a bit of confession and disclosure, I have toyed with the notion of hanging up my pilot’s license and settling down into a long stasis. Over the last year has seen some interesting flak and change happen in the universe and not all of them have been useful or happy. There were times and days where I could not be arsed to haul my pod into a ship to do much of anything, let alone fly around, shoot, scan, salvage, explore…. So in the midst of all this malaise, comes a rather expected update to the universe with rather unexpected feelings attached to it.
Where there was apathy before, suddenly there is attention. Where before I felt like giving up, I am tending to feel things going up. I look forward to sliding into my ships and launching forth to interact with the others around me. If nothing else, at least there is in Crucible the concern for quality that derides my contempt and compels my attention. I am ready for change. The world is again before me on a plate of stars waiting to be devoured with the utensils of ships and shots.
I would like to leave you all with a quick Wordle of the patch notes mentioned above. I was singularly impressed with the results and how much it reflects the essence of change.
On [Re]-Evaluating the Whole Wormhole Works
Non-Industrialists Must Stop Reading Now and Go Shoot Miners!
For the rest of you – there has always been a small [ok LARGE] part of me that enjoys the industrial side of EVE. I like shooting people in ships, flying around looking for targets, debating how best to fit a ship for a job and if it is even a valid application; however I also like making things. For several reasons I have variously gotten involved in mining ore, making munitions and modules, building ships, inventing Tech 2 items and ships, harvesting gasses, reacting polymers, reverse engineering artifacts, building Tech 3 pieces and putting together planetary colonies for producing various tower fuels, T2 components and raw materials. It is the POS fuels and their production that this post deals with.
There are a multitude of ways to go about this and I will probably forget some along the way, so feel free to point those out to me. In the mean time, the following is a walk-through of how I got to where I am. Remembering how I had started with trying to set everything up in one go I knew that I was going to give it plenty of thought and try and do my homework.
When Penny and I returned to a C4 to live and hunt with a smaller pack, I opted to look at the whole PI process again and evaluate how best to approach it. I opted to see if I could produce enough robotics to keep the tower supplied without having to import them. They are an expensive part of the fuel calculation and would significantly affect what we had to provide on our own. This plan was to use the planets in the system to produce fuel for use and not for sale. The first fuel setup was Robotics as it accounts for about 15% of the total fuel costs and 30% of the non-ice fuel costs. A balanced fuel load [using as much of the fuel cargo space in the tower with all fuels for the same number of days] for our large faction tower means we need 816 units of robotics every 34 days.
In order to do this, we need to be able to produce 24 robotics per day. One Advanced Industry Facility produced 3 [u]nits of robotics per hour given 40u of Mechanical Parts and 40u of Consumer Electronics. This works out to 72u robotics per day if there is sufficient supply of Mechanical Parts and Consumer Electronics. The goal is then to determine how best to go about getting the Mech. Parts and Cons. Elect. supplies necessary to keep the Robotics rolling off the line continuously. The first attempt saw extraction and production spring up on our plasma world for Cons. Elect. and on a Barren planet for Mech. Parts. The second barren planet was then setup to combine the P2 materials into robotics.
One of the things that quickly became apparent when setting up a large scale Planetary Interaction colony was the extreme PG need for a large number of extractor heads. Thus there was always going to be a compromise over the amount of P0 material extracted and the number of basic industrial factories that could convert it to P1. Thus I was able to get about 1,400u each of Mech. Parts and Cons. Elect. This made for about 35u Robotics per day. While this was sufficient for producing the fuel we need for our tower, it was a very depressing return for what seemed like so much work put into clicking, hauling and then clicking again. This also only resulted in 500,000 isk/day in excess revenue which hardly seemed worth the time sink. It is for things like this that I pay people to change the fluids in my planetary vehicle.
On Strip Mining Planets
Moving into a Class 5 wormhole after the Class 4 saw a shift away from producing anything and toward raw extraction. This was the part of the plan where I put down extractor heads and landing pad to rip as much stuff out of each ball of dirt/lava/gas in our system that I could get my greedy little command centres on.
