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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If you don’t believe me now
You’ll never believe me now – (TMBG)
Ok, it looks like I might have been a little to personally enamored with living in a black hole. Really though, who could resist the sheer, unrequited and unbridled draw from a purely science stand point. Here we stand on the brink of a natural phenomenon so powerful that the very fabric of time and space are subject to its whim. Why, the gravity of the situation alone should inspire the kind of awe to last a couple of eternities worth of exploration. Well, apparently, “not so much” as one of our pilots put it.
So, the real issue turned out to be less of the anomaly and more of an issue with being so deep. We had scouts scanning out double digit paths through class four and five wormholes to find any kind of exit into known space. I don’t mind taking a freighter full of fuel or supplies or ice cream to a place they can import from, but if they can’t even get an exit all the logistics in the world is still going to fall short for them.
So after just a few short days in the class 4 with multiple static class 4s, we have moved next door to a class 4 with a static class 3 that is much more likely to have some kind of route out to known space. This will appeal to both the mission and industrial minded pilots who want to be able to come and go for various reasons as well as the pvp oriented personnel who want better access to replacement ships and modules.
[caption id="attachment_328" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Class 4 Wormhole - Sold"]  [/caption]
The fourth incarnation of our frontline, wormhole, attack base is online and operational. We still have a few details to sort out and getting it all in was a bit taxing, however we are satisfied with the location and hope to hang out for a bit before bidding adieu to the current class 4 home. The resource collection has begun, but the depth of the rabbit hole is going to make this location a bit more challenge logistically. We are 4-5 holes deep and finding a way out is sometimes a bit “precarious” to say the least [one exit was 20 jumps through low-sec on the other side of the universe from where we needed to be]. This also means that a few of our pilots are still on the outside waiting to get in. They are excited about shooting sleepers and asteroids and gas clouds and even intruders.
[caption id="attachment_331" align="alignright" width="150" caption="That Looks Painful"]  [/caption]
The tower itself is running well and fueled for quite some time. Everything is a learning adventure and we will continue to adapt. The second adaptation we’ve had to make is something we were aware of from the beginning and had tried to compensate for. The wormhole has a spatial anomaly called a Black Hole that our pilots have begun to call by all manner of unseemly names that I can’t bring myself to post. It isn’t the prettiest system I’ve ever seen, but there are times when you can forget about the painful, pulsating rip in the fabric of space and get on with your business. Needless to say, we are learning more about the realities of the black hole as opposed to the statistical information about black holes. Professional tip from some amateurs: Target Painters. They are working wonders. Really.
With the last wormhole processing wrapped up and the current one in preparation, we’ve decided to make some modifications to our approach. As we’ve been increasingly been in contact with forces that do not have our best interests in mind. Pirates, would be invaders and even other carebears, er industrialists want to use our space for their own gains. It would be fair to stay that until now, we have been fairly tolerant of visitors, as long as we are able to go about our business. Thus we arrive at something that has been coming for some time, but has been put off several times.
Enter the Suicide Death Squad – Dark Star Division for controlling the amount of time we end up having to do things differently. The basic premise is the fact that many of the people looking to have their presence felt in our system are more interested in the numbers. They want to see such things as, “Total Isk Destroyed” and “Isk Recovered” and “Loot Stolen”. We evaluated our options with regard to said mentality and decided on a course of action. For now I’ll sit on the details, but will let you know how it works out.
Ouch! I usually add a title after I’ve written something up. It stems from a long habit of writing without titles and basing them off of either the content that has been produced or some obscure, arcane reference made in the article that is only tenuously tied to the rest of the content and thus only understood by my psyche and perhaps the asteroids that I spend so much time talking to [apologies to the gas clouds, I've just been busy lately]. However I thought that perhaps I ought to stop and take stock of the last month or so of output and see what I can learn and where we’re headed as well. Back to the title; I thought perhaps after adding it that it might appear like I only manage to post information monthly, but upon review realize that it only seems like that because I’m sad that I just don’t get more up there for you. Thus, I will mix in some information you might be interested in about my activities along with some information that you might be interested in about the statistics related to my postings.
[caption id="attachment_319" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Visits"]  [/caption]
I had been trying to get the WordPress Stats plug-in to work for several months, but managed to repeatedly get results of zero visits a day [sorry Mom, I know you were reading!] and once I even had -4. I’m not sure what happened, but as of September 13th, the whole contraption started reporting visits as well as the other reference information. I wouldn’t have even noticed that, but for a mis-click on “Blog Stats” instead of “Dashboard”. So I started perusing the results and checking back from time to time. There were several surprising things that I just wasn’t expecting when I started looking back at the visits, searches, references and onward traffic. I printed the daily views graph all to include in the post and quite by accident the median daily post number was highlighted.
