PoS shenanigans

Last night, I had an Eve-related dream. I was dual boxing, moving one character on a haul run to empire out of a wormhole, and running a sleeper site on the other in a dominix. In the dream, I kept falling asleep, and waking up and seeing the hauling character floating visible at a WH with a dude flashing red approaching me. I kept telling it to run, then tabbing to the sleeper fight and managing drones, falling asleep again, ectera. Eventually, I screamed “I can do this” in the dream and woke up.
The probable reason behind that dream, besides too many cheese sandwiches, was that the day before, through a varying series of coincidences, I found myself with 900 mil and no idea what to spend it on. After laughing and joking with several people, the responses were:

Market investing

“give it to me lulz”

buy a rattlesnake

Save it

Go capital.

Buy a covetor BPO

After realizing that none of the above options really had any profitable reward, I remebered one of my Eve-resolutions: to manage a PoS. So, asking around in corp, ny alt’s corp, my alt’s alliance, the channel “wspace colonists” and “pos funtime” I had a general idea of what to expect.
Most of the responses told me that Pos management was like trying to keep plates spinning, and managing W-space PoSes was like keeping plates spinning and only being allowed to touch them every six hours.

Disregarding the negative comments(like the idiot I so often am), On the next trip out I bought two simple reaction arrays(24 mil), some minerals(10 mil), and some silos(15 mil). I anchored them, onlined them, took them back offline, put the right BPs and materials in them, onlined them, put them online again, unanchored them and moved everything closer together, onlined it again, cursed at the PoS management tab for a few minutes and finally had everything running smoothly, with cadmium and mercury going in one side and unrefined dysporite coming out the other.

Later, while buying iced tea, saltine crackers and nacho cheese I thought about tech II components, how everyone was whining about how much they cost, so, figuring it was only a small step forward, decided to revamp from small time alchemy to big time minerals to complex materials reactions.

Later still, while enjoying nacho cheese, saltine crackers and iced tea(10$ for three day supply), I scanned an exit to lowsec and headed to jita, buying a large tower(350 mil), fuel for a few days(10 mil), materials for a few days(150 mil, effing dysprosium), a complex array(22 mil), a simple array(10 mil), and assorted blueprints(10 mil), and a small amount of guns and ammo(15 mil). Hauling all of this to our lowsec entered(lowsec->c3->c5->c6->c6->c6->c5->us), I got into home WH, and started anchoring the tower. Things went well, I put the fuel I had purchased in the fuel thingy, and pressed online.

I was immediate informed that I had forgotten liquid ozone and heavy water, and that the static had just gone end of lifetime.

Sneaking over to the PoS already established by a corp mate, who also handles the K-space hauling(Let’s call him Captain Forgiveful), I removed some heavy water and liquid ozone from our rorqual fuel tab in the corp hangar, leaving an IOU. Fifteen minutes later, I realized I had forgotten strontium. Another trip and IOU followed.

Eventually, I got the complex array and simple array anchored, the silos and coupling arrays arranged in a tasteful, yet convenient fashion, and everything running smoothly. I went to bed(4 am) and woke up the next morning, waited for the static to collapse, scanned a new one, scanned a route to K-space(c5->C6->c4->c4->c3->lowsec).

Have I mentioned that I reeeeeeeally hate scanning?

Getting a tally of fuel and materials, I only had 7k m3 of product to haul out, but was going to need like 35k m3 of fuel and materials. So, I fit my Occator for maximum escaping capability(+6 warp strength, 33k tank), and headed through lowsec with 50 mil of product in my cargo, as well as the can “Haav’s painful memories”, a can with a long and meandering story. Essentially, I had it with me mining in highsec, had my first hulk in it when I went to nullsec, was the only cargo container to survive when we were violently pushed out of nullsec, used in W-space to hold personal belongings for the last three months, ectera.
The first jump went smoothly. On the second gate(I was scouting w/ my alt in a capsule), there was a red pirate Abbadon. Hoping he didn’t have four warp scramblers fit, I started warping to the next gate. To my surprise, he warped with me. The next gate had a typhoon and two other Bss, one of which opened fire. Panicking, I jumped through the gate and warped to the next one before the other two could lock me. The gate was clear, I jumped and saw two BSs and an Onxy. I briefly mused on what an Onyx was, and getting no other mental connection than a rock-type pokemon that evolved into Steelix, engaged warp and watched unhappily as he scrammed me completely, painfully reminding me that in addition to tail whip, tackle and screech, an Onyx was a heavy interdictor that could fit a script to get a warp scrambler with infinite strength. The The Occator popped, I warped my pod out, posted a humorous comment in local and continued onto Jita. With my meager funds, I purchased a day of fuel, and went back through the pipe in a Viator (cloaky hauler) and an unfit itty to distract people so the Viator could hide. Both ships made it back into the WH safely w/ a day of fuel.