The initial plan here was to stockpile the extracted Planetary resources [P0] materials until a suitable wormhole opened up and then flood the market with it all. The basic tenets involved were: Low Stress; Low Time; Low Margin; Medium Returns. This plan was enacted and working for only a couple days before two things happened to change it all up.
The first was the change from extractors to extractor “control units” and “heads” for getting the P0 out of the planet. This required going back to each planet and restructuring how everything was laid out on the colony. While this was time consuming, it was in all actuality a blessing because of the following reason required some colony restructuring/thinking.
The second issue was probably the more important factor – raw P0 are rather bulky in large quantities. Another pilot and I quickly realised that using the XL ship assembly array as well as the freighter was not going to be sufficient to hold all the stuffing we were pulling out of our plush planets. A quick refit saw the new extractor heads added and a couple dozen basic processors to change our P0 into Tier 1 products [P1]. This resulted in our good only needing 25% of their former volume [3000 units of P0 = 20 units of P1: 30m3 P0 = 7.6m3 P1]. This made storing the produce much easier, moving it out take less time/effort and allow us to wait for a suitable exit that we were comfortable using.
In a typical day I could collect about 18,000 units of Oxidizing Compounds [there was a lot of gas] over three planets. A fourth planet was setup on our temperate world for exporting mass quantities of Industrial Fibers which could theoretically generate about 12,000 units. If you noticed from the previous paragraph, this is a still a lot of cubic meters of stuff. So much so that in order to keep enough space free in the spaceport I was forced to export my planetary goods 2-3 times per day. This was also an unworkable solution not to mention unsustainable from a resource point of view.
In the end I scaled back the extraction and production on the gas planets to about 3,100 units of P1 each day [ending with a full spaceport] and then could export and restart the whole process over again. This was all worth about 500,000 isk per planet per day logged on. This meant with my 5 planets, I would be able to generate 2.5 million isk per day for about 20 mins of clicking. Yeah – it took a while for that to sink in. This was not going to be a long term cash cow but it was certainly something to fill in the space between scanning, running anomalies, hauling crap and running reactions.
On Adding, Subtracting and Finding Yourself Happy
 Some things are easily quantified and measured. They can be numbered, totalled, divided, analysed and reported. This is basic maths and accounting, in that you know how much of something there is and how much it is worth in time, effort, profit, etc. These are the things that most people aim for and are more than happy pursuing. More and better ships, profit, ore, isk, research, production, flying, etc.
On the other hand, there are the unquantifiables. The things that defy counting and spurn attempts to wrangle them into mathematical formulae. The time spent teaching a new corporation member the way things are done or walking a newbie through basic scanning 101 can be really hard to put a number on/in/by. How do we assign a value to the logistics pilot that kept several millions or even billions of isk on the field longer in a fight? Is there any quantitative measure for the time spent making sure the POS was set up efficiently so that arrays were easily accessed without flying back and forth all over the bubble? How about the amount of energy and resources put into manning a gate camp?
Still another thing to consider is how much isk is enough? The answer ranges from the PVP pilot who like heroin addicts, just wants enough for the next fix, er, ship to the full-on industrialist/trader who needs all of the isk to be satisfied. Most of us fall somewhere in between where we have a comfortable point, varying slightly by our preferred hulls and fittings. We could all use more and could survive on less.
Orakkus recently wrote about what it takes to be a Solid Pilot, and I think it is just as applicable to the discussion of value [and worth a plug as well]. There is a certain value to a pilot that can fully fit a sniper battleship and the one that knows she needs to stick to something else. It is often immeasurably valuable for fleet commanders to know that the the people in the fleet know their roles and can adequately fill them. I am afraid of only two things in EVE: 1) Logging in and finding that my friends have decided to pack it up and move to some other venue; 2) Idiots.
The first is mitigated by the communication channels that friends share in and outside of New Eden but the second is something that shatters dreams in fits of screaming nightmares. This is another item of value that is hard to quantify. How long do you invest in people that seem to be unable to learn or at least very slow to pick things up? Almost every cost/benefit analysis argument generally boils down into either a he-said-she-said situation or becomes so subjective as to be meaningless.
