Yesterday didn't seem like anything special, it was just the day before New Years Eve. I had to work, and when I got home I ran to a friend's house for an hour. By the time my wife got off work we decided to meet at home and go grab some dinner and hit up the grocery store for New Years Eve preparations.
My original intentions for EVE were the same as the night before, to log in and do something, anything at all really. I'd been slacking so much lately that it was going to put me really behind. I knew my tower had 25 days of fuel the last time I checked, but couldn't remember how long it had been since I had checked. The previous night's plans never came to be and it looked like tonight's would end the same way. So we headed out, hit up a local Coney Island restaurant, and did some shopping. By the time we got home it was approaching 10pm, and I had to work in the morning, but I needed to at least log on and check my POS situation.
Since I always log out at a safe spot, I tend to scout first when I log in. I don't like to warp to my POS and reveal my presence until I know what's going on around me. So checking the fuel would have to wait. Scanning down the hole was the first priority. There were only 8 signatures, 2 were gas sites, 2 were pirate data sites and 4 were wormholes. Besides my two statics there was a frigate hole to null and a K162 from w-space. Not thinking much about that last one, I decided I'd huff some gas.
Starting with a Sizeable Perimeter Reservoir, I vacuumed up C84 until the rats spawned. After clearing them I finished up the C84 and moved on to the C50. Checking Eve-Central I was surprised to find C50 was worth more than C84 at the time. I figured I'd hit up the other gas site next since it was a Barren Perimeter Reservoir and had a nice chunk of C50 in it.
So I moved to the next site and had extracted about 1000 of the 3000 units of C50 in it when d-scan got a hit. A Heron was nearby, so I warped to the POS to minimize any chance of him knowing what I was up to. Flipping to the Cheetah, I warped off to see what was up. He was still on scan, but no probes. Then all of the sudden it hit me, "hey dumbass, that K162 could be a Shattered Wormhole." Figuring the Heron could entertain himself, I warped to the hole and jumped through. Jackpot! It led to J010000 which was indeed a Shattered Wormhole.
I was excited but also annoyed, it was getting later and I hadn't planned to stay up this late. With the next night being New Years Eve I needed to get some rest so I could actually stay awake for that. Popping up the probe scanner, there it was... an ice field. I guess sleep can wait.
Before I dove into that I wanted to know about this "Epicenter" thing that showed up on the overview. I warped to it at range and took a screenshot of it, but I had more pressing things to deal with so I moved on. While warping to the ice field I wondered if I'd actually be able to pull off mining some ice. After landing I found the field was huge, tons of ice rocks in a long line. It's been a long time since I've been in an ice field but this felt bigger than anything I'd seen.
At first I thought I was out of luck, I didn't see any Glacial Mass, but after finding all the other kinds of racial ice I knew it had to be there too. It was, and it was staring me right in the face. I bookmarked one of the giant ice cubes and hit d-scan. A Mobile Depot showed up, that could mean trouble. I decided to warp around the system and figure out if anybody else was there.
By some crazy chance of luck the first planet I warped to was planet 5. There was something on the overview but it wasn't the depot. I had to do a double take, but it was real. There was Sukuuvestaa Heron sitting there uncloaked, not moving. It was about 80km away and I figured it was a long shot but I slow boated over to about 14km and bookmarked the spot. Frantically I warped back to my wormhole entrance, which luckily was out of scan range from the planet. A quick warp to the POS and I was in my Claw, headed back to J010000.
I was beginning to think the guy was AFK or really engrossed in probing. I landed on grid and he still hadn't moved. I covered the 5km to scram range in an instant and he popped pretty quickly. Somewhere between the moment he popped and the moment his pod followed suit, he convo'd me. I rejected it out of habit, plus I had already decided to pod him so there was no point in chatting.
I've been on the fence about how I would handle podding people in wormholes. Not podding people as a rule wouldn't save my pod from being crushed, but it still felt like the right way to handle things. But tonight I wanted to mine ice and I couldn't have any stragglers kicking around, so in the half second it took to lock his pod I decided to send him home.
Moments later I got an EveMail from him titled "Ruthless" and stating "That was my only ship." I responded with "I'd suggest being cloaked the next time you are trying to probe." He didn't seem that upset, there was a smiley emoticon in the mail so I figure he took it well enough.
I bounced around the system real quick and since it looked clear I headed back for the Procurer. As I landed in the ice field and hit d-scan, up popped a Malediction. I knew these shattered holes would be high-traffic, but it was still really bad timing. With a sigh I headed back to my wormhole, I wasn't going to take the chance that the Interceptor was alone.
Grudgingly I got back into the Cheetah. The clock was ticking and I was up way later than I wanted to be. But I headed back to the shattered hole where I bounced the outer planets looking for anything concerning. I found the Mobile Depot at planet 10, it was reinforced with 11 hours left on it. The Malediction was nowhere to be seen. Some probes had shown up at first but now everything was quiet. Deciding to tempt fate once again, I headed back to swap into the Procurer.
This time things went smoother. I sat in the ice field, pulling down a block every 1m 18s. I started looking up refine amounts, calculating how many days of fuel I was getting per cycle and all that. I found myself getting a little lazy with d-scan and tried to pick up the pace.
The frequency with which you click d-scan is very important. Even a one second delay can mean the difference between getting caught or not. This importance was demonstrated to me moments later when a Heretic showed up on scan. My brain said "Interceptor" again, even though it wasn't, but I reacted correctly anyway, immediately warping out of the site. The Heretic landed and dropped a warp disruption bubble just as I was accelerating into warp. I had escaped, but I wasn't home yet.
When I brought the Procurer into the shattered hole I had made a few inline safes on the way from my entrance to the ice field. I was in warp to one of those because it was the fastest thing I could click to warp to. When I landed, in scan range from the exit, nothing was on scan. I proceeded to warp to the exit and just as I got into warp the Heretic was on scan again. I landed on the exit, he landed on grid, I jumped, he followed a few seconds later. He couldn't have missed me by any less the first time and he couldn't have caught me by any less this time. He popped two bubbles and I was stuck, so I committed to the fight.
My choice of the Procurer suddenly seemed prescient. The nice tank and drone bonuses would give me a shot. I still didn't know if he had friends on the way, so I started slowboating out of the bubble while locking him up and sending my Warrior II's to greet him. He didn't appreciate their greeting, his shield was dropping way faster than mine and I was just sitting passive with an active tank on standby. As he slid into armor he appeared to be de-aggressing, but this was a wormhole, that wouldn't make any sense. It turned out he had just switched to shooting my drones, and got one low into armor and bleeding some hull before he gave up and left. I think he jumped out, I was more concerned with surviving at that point to care. A few seconds later I reached the edge of the bubble, and warped to the POS.
It was nearly 1am, I was tired and simultaneously pumped with adrenaline. I also had a combat timer to worry about, but I wanted to go to bed. This final adventure had netted me 8 blocks of Smooth Glacial Mass, which is only a little more than one day worth of fuel products, but overall the night was a raging success. Not forgetting my original goal I did remember to check the POS fuel, 21 days remaining. Stocking up will have to be a goal for next week.
After waiting out the combat timer I safepotted and logged. Sleep didn't come as quickly as I wanted, the adrenaline took a while to disperse. But I woke up okay this morning so it could be worse.
Have a Happy New Year and don't forget to click d-scan, possibly more often than you already are.
Scanning...
There's nothing shiny in the solar system map. The solemn darkness eats away at your soul.
Wednesday, December 31, 2014
Monday, December 29, 2014
RLS: How a WiFi Thermostat took down an Exchange Server
RLS stands for "Real Life Stories" and I'll be posting them from time to time when the situation warrants it. This real life story ruined my plans to play EVE over the weekend, and it's kind of obscure, so I figured it was worth posting.
From looking at the title you might think this would be some elaborate tale of hacking and mystery. Wouldn't that be exciting? But no, that is not the case. First you should know that in real life I'm an IT Professional. My experience ranges across everything from software development to desktop support to server management. I've been at my current job for nearly 8 years and am responsible for a variety of things. Maintaining the servers and network infrastructure is one of my primary functions, although on any given day you could also find me performing a webmeeting to train customers on our software product. Such is the nature of working for a small business.
On Friday I expected a quiet day. My youngest son came to work with me since he didn't have school. Things went fine in the morning, he entertained himself with his new iPad Mini that he got for Christmas. He hadn't eaten much breakfast and so by 11:00am he was pestering me for lunch. I gave him a bag of peanuts to buy some time. He ate half of them and was good for a bit.
I had spent the morning prepping some changes to our Exchange server for a new domain we were adding. Around noon I rebooted the server and that's when things went haywire. Our Exchange server is several years old, it requires some poking and prodding to come up properly after a reboot. This time though, it wasn't working. The Transport Service wouldn't start, no matter what I did. Something major was wrong and I snapped into triage mode. Ignoring all around me, including the time, I started digging through server logs, and googling potential problems.
For about an hour I hammered at it, some of that time was waiting on the slow server to reboot but mostly it was just trying different tricks. There are enough things that can go wrong to break the Transport Service that it wasn't immediately obvious what was wrong. My son was getting hungry again, but being in triage mode I wasn't hearing it. I told him to finish the bag of peanuts and kept working.
Time flies when you tune out the world and are lost in thought. For nearly another two hours I dodged my son and rambled incessantly at no one in particular as I researched the problem and tried solutions. Finally, as it approached 3:00pm, I dropped out of my triage bubble and decided I had to do something about my son. It's hard to convince yourself to leave when a server is down and you're the only one there who can do anything about it. Luckily my son wanted Taco Bell and it's right around the corner. Ten minutes later we were back and eating. I polished off a Mexican Pizza while continuing to research the problem.
About this time it was becoming clear that one of the things that can break the Transport Service is a broken domain replication scheme. At first I didn't think that could be it, because while I had run into problems like that in the past, they were long since resolved. At least that's what I thought...
In the past I've found that even though the master computers in a Forest (the Microsoft Organizational Entity) should always be able to see and talk to each other, it's incredibly easy to break that portion while the servers themselves still appear to be communicating. Just because one server can see and access another doesn't mean the services that keep them synced can also. This can be determined fairly easily by reviewing the logs, but unless something big is happening to get my attention I don't always go through the logs.
Over the next couple hours I narrowed down the issues. Was the domain/forest still configured correctly? It appeared to be. When was the last successful communication? Five months ago. Wait, what?! How is that possible? We moved into this building six months ago and everything was working fine at that point! But the logs don't lie, the last successful replication was near the end of July. I racked my brain to remember what could have happened around that time.
Still unsure of what to do next, I tested name resolution from the server and found my culprit. Everything I tried to ping on our internal network was resolving to our outside IP, that was a huge red flag. With a few more tests the answer became clear, somehow the server was using Google DNS (8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4) to resolve names instead of my internal servers. A little more digging found the reason, a spare network adapter on the server was setup for a completely different subnet and had the Google DNS addresses in it. Somehow it was defaulting to using that DNS server even though we weren't routing traffic to that subnet at all. That's when it hit me, late July, a weird subnet, both clues pointed to a WiFi Thermostat we had bought about a month after we moved in.
I wanted to look into that further, but getting the server back up was top priority. It was closing in on 5:00pm and it was already clear I'd be staying late. My son wasn't happy about that, but such is life.
First I wiped the settings from that adapter, and instantly the name resolution started working again. That would have been a great solution if I'd noticed the replication problem within 60 days, during which time the server could have worked out all the discrepancies and gotten back to normal. But past that you have to start over. So I kicked the other server out of the forest, rebooted the Exchange server and voila, the Transport Service started working again and email was back up. It was now about 5:30pm and I was mentally fried.
I decided that was good enough for the day, I'd come back on Saturday morning and get the other server put back into the forest and get it functioning. As we drove home I analyzed how this had happened.
You see these new WiFi thermostats have to be configured when you get them, they need to join your WiFi network to be useful. In this case I had used a spare adapter on the server to connect to the thermostat to set it up initially. I had considered using a spare PC for this, but the server was a quicker solution at the time. Not to mention that I could have cleared the settings or disabled the adapter afterwards, but I left it in place in case I needed to reset the thermostat later. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it's just a reminder to avoid messing with anything that could break the servers.
By the time I got home Friday evening any will I had to play EVE was gone. I needed slow, easy entertainment at that point. The challenges of EVE would have overwhelmed me, I'd had enough challenges for one day. Plus I had to get up the next morning and dive into that mess again. Luckily the remaining tasks wouldn't take long and I would only be at work for about an hour before returning home and enjoying a lazy Saturday. So on Friday and for the rest of the weekend I played quite a bit of Blue Dragon with my son and ate yummy things like fresh kielbasa and cheesecake.
The clock is ticking though and towers don't fuel themselves. So I'll be back at it this week and the normal EVE related posts will return soon.
From looking at the title you might think this would be some elaborate tale of hacking and mystery. Wouldn't that be exciting? But no, that is not the case. First you should know that in real life I'm an IT Professional. My experience ranges across everything from software development to desktop support to server management. I've been at my current job for nearly 8 years and am responsible for a variety of things. Maintaining the servers and network infrastructure is one of my primary functions, although on any given day you could also find me performing a webmeeting to train customers on our software product. Such is the nature of working for a small business.
On Friday I expected a quiet day. My youngest son came to work with me since he didn't have school. Things went fine in the morning, he entertained himself with his new iPad Mini that he got for Christmas. He hadn't eaten much breakfast and so by 11:00am he was pestering me for lunch. I gave him a bag of peanuts to buy some time. He ate half of them and was good for a bit.