Reactions are currently underway at a projected profit of 5 mil/hr, and I am currently flat effing broke :P.

Later, I bought the container back from the scramming dudes for a mil, after selling some product. I know it could’ve been another container but figured my odds were good.


Directional: How not to die

For those of you who don’t know, in WH space local chat is delayed. This basically means that if someone is in system with you, you don’t know unless you tell a joke so good that they type “lol” in local out of habit, or they uncloak in a stealth bomber and launch a bomb at your unsuspecting self. Considering that, again, anyone and everyone can and will try to kill you, you need to have an alternate method to detecting other players before they sneak up on you and give you a prostate exam with an interdictor, hence your directional scanner.

Most miners, highsec and nullsec, don’t give two units of tritanium about the directional scanner. If there’s someone in local, and they’re red, run, if not, keep mining, or get in a battleship.

I can only assume that the other denizens of other places besides WH don’t care about the directional either.

Anyway, the directional scanner works like a local chat, if you bought said local chat secondhand at a flea market from a dude with a shotgun and basset hound. It can’t see cloaked ships, only has an effective range of 14 AU, and, most damning of all, has to manually be pinged for new information.

If you ping your directional with active overview turned on, you’ll see whatever ships, etcetera are within 14 km of you. If you turn off “active overview settings”, then you get EVERYTHING within 14 AU of you, including moons, planets, and every single PoS module your tower has.

You may be asking why you’d ever want to turn off active overview settings, which seems reasonable at first, but shrivels away into idiocy with two key points:
Point one: By the time you see a ship on the scanner, you’re already dead.
Point two: Unless you turn your active overview setting off, you can’t see scan probes.

Scan probes are a very, very important thing to see on the directional.
The only way for someone to find and kill you is by using scan probes, the directional can see scan probes, there’s no problem, right?

Nope.

Because of mining drone’s giant sig radius, and a hulks moderate sig radius, it’s fairly easy to find a hulk. This means that you, as a miner/sleeper killing dude, need to be very, very on the ball when it comes to scanning the directional. Or you die. Maybe not immediately, maybe not in a few days, but It’s almost guaranteed when you find yourself in a bubble you weren’t watching the scanner.

Of course, a jerk could, hypothetically, scan out a grav site, then come back in a combat ship a few hours later and gank whoever mining with no warning whatsoever, or have such good scan skills that he pins you w/ probes @ 16 AU or some way to counter the directional scanner.

The downside to having active overview settings turned off, which I’ve stated before, is that it picks up all the planets, moons, ectera nearby, making it hard to pick out probes. This is somewhat countered by a strategy I developed of watching the little scrolly bar on the right side of the directional box. If the thing changed, I scrolled through the box to see if scan probes had appeared. If the size didn’t change, I assumed I got to live another five seconds.


bloggedy blog blog #14

Welcome to the fourteenth installment of the EVE Blog Banter, the monthly EVE Online blogging extravaganza created by CrazyKinux. The EVE Blog Banter involves an enthusiastic group of gaming bloggers, a common topic within the realm of EVE Online, and a week to post articles pertaining to the said topic. The resulting articles can either be short or quite extensive, either funny or dead serious, but are always a great fun to read! Any questions about the EVE Blog Banter should be directed to crazykinux@gmail.com.

The first banter of 2010 comes to us from the EVE Blog Father, CrazyKinux himself, who asks the following:
As we begin another year in New Eden, ask yourselves “What Now?” What will I attempt next? What haven’t I done so far in EVE? Was it out fear, funds, or knowledge? Have I always wanted to start my own corporation, but have never dared doing so? Is there a fledging mercenary waiting to come out of its shell? Or maybe an Industrialist? What steps and objectives will I set myself to accomplish in order to reach my ultimate goal for this year? EVE is what you make of it. So, what is it going to be for you?

So far, in my Eve life, I completely ignored the trial and spent five conceding trial accounts learning how to play until I gave up and ran the tutorial.

