Empire Research and POS Attack

Posted: 2011-08-25 | Author: | Filed under: industry, pos | Tags: , , , , | 11 Comments

In Empire space open Material Research slots are notoriously hard to find. To view Public slots in your area,  go to your Science & Industry section, Installations tab, filter by Material Research / Any / Current Region / Public. This will show you just how full the slots are.

The saturation of slots in Empire is true for Material Research and Copy job activities while Time Efficiency and Invention slots are generally easy to find.

Why are Time Efficiency (PE) and Invention slots generally open in empire?

Adding PE to a BPO reduces a small amount of time off of the construction job. For example here are the build times for a Noctis at differing PE levels (doesn’t account for character skill bonuses):

PE 5: 2 hours, 46 minutes
PE 10: 2 hours, 43 minutes
PE 20: 2 hours, 41 minutes
via games.chruker.dk

If getting it to PE 20 only save 5 minutes off of the build time, why even bother? A lot of small industrialists consider PE on a blueprint a bonus. The amount of time does scale with the job length so for long jobs such as capitals, PE can save a few hours and might be worth the investment. Also if you are planning on making 1,000 Noctii (?), then you will want to spend some research time adding PE to the BPO.

For invention, the jobs are quick. To invent a Cap Recharge II the job takes 2 hours and 30 minutes. I find that it is easier to run a batch of invention jobs and then spend a few weeks working on the invented T2 BPCs.

So what is the budding industrialist supposed to do when he or she wants access to a lot of ME and Copy slots? Why setup a POS of course! How exciting — hours of anchoring, fueling, and defense management! Can you tell I don’t like POS management?

I stupidly setup my research POS in a lowsec dead-end system that has a lot of cyno traffic. I picked this system due to my Highsec proximity.  Not to my surprise, a local pirate group had targeted the tower within two weeks.

One weeknight while I was out to dinner, I started to get frantic emails and text messages from corpmates who were seeing the in-game ‘Under Attack’ messages. When I got home I was able to cancel the research jobs, unanchor all of the labs, pull out the majority of the fuel, and online a bunch or hardeners just to make the job of taking the tower down more tedious; the amount of smack in local informed me that they were there to stay and finish what they had started.

Note to you pirates out there that think killing a POS with labs will get you billions of BPOs: you can run the jobs remotely. This means that the BPO is sitting in a Station in the corporation hangar. The research is done from the POS while the shiny BPO is locked up in the Station corporation hanger.

Second note to pirates: If you find a research tower in a system with NO station, then you have found something quite precious.

After the last hardener was setup, I logged off, watched some Netflix, and went to bed. After waking up and reviewing the Eve in-game alerts, it turns out that they did put the tower into Reinforced mode after 7 hours. I’m glad that the only POS bashing I have participated in on was with Supercarriers and Titans; subcapital POS bashing seems like a boring, boring task.

The lowsec pirates did camp the lowsec station that I was using as a base and stalked me into Empire while the tower was in Reinforced. I believe that they were gathering intel to see if I was going to mount a defense effort or possibly unanchor and save the tower. Having wrote off the costs of the POS project from the beginning, I wasn’t interested in either. Saving the 700 M worth of labs was all I really cared about.

Two weeks later the POS still stands anchored, offline, and with damaged guns that need repair in order to unanchor and save the tower. For now I have no interest in saving it and I need to find a different method or location for getting ME and Copy slots.

Building a Jump Freighter

Posted: 2011-08-24 | Author: | Filed under: industry | Tags: , , , , | 24 Comments

*Warning* Eve Industry Speak Ahead!

I have always been a builder. Even as a young child I would construct elaborate towers of falling water in the kitchen sink with dirty dishes and cups. My parents told me that I would entertain myself for hours with a small stream of running water and some dirty dishes.

There is something satisfying about taking smaller components and arranging them in a way to serve a higher purpose and I have definitely channeled this passion into Eve. Though the T2 production chain is complicated, there is a beauty to it.

I spend a lot of time on the Sell Forum section of the Eve website. Some deals are in your favor, but you have to do your research. One evening I found a person selling some invented Jump Freighter Blueprints and that really interested me. For a while now, I have been looking to put my Capital BPOs to good use as they have been sitting idle in station for over a month now.

The contract was for 6x ME-1 Anshar BPCs for 700 M, so 116.67 M each. I looked at Jita contracts for ME-1 BPCs and they were selling for around 180-200 M.

Perhaps I stumbled upon a weary industrialist looking to sell his inventory? The offer seemed like a legitimate deal so I accepted it. He even threw in two Obelisk T1 BPCs for free which run about 35 M each. Nice.


Channel Name:    Private Chat (Seller)
Listener:        Blake
Session started: 2011.08.15 19:19:54
—————————————————————

[ 2011.08.15 19:19:56 ] Blake > hi
[ 2011.08.15 19:20:00 ] Seller > hey bud
[ 2011.08.15 19:20:04 ] Seller > you into those bpc?
[ 2011.08.15 19:20:17 ] Blake > nice price
[ 2011.08.15 19:20:19 ] Blake > I’ll take em
[ 2011.08.15 19:20:24 ] Seller > i’ll do all 6 for 700m
[ 2011.08.15 19:20:30 ] Seller > ok, contract to you? now?
[ 2011.08.15 19:20:36 ] Blake > yep
[ 2011.08.15 19:20:59 ] Seller > need those obelisk bpc as well?
[ 2011.08.15 19:21:21 ] Blake > not right now
[ 2011.08.15 19:21:35 ] Seller > foc
[ 2011.08.15 19:21:37 ] Seller > you can have them
[ 2011.08.15 19:22:33 ] Blake > foc?
[ 2011.08.15 19:22:39 ] Blake > oh oh free of charge?
[ 2011.08.15 19:22:40 ] Seller > free of charge
[ 2011.08.15 19:24:17 ] Blake > thanks man
[ 2011.08.15 19:24:24 ] Seller > my pleasure
[ 2011.08.15 19:24:26 ] Seller > enjoy :))
[ 2011.08.15 19:24:31 ] Blake > fly safe

Well now what do I do? I also needed to purchase the Gallente based Advanced Capital Ship Components which run 13.5 M each at NPC prices and get them to at least ME 10.