I had spent the morning prepping some changes to our Exchange server for a new domain we were adding. Around noon I rebooted the server and that's when things went haywire. Our Exchange server is several years old, it requires some poking and prodding to come up properly after a reboot. This time though, it wasn't working. The Transport Service wouldn't start, no matter what I did. Something major was wrong and I snapped into triage mode. Ignoring all around me, including the time, I started digging through server logs, and googling potential problems.
For about an hour I hammered at it, some of that time was waiting on the slow server to reboot but mostly it was just trying different tricks. There are enough things that can go wrong to break the Transport Service that it wasn't immediately obvious what was wrong. My son was getting hungry again, but being in triage mode I wasn't hearing it. I told him to finish the bag of peanuts and kept working.
Time flies when you tune out the world and are lost in thought. For nearly another two hours I dodged my son and rambled incessantly at no one in particular as I researched the problem and tried solutions. Finally, as it approached 3:00pm, I dropped out of my triage bubble and decided I had to do something about my son. It's hard to convince yourself to leave when a server is down and you're the only one there who can do anything about it. Luckily my son wanted Taco Bell and it's right around the corner. Ten minutes later we were back and eating. I polished off a Mexican Pizza while continuing to research the problem.
About this time it was becoming clear that one of the things that can break the Transport Service is a broken domain replication scheme. At first I didn't think that could be it, because while I had run into problems like that in the past, they were long since resolved. At least that's what I thought...
In the past I've found that even though the master computers in a Forest (the Microsoft Organizational Entity) should always be able to see and talk to each other, it's incredibly easy to break that portion while the servers themselves still appear to be communicating. Just because one server can see and access another doesn't mean the services that keep them synced can also. This can be determined fairly easily by reviewing the logs, but unless something big is happening to get my attention I don't always go through the logs.
Over the next couple hours I narrowed down the issues. Was the domain/forest still configured correctly? It appeared to be. When was the last successful communication? Five months ago. Wait, what?! How is that possible? We moved into this building six months ago and everything was working fine at that point! But the logs don't lie, the last successful replication was near the end of July. I racked my brain to remember what could have happened around that time.
Still unsure of what to do next, I tested name resolution from the server and found my culprit. Everything I tried to ping on our internal network was resolving to our outside IP, that was a huge red flag. With a few more tests the answer became clear, somehow the server was using Google DNS (8.8.8.8 & 8.8.4.4) to resolve names instead of my internal servers. A little more digging found the reason, a spare network adapter on the server was setup for a completely different subnet and had the Google DNS addresses in it. Somehow it was defaulting to using that DNS server even though we weren't routing traffic to that subnet at all. That's when it hit me, late July, a weird subnet, both clues pointed to a WiFi Thermostat we had bought about a month after we moved in.
I wanted to look into that further, but getting the server back up was top priority. It was closing in on 5:00pm and it was already clear I'd be staying late. My son wasn't happy about that, but such is life.
First I wiped the settings from that adapter, and instantly the name resolution started working again. That would have been a great solution if I'd noticed the replication problem within 60 days, during which time the server could have worked out all the discrepancies and gotten back to normal. But past that you have to start over. So I kicked the other server out of the forest, rebooted the Exchange server and voila, the Transport Service started working again and email was back up. It was now about 5:30pm and I was mentally fried.
I decided that was good enough for the day, I'd come back on Saturday morning and get the other server put back into the forest and get it functioning. As we drove home I analyzed how this had happened.
You see these new WiFi thermostats have to be configured when you get them, they need to join your WiFi network to be useful. In this case I had used a spare adapter on the server to connect to the thermostat to set it up initially. I had considered using a spare PC for this, but the server was a quicker solution at the time. Not to mention that I could have cleared the settings or disabled the adapter afterwards, but I left it in place in case I needed to reset the thermostat later. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now it's just a reminder to avoid messing with anything that could break the servers.
By the time I got home Friday evening any will I had to play EVE was gone. I needed slow, easy entertainment at that point. The challenges of EVE would have overwhelmed me, I'd had enough challenges for one day. Plus I had to get up the next morning and dive into that mess again. Luckily the remaining tasks wouldn't take long and I would only be at work for about an hour before returning home and enjoying a lazy Saturday. So on Friday and for the rest of the weekend I played quite a bit of Blue Dragon with my son and ate yummy things like fresh kielbasa and cheesecake.
The clock is ticking though and towers don't fuel themselves. So I'll be back at it this week and the normal EVE related posts will return soon.
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Chatlogs FTW
Where did I go today? What was that system called? How did I get there? All of these questions can be answered by reviewing your chat logs. For example, what was the name of the null system in Period Basis that my static led to on Sunday? Z-M5A1 Why is that important? It's not, that's just an example of something I had forgotten about that the chatlogs reminded me of.
So why was I digging through my chatlogs? For whatever reason, it occurred to me that while I was AFK on Sunday some crazy person got into my wormhole and started rambling to himself. I don't know if he came in through the High-Sec connection. I do know some people came in that way and did some probing, I'm assuming that's who he was trying to talk to.
Anyway, as a public service announcement, this is why you shouldn't do crack:
[ 2014.12.21 22:54:12 ] Morph Norad > lol
[ 2014.12.21 22:54:27 ] Morph Norad > i just did 140 million in this site
[ 2014.12.21 22:54:37 ] Morph Norad > even with a logi and t2
[ 2014.12.21 22:54:42 ] Morph Norad > im so pro
[ 2014.12.21 22:55:02 ] Morph Norad > anyone here?
[ 2014.12.21 22:55:40 ] Morph Norad > >_<
[ 2014.12.21 22:55:46 ] Morph Norad > so quit but i can see you all
[ 2014.12.21 22:55:55 ] Morph Norad > bye scooby
[ 2014.12.21 23:16:38 ] Morph Norad > hi im friendly
[ 2014.12.21 23:16:52 ] Morph Norad > can you link me the exit pls my wh collapsed
[ 2014.12.21 23:18:24 ] Morph Norad > hey you with a covops
[ 2014.12.21 23:18:35 ] Morph Norad > did u enter here from a null sec ?
[ 2014.12.21 23:20:04 ] Morph Norad > cmon i can see your probes
[ 2014.12.21 23:20:25 ] Morph Norad > nvm i founded the exit see ya , this sector is clear i cleaned up
[ 2014.12.21 23:20:31 ] Morph Norad > dont waste time
So why was I digging through my chatlogs? For whatever reason, it occurred to me that while I was AFK on Sunday some crazy person got into my wormhole and started rambling to himself. I don't know if he came in through the High-Sec connection. I do know some people came in that way and did some probing, I'm assuming that's who he was trying to talk to.
Anyway, as a public service announcement, this is why you shouldn't do crack:
[ 2014.12.21 22:54:12 ] Morph Norad > lol
[ 2014.12.21 22:54:27 ] Morph Norad > i just did 140 million in this site
[ 2014.12.21 22:54:37 ] Morph Norad > even with a logi and t2
[ 2014.12.21 22:54:42 ] Morph Norad > im so pro
[ 2014.12.21 22:55:02 ] Morph Norad > anyone here?
[ 2014.12.21 22:55:40 ] Morph Norad > >_<
[ 2014.12.21 22:55:46 ] Morph Norad > so quit but i can see you all
[ 2014.12.21 22:55:55 ] Morph Norad > bye scooby
[ 2014.12.21 23:16:38 ] Morph Norad > hi im friendly
[ 2014.12.21 23:16:52 ] Morph Norad > can you link me the exit pls my wh collapsed
[ 2014.12.21 23:18:24 ] Morph Norad > hey you with a covops
[ 2014.12.21 23:18:35 ] Morph Norad > did u enter here from a null sec ?
[ 2014.12.21 23:20:04 ] Morph Norad > cmon i can see your probes
[ 2014.12.21 23:20:25 ] Morph Norad > nvm i founded the exit see ya , this sector is clear i cleaned up
[ 2014.12.21 23:20:31 ] Morph Norad > dont waste time
Monday, December 22, 2014
Leftovers
Saturday I slept in a bit, but got up and logged in while it was still considered morning. I did the usual POS shuffle with online arrays and then went back to being cloaked in a safespot.
Job number one was scanning down the hole. There were still quite a few signatures left from my scans on Thursday night. That included two of the gas sites that were up on Thursday night. One of them was the one I was in when the action started, LBA-008. I was definitely going back for that gas since I'd already killed the rats. The other, CUT-586 , I would find out later was most likely where the Venture was killed. Both were first kicked on Thursday night and so both would last through Saturday evening.
About the time I finished scanning, my wife was up and ready to go out. We grabbed lunch at a local bar that makes great pizza. I ordered a pizza with way too many olives on it, but it was still awesome. Next we were supposed to do some shopping, but my wife had been itching to get her nails done and there was a place just down the street that didn't look too busy.
Now I don't normally go with her for this stuff, but I figured it was no big deal. We walked into the nail place and I nearly passed out from the fumes. I've walked by a few of these places in malls and it was never this strong. The last one I went to with her was dead and so it wasn't bad. This one though, sweet goodness, they were busy as heck and there was no ventilation.
Trying not to be a wuss, I toughed it out for five minutes or so. When one girl got up from the waiting area because she was next, I took her spot right next to the door. That really didn't help at all, even with people going in and out. So I grabbed the keys from my wife and went and sat in the cold car. I could have started it, but I'm tougher than that, cold is no big deal, fumes are.
She had picked this place because it didn't seem busy, but it actually was, so we were there a while. By the time she was done we had used up a good chunk of our shopping time. So we just made one more stop for hair dye and toothbrushes at the local CVS.
Our kids had been spending the night at my parent's house so my wife could finish up Christmas shopping and wrapping the day before. By the time we got home they were back. Our youngest son's room always devolves into a disaster over time and this was the day we were going to start tackling it. So that was next.
This was when I finally started to make some progress in EVE. I'd give him a task that would take a while, then go mine some gas. I managed to take down LBA-008 this way, and later CUT-586. That was when I noticed a very small amount of one cloud was missing, and the rats were long since dead. CUT-586 had to be where the Venture had died on Thursday night. I'm guessing he only got off a few cycles before the Cerberus landed.
Basically Saturday was just a string of little things, like mining out one cloud at a time, or hitting up a Blood Raider data site. The real challenge of the day was starting a project to sort all of our legos into color specific bins. This task was not completed in one day.
On Thursday night I had promised my younger son that on Saturday we could play some Xbox 360 games together. Later in the day, when the cleaning had stopped, we tried to do that. First it was Disney Infinity, but that didn't go well. To play in an actual world with two players you need two characters from that world. This is the opposite of Skylanders where you are better off with two different types. Since we didn't know this when we bought it, we only had one from each world and couldn't play two players.
Next up was Skylanders, but we only have one base unit, so we couldn't play two players there either. Finally it was decided that we would go back to Blue Dragon, an older J-RPG which we had started playing together a year ago. It's a single player game, but one where we could take turns and work together. So we spent a few hours doing that and then it was time for bed.
On Sunday I got up in the late morning again. This time my wife needed to run out with my older son to do some shopping and take the younger son to her mom's place. I logged in and scanned down the hole, found little that was exciting, and spent some time surfing the net and goofing around.
I can't remember the exact timing, but I remember sitting there and suddenly noticing a single new signature. My statics were fresh so it wasn't that. I was kind of hoping it was a gas site, but it was a wormhole, a K162. I never know what to expect with K162's, it's always a surprise. Since I recently joked that Bob was going to flood me with High-Sec exits and hoard the Shattered Wormholes for himself, that is exactly what happened. Welcome to Dammalin, in Heimatar, three jumps from Rens.
I had some stuff to sell and the blue loot orders were a little farther than Rens, but no biggie. It was going to take two trips to get all the gas out so I got started right away. Rens has a pretty healthy market, I was able to sell pretty much everything to buy orders except the gas, which I put up at competitive prices. After the second run for Gas I had to decide what I needed to bring back in.
Normally that would be fuel, but I'm in pretty good shape at the moment and don't want to get too far ahead on supplies until I get a little further ahead in ISK. I had been reading my 30-day report, which was a previous post on the forums before the blog was started, and in it I had set two goals for this month. #1 was a Research Laboratory and #2 was a T3. The T3 was more of a long term goal, I didn't expect to get it in a month, just to start raising money for it. The Research Laboratory was a goal I wanted to achieve but wasn't sure if it would be worth it ISK-wise as something to do early in the adventure.
Coincidentally, according to Eve-Central, the cheapest Research Laboratories in EVE are in the Heimatar region, for 30m ISK. There were three of them, two in Low-Sec and one where the route went one jump through Low-Sec, so I bought that one. Normally these are over 50m ISK, so that was a good enough deal for me. I hauled that sucker back to the hole and set it up. I have to leave an extra hardener offline while I'm using it but I won't be leaving it on all the time anyway.
Previous to that purchase I was approaching breaking even for the month, afterwards of course I was not. So I grabbed an extra load of Robotics I had stashed and ran them out for another 10m ISK. The goal for the remainder of the month is ISK, I need to come out ahead if I ever want to get that Loki. If my sell orders do well that will make up the difference. These first few months have been expensive as I fill in the gaps I didn't plan for. I'm hoping this will be the last month where that is the case.
Job number one was scanning down the hole. There were still quite a few signatures left from my scans on Thursday night. That included two of the gas sites that were up on Thursday night. One of them was the one I was in when the action started, LBA-008. I was definitely going back for that gas since I'd already killed the rats. The other, CUT-586 , I would find out later was most likely where the Venture was killed. Both were first kicked on Thursday night and so both would last through Saturday evening.