It seems that for the half of September that I was able to get statistics for I managed to get 674 visits. I have to admit a certain amount of joy in this. I fully expect that half of that was Mom trying to see if I had finished training for a Command Ship yet. The average number of visitors was 39 and the median was 32. If those just seem like random numbers to you, let me put it into perspective. I didn’t know of more than four people who had visited the site and to find out that nearly 8 times as many visits had occurred as shiny [please help me with the illusion and don't mention unique page views, etc].
Another odd number I’d like to point out is the number 1. Apparently that is how many of the same search results led to my page being located and served. At no point in the last 17 or so days did people search for same terms to find my page. Again, the number doesn’t mean anything. I just like things that are different.
Posting about fittings and ore prices appeared to be my niche, without really trying to hit anything in particular. I have no intention of trying to replicate something you can find somewhere else like the fittings of BattleClinic or Scrapheap. They do fittings better to a certain degree, but they also aren’t the one in my ship and have little to lose by suggesting an alternative that may or may not work. I appreciate their feedback, but also like the fact that my fittings are my own.
For the postings ore prices, I have noticed that they have been steadily coming down across the board as I update the page. I don’t have enough meta-data to extrapolate anything as interesting as causality [a slippery, dangerous area to tread into with the best of information], but I really am kind of surprised. I don’t rely on ore as the primary means for my income as much as I once did and only sell a Charon-load or so a month of tritanium these days.
Finally, as I realise this post is nearly as long as my skill plan for a carrier, I’ll wrap up with some training thoughts.
- Learning skills suck, but boy am I glad I have them. For now I’ll lump them in the same category as whiny pvp pirates who can’t handle changing mechanics, I’d rather not deal with them, but I’m glad they are there to provide more depths and aspects to the universe I love to swim in. Train them well and they will change your world.
- Support skills does not mean the ability to fly an industrial ship full of capacitor charges. Train electronics, engineering, WU/AWU [I hate you too!], science, mechanics, navigation. Just because there isn’t another module or battleship attached to the skill doesn’t make it worthless. I know none of the readers would fly without having these trained, but share with your new corp-mates.
- Training for a command ship has actually been a really gratifying long wait. It is a destination that becomes so much more along the journey. By the time I finish up the training for the command ships I will also have gained the ability to fly logistics and heavy assault ships along the way. In point of fact, after the first command ship, it will only take about 3 weeks to fly any other race’s set of logistics, HACs and command ships. I will still need to cross-train for the weapons systems, but the broad, hit-or-miss, seemingly random training to this point is actually paying off at this point.
- I believe in doing things well if I can. Training something to level V is not a sign of weakness or stupidity. Ok, it’s not always a sign of an idiot, the author might well fall in those categories.
Ok, I’m done till next month. [Ok, really I'll probably try to post something tomorrow but will fail miserably, feel bad about it, mope for two days and then rinse and repeat until next month rolls around.]
In a recent press release, CCP has announced that they fully intend to add the ability to actually get IN spaceships and fly them around the New Eden galaxy. No longer will players be limited to walking around in stations or duking it out over planetary resources, but will have the opportunity to see uncharted realms of nebulae and stars, wormholes and anomalies. Finally, a space based MMO where you can assume the role of a slick combat pilot or a disenfranchised trader. You could be a great merchant tycoon, spreading your wares and influence over hundreds of systems or a puny, low-sec pirate, camping a lonely gate in Aunenen. . . .
Personally, I’m very excited to be able to fly spaceships. As I look back to why I started playing EVE in the first place, it was so that I could fly a spaceship. Science & Maths, PvP & PvE, Research & Industry were all just icing on the cake as I get to fly a spaceship. So maybe in my excitement and desire to fly a spaceship, I missed the memo that said I would like flying spaceships more if I could only get out of my spaceship and walk around in a station or shoot other people on a planet. Shoe-horning the sovereignty mechanic on top of this seems like a poor and somewhat tenuous connection to flying spaceships.
If I really wanted a walking avatar, I would have probably not chosen EVE and a game designed around flying spaceships. Maybe it’s just sour grapes and disenchantment over the lack of any real science and industry features being delivered in the Quantum Rise patch [hardly an expansion] or perhaps it is just “old-timers” disease whereby I cannot embrace the inevitable changes that happen to things you love [they grow old and die]? I just cannot ken the path CCP is charting and what I can see does not really impress nor intrigue me.
In reality, if I was really desirous of shooting people from a first person perspective, I would have stopped flying a spaceship some time ago and bought and played a first person shooter. Maybe even something like Dust 514 where I hear they are going to add “Flying In Space” [FiS] Soon™.