Right, now to build the things! Our T2 production page of the wallet manager is still taking shape, so I had to resort to using Excel to calculate the build costs.


Now before you rush out to get into Jump Freighter production, consider the large amount of time and capital involved.

First you need the T1 item for the T2 production job and building an Obelisk from BPCs kills the profits. If you build them from BPOs, there is about a 110 M profit at Jita mineral prices. Also, in order to timely produce a freighter, you need multiple copies of the BPOs. I found that you need 1:1:3:2 in order to build a freighter every 15 days.

Second, you need a freighter BPC for Invention, which take around a month copy or you can buy one on the market for around 35 M. Datacores for the Invention job cost about 18.4 M and are consumed during the job. For a ship of this cost level, you are going to also use a decryptor to affect ME output of the T2 BPC, which costs about 6 M and is also consumed.

Now stack up the odds of the Invention success chance with a 41.58 % theoretical max success rate, which means that a successful invention job costs around 61.7 M and takes 5 days for the result and you can see why this isn’t a common industry production chain.

Whew, now to put all the items together to make a fancy Jump Freighter!

If you like these type of Industry posts, let me know. I’m not sure if I should continue to write them or file them under ‘nobody cares’ like Eve Fail (a site which I personally enjoy).

The Latest Eve Scam

Posted: 2011-08-12 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: | 6 Comments

http://www.phaserinc.com/index1.html

For those who have forgotten how to left click, the above is the manefesto of the latest Eve scam (hence the clever title) in which some people took about a trillion isk from slightly less smart people via a ponzi scheme, which is ironic because we actually had a ponzi scheme in real life recently, via one Bernie Madoff.

Or as the kindly old lady that lives across the street from me calls him, “that rotten bastard of a man”. Here’s how a ponzi scheme works, as far as I can tell.

Person A is the ponzi….er? Person’s B and C are the ponziee….es.

Person A says to Person B “If you give me an investment I will pay you back a percent of my profits”. Person B, being a typical Eve player tells Person A to fuck off. Person C being a Wow player says “sure!” and gives him 100 bucks, which entitles him to ten bucks a month until he takes the money back from Person A. Person A then goes to a bunch of other people and asks them for money under the same conditions. He uses their money to pay back person B’s 10 bucks a month as well as everyone else’s percents until they tell all their friends to give Person A money because look at all the money he gave us.

Once the scheme reaches critical mass(Either Person A has as much money as he wants or new people don’t join fast enough for him to pay off the people who have already given him money) he buys a boat and flies away forever with your money, fuck you.

So, this happened. I’d say to never trust anyone in Eve but with my recent embargo into trading(I’m not Blake but I’m starting to get the hang of it) I may be asking for investment at some point.

In conclusion trust no-one except for kindly old Mr. Miningzen, because he never loses ships/isk, doesn’t owe several other people billions of isk and loves you all to pieces.

Quafe Commemorative Casual Wear

Posted: 2011-08-10 | Author: | Filed under: market | Tags: , , , | 6 Comments

I paid some real world dollars to be able to watch the Eve Fanfest action over the HD stream. It was actually quite enjoyable on the living room television.

When I purchased the HD stream, I quickly clicked through the payment windows and there was some mention about a T-shirt.

Silly me, I thought I was getting a neat Quafe T-shirt in the mail in a few weeks. I checked my apartment building’s package room a few times after Fanfest ended in anticipation of the present and what I actually got were some pixels after I logged into my main character’s account.

Sure, why not? *click* Now I have some digital T-shirts sitting in my hangar.

I suppose that I should hang on to the items since they have gone up in price since they were put in the game.

I am however, left wondinering what this means for the furture of Eve. Are we gradually going to accept the new role that these types of items have in the game? I feel that items like this T-shirt, and especially the free Aurum that was introduced to players via the reward system for uploading content to eveisreal.net, are doing nothing but bringing the Aurum concept into our lexicon.

CCP Incarna Project Manager: People are not on board with the new currency!
Employee: Um, what if we just start giving it away? Perhaps for doing something easy like uploading some content for us?
CCP Incarna Project Manager: Make it go!

Frigate Shenanigans

Posted: 2011-08-04 | Author: | Filed under: ships | Tags: , , , , , | 11 Comments

To be honest with you, I’m not much of a PVP’er. I went right into Capital ships and trading to grow my wallet. Now I’ve got the urge to go fly around and blow things up.

I went through some of the popular fits on Battleclinic for the following ships and bought up some items.

  • Caldari Navy Hookbill
  • Federation Navy Comet
  • Imperial Navy Slicer
  • Republic Fleet Firetail
  • Rifter

I know you may argue that Rockets are broken so the Navy ships are useless, but I’m more about the adventure on this experiment than actually looking to win 100% of the time.

I will of course post any stories about ridiculous kills and my adventure into PVP. Feel free to post any of your favorite Frigate ships setups! PEW PEW PEW!

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