Anyway, so far, I’ve done the following, in order:

Mined in highsec
Mined in lowsec
Mined in nullsec
Mined in wormhole
ninja salvaged
Ran missions. a bit.
Started authoring for a blog

What I want to do:
Fly a carrier
Fly a dread
Fly tech 2 gallente cruisers
Fly command ships
Get a hulk to maxed yield
Establish and run a nullsec PoS
Be involved in a nullsec corp in some form.
Actually get around to PvP
Figure out how to research
Figure out how to invent
Start up a hulk production line
Buy a covetor BPO
fly assault ships
legitimately kill someone else(currently at 0 kills 35 losses)

I have been stopped by time and money and experience insofar.
So, to do list, in order:
learn how to research things
learn how to invent things
buy a Covetor BPO
invent a bunch of hulk BPs in the WH
Sell the hulk BPs and use the profits to buy tech 2 parts, squirrel them back to the WH
Build hulks in the WH, move them out for profit.
Use the profit to buy a rattlesnake, fly around the stars enjoying the combination of heavy drones and missiles, my two favorite things.
lose the rattlesnake in some sort of epic fighting, possibly manage to kill a rifter or something.
use the vast social network established by this point to set up moon mining PoSes, start cranking out hulks, sell them, do whatever the heck I want to, forever.


Crazy Genius!

is what I’d like to refer to myself to as, but with my current self-esteem issues the closest I can get is “Lucky Idiot” in that most of my incredibly stupid ideas work out in an awesome way. I think this is the result of my analytical mind complimented with Attention Deficit Disorder, so I think of crazy ideas, then make them plausable, then convey them in a humorous enough way that everyone is attracted enough to actually think about it and maybe do it, see my afterburner/orca and ECM hulk ideas.

Alright, the ECM hulk didn’t work out very well, but my idea to fit low-friction nozzles to help us run away faster instead of cargo optimizers was a great idea and now everyone in our WH has them >.>

My point is, most of these ideas are gems while a goodly percent turn out to be ridiculous. With that in mind, here is my latest silly idea:

Because all the gankers in hulkageddon need minerals to buy ships to kill us, let’s hold off on selling minerals for a week or two. This may actually help megacyte’s current price.

No, that isn’t actually my idea nor the idea I had in mind. THAT idea is, *drumroll*, Static WH mining.

People will say that WH space is completely random and silly, and use the analogy that K-space is an empty glass and WH space is a pile of BBs you just poured into the glass. And you enjoy shaking the glass every 24 hours and listening to the people living in the BBs curse.
Anyway, that’s not necessarily true. WH space is really like a three dimensional series of orbiting spheres interlocking, rotating at different speeds, which, if someone ever actually mapped that thing, would look insanely beautiful and would probably help a lot of WH miners and such.
Oh look, there goes my brain, feeling euphoric at the possibility of learning how to program something like that.
Anyway, what that analogy was talking about is that some/all WHs have static links, I.E. whenever you scan, you are guaranteed to find a WH leading to that type of exit. If the WH leading to that type closes through whatever means, a new link will be established to another WH of that type.

Another bit you need to understand is site despawning. Once you completely shoot/mine/explore the crap out of any specific site, it vanishes next downtime. As you do whatever to more and more sites in one specific WH, the sites spawn slower and slower until you’re stuck sitting there watching Stargate SG-1 reruns until a new grav spawns in a week or so.

Anyway, here’s my idea: Since we’re currently in a C5 with a static C6, why not mine the gravs in the static? That way, we’ll never run outta sites and have nigh infinite ore available. Here’s how I think this will play out:
We find a C6.
We move an orca and a few BSs into the WH, the Orca sets up a PoS with some guns while the BSs open a grav site.
The BS pilots go back to the pos in the C5 and get hulks(or Covetors) and mine in the C6, while the orca pickups and drops the ore in the small pos corp hangar, and once the op is done, the miners use T1 industrials to haul the ore out through the WH to preserve the integrity.
The orca has scan ships and/or a probe launcher fitted in case of the second worst case scenario or less:
Worst case scenario: we lose 6 Covetors and a fully insured Orca. Losses: not very much.
Second worst case scenario: we lose the mining ships and the orca gets locked down in the small pos, attackers wait it out and close the link to the C6 from the C5.
Counter: the orca warps to a safespot and cloaks/and or logoffskis. Logon/decloak later and scan an exit.
Note that this has to be done AS the hulks are being destroyed >.>

Stupid idea? Really stupid idea? Stopped reading halfway through because of the stupidity? Genius idea? Already thinking of ways to counter it? Tell me!