About the time I finished scanning, my wife was up and ready to go out. We grabbed lunch at a local bar that makes great pizza. I ordered a pizza with way too many olives on it, but it was still awesome. Next we were supposed to do some shopping, but my wife had been itching to get her nails done and there was a place just down the street that didn't look too busy.
Now I don't normally go with her for this stuff, but I figured it was no big deal. We walked into the nail place and I nearly passed out from the fumes. I've walked by a few of these places in malls and it was never this strong. The last one I went to with her was dead and so it wasn't bad. This one though, sweet goodness, they were busy as heck and there was no ventilation.
Trying not to be a wuss, I toughed it out for five minutes or so. When one girl got up from the waiting area because she was next, I took her spot right next to the door. That really didn't help at all, even with people going in and out. So I grabbed the keys from my wife and went and sat in the cold car. I could have started it, but I'm tougher than that, cold is no big deal, fumes are.
She had picked this place because it didn't seem busy, but it actually was, so we were there a while. By the time she was done we had used up a good chunk of our shopping time. So we just made one more stop for hair dye and toothbrushes at the local CVS.
Our kids had been spending the night at my parent's house so my wife could finish up Christmas shopping and wrapping the day before. By the time we got home they were back. Our youngest son's room always devolves into a disaster over time and this was the day we were going to start tackling it. So that was next.
This was when I finally started to make some progress in EVE. I'd give him a task that would take a while, then go mine some gas. I managed to take down LBA-008 this way, and later CUT-586. That was when I noticed a very small amount of one cloud was missing, and the rats were long since dead. CUT-586 had to be where the Venture had died on Thursday night. I'm guessing he only got off a few cycles before the Cerberus landed.
Basically Saturday was just a string of little things, like mining out one cloud at a time, or hitting up a Blood Raider data site. The real challenge of the day was starting a project to sort all of our legos into color specific bins. This task was not completed in one day.
On Thursday night I had promised my younger son that on Saturday we could play some Xbox 360 games together. Later in the day, when the cleaning had stopped, we tried to do that. First it was Disney Infinity, but that didn't go well. To play in an actual world with two players you need two characters from that world. This is the opposite of Skylanders where you are better off with two different types. Since we didn't know this when we bought it, we only had one from each world and couldn't play two players.
Next up was Skylanders, but we only have one base unit, so we couldn't play two players there either. Finally it was decided that we would go back to Blue Dragon, an older J-RPG which we had started playing together a year ago. It's a single player game, but one where we could take turns and work together. So we spent a few hours doing that and then it was time for bed.
On Sunday I got up in the late morning again. This time my wife needed to run out with my older son to do some shopping and take the younger son to her mom's place. I logged in and scanned down the hole, found little that was exciting, and spent some time surfing the net and goofing around.
I can't remember the exact timing, but I remember sitting there and suddenly noticing a single new signature. My statics were fresh so it wasn't that. I was kind of hoping it was a gas site, but it was a wormhole, a K162. I never know what to expect with K162's, it's always a surprise. Since I recently joked that Bob was going to flood me with High-Sec exits and hoard the Shattered Wormholes for himself, that is exactly what happened. Welcome to Dammalin, in Heimatar, three jumps from Rens.
I had some stuff to sell and the blue loot orders were a little farther than Rens, but no biggie. It was going to take two trips to get all the gas out so I got started right away. Rens has a pretty healthy market, I was able to sell pretty much everything to buy orders except the gas, which I put up at competitive prices. After the second run for Gas I had to decide what I needed to bring back in.
Normally that would be fuel, but I'm in pretty good shape at the moment and don't want to get too far ahead on supplies until I get a little further ahead in ISK. I had been reading my 30-day report, which was a previous post on the forums before the blog was started, and in it I had set two goals for this month. #1 was a Research Laboratory and #2 was a T3. The T3 was more of a long term goal, I didn't expect to get it in a month, just to start raising money for it. The Research Laboratory was a goal I wanted to achieve but wasn't sure if it would be worth it ISK-wise as something to do early in the adventure.
Coincidentally, according to Eve-Central, the cheapest Research Laboratories in EVE are in the Heimatar region, for 30m ISK. There were three of them, two in Low-Sec and one where the route went one jump through Low-Sec, so I bought that one. Normally these are over 50m ISK, so that was a good enough deal for me. I hauled that sucker back to the hole and set it up. I have to leave an extra hardener offline while I'm using it but I won't be leaving it on all the time anyway.
Previous to that purchase I was approaching breaking even for the month, afterwards of course I was not. So I grabbed an extra load of Robotics I had stashed and ran them out for another 10m ISK. The goal for the remainder of the month is ISK, I need to come out ahead if I ever want to get that Loki. If my sell orders do well that will make up the difference. These first few months have been expensive as I fill in the gaps I didn't plan for. I'm hoping this will be the last month where that is the case.
Friday, December 19, 2014
There's always a bigger fish
I didn't expect last night to be anything exciting. My wife had to go to her work Christmas party so I picked our youngest son up from school after I got off work. When we got home I made him a chicken/spinach/cheese tortilla and went downstairs to log in. I wasn't hungry because my co-worker bought us a metric ton of sushi for lunch and we ate all of it.
Having just played the night before, I had plenty of bookmarks that were still active signatures. I went through the list and cleaned out the dead ones, then narrowed down the active signatures in the scan window. There were 2 new signatures, but they weren't my statics, somehow those were still up from the day before and nearing the end of their natural lifetime. The new sigs turned out to be a frigate sized wormhole to wspace and a null data site. Looking at what was available I noticed there were 5 gas sites up. One of them was a Sizable Perimeter Reservoir which looked tempting. C84 gas has been a good seller for me so far.
Figuring it was best to get right to work, I jumped in a Venture and warped to the site. I knew something was wrong as soon as the grid loaded, because the rats were up. With a few quick clicks I was prepped to warp again as soon as I landed. Before the rats could even start to lock me up I was in warp back to the POS. Right before the grid disappeared from my overview I saw that the C50 cloud was missing, and I suddenly knew what had happened. Somebody had been ninja huffing, cleared the C50 and possibly some of the C84 and when the rats spawned they bailed. That meant they couldn't have gotten more than 1000-1500 m3 of the C84 and there would still be 4500-5000 m3 left. That was good enough for me.
It's almost like cheating, using the Drake to kill gas site rats, unless it's sentries in an Ordinary Perimeter Reservoir, then it's appropriate. Six dead Sleeper frigates later I came back in the Heron for cleanup duty. Minutes later I was back in the site, in the Venture, huffing that sweet gas. This blissful experience only lasted about two minutes, because Probes!
They were Sister's probes, from what I eventually found out was a Buzzard. Not being in the mood to wait around and see how long it took this person to probe down the wormhole, it occurred to me that now would be a good time to do some PI on an alt. Both alts had started training the skills, and one of them had actually put up an installation, so I decided to put up a second installation to improve my Enriched Uranium and Mechanical Parts output.
After a quick character swap and a game of "where did I leave that cloaking device?" The alt was in the Osprey with Cargo Expanders, and coincidentally that was where I had left the cloak. Eyes 1, Memory 0. With the probing Buzzard still hard at work, I warped to a Lava planet and got to work setting up a new installation. I won't bore you with the details of setting up the PI installation, it happened, clicks were made, yay me or something.
Eventually the probes disappeared, that's when the Buzzard showed up on scan and then disappeared, never to be seen again. I swapped characters, back to Niskin, and bounced around the hole. All clear! So I resumed the blissful gas huffing, taking in exactly 4960 m3 of gas before warping back to the POS to drop it off. C84 doesn't fit neatly into the 5000 m3 Ore Bay of the Venture, so I had to stop it a cycle early to avoid waste. Back at the POS, I hit scan to find a Drake and Ferox somewhere nearby. This part is a little fuzzy for me, but I do know I warped back to the site and landed as the Drake and Ferox were warping off.
I thought they were after me so I warped back to the POS again and got into a CovOps. After warping to a safespot in the middle of the system I proceeded to play the 5 degree scan game. Recently I've had some frustrating issues with getting things down to 5 degrees, and last night it hit me as to why. The signatures on the overlay, the ones that appear in space, are not positioned exactly where they really are in space. I knew this, but hadn't translated it over to how that affected d-scanning. Anoms are exact, signatures are not, which is why sometimes I could get 5 degrees no problem and other times I'd lose them below 15. Major duh! But this led to me getting the Drake and Ferox on 5 degree scan, 0.6 AU away in a Frontier Perimeter Reservoir, just sitting there.
I waited a while, they weren't warping around at all, just sitting there. I wasn't sure why at the time, but it would become clear later. I took this opportunity to reflect on the sad PvP situation I kept finding myself in. There were two of them, which severely reduced my chances of having any success killing them. But even if there were only one, it would have been a tough call. Taking a Battlecruiser in the Claw would require it to be fit poorly for small ship opponents, and would take a while. The Hawk (I have a Hawk, I just never mentioned it before) would be the same thing but even slower. Even my assumed next PvP ship upgrade, a Bomber, would be a dicey proposal. A Loki could certainly take one of them, not sure about two, again it depends on fits. But that didn't matter, I didn't have a Loki yet or the skills trained properly.
Having successfully thrown myself a pity party, I decided to go AFK and see what developed. About 20 minutes later I got back and found d-scan empty again. Yay, they were gone. Time to finish this gas site. By the time I got back to the POS it was Probes! all over again. This time I said screw it. There had to be less than 1000 m3 left in the site based on my calculations. I was going for it.
Landing in the site, which was located near the center of the solar system just like everything else, I started playing with d-scan ranges. The probes were within 5 AU, but not 4 AU, no biggy. I dialed it down to 2.5 AU and spammed the scan button. A few probes showed up at times but never the full set. It wasn't long before the last 600 m3 or so of C84 gas was in my hold, the cloud popped and I warped back to the POS. The probes disappeared shortly after.
I still had some time left, the wife had left her Christmas party and was finishing up Christmas shopping. I picked out a gas site that I hadn't seen the Drake and Ferox in and warped to it. Rats, again! So now I knew what was up. They had been warping to gas sites and sitting there waiting to kill the rats. This site had both clouds so it wasn't a ninja situation. Once again I did the dance of Drake and prepped the site for huffing. That's when things got interesting.
While I was clearing the rats in the Drake my wife called, she was on her way home and once again we needed to play driveway car shuffle. I had to work the next day but she didn't. Since 2x frigates and 1x cruiser don't last very long, I finished the fight and warped to the POS. The next few minutes involved car swapping and chatting with the wife. Then I ran back downstairs to finish up.
Swapping from the Drake to the Heron I warped back to clear the wrecks. D-scan was hot, showing a Cerberus and a Venture. "I wonder if they are working together?" D-scan again, Cerberus and Capsule. "I guess not." I went into panic mode, scooped the loot and the MTA and left the wrecks to rot. Noo, not my potential Nanoribbons! But it was time to get into a CovOps and see what was up.
Warping back to the middle of the system things had gotten even more interesting. The Cerberus was still on scan, and the Drake and Ferox were back. I tried to narrow the location down, but watching the situation develop was more interesting. You never know what you are missing while you are trying to isolate the next tightest degree. So I set it back to 360 degrees and tried to imagine what was happening.
Next on scan was the Cerb, two warp disrupt probes, the Drake and the Ferox. No sign of what dropped the warp bubbles. The Drake eventually disappeared, but no pod so it must have escaped. One warp disrupt bubble popped and then the Cerb's backup arrived. Cynabal, Curse, Rook and a short time later a Scimitar. The Ferox didn't last long at that point. Then the remaining ships slowly left the scene, and things got quiet again.
My curiosity was peaked, who were these visitors? It occurred to me that I could just search zkillboard for my J-ID and find out really easy. Up until now I've kept my wormhole identity secret on this blog. Anybody who has followed the blog and knows where to look could have found the J-ID by now. For the purpose of finishing this post properly I'm going to let the cat out of the bag.
What I had witnessed on d-scan was a Lazerhawk drive-by on the guys I had just wished I could take on myself. Bob works in strange ways it seems. I got to see the big guys at work without the prestigious but unfortunate case of being the target. With that all figured out I did a little PI management and logged off. It felt like I didn't accomplish much, but it was still one heck of a night.
Fly safe everyone, have a good weekend, and watch out for bigger fish!
Having just played the night before, I had plenty of bookmarks that were still active signatures. I went through the list and cleaned out the dead ones, then narrowed down the active signatures in the scan window. There were 2 new signatures, but they weren't my statics, somehow those were still up from the day before and nearing the end of their natural lifetime. The new sigs turned out to be a frigate sized wormhole to wspace and a null data site. Looking at what was available I noticed there were 5 gas sites up. One of them was a Sizable Perimeter Reservoir which looked tempting. C84 gas has been a good seller for me so far.
Figuring it was best to get right to work, I jumped in a Venture and warped to the site. I knew something was wrong as soon as the grid loaded, because the rats were up. With a few quick clicks I was prepped to warp again as soon as I landed. Before the rats could even start to lock me up I was in warp back to the POS. Right before the grid disappeared from my overview I saw that the C50 cloud was missing, and I suddenly knew what had happened. Somebody had been ninja huffing, cleared the C50 and possibly some of the C84 and when the rats spawned they bailed. That meant they couldn't have gotten more than 1000-1500 m3 of the C84 and there would still be 4500-5000 m3 left. That was good enough for me.
It's almost like cheating, using the Drake to kill gas site rats, unless it's sentries in an Ordinary Perimeter Reservoir, then it's appropriate. Six dead Sleeper frigates later I came back in the Heron for cleanup duty. Minutes later I was back in the site, in the Venture, huffing that sweet gas. This blissful experience only lasted about two minutes, because Probes!
