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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In Search of Perfection

I’m always trying to make the best of both what I have and what I can do. In some cases that means being as efficient as possible and cutting costs and corners. At other times it is a matter of training that last skill to level V. Currently I’m working at wrapping up Production Efficiency to level V so that the stuff I manufacture costs less and I’ve been slumming [mission running] so that I’ll have enough LP to purchase an Inherent Industries ‘HX-2′ mining implant and then the ‘HY-2′ ice duration implant. My clone out in the Ardalabier ice fields will get the HY and the main high-sec mining clone will get the HX. I’m about half way there. If I get those all squared away, I’ll consider a set of implants for the mission clone.

On other progress fronts, I’m getting closer to having some good R&D agents with Lai Dai. I have plenty of standings, but the skills are still by major road block. For someone who likes to do a little bit of everything, getting your skills up to a sufficient level can be maddening. So in four days I’ll shift from production training to research training all the while I’ll be missioning to be able to mine more efficiently.

On the sales front, I know I’ll need more order slots, but that has also fallen in terms of importance to the other options. I’ve been putting my LP from Amarr corporations into faction laser crystals. This has been fairly profitable as they would otherwise just be collecting dust and the crystals additionally required for purchase have all been from mission loot.

Summary:
Perfection is painfully slow in coming sometimes.
Implants are worth the cost [sometimes].
LP should be available to sell/contract/trade.
Clones allow for specialization without alts.

Addendum:
Apparently magnetic cable flux disruption from a small planetoid in some far distant system is playing havoc with my pod’s electronics and it’s taking hours to accomplish little tasks like docking, warping, jumping or even just using the coms. [Some numbnut cut two major under sea cables in the Mediterranean Ocean and all of my connections are being routed to Venus first which further results in a ping of something on the order of 4800 ms.] I think the term is Sad Panda™.

Search of Heartache II

So hot off my recent successes with exploration, I fired up The Pogues and headed out to try and find some more hidden belts. This time I jumped two gates downstream to the last system in the constellation and figured I’d work my way back toward home. If I failed to find any results in those systems, I’d then move on up toward the other end of the constellation. Needless to say, the first three systems were busts. I didn’t get a single signature hit on any of them. (It is a good think I’m making these probes on my own now.)

On the fourth system I managed to pull up a single gravemetric signature on my Multispectral probe. I was excited, here was some yummy asteroid goodness to find and feast upon! I pulled up the system map and gauged where would be the ideal locations for my next set of probes. I wanted to get as much coverage as possible without wasting any probes. The problem is that this particular system is small and the five inner planets are all within a couple of AU of each other. I worked out a system I thought would work and started warping around laying my Quests out get a warp-able destination. The first set of probes didn’t return a signature which I had read on the datasheets wasn’t unheard of. I fired off another Multispec to make sure the hidden belt was still around and hadn’t been mined out by a competitor.

The trace still showed up, so I went and laid out another set of Quests to try and get a fix on it. I varied my pattern a little bit this time to see if a slightly different layout might get a result. On the third scan a weak signature popped upon my HUD and I was grateful to see it, even if a little bit tired by now. I was putting a lot of time and isk into this venture, as was excited to see it begin to pay off. I was still a long way from operating in the red on exploration as the first small site had more than paid for additional probes and skills, but I knew I couldn’t just rely on that. The signal strength was a paltry 0.019 and about an AU away. I warped to destination, destroyed my existing probes and popped some Pursuits into the launcher. I figured if I could get a solid hit here, I might could afford that sweet little SoE probe launcher I saw in the contracts catalog.

The net result of the evening of scanning was, I scanned with my mid-range probes for over 2 hours and never got any closer than .6 AU. Almost every scan came back negative, and those that didn’t were very unreliable. My one consolation is that the site must have been very good because I couldn’t locate it. [Note: Given my skill set, it could be that I just didn't have the ability to narrow it down.] This following hard on the heels of my earlier scan triumph, was disheartening and depressing. I still like scanning, but I’ve also seen his dark side and will be ever more scarred by it.

