See how the other side lives
Posted: 2009-12-17 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: carrier, gank, killed, ore, profit, ships, wormhole 4 CommentsWH mining is, in itself, risky, stupid, and profitable. Haul a pos in, get a refining array/rorqual up n running, clear the sleepers out of a belt n sit there for a few days with one finger on the drag ore to can button, one finger on the directional scanner, one finger on the coffee maker and one hand on a clean pair of shorts for when someone shows up with murdering miners on the mind.
Recently, our Rorqual/carrier pilot left us for greener less miney pastures. I didn’t ask directly, but he said something about lowsec pvping. Best regards to him, let’s hope he doesn’t get roflpwned by a DD, but knowing him he’d probably blow up his carrier before the DD could fire.
Five minutes of MS paint.
Anyway, thankfully the rorq pilot didn’t take the rorq with him, but the only other person currently in the WH can only compress ABC and is working on his leadership skills ATM. So, once we finish the ABC in the belts we have to either open up another grav site or mine lowsec ores at a 75% reduction in refine profit.
In light of this, I’ve started training a mission alt on my alt account and a salvage alt on my main account. This is mainly because:
A: I figured that a salvage boat would take much less time than a BS missioner to train,and I wanted to detract as little time as possible from my glorious main account.
B: My alt account just finished training for the Orca, so I don’t know what to do next w/ her.
C: IMO, l4 mission running is much more profitable than 75% refine of lowsec ores.
D: I’ve always wanted to explore the flip side of Eve to mining, i.e. shooting stuff.
E: Inevidably, the ABC runs out when I’m alone online, and since I lost my Domi recently, I cant unlock a new site.
Anyway, the training is going well, my main account is in a rigged catalyst with all skills moderatley trained, and my alt account already had a character w/ caldari cruiser IV trained.
Funnily enough, I accidentally left the alt in the last WH we were in, months ago. Renamed the drake “Free drake” and podded her back to empire. Yes, several of my corp mates have told me that I should have self-destructed for the insurance, but I didn’t know insurance worked that way.
Anyway, training is going well, once we run out of grav sites I’ll start running some missions and work my way slowly up to level 4 missions and possible large piles of isk. Anyway, I’ve run into a dilemma.
My main flies Gallente, and my drone skills are improved to the point that my drones are like little whirling balls of death. This is great for missioning, and since unlike sleepers, redular mission fodders never change the target or start shooting drones or some annoying thing like that, it seems great.
On the flip side, the Caldari have… well… tiny drones and missiles. I made the alt origionally because I was sick of three button combat (Drones Engage, Drones Orbit, Drones return to drone bay) and wanted to try missile combat (Target dude, F1 F2 F3 F4 F5 F6 F7, target new dude). So far, flying a caracal is proving fun.
So what I’m saying here is, I’m torn between simple drone fighting while I soley operate the salvager, or Raven Hot-damn-missiles-are-awesome boom boom boom.
So, talking to all you mission runners, if I’m running a salvage account at the same time, should I stop training caldari and go gallente, or stick w/ caldari?
Dominion nullsec mining
Posted: 2009-12-10 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: c5, freighter, industry, mining, pos, profit, pvp, rorqual, scanning, wormhole 6 CommentsDominion has me worried, not on how nullsec will become more interesting, but on how it will affect nullsec mining. As I said earlier, WH space mining is arguably the riskiest and profitable way to make isk in eve. It’s balanced that way, because after you mine the ore while looking over your shoulder every few seconds to make sure a Loki isn’t behind you, you have to either compress or refine the ore, then get it out of the WH itself which usually equates to pulling teeth while very carefully watching local(if you get a nullsec link) and the directional as you go through C2s, C3s and nullsecs. Getting supplies into the WH is a hassle, seeing as you need to haul any large amount of equipment in an industrial, and unless you have the isk/time invested in a covops blockade runners, gate camps are a pain.