They were Sister's probes, from what I eventually found out was a Buzzard. Not being in the mood to wait around and see how long it took this person to probe down the wormhole, it occurred to me that now would be a good time to do some PI on an alt. Both alts had started training the skills, and one of them had actually put up an installation, so I decided to put up a second installation to improve my Enriched Uranium and Mechanical Parts output.
After a quick character swap and a game of "where did I leave that cloaking device?" The alt was in the Osprey with Cargo Expanders, and coincidentally that was where I had left the cloak. Eyes 1, Memory 0. With the probing Buzzard still hard at work, I warped to a Lava planet and got to work setting up a new installation. I won't bore you with the details of setting up the PI installation, it happened, clicks were made, yay me or something.
Eventually the probes disappeared, that's when the Buzzard showed up on scan and then disappeared, never to be seen again. I swapped characters, back to Niskin, and bounced around the hole. All clear! So I resumed the blissful gas huffing, taking in exactly 4960 m3 of gas before warping back to the POS to drop it off. C84 doesn't fit neatly into the 5000 m3 Ore Bay of the Venture, so I had to stop it a cycle early to avoid waste. Back at the POS, I hit scan to find a Drake and Ferox somewhere nearby. This part is a little fuzzy for me, but I do know I warped back to the site and landed as the Drake and Ferox were warping off.
I thought they were after me so I warped back to the POS again and got into a CovOps. After warping to a safespot in the middle of the system I proceeded to play the 5 degree scan game. Recently I've had some frustrating issues with getting things down to 5 degrees, and last night it hit me as to why. The signatures on the overlay, the ones that appear in space, are not positioned exactly where they really are in space. I knew this, but hadn't translated it over to how that affected d-scanning. Anoms are exact, signatures are not, which is why sometimes I could get 5 degrees no problem and other times I'd lose them below 15. Major duh! But this led to me getting the Drake and Ferox on 5 degree scan, 0.6 AU away in a Frontier Perimeter Reservoir, just sitting there.
I waited a while, they weren't warping around at all, just sitting there. I wasn't sure why at the time, but it would become clear later. I took this opportunity to reflect on the sad PvP situation I kept finding myself in. There were two of them, which severely reduced my chances of having any success killing them. But even if there were only one, it would have been a tough call. Taking a Battlecruiser in the Claw would require it to be fit poorly for small ship opponents, and would take a while. The Hawk (I have a Hawk, I just never mentioned it before) would be the same thing but even slower. Even my assumed next PvP ship upgrade, a Bomber, would be a dicey proposal. A Loki could certainly take one of them, not sure about two, again it depends on fits. But that didn't matter, I didn't have a Loki yet or the skills trained properly.
Having successfully thrown myself a pity party, I decided to go AFK and see what developed. About 20 minutes later I got back and found d-scan empty again. Yay, they were gone. Time to finish this gas site. By the time I got back to the POS it was Probes! all over again. This time I said screw it. There had to be less than 1000 m3 left in the site based on my calculations. I was going for it.
Landing in the site, which was located near the center of the solar system just like everything else, I started playing with d-scan ranges. The probes were within 5 AU, but not 4 AU, no biggy. I dialed it down to 2.5 AU and spammed the scan button. A few probes showed up at times but never the full set. It wasn't long before the last 600 m3 or so of C84 gas was in my hold, the cloud popped and I warped back to the POS. The probes disappeared shortly after.
I still had some time left, the wife had left her Christmas party and was finishing up Christmas shopping. I picked out a gas site that I hadn't seen the Drake and Ferox in and warped to it. Rats, again! So now I knew what was up. They had been warping to gas sites and sitting there waiting to kill the rats. This site had both clouds so it wasn't a ninja situation. Once again I did the dance of Drake and prepped the site for huffing. That's when things got interesting.
While I was clearing the rats in the Drake my wife called, she was on her way home and once again we needed to play driveway car shuffle. I had to work the next day but she didn't. Since 2x frigates and 1x cruiser don't last very long, I finished the fight and warped to the POS. The next few minutes involved car swapping and chatting with the wife. Then I ran back downstairs to finish up.
Swapping from the Drake to the Heron I warped back to clear the wrecks. D-scan was hot, showing a Cerberus and a Venture. "I wonder if they are working together?" D-scan again, Cerberus and Capsule. "I guess not." I went into panic mode, scooped the loot and the MTA and left the wrecks to rot. Noo, not my potential Nanoribbons! But it was time to get into a CovOps and see what was up.
Warping back to the middle of the system things had gotten even more interesting. The Cerberus was still on scan, and the Drake and Ferox were back. I tried to narrow the location down, but watching the situation develop was more interesting. You never know what you are missing while you are trying to isolate the next tightest degree. So I set it back to 360 degrees and tried to imagine what was happening.
Next on scan was the Cerb, two warp disrupt probes, the Drake and the Ferox. No sign of what dropped the warp bubbles. The Drake eventually disappeared, but no pod so it must have escaped. One warp disrupt bubble popped and then the Cerb's backup arrived. Cynabal, Curse, Rook and a short time later a Scimitar. The Ferox didn't last long at that point. Then the remaining ships slowly left the scene, and things got quiet again.
My curiosity was peaked, who were these visitors? It occurred to me that I could just search zkillboard for my J-ID and find out really easy. Up until now I've kept my wormhole identity secret on this blog. Anybody who has followed the blog and knows where to look could have found the J-ID by now. For the purpose of finishing this post properly I'm going to let the cat out of the bag.
What I had witnessed on d-scan was a Lazerhawk drive-by on the guys I had just wished I could take on myself. Bob works in strange ways it seems. I got to see the big guys at work without the prestigious but unfortunate case of being the target. With that all figured out I did a little PI management and logged off. It felt like I didn't accomplish much, but it was still one heck of a night.
Fly safe everyone, have a good weekend, and watch out for bigger fish!
Thursday, December 18, 2014
Apparently I'm a hoarder
Yes, I'm "that" guy, the one who has all the anomalies in your constellation locked up in my wormhole. Last night's count was 27, mostly combat sites, clogging up my Probe window. I think that puts my carebear rating at 1/10. It was so ridiculous that I had intended to warp around and get a bunch of the timers running at the end of the night. Unfortunately I ran out of time and was very tired by the time I logged off, so that will happen another night.
Yesterday started pretty simple. I got home from work and the wife was still at work, so I logged in. I had been worrying all day--due to my slacking over the last week--that I was falling behind on earning ISK, and letting the POS fuel situation languish. The former was true, I hadn't been running sites much, but the POS fuel supply wasn't in any dire position. For whatever reason I thought I had dipped below 28 days supply, which had never happened yet since I moved in.
After logging in I warped around and scouted out the hole, nothing was showing up on scan. Not really paying attention to the time, I figured I'd run a quick combat site. This is becoming a bit of an auto-pilot effort for me now. Grab Drake, grab ammo and MTU, warp to site, drop MTU, align, kill. It was going fine until the end of the 2nd stage, when my cellphone rang. My wife was almost home and we needed to play driveway shuffle with the cars. Normally this is where I'd be like "I'm busy, I'll move them later." But I had already told her I was playing and it was a good time to earn some standing.
So I finished off the second wave and warped out as the third was spawning, back to the POS. I ran out and sat in my car, which was colder than one would expect for having just driven it home from work. A few minutes later she arrived, and we pulled into the driveway in the correct order for our work schedules the next day. As we walked in the house I said "I need to go finish what I was doing." She responded with "I need you to help with dinner." I told her I'd hurry, and I did.
Getting back downstairs I had a dilemma, I don't like sitting in the POS in a PvE ship and then warping out to a site all obvious like. Normally I swap ships, and warp off and cloak when I take these breaks. There wasn't time and my site already had wrecks and an MTU in it... Throwing caution to the wind, I warped back to the site. Luckily there was no ambush, just the site as I had left it. I quickly finished it up, grabbed the salvage Heron and cleaned up the loot.
After a quick ship swap I was back in a safespot cloaked. I ran upstairs to help with dinner, which turned out to be that I was making the salad. That involved adding one bag of mixed salad greens, adding some corn, rinsing and adding some black beans, chopping and adding some peppers and green onions and mixing it all up. Then I helped get all the plates ready and sat down to eat.
My wife and I usually eat in the living room with the TV on, with the kids at the table in the other room. A decent amount of time had passed and it was approaching 8:00pm local time. I briefly forgot that I was logged in and had planned to run anoms all night. Looking through the cable guide there was a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie coming on at 8:00, one we hadn't seen yet.
We actually watch a lot of these movies, it's just something simple to have on that you don't have to get too invested in. This year the channel had a bunch of new premieres, the last two of which looked really bad. I had joked previously that we had to watch them both and decide which was the worst. The movie coming on at 8:00 was the first of those two, so I said "sure, let's watch it." Moments later I remembered the original plan and thought "oh well, the movie will be over at 10:00."
As it turns out, I think the last of the two movies will be the worst, this one wasn't as bad as I expected. But it was 10:00pm and with the wife headed to bed, I went back downstairs to continue my plan forworld domination not running out of ISK. Once again I checked the hole, with nothing on scan it was back into the Drake. This is how I prefer to operate, long periods of sitting cloaked followed by the appearance of a Drake and a quick run of a site. It minimizes the attention of those who may pass through and then find a reason to linger.
Things started out fine, but before the end of the first wave d-scan showed a Heron. Heron's can't warp cloaked, so I warped back to the POS and jumped in the Claw. Core probes appeared, and the Heron stayed on scan, so I bounced around trying to find him. He was near my POS, but not at the planet or POCO. Eventually it occurred to me that he was probably still on grid with the wormhole he came in. Once again, if I scan first nothing happens, If I don't it's non-cloaky targets galore. I switched to the CovOps and took a stab at combat probing him down. He didn't stay on scan long after that. Bouncing around the system, the probes were gone, the Heron was gone. Oh well, back to the grind.
While finishing up the site it occurred to me that a non-cloaking Heron is not something that was likely to have come through my C5 or Null statics. It was getting late, around 11:00pm, yeah I know, I'm old. But I knew I had to scan down this hole, and still needed to do PI and I wanted to run more anoms. So scanning it was, which found several gas sites, but I already had too much to do! Eventually I found it, the K162 from Low-Sec, that explained the Heron. Jumping through I found myself in Turnur in the Metropolis region. My first exit after moving in, found in an adjacent hole, had led to Metropolis Low-Sec, so this was a pleasant surprise. Being seven jumps from Hek this was a great spot to pop out, I checked my market quickbar and everything I needed to buy and sell was either in Hek or on the way there.
I jumped back into the wormhole and warped to the POS. With all the blue loot, salvage and a load of C60 & C70 I headed out in the Prowler once again. A quick stop at a Low-Sec station took care of the blue loot, the rest went to Hek and was sold. I put the gas up on the market, having to stray from my Jita Everywhere philosophy due to market saturation on one of the gasses. I then filled up on ice products for fuel and suddenly remembered I needed Micro Jump Drives too.
MJDs were introduced while I was on a break from the game, and I haven't fitted one yet. It turns out they have a separate skill and I hadn't trained that yet either. Luckily both items were available on the route back to the wormhole. With another 5m ISK burned on stuff I hadn't planned for, I headed back home.
Back at the POS, checking my supplies, I had plenty of ice products but was a bit short on PI materials. It was getting close to midnight so I wanted to get that taken care of so I could go to bed. Mostly it was Enriched Uranium, and I had some on the planet so I just had to go get it. But I also went through restarting extractors and moving materials between planets to make the advanced materials.
As I was preparing to start the fuel job I noticed how much fuel I actually had, still more than 28 days, but not by much. Feeling better about it all I started another 50+ runs. Then I realized I had a surplus of Robotics, the one PI item I do actually haul out and sell. So I made a final trip out to Metropolis to find the market for Robotics was quite healthy. I usually list these on sell orders but the buy orders were so good I flat out sold them all immediately. 12.5m ISK richer I flew back home.
Finally it was time to offline the SMA and the Ammun.... oh crap I'm making fuel! I hadn't made fuel since upgrading my defenses and hadn't figured out what to leave online/offline during that period. It turned out to be best just to leave one hardener off. The clock had hit 1:00am and I was wiped out. So I stumbled off to bed, mostly due to a few glasses of wine. Luckily sleep came quickly, but I still woke up pretty tired.
In the morning I got up and delivered the fuel job, offlined the Ammo Array and put the hardener back online. It was perfect timing, I logged in with 4 minutes left on the job. I think that's about as productive of a night as I could ever expect. Now if I could just find time for a nap...
Yesterday started pretty simple. I got home from work and the wife was still at work, so I logged in. I had been worrying all day--due to my slacking over the last week--that I was falling behind on earning ISK, and letting the POS fuel situation languish. The former was true, I hadn't been running sites much, but the POS fuel supply wasn't in any dire position. For whatever reason I thought I had dipped below 28 days supply, which had never happened yet since I moved in.
After logging in I warped around and scouted out the hole, nothing was showing up on scan. Not really paying attention to the time, I figured I'd run a quick combat site. This is becoming a bit of an auto-pilot effort for me now. Grab Drake, grab ammo and MTU, warp to site, drop MTU, align, kill. It was going fine until the end of the 2nd stage, when my cellphone rang. My wife was almost home and we needed to play driveway shuffle with the cars. Normally this is where I'd be like "I'm busy, I'll move them later." But I had already told her I was playing and it was a good time to earn some standing.