P.S. Orca with a scan ship fitted to it… hehe… that gave me an image of an Orca with a buzzard welded to the side…

Edit: corp mate gave me the idea of using a BC for boosting in hostile WHs, eliminating the need for a PoS and reducing losses, if an itty V, myrm and 6 covetors are use for mining, to…lessie…
6 covetors: 10 mil to fully insure
1 myrmadon: 30 mil.
1 rigged itty V: 30 mil
so 120 mil if we get completely screwed, compared to
6 hulks: 1.2 bil
rigged orca: 400 mil
so 120 mil minimum risk for obscene profits.


Hulkawhat?

Warning: contains small amounts of miner whine. Drink responsibly.

So, apparently Hulkageddon II or whatever started today, or yesterday, depending on what time zone you live in, what time zone it was based off, I really wasn’t paying much attention.

Sometimes, I really like mining in WH space. Sure, someone could kill you at any moment, but the chance of it happening is much, much less than two dudes drunk in catalysts alpha striking your ass back down to covetor, financially, while giving them enough ISK from insurance and your modulated strips to do it all again to the point of organizing a contest based around screwing dudes over.

So, some dude said one day “Hey, let’s make other people’s lives miserable and hide it behind a facade of killing macrominers, requesting that the insurance system be fixed, and the words ‘arr’ and ‘allah ackbar'”. And apparently, all the people who joined him on this had so much fun that they said they should have a second one. Which they did. And then they kicked a puppy to get the puppy to whimper at them while they kicked his puppy friends too.

I know that mining barges, are, by design if not name, mining ships. I know that since they far outstrip(Pun intended) all other ships in terms of sheer minage ability. But does that really mandate a complete lack of defensive abilities and less offensive capacity than a tech one frigate?

A hulk has, base, approximately 7k EHP. You can tank that to the point that it can hold against most nullsec rats without much expense or spend a hellovalot and get it to tank all nullsec rats, but you won’t because the only reason you’d do that is if you either didn’t have a combat ship in the null system or you wanted to AFK in nullsec, two choices that would immediately drop-kick you back to a starting systems.

I know that I’m not the first person to whine about this, but when I get warp scrambled in a hulk, I take my hands off the keyboard. There is absolutely nothing I can do, offensive or defensive, that will prolong the combat enough for anyone friendly to step in and save me. Attempts at fitting an ECM hulk have gone horribly, since the ONE situation where I was in a situation where a hulk was being tackled, I locked the offending Loki, engaged the ECM and watched as absolutely nothing happened.

The concept of a Hulk is, bluntly, a ship that’s slow as hell, tankless as hell, unoffensive as hell, slow to align as hell, with basically every possible stat set to the lowest and boosting mining ability to the very highest.

Am I crazy, or does anyone else think that a Hulk, currently a 190 mil ship, shouldnt be able to be killed for under a mil, reward the killer with 7 mil, on average, worth of modules and payout 4-10 mil, depending on insurance, to the killed?

I mean, hell, letting strip miners do some damage would mollify me. It wouldn’t have to be much damage, just enough for me to think “HA, I can hurt you a little before I explode” instead of “Oh, I’m scrammed. Time to make a sandwich”.

I realize that I’ve kinda shot myself in the foot for almost ignoring the hulk’s dronebay, but when was the last time you felt threatened by five hobgoblins?

Alright, that would be a bit threatening…. Checking EFT, five hobgoblin IIs is…85 dps for me. So, in the fifteen seconds it takes to kill me, I can seriously threaten anyone with 1240 EHP or less. Boo.

Also, I’m sure this question has been asked and answered, but why kill miners? Be forewarned, any answer that sounds like “FOR MINER TEARS LIKE THIS ONE YUM YUM SLURP SLURP” or similar will be met with extended metaphors talking about kicking a puppy to listen to the whines. Dude, why would you kick a puppy? Unless it was a pomeranian one. That, I could sympathize with. For the non-dog-fanatics, Pomeranians are the small yappy dogs that are balls of fur with a face, bred for long, silky hair and a tendency to bark at anything percieved as a threat. Which is everything. Which gets EXTREMLY annoying when you’re the neighbor of someone with not one, but two Palmeranians that won’t shut up at one in the morning.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, we just got the first snow of the season so I shall be trying to carve a snow-hulk.

Edit: first attempt went horribly, as did later attempts to make a snow-capsule.