On that note, losing 100 mil to a lowsec gatecamp while holding 6000 m3 has persuaded me to upgrade from my faithful, infinitely customizable Iteron mark V to a Viator which, had I been smart enough to use it previously, wouldn’t have lost me a total of 200 mil worth of modules over the last month. Anyway, Dominion.
What we’ve seen so far has been what we’ve been told, a moderately smooth transition from the old to the new, and funny people to laugh at when they lose freighters. On the freighter topic, my fingers are crossed that that will fix the megacyte market. and by “fix”, I mean “make my WH mining more profitable”. On this topic of profit, the news on grav sites scares me. Quoting a recent devBlog:
“Ore Prospecting Arrays: These are hidden asteroid belts and you get one site guaranteed for every level of upgrade to a maximum of five. These are not the typical hidden belts though. If you’ve ever been into wormhole space and seen some of the riches there, then you have an idea of what to expect. Within these hidden belts reside mythical beasts such as ‘King Arkonor’ and many of his closest friends. These sites will re-spawn every downtime, so even if you do not mine out every rock, there will be fresh ones waiting for you the next day.”
In the WH space I like to say I live in, the roids are, coining a phrase, fuggin monsterously huge. Some unforeseen circumstances arose and it was just me in my hulk , my alt in a hauler, and an orca pilot who had fallen asleep in the pos a few hours ago. Timing myself, in about 7 hours of sitting there suspended between being scared and being bored out of my skull, I mined about 55,000 units of bist and the roid I was working on did not die. I have no head for the market, mostly because a good friend manages the selling of the refined ore, but i’m gonna assume that 880,000 m3 of nullsec ore is worth a hella lot. The immense wealth I am sitting on is still at risk, we could get bubbled getting it back to jita, hauling it out through connecting WHs and nullsec, and then a jita gank. But that’s what makes this whole lovely world balanced. If we wanted titanium, we’d mine in highsec for hours and make 3 mil per jetcan instead of the lovely 15 mil per jetcan nullsec ores bring. But in highsec you have local and there aren’t people activley seeking your murder. Except goons or hulkageddon or some dude in a destroyer killing you and still making enough isk to buy a new destroyer and do it all again. Anyway, its all a beautiful graph of risk verses profit.
I feel that nullsec changes are going to take that graph and break it over it’s knee. In friendly nullsec, which is where miners would usually go, I’d assume, there is very little risk. Admitted, you can’t AFK mine, but you’ve got local and you’ve marked every space-tree for 5 systems in every direction. If someone who wants you dead even thinks about scanning you out and killing you, you have about 5 minutes notice to warp out and maybe go back and get the jetcans too. This safety while still getting nice lowsec ores and the occasional nullsec, depending on how deep you are, is again balanced by you having fought tooth and nail for every damn inch and someone could bring in a fleet of dreads at any second and kill everything you’ve ever worked for. If I’m reading this change correctly, then for every system you control and upgrade, you’ll be able to get up to five very, very rich belts full of ABC, which can then be mined at much less risk than WH mining, which then can be hauled out through friendly nullsecs and sold, or used to build more dreads that can be used to scare the hell out of your neighbors or be used as space-lawn furnishings or whatever.
Bottom line, I expect the ABC market to start lowering prices or for everyone and their dog who can mine in nullsec to have enough ships to use them as torpedo ammo. So, in scenario one, the bottom falls out of the ABCs and WH miners start getting richer slower and new corps start getting money faster. Scenario 2, the market holds and everyone builds more blobs with the influx and there’s more Internet spaceship fighting hurray. Taking a step back, there’s a chance that this will all just end up with happier new corps and more ships to bash against each other, but there’s also a chance that things could go downhill.
I’m expecting the market to react in 3-4 weeks, since right now people are more concerned with actually getting the upgrade thingys into the nullsecs :P. Let me know if I can put one of those up in a wormhole, I’d guarantee we’d appreciate some minin love. Or maybe some sort of… incoming wormhole detector, which playes a sound file that sounds like a little girl screaming whenever an incoming WH appears.