So I finished off the second wave and warped out as the third was spawning, back to the POS. I ran out and sat in my car, which was colder than one would expect for having just driven it home from work. A few minutes later she arrived, and we pulled into the driveway in the correct order for our work schedules the next day. As we walked in the house I said "I need to go finish what I was doing." She responded with "I need you to help with dinner." I told her I'd hurry, and I did.
Getting back downstairs I had a dilemma, I don't like sitting in the POS in a PvE ship and then warping out to a site all obvious like. Normally I swap ships, and warp off and cloak when I take these breaks. There wasn't time and my site already had wrecks and an MTU in it... Throwing caution to the wind, I warped back to the site. Luckily there was no ambush, just the site as I had left it. I quickly finished it up, grabbed the salvage Heron and cleaned up the loot.
After a quick ship swap I was back in a safespot cloaked. I ran upstairs to help with dinner, which turned out to be that I was making the salad. That involved adding one bag of mixed salad greens, adding some corn, rinsing and adding some black beans, chopping and adding some peppers and green onions and mixing it all up. Then I helped get all the plates ready and sat down to eat.
My wife and I usually eat in the living room with the TV on, with the kids at the table in the other room. A decent amount of time had passed and it was approaching 8:00pm local time. I briefly forgot that I was logged in and had planned to run anoms all night. Looking through the cable guide there was a Hallmark Channel Christmas movie coming on at 8:00, one we hadn't seen yet.
We actually watch a lot of these movies, it's just something simple to have on that you don't have to get too invested in. This year the channel had a bunch of new premieres, the last two of which looked really bad. I had joked previously that we had to watch them both and decide which was the worst. The movie coming on at 8:00 was the first of those two, so I said "sure, let's watch it." Moments later I remembered the original plan and thought "oh well, the movie will be over at 10:00."
As it turns out, I think the last of the two movies will be the worst, this one wasn't as bad as I expected. But it was 10:00pm and with the wife headed to bed, I went back downstairs to continue my plan for
Things started out fine, but before the end of the first wave d-scan showed a Heron. Heron's can't warp cloaked, so I warped back to the POS and jumped in the Claw. Core probes appeared, and the Heron stayed on scan, so I bounced around trying to find him. He was near my POS, but not at the planet or POCO. Eventually it occurred to me that he was probably still on grid with the wormhole he came in. Once again, if I scan first nothing happens, If I don't it's non-cloaky targets galore. I switched to the CovOps and took a stab at combat probing him down. He didn't stay on scan long after that. Bouncing around the system, the probes were gone, the Heron was gone. Oh well, back to the grind.
While finishing up the site it occurred to me that a non-cloaking Heron is not something that was likely to have come through my C5 or Null statics. It was getting late, around 11:00pm, yeah I know, I'm old. But I knew I had to scan down this hole, and still needed to do PI and I wanted to run more anoms. So scanning it was, which found several gas sites, but I already had too much to do! Eventually I found it, the K162 from Low-Sec, that explained the Heron. Jumping through I found myself in Turnur in the Metropolis region. My first exit after moving in, found in an adjacent hole, had led to Metropolis Low-Sec, so this was a pleasant surprise. Being seven jumps from Hek this was a great spot to pop out, I checked my market quickbar and everything I needed to buy and sell was either in Hek or on the way there.
I jumped back into the wormhole and warped to the POS. With all the blue loot, salvage and a load of C60 & C70 I headed out in the Prowler once again. A quick stop at a Low-Sec station took care of the blue loot, the rest went to Hek and was sold. I put the gas up on the market, having to stray from my Jita Everywhere philosophy due to market saturation on one of the gasses. I then filled up on ice products for fuel and suddenly remembered I needed Micro Jump Drives too.
MJDs were introduced while I was on a break from the game, and I haven't fitted one yet. It turns out they have a separate skill and I hadn't trained that yet either. Luckily both items were available on the route back to the wormhole. With another 5m ISK burned on stuff I hadn't planned for, I headed back home.
Back at the POS, checking my supplies, I had plenty of ice products but was a bit short on PI materials. It was getting close to midnight so I wanted to get that taken care of so I could go to bed. Mostly it was Enriched Uranium, and I had some on the planet so I just had to go get it. But I also went through restarting extractors and moving materials between planets to make the advanced materials.
As I was preparing to start the fuel job I noticed how much fuel I actually had, still more than 28 days, but not by much. Feeling better about it all I started another 50+ runs. Then I realized I had a surplus of Robotics, the one PI item I do actually haul out and sell. So I made a final trip out to Metropolis to find the market for Robotics was quite healthy. I usually list these on sell orders but the buy orders were so good I flat out sold them all immediately. 12.5m ISK richer I flew back home.
Finally it was time to offline the SMA and the Ammun.... oh crap I'm making fuel! I hadn't made fuel since upgrading my defenses and hadn't figured out what to leave online/offline during that period. It turned out to be best just to leave one hardener off. The clock had hit 1:00am and I was wiped out. So I stumbled off to bed, mostly due to a few glasses of wine. Luckily sleep came quickly, but I still woke up pretty tired.
In the morning I got up and delivered the fuel job, offlined the Ammo Array and put the hardener back online. It was perfect timing, I logged in with 4 minutes left on the job. I think that's about as productive of a night as I could ever expect. Now if I could just find time for a nap...
Tuesday, December 16, 2014
Two Things
#1 CSPA Charges
As I understand it there have been changes made to mitigate this, and I had even forgotten about the CSPA setting myself. For anybody who has tried to EveMail me in the past, you may have been asked to pay 1 million ISK to do so. This has been corrected, the charge is now 1000 ISK. So if you need to EveMail me it will be slightly less painful.
#2 Anonymous Comments
Initially I set up this blog to disallow anonymous comments. This was mainly due to the nature of the internet and the likeliness that some jerk would come along and abuse it. While that is still a possibility, I have changed the blog to allow anonymous comments. I did this because somebody asked nicely, and that's really all it takes. Just know that if it gets out of control I will flip it back to registered users only, or forced moderation of all comments. I'm sure that anybody who enjoys reading this blog is unlikely to cause a problem. But I want to be clear that this is a test to see how things go.
Monday, December 15, 2014
I was just kidding about that fate thing...
Bob wasn't amused by my temptation of fate last Wednesday evening. He apparently gave me that inbound High-Sec connection for a reason, and was not happy when I ignored it. Possibly inspired by the thoughts I had the following day, he saw fit to give me another chance. I wasn't going to push my luck this time.
On Thursday, before he made his plans known, I was operating in good faith. That was the day I'd said I was going to investigate proper POS defenses, and so I did. The EVE POS Builder website is a little out of date, but mostly accurate. You just have to be sure to check stuff in game before you buy and commit to a setup.
It took a while to come up with the right setup. "Will this fit?" "What if I leave that offline?" "How many of those do I need?" "Hmm, I've never run out of CPU before." Eventually I had a plan for all the arrays to bring in and what should be left online when I'm not logged in. Now it was just a matter of setting aside the ISK and waiting for a good exit.
The next day, when I got home from work, I logged in to see what the weekend had in store for me. Things were quiet again, nothing like Wednesday when the entirety of the The Forge region decided to vacation in my wormhole. So I assumed my connections were back to normal, likely a couple nulls and a couple wspaces. Friday nights are a good time to scan down the hole to prepare for the weekend, so I got to work on that.
I assume most people in wspace organizations use Tripwire or some other website to record their scanning information. When you have multiple people who need to contribute and use the information it surely makes things simpler. Operating solo, I use a method that works pretty well for me, I write everything down on graph paper. This is only for connections, anything else I just use corp bookmarks to keep track of. Using graph paper means I always have a scratch pad nearby, and I'll make notes about things or cross off dead connections and update it. Usually I start a new page for a new session, but sometimes they carry over if I play a few days in a row. This method has been helpful for the blog because I've started keeping notes on the pages so I don't forget important details about my play sessions.
Normally I detail all my connections on that page and refer back to it later. But I was so shocked when I found a K162 from High-Sec, for the second time in a week, that the rest wasn't recorded and has since been forgotten. The only connection listed on that page says "Ation, Sinq Laison." After finishing scanning down all the remaining signatures, I jumped out to Ation to inspect the market. Dodixie was the local trade hub and only a few jumps away. I switched to the Prowler for transport duty and headed over there.
Originally I had thought that the arrays I needed were more expensive, about double actually. But it turns out that most of the stuff was in the 5m ISK range. Hardeners, ECMs, and pretty much any other defensive array I needed. Some were 8m and some were 3m, but generally offsetting each other when that happened. In all, 11 arrays were purchased and needed to be hauled back. At 4k m3 per array, that was a total of 44k m3.
My Prowler is 7.7 m3 short of an even 12k m3, which is normally not an issue, but when that is the difference between hauling 2 or 3 arrays at a time it's kind of annoying. But I got on with it anyway, making the trip back and forth with only 8k m3 each time. As I was jumping back into my wormhole on the second trip back, it occurred to me that my alt has a T1 hauler that could have done this in two trips. I'm so used to Low-Sec exits that I was operating like this was one. Still it is dangerous once you are in the wormhole, and even though it's just one warp back to the POS from there, I'd hate to get caught and killed with all this new stuff as I was arriving back home. So I continued with the Prowler and made all 6 trips that were needed.
On one of the last few trips I also grabbed some extra Liquid Ozone and Heavy Water, as I had investigated the results of mining Ice and found I'd need more of those if I only went after Glacial Mass (Hyrdrogen Isotope Ice). I don't really know what will be in the Shattered Wormholes so I want to be prepared. Then on the last trip I had a lot of extra room so I considered grabbing a Stealth Bomber to bring in. The local prices weren't bad, but I need to do some training before I figure out exactly how I will fit and use one for my wormhole purposes. There will always be more for sale, so I passed and headed back.
On one of the previous runs, as I was landing on the wormhole connection, I noticed it had flipped to nearing the end of its natural lifetime. I check every time I go in or out so I knew it had just flipped. The EVE clock said 01:33, about 8:30pm local time. If I had any other errands to run I certainly had the time. It turns out I couldn't think of anything else and I'd spent enough ISK for one day, so once the defensive arrays were in that was it.
I spent the remainder of the evening anchoring the arrays around the POS and testing to make sure everything I wanted online at once would actually work. Then it was on to determining what to offline when I wanted to use the Ammo Assembly array or more commonly, the Ship Maintenance Array.
As it got later, I wanted to do something productive. Having had my gas sites mined out from under me the previous Saturday, I was ready to hit one up. There were two up, I picked one and got to work. Almost two-thirds of the way through mining out the gas, the rats spawned. I quickly switched to the Drake and took them out, then returned in the Heron to loot and salvage. Finally I extracted the second half of the larger cloud, clearing the remaining third of the site.
Once that haul was safely stored in the Orca's Ore Hold it was off to bed. I intended to play more over the weekend but it never happened. On Saturday I played some Minecraft with my youngest son, exploring the depths of the Mountain world we've been conquering in Survival mode. And on Sunday I took my wife to the new Hunger Games movie, which was pretty good. Who knows what this week will bring.
Thursday, December 11, 2014
Always thinking
If it isn't clear by now, my brain never really shuts off. It's always processing something, poring over information and ideas. That means that yesterday I could think one thing, and overnight my brain could process it and wake me up with a different approach. That is why I can sleep all night, wake up, and in the short time that I lay there waiting for my alarm to go off, have several revelations.
This morning was no different. Overnight my brain processed the following issues:
#1 Trying to scan somebody down in a CovOps, for the purpose of PvP, and then having to switch to an Interceptor to kill them... sucks. Cloaky T3's are the meta in wspace for a reason, less missed opportunities and sufficient tank/DPS for the job.
#2 I've known for a while that my POS defenses are lame, but haven't done anything about it. Normally this would have stayed lost in my subconscious, but having ignored a High-Sec exit the night before, my brain was analyzing what I should have used that exit for, all night.
For issue #1, without the steady and substantial income needed to replace T3's at the rate I would surely lose them, that option is ruled out for now. That also means that sufficient tank/DPS is probably out of my reach and I should focus on not missing opportunities. This really leaves one option that I can see, bombers. I literally woke up thinking, "I need a bomber!"
Being able to fly around cloaky, probe when needed, and attack when the opportunity presents itself seems like the right mix for the minimum effective solution. So I will be playing around with fittings today to see what, if anything, is workable.
One of the things I originally liked about posting all this stuff in a forum thread instead of here, was the feedback from other players. Coincidentally, this morning I also received an EveMail from a player who had been reading this blog. He asked to remain anonymous and I will respect that. His mail actually involved taking a look at bombers, for a completely different reason that I won't reveal here. It also involved issue #2 above. So I was grateful for that. Two reasons to do something are better than one, and tips about POS defense are always welcome.
Right after I moved in I got into a discussion about POS defenses in a separate thread than the one that spawned this blog. That's when I initially realized how poor my defenses were. Since then I've had a loose plan in my head on how to change it, but haven't been confident enough that it was the right fix to actually go through with it. Plus, ISK, these mods are expensive.
The EveMail pointed out some strategic aspects that I hadn't thought of, completely changing how I'm looking at POS defenses. Today I plan to go through and and try to come up with something that covers the important bases and ignores my original misconceptions about the issue. Then I'll just bring new mods in as I can, rather than worrying about switching the whole thing over at once. Nothing will be taken away, just some stuff offlined. So it will be easy to transition.
Going forward you'll likely see more posts like this mixed in with the playtime reports. I'm very sure that I spend more time thinking about EVE than I do actually playing it. Such is the nature of playing a very complicated game when you are married with children and work full time.