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.
I’ve finally been able to get some time to sit down and actually play, write and most importantly fly! The second stage of wormhole operations [WH 2.0] has been proceeding at full steam. I sincerely apologize to anyone wondering what was going on. We managed to find a nice little class three wormhole system with a static, high-sec, regenerating wormhole. I’m hoping to be able to use this as our staging ground for further wormhole operations and production ventures. In effect, the wormhole space gives us a small, portable pocket of null-sec from which to operated out of, without the associated hassle of carving said bit out from some existing alliance death-grip.
It is exciting to think and dream about the future possibilities of T3 production and supply, but at the same time we need to remain grounded in reality. We’re trying to work out what our needs are as opposed to what we’d merely like or want. Do we need that large faction tower? [probably not.] Do we need the ability to manufacture the full range of T3 hulls and subsystems? [Maybe as many as we can get, but understanding that we probably can't compete with the larger alliances.]
We have for all intents and purposes created a mini-alliance with in the corp. We have a dedicated group of wormhole engineers [what we're calling the people doing everything in the WH] and another group that are still in high-sec. We’re not opposed to a full fledged alliance, but currently don’t see the benefits outweighing the costs. Perhaps in time my views will change.
In news unrelated to WH’s, I noticed that I am nine days away from celebrating my one year anniversary with the Engineers. It has been an interesting and fun time, and it is neat to look back on all of the things we’ve accomplished and learned. I’ve moved from barely flying my Retriever to being a proficient ABC miner in a fully tricked out Hulk. I’ve expanded my personal BPO collection to include most all of the other ships and modules that I like to fly and use. The corporation has moved from selling a variety of T1 modules, ships and ammunition into an ever increasing number of T2 items and ships. I know there is still a lot of things we could do and improve upon, but we’ll get there. Step by step.
We successfully dismantled the POS from our little corner of wormhole space and got everything moved out and back into high security space. There was one little hiccup as a bunch of fuel was exported to an island [group of high-sec space surrounded by low-sec/0.0 space] that required a bit of scouting to extricate.
We’ve learned a lot about the whole procedure and how to approach wormholes which makes the operation an overall success. The main drawback was the initial investment was probably overkill for the returns, but in terms of knowledge was likely priceless.
Personally, I have a very low wallet and need to seriously rectify that. As we are also looking at moving into more permanent tech three (T3) production, the capital investment costs are still accumulating [labs, reactors, component bpos, reactions, skills] and will need to be factored into the final evaluation. We saved all of the salvage from our time in the ‘hole as a precursor to production, but are considering putting it up for sale as a support for future wormhole expansion.
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 don’t have all my ducks in a row. If I did, this wouldn’t be only second notice after a big dry spell. I’m trying to get caught up and re-arrange a few things. In the midst of all of this, I think I have determined what caused the previous communications outage.
Sure there was the tragic loss of hardware, resulting in an inability to connect to the interweb. Sure there were a lot of changes going on around me. I think that the real reason is much more insidious. As I looked back over some of the last pages that I had written and the information I had disseminated, one particular piece stood out. I mentioned something about trying to get caught up.
What was I thinking? More about that later. First a look at some possible methods things could have come to the horrible state that I found them in.
Had I become so cavalier with my time that I felt it necessary to provoke that God the Amarrian Cape Covered Corps keep babbling about [Just kidding Empress Jamyl. Don't suicide bomb my Hulk.]. I only meant that I intended to catch up. I in no way meant that I had it easy and needed a strong dose of hardship to bring me back to reality.
Perhaps I had pissed off the pragmatic capitalist pigs, er, Caldari. They knew I was beginning to get into a swing with my medium hybrid ammo store. It could have just been a case of warranted market pvp that resulted in my whole system of work getting screwed up completely. I was only making an average of 300-500,000 isk per day, which is hardly worth a kingdom.
I really didn’t have the Gallente or Minmatar on the radar. Mayhap it was just that little slight of attention that warranted there subtle interference. They could have always just let things be as I fully intended to sell them hybrid and projectile ammo too.
Regardless of the method, the reason was always the same. I had tempted fate and destiny had rained down ruin and distruction. Well pain and suffering. Well really just inactivity and boredom. I danced with destiny and she trampled all over my tulips before passing out drunk in my ship maintenance bay, obscenely blocking the airlock safety sensor. I’m to blame.
If you got this far, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get caught up. I will always be behind.
Je suis le ténébreux,- le Veuf, – l’inconsolé,
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie:
Ma seule étoile est morte, et mon luth constellé
Porte le soleil noir de la Mélancolie.
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