Of WH mining and woe
Posted: 2009-12-08 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: gank, mining, podded, pvp, wormhole 4 CommentsIt was a cold and black day. Not to say that it was colder or blacker than any other day, or if this was a day at all. Such is life in the wormhole.
The miner sat in the ancient hulk, bored out of his skull. Every three minutes, his ship would shudder and the console would tally the new ore in his hold. He would lazily instruct the cargo drones to pile the ore into a canister and jettison it into space. Sometimes, in jest, he would instruct the drones to jettison the container just so that the escaping air would propel the can into one of the other five antique mining barges next to him, then mentally smirk as it bounced off the shields to the indignant cry of the pilot. Then, a green light would snare the can, dragging it into the slightly less ancient hauling ship, a proud if aging Iteron mark V, piloted by the most attractive (read: only) female any of them had seen in the last three months of this expedition.
The asteroid before him silently imploded under the strain of the strip miners ravaging it, and the small group of barges slowly reoriented themselves to the next bistot asteroid, the strip miners for each ship crossing and forming a melodious pattern of whatever the hell the strip miners used to scrape the ore from it’s home; he had always zoned out when the station tech started droning about those scientific whatsita. For all he cared, they ran on pixie dust.
Shaking himself out of his boredom induced stupor, he ran a system scan again, a echo of fear running through him briefly at the thought of an unwelcome visitor. But the scanner was clean. It was always clean. That was the thing about this place. Everything was perfectly safe until you took your eyes off it, like the temporary station they had set up next to planet J-whatever, which the resident mechanic had assured him would never fail… a second time. On mention of the incident where the shields had sputtered momentarily, the mechanic would always point fingers at the sputtering machinery and claim mechanical errors, all of which he had seamlessly repaired with nanite paste and old quafe cans.
Breaking his train of thought once again, the man ran a scan of the system, mentally sighing as he scrolled through the list. Then, he stopped. Re-reading the entry, he confirmed that there was no error.
Sister class combat probes. Five of em. Son of a bitch.
Screaming through fleet chat the impeding danger, he aligned his ship to the nearest planet, ever so slowly engaging warp, glad he had badgered the bastard running this operation to provide him with the tools to soup up his aligning time. It was still far too slow, though.
As the other ships slowly aligned themselves to their own celestial targets, a ship he only vaugely recognized from fuzzy pictures arrived at the belt they had been residing in, deftly manuvering around asteroids even as the miner heard the computer wail about a target lock being established.
One of the new pilots screamed into all our heads, painfully telling us that the Loki had done something to his warp core, that he couldn’t run. Desperatley, the old miner ordered his ship to target the minmatar bastard. He routed power from his useless strip miners to the only offensive capability his ship had, some cheap and shiny electronic countermeasures that just might be able to help the stricken pilot. Engaging the sensor dampener, the ECM modules warmed to completion, but just as it was about to fire, the old man’s warp drive sputtered to live and he was unwillingly yanked from his soon-to-be dead friend and into the void. He was safe, but as he silently set a warp course to the temporary station, the screams of the unlucky rang heavy in his ears.
The old man sat in his bunk, staring at the now empty beds beside his, the voices in his head repeating their screams over and over, his last memory of his friends. The hauler had survived, taking a quafe break in the hangar, and 2 others beside me, experienced men, had survived. The loss of the other two companions, one who he had tried and failed to save, echoed through his frame as he sobbed, the cold unfeeling part of his brain reminding him that he was still alive and the profits from this weeks ore could buy quite alot of happiness.
It’s about time.
Posted: 2009-12-07 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: industry, orca, ships, wormhole 7 CommentsA month or two after the previous post’s adventure of the nullsec wormhole, my alt has finally finished her orca training. After some amusing juggling of a WH to our WH base about to pop and 30 jumps both ways, my main was in our WH pos, and my alt was in highsec with the orca, which was, as promised, fully rigged and fitted. Not bad for 250 mil.
First thought: hell yeah, orca! yeah! looks cool!