This morning was no different. Overnight my brain processed the following issues:
#1 Trying to scan somebody down in a CovOps, for the purpose of PvP, and then having to switch to an Interceptor to kill them... sucks. Cloaky T3's are the meta in wspace for a reason, less missed opportunities and sufficient tank/DPS for the job.
#2 I've known for a while that my POS defenses are lame, but haven't done anything about it. Normally this would have stayed lost in my subconscious, but having ignored a High-Sec exit the night before, my brain was analyzing what I should have used that exit for, all night.
For issue #1, without the steady and substantial income needed to replace T3's at the rate I would surely lose them, that option is ruled out for now. That also means that sufficient tank/DPS is probably out of my reach and I should focus on not missing opportunities. This really leaves one option that I can see, bombers. I literally woke up thinking, "I need a bomber!"
Being able to fly around cloaky, probe when needed, and attack when the opportunity presents itself seems like the right mix for the minimum effective solution. So I will be playing around with fittings today to see what, if anything, is workable.
One of the things I originally liked about posting all this stuff in a forum thread instead of here, was the feedback from other players. Coincidentally, this morning I also received an EveMail from a player who had been reading this blog. He asked to remain anonymous and I will respect that. His mail actually involved taking a look at bombers, for a completely different reason that I won't reveal here. It also involved issue #2 above. So I was grateful for that. Two reasons to do something are better than one, and tips about POS defense are always welcome.
Right after I moved in I got into a discussion about POS defenses in a separate thread than the one that spawned this blog. That's when I initially realized how poor my defenses were. Since then I've had a loose plan in my head on how to change it, but haven't been confident enough that it was the right fix to actually go through with it. Plus, ISK, these mods are expensive.
The EveMail pointed out some strategic aspects that I hadn't thought of, completely changing how I'm looking at POS defenses. Today I plan to go through and and try to come up with something that covers the important bases and ignores my original misconceptions about the issue. Then I'll just bring new mods in as I can, rather than worrying about switching the whole thing over at once. Nothing will be taken away, just some stuff offlined. So it will be easy to transition.
Going forward you'll likely see more posts like this mixed in with the playtime reports. I'm very sure that I spend more time thinking about EVE than I do actually playing it. Such is the nature of playing a very complicated game when you are married with children and work full time.
It feels different in here
Most of the time when I log in there is nothing on scan. Sometimes there are probes, but no ships. Rarely there will be an actual ship on scan. I logged in last night intending to spend a few minutes checking PI, but d-scan was telling me something was different today. There was a Magnate on scan, and he didn't disappear when I dropped probes. Then a Gnosis appeared on scan. For a little while they would appear and disappear from scan. So I decided to scan down the hole to see what was up.
I only had a half hour, which is why I hadn't intended to play originally. The plan was to go to a friend's house and he wasn't ready yet, so I was biding my time. First I ignored all the sigs I already had bookmarked and deleted all my old WH connections from the weekend. This time I bookmarked everything, even the gas sites.
There were a lot of wormholes. The first ones I found were a K162 from a C4, a frigate hole to wspace, and another K162 to somewhere that was ending. Knowing there were at least two more, my statics, I kept scanning.
When I discover wormhole connections I usually warp to them right away, at range, to scout them. Then I stay on that grid until I find the next one. This time I was seeing a lot of traffic. On one hole a frigate came through. Then on the next hole, the K162 that was near end of life, a Hulk landed and jumped through. I thought about grabbing the Claw and chasing it, wondering if I could solo a Hulk with that ship. Probably, but I'd need an overview tab for drones, which I've never gotten around to setting up. I made a mental note to actually do that this time and went back to scanning the hole.
I found 3 more wormholes, my C5 and Null statics, and... an inbound from High-Sec. Well that started to explain the traffic. Somebody dropped T1 core probes shortly after I recalled mine, I think it was the Magnate. My curiosity was peaking, so I bounced to a planet and jumped through to a system whose name I've already forgotten. The name wasn't the important part, the region was. Nothing gets you traffic like a connection to The Forge.
With time running out before I needed to leave, I jumped back to my wormhole and reviewed what I'd found. The frigate hole was a L002, and I'm not real familiar with the various hole codes for that class of holes. Wondering if that led to one of the new shattered holes, I warped to it and jumped through. The hole itself was a pretty blue color, and landing on the other side I found there were system effects. The Anom list looked less interesting than I expected, and there were no ice fields. I warped to a planet to see what these shattered planets looked like. Landing at one of the few planets in the system, I was saddened to see a fully intact planet.
Funny story, the new wormholes all start with J000 and this one started with J100. This was not a shattered hole. My brain wouldn't admit the mistake though, still thinking the new holes were 100 instead of 000. A quick check of StaticMapper told me this was a C2 Cataclysmic. Stupid brain, remember stuff better next time! With that lame adventure over I jumped back home, warped to a safe and logged off.
I don't like to tempt fate, but it wasn't a good night to commit to EVE and I couldn't think of any reasons why I needed an exit at the time. So I let the opportunity pass. Bob will be disappointed, I'm sure. I don't expect him to give me any good exits again for a while. Or maybe he'll just give me good exits and no shattered connections. Only time will tell...
I only had a half hour, which is why I hadn't intended to play originally. The plan was to go to a friend's house and he wasn't ready yet, so I was biding my time. First I ignored all the sigs I already had bookmarked and deleted all my old WH connections from the weekend. This time I bookmarked everything, even the gas sites.
There were a lot of wormholes. The first ones I found were a K162 from a C4, a frigate hole to wspace, and another K162 to somewhere that was ending. Knowing there were at least two more, my statics, I kept scanning.
When I discover wormhole connections I usually warp to them right away, at range, to scout them. Then I stay on that grid until I find the next one. This time I was seeing a lot of traffic. On one hole a frigate came through. Then on the next hole, the K162 that was near end of life, a Hulk landed and jumped through. I thought about grabbing the Claw and chasing it, wondering if I could solo a Hulk with that ship. Probably, but I'd need an overview tab for drones, which I've never gotten around to setting up. I made a mental note to actually do that this time and went back to scanning the hole.
I found 3 more wormholes, my C5 and Null statics, and... an inbound from High-Sec. Well that started to explain the traffic. Somebody dropped T1 core probes shortly after I recalled mine, I think it was the Magnate. My curiosity was peaking, so I bounced to a planet and jumped through to a system whose name I've already forgotten. The name wasn't the important part, the region was. Nothing gets you traffic like a connection to The Forge.
With time running out before I needed to leave, I jumped back to my wormhole and reviewed what I'd found. The frigate hole was a L002, and I'm not real familiar with the various hole codes for that class of holes. Wondering if that led to one of the new shattered holes, I warped to it and jumped through. The hole itself was a pretty blue color, and landing on the other side I found there were system effects. The Anom list looked less interesting than I expected, and there were no ice fields. I warped to a planet to see what these shattered planets looked like. Landing at one of the few planets in the system, I was saddened to see a fully intact planet.
Funny story, the new wormholes all start with J000 and this one started with J100. This was not a shattered hole. My brain wouldn't admit the mistake though, still thinking the new holes were 100 instead of 000. A quick check of StaticMapper told me this was a C2 Cataclysmic. Stupid brain, remember stuff better next time! With that lame adventure over I jumped back home, warped to a safe and logged off.
I don't like to tempt fate, but it wasn't a good night to commit to EVE and I couldn't think of any reasons why I needed an exit at the time. So I let the opportunity pass. Bob will be disappointed, I'm sure. I don't expect him to give me any good exits again for a while. Or maybe he'll just give me good exits and no shattered connections. Only time will tell...
Tuesday, December 9, 2014
The end of a long day
It's easy to lose track of time when I'm in the basement playing EVE. The glass block window in this room--which is my only exposure to the world above--doesn't directly face the sun's path and gives few clues to what is going on outside. The EVE clock is always visible and even though I'm quite adept at subtracting 4 or 5 depending on the state of daylight savings time, it's not always obvious in my head what the actual time is when I look at it.
I knew it was getting later. The wife had called, they were done making cookies and heading to dinner. With that and being an hour away I knew I had about two hours before I had to worry about interruptions. So it seemed like a good time to run a combat site.
Captain PT had gone inactive a few hours ago. All his POS Trash was sitting parked. Near the end of his online time he had been sitting on the Low-Sec exit in one of the Moa's, I was always going by in the Prowler or CovOps when he would be there. Luckily the time I jumped in with the Osprey he was nowhere to be found. But none of his ships had moved in a while, so I wasn't worried about him.
Earlier in the day I had fitted my salvaging ship with a 1MN Afterburner, so it was back to normal functionality. But even better than that, I had Mobile Tractor Units to try out! These things actually solve two problems for me. Number one, flying around to each wreck is slow and sucky and keeping a ship half fit with tractors and salvagers is also sucky. So a deployable that tractors and loots is super-awesome. Number two, I always feel like I should drop a can when I land in a site, but I hate randomly ejecting something from my hold. The MTU is something I need to drop anyway and is fine sitting at the site warp-in.
Having a few Perimeter Checkpoints to choose from, I selected one that wasn't at the top of the anomaly list using the default sort. Other than dropping the MTU on warp-in, this was pretty much like any other run I've detailed in the past. When the site was done I came back in the Heron as the last wreck was being tractored in. After a quick salvage session I looted the MTU and scooped it.
Warping back to the POS I did a double-take, 7 Melted Nanoribbons, Seven! I've seen zero before, or one, or some other number near one. But never anything like this. If I hadn't checked my cargo hold before warping in to loot, I'd think these were leftovers I'd forgotten about. That's about double the value of the blue loot from the site, just in nanoribbons.
Since I'd already spent a crap-ton of money that day, I figured it wouldn't hurt to run this stuff out and sell it real quick. At the very least it would cover the cost of the T3 skills I had bought earlier. Somehow that got left out of this tri-post extravaganza, but on an earlier trip I had purchased the Minmatar Strategic Cruiser and Subsystem skill books to fly a Loki. So I jumped in the CovOps, again, and headed out to Placid.
What I didn't realize was that Placid's market sucks. There were no blue loot buy orders and the nanoribbon prices were abysmal. A quick check of Eve-Central gave me a few options, and I chose the Yona system, in Essence. Flying over there took several jumps but eventually I made it and sold all the loot. With another 35m ISK in the wallet I was about to head home when I realized I was very close to my old staging point in Charmerout. It was only a few jumps away so I stopped by for a few other things I forgot earlier.
Finally, for real this time, I headed back to Amoen, back through Captain PT's hole and into mine. Lazily I did some PI management and eventually logged out. It had been a very long and very productive day. Normally I wouldn't say that about a day where I only did one fuel related run, but the situation didn't call for more than that, and I feel pretty good about how it all went.
I knew it was getting later. The wife had called, they were done making cookies and heading to dinner. With that and being an hour away I knew I had about two hours before I had to worry about interruptions. So it seemed like a good time to run a combat site.
Captain PT had gone inactive a few hours ago. All his POS Trash was sitting parked. Near the end of his online time he had been sitting on the Low-Sec exit in one of the Moa's, I was always going by in the Prowler or CovOps when he would be there. Luckily the time I jumped in with the Osprey he was nowhere to be found. But none of his ships had moved in a while, so I wasn't worried about him.
Earlier in the day I had fitted my salvaging ship with a 1MN Afterburner, so it was back to normal functionality. But even better than that, I had Mobile Tractor Units to try out! These things actually solve two problems for me. Number one, flying around to each wreck is slow and sucky and keeping a ship half fit with tractors and salvagers is also sucky. So a deployable that tractors and loots is super-awesome. Number two, I always feel like I should drop a can when I land in a site, but I hate randomly ejecting something from my hold. The MTU is something I need to drop anyway and is fine sitting at the site warp-in.
Having a few Perimeter Checkpoints to choose from, I selected one that wasn't at the top of the anomaly list using the default sort. Other than dropping the MTU on warp-in, this was pretty much like any other run I've detailed in the past. When the site was done I came back in the Heron as the last wreck was being tractored in. After a quick salvage session I looted the MTU and scooped it.
Warping back to the POS I did a double-take, 7 Melted Nanoribbons, Seven! I've seen zero before, or one, or some other number near one. But never anything like this. If I hadn't checked my cargo hold before warping in to loot, I'd think these were leftovers I'd forgotten about. That's about double the value of the blue loot from the site, just in nanoribbons.
Since I'd already spent a crap-ton of money that day, I figured it wouldn't hurt to run this stuff out and sell it real quick. At the very least it would cover the cost of the T3 skills I had bought earlier. Somehow that got left out of this tri-post extravaganza, but on an earlier trip I had purchased the Minmatar Strategic Cruiser and Subsystem skill books to fly a Loki. So I jumped in the CovOps, again, and headed out to Placid.
What I didn't realize was that Placid's market sucks. There were no blue loot buy orders and the nanoribbon prices were abysmal. A quick check of Eve-Central gave me a few options, and I chose the Yona system, in Essence. Flying over there took several jumps but eventually I made it and sold all the loot. With another 35m ISK in the wallet I was about to head home when I realized I was very close to my old staging point in Charmerout. It was only a few jumps away so I stopped by for a few other things I forgot earlier.
Finally, for real this time, I headed back to Amoen, back through Captain PT's hole and into mine. Lazily I did some PI management and eventually logged out. It had been a very long and very productive day. Normally I wouldn't say that about a day where I only did one fuel related run, but the situation didn't call for more than that, and I feel pretty good about how it all went.