Search of Heartache I

Having recently wrapped up Astrometrics IV, I headed out in my trusty Heron. I really like the ideas & mechanics behind exploration and I was excited to put it to work while I was working toward training the rest of the skills on the List™. My home system was empty so I warped next door to see what they had to offer. After my unskilled 431 second scan, what should appear to my multispectral probe but a Gravimetic site. Nearly lost in excitement I warped off to the first planet, simultaneously destroying the first probe and pulling up the system map to chart out the Quest probe layout.

The tiny system had two outer planets and a group of tightly bunched inner bodies. I figured out the best way to use four probes to completely cover all of them & then began another unskilled 431 second scan. On the very first run up pops a signature with a 0.6 AU accuracy. As I warped off to the point, I again bid goodbye to another set of probes & loaded some Gravimetic Combs to track it down. The first scan returned nothing, as did the second. On the third I could scarcely believe my eyes. A signature with an accuracy of 0m!

Flush with success, I cheekily warped to 0m and scanned the asteroid contents while aligning towards my home system. It was a small to medium belt of 15-20 rocks with about 175,000 units of various Omber derivatives. Arriving back home, I jumped into the Lou Ferrigno, loaded a fresh set of Omber I crystals and cleaned out the cargohold. The rest of the corp had long since docked and headed off to other pursuits. I knew this was going to have to be a one woman show. I opted to go with jetcans and risk the flippers as I was on a role as well as a bit of a time clock. Approximately an hour and fifteen minutes later I was busy loading the last of the ore and heading off to refine the whole mess.

Then I got a bit proud and maybe a tad cocky… (to be continued)

Industrials, Transports and Freighters. Oh My!

I’ve finally wrapped up several skill sets that I have been wanting for some time. I can finally fly the whole range of Caldari industrial, transports and freighters. I can’t afford my Bustard, Crane or Charon yet, but I can fly them.

I also saw the devblog about the coming changes to the transports and I think they are good changes. I’m not so sure they were ‘broken’ per se, but they sure weren’t fully utilized. This may encourage more players to get into them and train beyond Transport level 1.

Also tucked into this blog is some ninja posting about the buff to the Mackinaw that allows it to finally fit two Ice Harvester Upgrades II and an increase in cargo hold that will let you hold 2 full cycles.

Almost There

I’m finally almost to Caldari Industrial V. It’s been a long week, but I can finally see the end. Well, I can see it a week away. I thought about just training Gallente Industrials to level five, but since I also knew I wanted to fly a Charon, it seems frivolous to do both. At least at this point.

It’s been rough only having the Badger Mk 2 and it’s ~10-13.5 m3 capacity. Even with the 4 GSC‘s it only hauls 16,000 m3 worth of my stuff. If I forego the bonus yield of my MLU 2′s on Lou Ferrigno, I can slot in a couple of Cargo Expander 2′s and actually care more than my industrial ship. Something about that seems wrong. :(

After I have the Charon, I’ll probably go back and pick up the skills for the Iteron Mark V, but until then, I will make do. Since I have been focusing on mining, I haven’t been the one entrusted with hauling on any group mining ops. For that matter, there haven’t been many group mining ops lately. I also just realized that even though I will have the skills for a freighter, I’m roughly 1,500,000,000.00 isk short of actually slotting my pod into the beast.

And finally, I’ve decided to pick up and train Transports to level 1 to shift into a Bustard for intermediate hauling in the interim.

Sadness Falls From Skies

I don’t know where to begin. It seems the universe is going to change radically in the next couple of days. The faithful, foolproof capsuleer mnemonic skill training system is going under a radical frameshift resulting in a cessation of training when you capsuleer membership dues aren’t paid. It seems that even though the system was unintentionally created this way and has operated this way without fail for the last 5 years, it has now become a necessity.