Second thought: Boy, this thing is slow as %#@&.
Third thought: So this is why people have designated webbers.
The thoughts kinda meander from there, but in idle speculation, if the purpose of the webbing thing is to reduce your max speed to improve align time, couldn’t you use an afterburner or MWD, start aligning, then once the cycle finished you’d be going the correct speed and warp quickly? I personally can’t check this, seeing as my alt is completley hauling related, no navigation skills at all (boy, hindsight), but if someone could let me know I’d appreciate it.
Anyway, 5 jumps (felt like eternity) later, in Amarr, I drooled briefly over capital tractors, mindlinks, faction shield boosters, ecetera before being reminded that A: i have no isk, B: i have no skills, and C: we already have an orca in the WH to handle all boosting-related issues.
So, to make the most of the orca, i’ve stripped out the foreman link bonuses and align time reducers and fitted it entirely for hauling 😛
Ironically, my alt got trapped in a JGN that closed earlier this week and I had to pod myself to escape. A good policy is apparently to fit a scan launcher to every ship besides hulks… really should have thought of that. So, if anyone finds an itty V in WH space called “Free itty V rigged”, enjoy it >.>
*queues astrometrics in his alt.
Anyway, once we get an entrance that won’t close at any second and isn’t literally 5 WHs between us and highsec, like the one this morning, then I’ll get my orca in and enjoy hauling 8 cans at once. Until then, I plan to sit around running l2 missions w/ orca support XD.
Also, new browser is totally effin sweet but can’t play flash… yet. The day I can watch this in the browser while mining is the day my jaw gets locked in a smile.(NSFW)
Fly risky, because if you wanted to fly safe you’re really playing the wrong game.
edit: I swear, I thought about the MWD on the way home from college at a red light, not after finding the battleclinic linkie in comments. Thanks a bundle!
second edit: alright, after staring at the loadout in comments and screwing around with a 100mn afterburner, I managed to get the orca to a 12 second align time IF I was facing in the general direction of the object I wanted to go to, and i disengaged the afterburner once I reached 50% of my AB-boosted max speed, which translated into more than 75% of my normal speed, which worked well as a slingshot manuver. So, in theory, if I somehow, god forbid, ran into a very inattentive gatecamp I could break gatecloak, prototype cloak, get aligned, toggle the afterburner for one cycle then disengage it once I reached 50%, I’d only be visable to the dudes for 12 seconds as opposed to 40. With a sig radius so big they could fire in the opposite direction and still manage to hit me. Well, at least the afterburner makes the warp time about 30 seconds as opposed to 46. So, I’ll queue high-speed manuvering and be slightly faster in warping. Hurray!
On haulers in nullsec
Posted: 2009-12-06 Filed under: eveonline | Tags: freighter, gank, nullsec, wormhole 2 CommentsI’ve been hearing alot of complaining about the freighter requirement to establish something or other in nullsec, w/ people pointing out the freighter ganks n such, and other people scolding the first group of people for complaining or something like that, I wasn’t really paying attention.
My knowledge of this situation is hindered somewhat by my brief stay in nullsec being brought to an abrupt end by 40 AAA dreads taking all of my alliances PoSes down in one fel swoop, which was followed by me running 2 itty Vs out through 6 red nullsecs at the request of a corpmate. Lost one, got the other to safety.
Anyrate, sometime before every tower we owned and a few we didn’t were put into reinforced, and i lost an itty trying to get the more valuable pieces of equiptment through nullsec, I had just received my first WH check from the last week of mining, totaling at 350 mil. This was put into sharp perspective by the last ship I had bought, my first hulk, taking me a month of ice mining to afford. Ironically, the first thing I bought was a hulk, to replace the hulk I had lost a few days before, in WH space. This left me with approximatley 270 mil, and I was still reeling from how much it was when alliance chat lit up with the words:
“lol who wants to buy a rigged orca 250 mil”
The lol was a little jarring, but I immediately replied that I was extremely interested and would like to buy it. I was informed that the orca in question was 12 jumps deep in nullsec space with 6 of said jumps being in red territory, and the system it was being held in was having the crap beaten out of it by said reds who hadn’t appreciated our occupation of what was apparently their space. Anyway, being the stupid, stupid idiot that I was and with an extremely loose understanding of just how slow and cumbersome orcas were, and with no ability or close friends able to fly the orca, I agreed.