On Scanning, Shooting, Salvaging, Harvesting, Hauling and Helping
In a whirlwind rush, the list of things to get done piles up and begins to look like a impending avalanche. There may be fields of ore just floating out in our system patiently waiting to hear from our barges. There are definitely wormholes that have yet to be found, surveyed, catalogued and stored. There are gases dispersing, hoping to be harvested and stored until processing. There planetary resources to extract, refine, process and export. There are reaction to be run, research to be installed, POS arrays to be unanchored, moved, anchored, onlined and utilised. There are resources to be exported, sold, contracted and traded. There are fuels, modules, ships, ammo and skills to be imported. There are possibly neighbours that would like us to alleviate their shields, scour their armour and generally remove their hulls from them.
And none of that even begins to include the number of people that need to be thanked, congratulated, hailed, ignored, watched, befriended, shot, reshipped, berated and/or bereaved. Throw in some ongoing conversations about the nature of the universe, whether ships really fly in space or swim through it, who did what to whom and where to go to get some good, hard spiked Quafe.
The world we live and fly and fight and engineer in is rich, deep and very, very personal. It takes more than just a passing interest in spaceships and spreadsheets to appreciate it fully. This is not to say it’s perfect. The interface confounds me on a regular basis, my ship seems to occasionally have a mind of its own, the drones only respond 100% correctly on the second Tuesday of each week and occasionally my overview tells me I’m somewhere else.
We are busy little Wormhole Engineers. We like our part and the jobs we do. If you are looking for a stable source of income and relaxed, arm-chair piloting – keep flying. There is none of that out here.
On Getting To Know The Author
Somewhat in response to Freebooted‘s post about introductions, I came up with the following:
[caption id="attachment_678" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Vestigial Heritage"]  [/caption]
I’m an old Caldari pilot who has managed to fly a lot of ships, visit a lot of systems and learned some of the most spectacular ways to die. I believe in working very hard to be the best pilot that you can. To that end, I spend a lot of my skill points on getting my skills to level 5. This also means I don’t have a lot of skills. I love my Drake and I don’t mind trying to use it in a lot of different situations.
I am that bane of banes for MMOs, the carebears’ carebear. I like mining. I like manufacturing. I like killing rats and Sleepers, setting up towers, plugging different numbers in spreadsheets and seeing what comes out. I like flying with a group of friends more than I realised when I started and I miss them when they are gone. I used to mine Veldspar in high-sec before I started exploring and mining Kernite in exploration sites. I would run missions for extra ore when the macro-miners would strip out whole systems.
I have a whole lot of blueprints and end up using them on occasion. I have been in one fail cascade, one very successful corporation and have most recently started out again on my own with a new venture. We endeavour to focus on solely on wormholes and utilising them for fun and profit.
On Living And Lasting In Wormholes
In a recent article Star Defender ponders the longevity of wormhole occupants and the preponderance of persons heading back into known space. This is increasingly true, I will agree. One of the other things we have noticed is that even within a corporation, we’ve found that some people who loved the wormhole when they first moved in, decided that it wasn’t really a long term option for them.
After doing this for almost a year, we’ve learned that it is, as much as anything, a lifestyle issue. Some people are looking for isk and have decided that missions or tending their rock gardens in high sec is more to their liking. Others miss the constant flow of traffic and capsuleers that they can shoot at. We look for people who like smaller ops, closer knit groups and slightly neurotic. The people who end up doing the best are the ones who don’t like crowds, love making things work [especially without the right tools], and are used to living on the fringes of society.
In many ways, Letrange’s post on Alliances as they relate to wormhole life is indicative of the issues involved in long term wormhole residency. If you haven’t read it, let me take the liberty of paraphrasing him, “1st, go read Letrange’s Blog Entry. Back. Good.” Basically as it relates to wormhole life, alliances are different. Both alliances and corporations need to start thinking approaching life differently from their counterparts in high-sec, low-sec and null-sec. There are aspects of all of them that apply, but there some things that need to be thought through differently.
The first to be addressed is living out of what amounts to a caravan parked on the Gaza border. You desperately need fuel, supplies and food; however, parties on both sides of you are armed and should be considered dangerous to your well-being. You have to find ways to be self-sufficient while sharing with those also in your RV. One hopes that everyone living in the same place is courteous, thinks exactly alike and doesn’t have any body odour. If you solve this in a manner that keeps everyone happy, let me know.