This wormhole is NOT reaching the end of its natural lifetime
I almost forgot that I did make one more run out of that last hole, in a pod, to grab a Magnate I noticed in a hangar in Arraron. I'm not even sure why I had one there, but who cares! It was like 3 jumps away.
So anyway I was probing down J134107's low-sec static and I found it. By some miracle of Bob it was not reaching the end of its natural lifetime. It led to Amoen, one jump from High-Sec in Placid. So I prepared for Prowler run number two. This time the plan was improvised because I wasn't really sure what I needed, just that I needed something.
As I was flying out I decided to focus on PI for the alts (skills and command centers), and to research mining barge options. I detailed the mining barge thoughts a few posts ago, but that whole thought process went down during this run. Eventually it was all worked out and I headed off to pick up everything I'd bought.
Loaded up with the PI stuff and the Procurer, I returned to my wormhole. There were some more crossjumps with Captain PT, sometimes he'd be on the wormhole in one of the Moas, sometimes he'd be hauling. He moved the Stratios at least once.
Suddenly it hit me that I really had more stuff to bring in. But first I had to swap the PI skills over to the other toons and get all that rolling. After that it was on to the things dreams are made of, like spare Strontium and Giant Secure Containers. After those two trips it occurred to me that one of my alts didn't have a ship with a hold big enough to carry a command center. Some quick EFT'ing told me the simplest option was an Osprey with three Expander II's. I had one, about 12 jumps away in Yvangier, and the expanders were next door in Charmerout. So I made that trip in my pod and brought the ship back.
By that time, the alt who needed it had the skills trained to get started. You have to have Remote Sensing trained to 1 to do any scanning to figure out where to put down your Command Center. I set her first site up on a Barren planet. I'm pretty sure there is no amount of Mechanical Parts that is too many, so I wanted to get more of those in production.
With that all setup, I finally had a moment to breathe. While logging in the other alt to check some things, a thought popped into my head, I hadn't gotten all the fittings I needed for the Procurer. To be honest I didn't have a full fit worked out when I purchased it. So I finished that fitting exercise and made another trip out in a CovOps to pick up some modules.
With all the hauling I could think of completed, and the Low-Sec exit still wide open with lots of time left, I wasn't sure what to do next. A quick check of the map showed that Genesis wasn't far from Placid, so I decided to go back over there and get some items up on the market. Between Pashanai and Yulai I had lots of stuff to sell. Mostly data site drops, and other items I wasn't familiar with. Without having to visit the actual stations, yay Trade skills, I sat cloaked in a system at the edge of Genesis listing everything I could. Datacores, Decryptors, and some other things I had no idea what they were for, all got listed up once I finished researching their prices.
Eventually that was finished, with only 2 sell order slots remaining, I headed back home. The wormhole still had not hit that end of lifetime state. This was crazy, I was actually running out of uses for a good exit. But the day was not over yet.
Continued... (last one)
So anyway I was probing down J134107's low-sec static and I found it. By some miracle of Bob it was not reaching the end of its natural lifetime. It led to Amoen, one jump from High-Sec in Placid. So I prepared for Prowler run number two. This time the plan was improvised because I wasn't really sure what I needed, just that I needed something.
As I was flying out I decided to focus on PI for the alts (skills and command centers), and to research mining barge options. I detailed the mining barge thoughts a few posts ago, but that whole thought process went down during this run. Eventually it was all worked out and I headed off to pick up everything I'd bought.
Loaded up with the PI stuff and the Procurer, I returned to my wormhole. There were some more crossjumps with Captain PT, sometimes he'd be on the wormhole in one of the Moas, sometimes he'd be hauling. He moved the Stratios at least once.
Suddenly it hit me that I really had more stuff to bring in. But first I had to swap the PI skills over to the other toons and get all that rolling. After that it was on to the things dreams are made of, like spare Strontium and Giant Secure Containers. After those two trips it occurred to me that one of my alts didn't have a ship with a hold big enough to carry a command center. Some quick EFT'ing told me the simplest option was an Osprey with three Expander II's. I had one, about 12 jumps away in Yvangier, and the expanders were next door in Charmerout. So I made that trip in my pod and brought the ship back.
By that time, the alt who needed it had the skills trained to get started. You have to have Remote Sensing trained to 1 to do any scanning to figure out where to put down your Command Center. I set her first site up on a Barren planet. I'm pretty sure there is no amount of Mechanical Parts that is too many, so I wanted to get more of those in production.
With that all setup, I finally had a moment to breathe. While logging in the other alt to check some things, a thought popped into my head, I hadn't gotten all the fittings I needed for the Procurer. To be honest I didn't have a full fit worked out when I purchased it. So I finished that fitting exercise and made another trip out in a CovOps to pick up some modules.
With all the hauling I could think of completed, and the Low-Sec exit still wide open with lots of time left, I wasn't sure what to do next. A quick check of the map showed that Genesis wasn't far from Placid, so I decided to go back over there and get some items up on the market. Between Pashanai and Yulai I had lots of stuff to sell. Mostly data site drops, and other items I wasn't familiar with. Without having to visit the actual stations, yay Trade skills, I sat cloaked in a system at the edge of Genesis listing everything I could. Datacores, Decryptors, and some other things I had no idea what they were for, all got listed up once I finished researching their prices.
Eventually that was finished, with only 2 sell order slots remaining, I headed back home. The wormhole still had not hit that end of lifetime state. This was crazy, I was actually running out of uses for a good exit. But the day was not over yet.
Continued... (last one)
Monday, December 8, 2014
Off to a good start
Sometimes everything aligns for the perfect opportunity, the stars, the planets, and maybe even the will of Bob. Or in this case, a few wormhole exits and my available playtime. Saturday was a long day in EVE, though it didn't feel that long as I stayed pretty busy.
Once a year, a few weeks before Christmas, my wife gets together with the ladies on her side of the family to bake cookies. This means there is always one Saturday in December that I get all to myself to do whatever I want. This year, with EVE consuming most of leisure time anyway, I set the whole day aside for that.
Since I knew I had the whole day I slept in and didn't get online until the late morning. I logged in to Probes! So I went right to probing myself, no point in wasting time. I scanned and bookmarked everything except the gas sites, figuring I'd come back around to them later. It's easy to pick out the sigs you didn't scan down once you label the rest.
With that done I decided to check my null static. It went to FKR-SR in Etherium Reach. There was one person in local, so I warped around the system to take a look at things. Bouncing a few belts, I landed in one with rats to find Rogue Drones. Eww, the Drone Regions, I knew Etherium Reach sounded familiar. At least they have bounties now. With that I headed back to my wormhole. Ignoring the C5 static I decided to check out a K162,
That connection led to J134107, a C2 with statics to Low-Sec and C2 space. The K162 was their D382 making me their static connection. This hole was inhabited, by a person I will call Captain POS Trash. He had numerous Moas, Ventures and other things in space at his POS, including a Stratios. I had started to see some traffic in my hole when I came back from Etherium Reach. It seems Captain POS Trash was the one probing my wormhole and had begun running sites in there.
I continued scanning J134107 hoping that Low-Sec static would make my day. The next hit was a wormhole, and when I warped to it, it was also a D382. Double checking to make sure it wasn't the hole I came in, and it wasn't, I stared at the hole and noted the presence of two C2 statics. Hoping StaticMapper wasn't wrong I continued scanning. Next up was another wormhole which turned out to be a K162... to High-Sec! A quick jump showed that it led to Ourapheh in Genesis, a few jumps from Pashanai where I had exited recently. But of course, just like every sweet exit I find, this one was nearing the end of it's natural lifetime.
I've learned not to care about that and to move quickly to take advantage of these short windows. So I pulled probes and headed back to my wormhole and POS. I think I spooked Captain POS Trash a little at first, some of his alts were on scan from my POS. But he probably saw me get into the Prowler because he stuck around and continued doing whatever he was doing. I grabbed all my null data/relic site loot, a load of gas and all my compressed ore and headed out to High-Sec.
I dropped all the stuff off in Yulai, and sold the blue loot and Melted Nanoribbons. Not really having time to go through and put up sales orders for the remaining stuff, I moved on to getting ice products for fuel. The nearest seller was in Pashanai, no wonder I went there last time. I remembered to get 1MN Afterburners, but the local price was not friendly, so only a couple. Also grabbed a couple Mobile Tractor Units and some skills.
With all that stuff tucked away in the hold, I headed back into J134107 with the goo I needed to make another 11 days of fuel. As I made the 2nd jump, back to my wormhole, I crossjumped a Venture. When I got back to the POS I grabbed a CovOps and warped around the system to try and get a bead on something.
Ventures have +2 Warp Core Stabilization and Moa's can fit decent tanks. But I figured maybe I could burn down a Venture with my Claw before it could warp. A Moa would be a more difficult challenge, especially since he had several and was either multiboxing or had friends. D-scan was not giving me much. Every time I'd narrow it down it would be away from a site. I bounced the Ore sites and found nothing. I found out later that he cleared the gas sites, but at the time I couldn't get him on scan in those either.
Since he was tearing it up in my home, I figured I'd go back to his wormhole and look for that Low-Sec static. There had to be other things I could do with a decent exit.
Continued...
Once a year, a few weeks before Christmas, my wife gets together with the ladies on her side of the family to bake cookies. This means there is always one Saturday in December that I get all to myself to do whatever I want. This year, with EVE consuming most of leisure time anyway, I set the whole day aside for that.
Since I knew I had the whole day I slept in and didn't get online until the late morning. I logged in to Probes! So I went right to probing myself, no point in wasting time. I scanned and bookmarked everything except the gas sites, figuring I'd come back around to them later. It's easy to pick out the sigs you didn't scan down once you label the rest.
With that done I decided to check my null static. It went to FKR-SR in Etherium Reach. There was one person in local, so I warped around the system to take a look at things. Bouncing a few belts, I landed in one with rats to find Rogue Drones. Eww, the Drone Regions, I knew Etherium Reach sounded familiar. At least they have bounties now. With that I headed back to my wormhole. Ignoring the C5 static I decided to check out a K162,
That connection led to J134107, a C2 with statics to Low-Sec and C2 space. The K162 was their D382 making me their static connection. This hole was inhabited, by a person I will call Captain POS Trash. He had numerous Moas, Ventures and other things in space at his POS, including a Stratios. I had started to see some traffic in my hole when I came back from Etherium Reach. It seems Captain POS Trash was the one probing my wormhole and had begun running sites in there.
I continued scanning J134107 hoping that Low-Sec static would make my day. The next hit was a wormhole, and when I warped to it, it was also a D382. Double checking to make sure it wasn't the hole I came in, and it wasn't, I stared at the hole and noted the presence of two C2 statics. Hoping StaticMapper wasn't wrong I continued scanning. Next up was another wormhole which turned out to be a K162... to High-Sec! A quick jump showed that it led to Ourapheh in Genesis, a few jumps from Pashanai where I had exited recently. But of course, just like every sweet exit I find, this one was nearing the end of it's natural lifetime.
I've learned not to care about that and to move quickly to take advantage of these short windows. So I pulled probes and headed back to my wormhole and POS. I think I spooked Captain POS Trash a little at first, some of his alts were on scan from my POS. But he probably saw me get into the Prowler because he stuck around and continued doing whatever he was doing. I grabbed all my null data/relic site loot, a load of gas and all my compressed ore and headed out to High-Sec.
I dropped all the stuff off in Yulai, and sold the blue loot and Melted Nanoribbons. Not really having time to go through and put up sales orders for the remaining stuff, I moved on to getting ice products for fuel. The nearest seller was in Pashanai, no wonder I went there last time. I remembered to get 1MN Afterburners, but the local price was not friendly, so only a couple. Also grabbed a couple Mobile Tractor Units and some skills.
With all that stuff tucked away in the hold, I headed back into J134107 with the goo I needed to make another 11 days of fuel. As I made the 2nd jump, back to my wormhole, I crossjumped a Venture. When I got back to the POS I grabbed a CovOps and warped around the system to try and get a bead on something.
Ventures have +2 Warp Core Stabilization and Moa's can fit decent tanks. But I figured maybe I could burn down a Venture with my Claw before it could warp. A Moa would be a more difficult challenge, especially since he had several and was either multiboxing or had friends. D-scan was not giving me much. Every time I'd narrow it down it would be away from a site. I bounced the Ore sites and found nothing. I found out later that he cleared the gas sites, but at the time I couldn't get him on scan in those either.
Since he was tearing it up in my home, I figured I'd go back to his wormhole and look for that Low-Sec static. There had to be other things I could do with a decent exit.
Continued...
Sunday, December 7, 2014
Loki
Like any good schizophrenic, I've got multiple ship hulls trained for multiple races to 5. For cruisers that would be Minmatar, Amarr and Caldari. So the question was always "which one?"
I know the Tengu is the obvious choice, but they are just so expensive. The Legion had been my backup choice, especially with the unlimited ammo options and that my alt could skill into it easily. But a recent thread on the wormhole forums kind of discouraged me from that. The initial plan is to rat in null with this T3, so it needs damage type selection and flexibility. The web range bonus for the Loki is very tempting, having flown a Rapier before and understanding the paper thinness of that ship. I'm still playing around with fits, but I've already purchased the skills. So Minmatar it is, for the first one. It's only 26m for the books, per race. So I'll have them all eventually anyway.
Now back to saving up for the ship in the first place! It's ~484m ISK for the hull and subsystems.