My alliance mates, being smarter than I was, recognized my stupidity for what it was and suggested kindly that they would only sell it to me if I had an orca capable pilot at the POS where the orca was located. After asking in alliance for about an hour, I found an orca capable pilot and we made the nullsec jumps, all of which were empty. Once we got there, I contacted the corp that was selling the orca, and was informed bluntly how much of an idiot I was. The CEO told me, kindly, that I should try and scan a WH exit, because it would weigh too heavily on her conscience to sell me an orca and watch me lose it between the pos and highsec. Since I was in a tech one frigate that had basic scanning equipment fitted, I reluctantly agreed. After I informed the alliance friend, he said that he was going to bed and would be back at 10 the next morning, this being at 11 o’clock at night. He left, and so I started scanning, with a tech one frig w/ frigate at IV, with basic probes, and no astrometric skills beyond astrometrics III. I found nothing in the system w/ the orca, and so decided to scan the adjacent system before I fell asleep for the night. Half an hour later, I was sleepily scanning down the first sig I saw when I realized that it was a wormhole.
Barely containing my shock, I warped to the wormhole to find it was a lowsec WH, one jump away from highsec. Silently cheering, I asked in alliance chat if anyone was online that could fly an orca or was in the corp that was going to sell me the orca.
No-one fit either category. After half an hour, one of the members from the corp logged in, but lacking an orca pilot I could do nothing. Silently saddened, rationalizing that the WH would vanish come downtime, I went to bed irritated. When I woke, I logged on and warped to where the WH used to be, saddened that I would have to scan again.
It was still there. With a good 14 hours left until it popped. In joy again, I asked in alliance and…..
No-one was online. Again. After another hour rationalizing on what to do and which trickster god was screwing with me, the man in control of nullsec operations for the alliance logged on. Since we were in the middle of slowly evacing all ships through the pipe of reds, morale was low. I immidiatley private convod him and told him in no uncertain terms that there was, quote, “ a %&#$ing worm-#@&%-hole that’s a straight %$&#ing shot to saftey”. He replied, in no uncertain terms, that that was #%&@in awesome, and he got his corp mates online to continue evacuations, starting with their orca. He consripted me to help, and I webbed the orca through the WH to highsec. Cheering to ourselves, we systematically began getting all the ships out of danger. 2-3 hours and most of the ships we could reach later, someone from the corp w/ my orca finally logged on. We brought him through the WH, loaded the orca up with various ships, and rammed that thing through the WH to safety. three hours later, we had all of the ships and half the PoSes moved out and were all feeling pretty pleased withourselves, until the next day, when AAA ran a fleet of 40 dreads in and steamrolled the remaining PoSes, which was kinda demoralizing. Fun fact, the ship and all my scan ships thereafter are named “Lucky bastard”, after this and another time when I scanned a neighboring C5 and a highsec enterence that lead to our corps normal space HQ in under 10 minutes through sheer random luck.
Anyway, this may be a noobish statment, but how hard would it be to find your nullsec system, scan a WH in either that system or blue territory (I really, really hope that you have at least one or 2 corps that call you friend nearby or your stay will be a short one indeed), link that WH to highsec and just go through there?
Funny coincidence, I can actually fly that orca tomorrow after months of training my hauling alt for it. Sweetness!
As a related story, it took me the better part of 9 hours to get the remaining itty V to safety as I would wait with my alt scouting one system ahead, and only make the jump once both systems were clear of reds.
As a closing note, the WH was already activated when I warped to it, as there were neutrals in local as me and the orca pilot made to the PoS.
k162space 