Other issue that exists after a short amount of time is resource availability. CCP stated that they never intended wormholes to be a long-term residential solution. They’ve set it up so all your fuel and possibly everything else you use up will come from beyond the confines of your home. Couple this with the simple fact that wormholes tend to ‘dry up’ with usage and soon there are a plethora of people and paucity of provender for them. This is the main issue for people that otherwise have the correct state of mind to survive in a hostile environment making ends meet with their own wits. They just need more ‘content’ to be content.
As a corollary to this, the more pilots that you have in a given system, the better equipped the corporation will be to deal with any of the situations that happen to come upon it. Besieged by battleships, bring it. Perplexed by pirates, pulp ‘em. Stymied by Sleepers, sic ‘em. But as above, it takes a lot of resources to provide a lot of resources and all of them chew through it rather quickly.
So we’re left with the phrase, “Lifestyle Choice” that I really think best captures what it means to be a wormhole resident. Things aren’t often grand out here, nor does it all happen with clockwork efficiency. Fleets are often best described as ad hoc and would make most dedicated FC’s cry. Logistics are always a bit of strain and a large percentage of time is dedicated to just making sure everything doesn’t come crashing down. I think it is ok to say that those of us who tend to stay out here in the wormholes are different. There’s a niche out here that we honestly feel blessed to be able to fill and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.
Things are happening all around us and changes are afoot. In more ways than just the mild revamp of this site, the more it changes, the more it will really stay the same. We are in the process of making some very fundamental changes to the way we will be approaching our wormhole operations. After a significant amount of thought, discussions and consultations with other experts, we have decided not to operate out of a wormhole from within the wormhole engineers’ division of Dark Star Galactic Engineers. Sadly, this marks the end of nearly a year of wormhole expeditions by the engineers of DSGE.
What this doesn’t mean though is that the people who have been diligently learning how to live out on the edge of the unknown will be leaving that life. We are still all going to be living in the same system and using the same ships and equipment. After much preparation we are decided to cut the apron strings and move out from underneath the protective umbrella of DSGE and work on our own as the Wormhole Engineers. We have big plans for the future and are excited about the opportunities that still lie ahead of us.
In continuation from the previous article…
Recently I found myself discussing the bygone era of naivete with regard to flying ever bigger, faster, deadlier, efficient, specialised and ultimately more expensive ships. We have all come a long way since our Ibises and Velators. The time since we’ve used civilian weapons [if ever] is far away and mostly gone are the days when the fittings and ships are limited by the skills we haven’t trained or isk we haven’t earned. We still flounder a bit on the first few times we do something new [ship fittings and how to effectively use a Stealth Bomber], but by now we know where to look for the information and make fairly educated choices and decisions based on that information.
Given that we are now what I would consider Intermediate level pilots, we are probably prime for various and sundry problems brought on by our decent into madness [Is linking to your own posts rather akin to talking to yourself? If so, I also have posts whereby I comment on my own posts thus creating a dialogue. Sadly, I'm probably going to end up posting a comment on one of my posts about a link to a post or comment of my own thus degenerating into complete insanity. I apologize to myself in advance.]. Having nearly gone off the deep end one too many times, it occurs to myself [and others, I'm far from unique or inspired], that fresh meat is needed to halt the rapidly encroaching madness. Either that, or we’d like to begin drafting some people so that we at least statistically reduce the number of insane pilot actions.
Actually, we’re debating bringing on a few newer members that we can ultimately train into effective capsuleers according to our own images while exploiting their current skills for our gain. We’re probably going to start with some dedicated salvage/mining personnel to help offset our tendency to let the mining sites in our wormholes degrade to uselessness as well as help accelerate the speed at which we can work over the various anomalies and signatures there-in. Having employed all manner of recruiting means in the past, I thought we might also benefit from some of the other blog readers/personalities out there who might like to take a chance on wormhole mining and salvaging.
I am hoping to wrap this up with a segment on some of the other recruiting methodologies and their relative effectiveness.
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.”
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