The sadness comes from the loss of many good capsuleers. It seems times are getting lean and the inability to keep your dues paid is nothing new. However, now without being able to continue to learn, it is likely that a lot of players won’t be interested in coming back. They’ll likely pick up jobs planetside or maybe just fly off the radar somewhere….

For myself, I don’t think I would have still been playing if this had been in effect from the beginning. :(

Freedom!

While continuing to learn how to reprocess modules more efficiently, I’m back in the Lou Ferrigno for several more sessions with my favorite space rocks. I like to think of my self as a Asteroid Psychologist taking rough rocks and releasing their inner potential. What was once merely a rock in a limited and captive environment, being stifled by the gravity of a local celestial body is given purpose and passion. Who knows how far they can go.

They could end up in your next shield extender, afterburner or rifter. They have almost unlimited potential. And to think so many people want to put a stop to it. All the time I hear, “Don’t mine.”, “It’s not worth it.”, and “In defense of these poor rocks we are declaring open season on you and your hulk.” It’s enough to make me almost want to cry. Why would people be so completely ignorant of the untapped promise locked in these modest, unassuming rocks.

Who Needs Isk

I moved a bunch of my Tritanium to market today. I’m still using a Badger II as I don’t have the resources to use a Charon yet or the skills for something like an Iteron V. The result is that I move about 1.6 million minerals per trip. At the current market rate, that means I’m getting about 4.9 million per trip. As it’s only 6 jumps, I’m ok with making the jumps and moving it to sell it.

Having made some isk, I was contemplating going back into the field to make some more roids cry, but somehow got distracted by a item link to a Drake battlecruiser. Suffice it to say that 31 million later, I’m right back where I started isk-wise. I’ve never owned a BC before and barely have the skill to fly the thing. I have the tank and support skills, but haven’t spent much time learning the weapons systems. As a primarily industrial character, I didn’t use much beyond the occasional assault launcher or 150mm rail gun. So now I have a very well tanked passive drake without any launchers. Hilarity never ceases.

Mining for Players

This is a topic that I’ll probably come back to at some point. Apparently at somepoint in my career, I made the following statement to a good friend. “I am that most dreaded of MMO players, the care bear.” I tend to upset the natural order of things by needlessly throwing resources at things that could be better put use wiping the virulent infection of my fellow humans from the universe. I constantly waste isk, time and other things to put people that I hardly know into new ships, get them started training new skills, help them get set-up for mining/research/learning/pvp/pve/et cetra.

Case in point: Today I happened across a young Caldari pilot fresh into the SAK and had an overwhelming desire to just throw help at him. He really didn’t seem to know a PDS from an SPR but that only further spurred me to fill his wallet with my isk. To top it all off, he was genuinely interested in learning the game and getting over the learning curve. I almost couldn’t contain my enthusiasm at finding someone so ready to play the game and learn the ins-and-outs of a complex system like EVE.

We talked a length about skill training, mining, missioning and the general accumulation of wealth and power. In the end, I gave him over half of my net isk worth in new skills and equipment that would have taken him a couple of weeks to obtain on his own. I pointed him toward such perennial favorites as EveMon and EFT so that he could begin planning for his own future and make educated decisions [or at least ask educated questions]. By downtime I had made a new friend, had helped a new player and lost over half my isk. Sheesh, what was I thinking :D

Refined Tastes

I couldn’t resist the title now that I have for the moment completed my mission grind. I now have enough standing with the local corp to refine my ore at 100% before taking it to market. For weeks I’ve just been sitting on my rock collection while I ground through mission after horrible mission to get enough standings. An unexpected bonus is that I have enough LP to pick up one of the specialized social skills from the LP store [nothing else of interest to a non-Amaarian pilot]. Now that I have my 6.7 standings, I’m refining on every trip out. The next major hurdle is getting it to the right market.

Speaking of refining, I’m finishing up Refinery Efficiency V so that I can start training Scrapmetal Processing and Ice Processing. Of course this also necessitates training Hydromagnetic Physics and Metallurgy. It really bothers me that inefficiency would take so much from the modules and fittings that I want to refine.