I know the Tengu is the obvious choice, but they are just so expensive. The Legion had been my backup choice, especially with the unlimited ammo options and that my alt could skill into it easily. But a recent thread on the wormhole forums kind of discouraged me from that. The initial plan is to rat in null with this T3, so it needs damage type selection and flexibility. The web range bonus for the Loki is very tempting, having flown a Rapier before and understanding the paper thinness of that ship. I'm still playing around with fits, but I've already purchased the skills. So Minmatar it is, for the first one. It's only 26m for the books, per race. So I'll have them all eventually anyway.
Now back to saving up for the ship in the first place! It's ~484m ISK for the hull and subsystems.
Operational Thoughts
There are a few things I wanted to post my thoughts on, but hadn't gotten around to doing yet. Saturday ended up being a long and busy day in EVE, so before I write up that blognaught I want to catch up on a few things.
Jita Everywhere
Having a decent amount of skill points in Trade can make life much easier. You can put things up for sale if there aren't any good buy orders around. The question for somebody like me is how to set prices? Do I set them high for maximum profit or low for the highest chance of a quick sale. I've always operated under what I call "Jita Everywhere." This is a method that uses that whore of a Trade Hub, Jita, as a reference for prices when you are anywhere else.
You see I'm one of those people who hates that we have a Jita. I've seen it develop over the years, getting worse and worse. Prices outside Jita have always been kind of sad, and I like to make people happy, so I spread that pricing joy around.
The way it works is that my sell price will always be based off of one of two things, the best Jita sell price or the best Jita buy price, ignoring outliers. When the item is likely to sell without major discounting I use the sell price as a base. When the item is likely to languish for a long time before selling I use the buy price. Those base prices are then adjusted up if the current region's prices are ridiculously high. So maybe it should be called Jita-ish Everywhere... But I digress.
This system has always brought me reasonable sales in a short timeframe. Somebody is always looking for a bargain without having to make the trip to Jita.
Gas Mining
Before I moved in I really had no idea how much gas I would me mining, or even if it would be worth doing at all. The first day in the hole I mined out a site, and luckily the next day I was able to haul it out and put it up for sale during a fuel run. Based on the above-mentioned sales philosophy those items went up around Jita buy prices. Listed on November 2nd, they both sold within 19 days. But that was only 2.5m ISK worth of gas.
Last March, when I was splitting time between Low-Sec and High-Sec, I found a wormhole connected to Yvangier and mined some gas out of it. When listed at reasonable prices they took similarly long to sell for maybe 10-12m ISK. That is why I didn't mine gas again for a while, I was watching to see if it was worth it.
When I did finally decide to mine gas again, I ran into some challenges. But still managed to pull out a full site worth of C84 and C72. That went up for sale yesterday in high-sec, at Jita buy prices. The C84 was gone in a few hours, for 5m ISK. If the C72 follows suit it will bring in 10x that and bring me closer to that T3 cruiser purchase.
Ice Mining in Shattered Wormholes
I spent some time thinking about this and whether or not it was worth it to get setup to mine ice in a shattered wormhole. There wasn't really a good way to quantify it, and then I realized it all boiled down to this: if the opportunity presented itself and I couldn't do it, would that bother me? In this case, yes, it would. So then it was on to deciding which ship made the most sense.
My focus was initially on mining yield. Being able to mine quickly means less time spent and hopefully less risk. But Covetors are expensive and get their yield bonus from using 3 ice lasers on long cycles. The Retriever has a huge ore bay, but still has somewhat longer cycles. The Procurer is built for tank, and only has one high slot for a mining laser. To balance the yield on this ship they bonused it heavily for duration reduction. For me this means that with one laser upgrade II fitted, the cycle time for ice is 1m 18s. Throw in the tank and drone bonuses and the fact that it's the cheapest of the 3 hulls and we have a winner.
For about the cost of a Covetor hull I have a tough mining option that fills its ore hold in 16 minutes. If I get interrupted often, the effect is minimized since cycles are much faster. This is always an issue with ice mining. Long durations complicate things.
Jita Everywhere
Having a decent amount of skill points in Trade can make life much easier. You can put things up for sale if there aren't any good buy orders around. The question for somebody like me is how to set prices? Do I set them high for maximum profit or low for the highest chance of a quick sale. I've always operated under what I call "Jita Everywhere." This is a method that uses that whore of a Trade Hub, Jita, as a reference for prices when you are anywhere else.
You see I'm one of those people who hates that we have a Jita. I've seen it develop over the years, getting worse and worse. Prices outside Jita have always been kind of sad, and I like to make people happy, so I spread that pricing joy around.
The way it works is that my sell price will always be based off of one of two things, the best Jita sell price or the best Jita buy price, ignoring outliers. When the item is likely to sell without major discounting I use the sell price as a base. When the item is likely to languish for a long time before selling I use the buy price. Those base prices are then adjusted up if the current region's prices are ridiculously high. So maybe it should be called Jita-ish Everywhere... But I digress.
This system has always brought me reasonable sales in a short timeframe. Somebody is always looking for a bargain without having to make the trip to Jita.
Gas Mining
Before I moved in I really had no idea how much gas I would me mining, or even if it would be worth doing at all. The first day in the hole I mined out a site, and luckily the next day I was able to haul it out and put it up for sale during a fuel run. Based on the above-mentioned sales philosophy those items went up around Jita buy prices. Listed on November 2nd, they both sold within 19 days. But that was only 2.5m ISK worth of gas.
Last March, when I was splitting time between Low-Sec and High-Sec, I found a wormhole connected to Yvangier and mined some gas out of it. When listed at reasonable prices they took similarly long to sell for maybe 10-12m ISK. That is why I didn't mine gas again for a while, I was watching to see if it was worth it.
When I did finally decide to mine gas again, I ran into some challenges. But still managed to pull out a full site worth of C84 and C72. That went up for sale yesterday in high-sec, at Jita buy prices. The C84 was gone in a few hours, for 5m ISK. If the C72 follows suit it will bring in 10x that and bring me closer to that T3 cruiser purchase.
Ice Mining in Shattered Wormholes
I spent some time thinking about this and whether or not it was worth it to get setup to mine ice in a shattered wormhole. There wasn't really a good way to quantify it, and then I realized it all boiled down to this: if the opportunity presented itself and I couldn't do it, would that bother me? In this case, yes, it would. So then it was on to deciding which ship made the most sense.
My focus was initially on mining yield. Being able to mine quickly means less time spent and hopefully less risk. But Covetors are expensive and get their yield bonus from using 3 ice lasers on long cycles. The Retriever has a huge ore bay, but still has somewhat longer cycles. The Procurer is built for tank, and only has one high slot for a mining laser. To balance the yield on this ship they bonused it heavily for duration reduction. For me this means that with one laser upgrade II fitted, the cycle time for ice is 1m 18s. Throw in the tank and drone bonuses and the fact that it's the cheapest of the 3 hulls and we have a winner.
For about the cost of a Covetor hull I have a tough mining option that fills its ore hold in 16 minutes. If I get interrupted often, the effect is minimized since cycles are much faster. This is always an issue with ice mining. Long durations complicate things.
Wednesday, December 3, 2014
The Saga Continues
This is a story in progress, it starts here.
I didn't expect Monday to be a day I could get online, but my wife ended up working late and when she came home she needed to run to Home Depot to buy a mini fridge. I went with her and afterwards we went to a local slider place I hadn't tried yet. Greasy steam grilled burgers are good for the soul. By the time we got home I realized there was some laundry that needed processing, so I logged in for a bit while handling that.
It turned out to just be a PI session, and an excerpt from any of those movies where people repeat the same day over again making the same mistakes. Managing the power grid on a Planetary Installation, even with max skilled grid, can leave you short of your goal if you do it in the wrong order. I have this habit of starting my extractors first, because "free resources yay," and then realizing I need to drop one or two heads to fit whatever installation I had meant to add to the planet. I did that on two out of three planets, on the same night, and this was not the first time. Sure I could just cancel the extractions and fix it, but they would be done again in 24 hours or less and I'm gonna get better at this memory game eventually, right?
On Tuesday I expected to play, I was even a little excited. I've been pounding it into my head that running combat anoms is still way better than running high sec L4's in terms of the ISK earned and time spent. If I can run those I can run these and be happy about it. The argument was working, I was looking forward to logging in and running some sites. The wife was going out for a girls night and the oldest son was at a hockey game. Once the younger son was in bed I logged in and bounced around the wormhole, all clear, time to get to work.
Earlier in the day I had reviewed some information about the combat anoms and determined that I'm not going to run Sleeper Data Sanctuaries again unless I have no other choice. They take longer to run and drop less blue loot than a Perimeter Checkpoint or Perimeter Frontier. I prefer those two, in that order, with Checkpoints dropping less but being quick to run. So I selected a Checkpoint, jumped in the Drake and warped to the site.
Having run several before now, I have the process down to a science. Approach the farthest sentry as soon as you land, which for me is really aligning to something in that general direction. Kill the first sentry while the other comes into range, kill a frigate or two, then the other sentry, then the cruisers to get the next wave. If you get close enough to the distant sentry all future waves will spawn within 58km, which for me is max Heavy Missile range. That saves a lot of re-positioning time and with the layout of my solar system I can usually align one way or the other, to a planet or back to the POS, while staying in range.
Of course I didn't quite make it that far, with a cruiser or two to go in the first wave... Probes! They were of the Sister's variety, so I hoped the person wasn't slow and would get it done and move on. Clearly I need to stop hoping for things, because it seems to make it worse.
I hadn't scanned yet, wasn't sure if I was going to, running sites was a higher priority. Rather than sit cloaked in a CovOps I decided to warp around the system in my Claw and be really annoying for anybody trying to figure out what I was doing. First it was dead wormhole bookmarks, then bouncing planet to planet. Then I made a warp from a safe near my POS to planet 1 and landed inside the POCO. The ship sat there briefly, calmly, and then was flung out at over 1km/s like a ship bouncing off a POS forcefield. That was fun, so I warped to planet 2, bouncing off the POCO in a similarly hilarious way. And that is how I created POCO Bounce the game for bored people with nowhere else to go. You see you can't just land inside a POCO with any old warp to any old planet. Some planets have the POCO's at zero, some don't. Even when they are you have to come in from the right angle and get the right randomized exit point from the RNG, otherwise the bounce gets missed or is underwhelming. I bounced back and forth between planets 1 and 2, eventually finding out that the best pattern was starting from planet 9, hitting planet 1 and then planet 2 for what could be two potentially spectacular bounces.
This was fun, but I didn't want to wear it out, what was taking this guy so long? This inconvenient delay reminded me of something I learned when my youngest son was born. Somebody told me at that time "sleep when they sleep." It was brilliant but a sleep deprived parent wouldn't think of that, they would try to accomplish other things while the baby slept. But if the baby is asleep, you should be too, you can do that other stuff when they wake up. So I jumped into my CovOps and started probing.
There weren't that many signatures, maybe 10 or 12. I tore into them, ignoring a gas site, and bookmarking all the wormholes and data/relics. When I got down to the last few, and the other probes were still, out I was really getting annoyed. Seriously man, I played POCO Bounce for a while and I'm still faster than you with my T1 core probes. Then the Helios showed up on scan briefly, I think he warped to a null data/relic site. It was gone again very quickly, he probably wasn't there long enough to hack any cans, maybe one.
Shortly after that the probes disappeared and things got quiet. I bounced around the system, cloaked, just to be sure. As I was getting ready to resume the site my wife walked in the door. Without going into a multiple paragraph explanation of why, just know that there are times when you can duck your wife and times when you can't. That moment when she walks in and wants to tell you about her day is not one of them. Starting to worry about wrecks despawning, I shrugged it all off and went upstairs to chat with her.
A little while later I got back downstairs to find that once again... Probes! So I continued working on laundry, reading the forums, and finally things went quiet again. Expecting the original wrecks to be gone, I warped to the site. They were actually still there, so I hurried and finished it up. I thought jetcans/wrecks lasted 90 minutes, maybe it's longer or maybe the delay seemed longer than I thought. It was about this time that a thought occurred to me, my loot/salvage Heron had no prop mod. Too late to care now, just get this done.
I'm really good at forgetting things until it's too late. If I'm going to remember to bring in more 1MN prop mods I need to grind it into my head. Looting a site without one wasn't quite enough and there were several null data/relic sites up, so I got started on that. The first one was gone, I'm guessing that is where the Helios went. The rest were intact, with the Serpentis site having cans really close together. The other sites had them much more spread out, and I slowboated at 502m/s to all of the cans in each site, slowly getting better at the hacking minigame in the meantime. The Angel site was a jerk and shut me down on 4 of the 6 cans. After the sites were done it was late, so I warped back to the POS, dropped off the loot from the last site and went to a safe to do some PI and logoff.
This time I did things in the right order, fixing the two planets I messed up the night before. Things are running at peak efficiency now with one more planet to figure out, but that is something for another day. I logged off and went to bed, failing to fall asleep right away. Somehow I feel better than expected this morning on just a few hours of sleep. I'm sure it will all catch up with me tonight.
Intro
First post! Well I guess that doesn't count when it's your own blog. Welcome to The Lonely Wormhole Blog. The tagline "It's Dark In Here" comes from a thought I had while scanning down my wormhole the week I moved in. Living in a wormhole means you will spend time staring at the Solar System map while you probe things down, it's inevitable and unavoidable. It's also really dark, just an empty black screen with a few drab grey lines and the blue and red bubbles of probes and signatures. It conveys that ominous feeling that in wspace, you are often in the dark about what is going on around you. You survive by rapidly and repeatedly checking the intel you do have, and making quick assumptions and decisions based on it. Being a solo player, this is compounded even more. No scouts, no eyes on entrances. It truly is dark in here...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)