Tuesday, July 27, 2010

Holy Giant Roids Batman!

Well, I got out the Retrievers yesterday and started by mining out the Arkonor and Bistot. It took me many hours, so I'm thinking of putting some Hulks in here with me, even if they can't get out. Ran the Intensive Refining Array, had no idea you can only do one ore type at once! No wonder no one mines out entire sites, it would takes days to refine!

So I came in today to finish off my Crokite roid, and lo and behold, found a new Spodumain. Hmm, I don't remember two.....wtf it's 70k! I guess it's one of the rare spawning roids things that happens that I've read about. Well I can confirm it. I'm busy mining it, and it'll probably take all day just to do it, if I even finish it!

I had ALOT of wormhole traffic yesterday, so I scanned down my new entrance and found....Rayeret??? Rayeret is the first system in which the static high sec was when I bought the hole. The chances are pretty astronomic that it just happened to spawn here again. Could I have a revolving static wh entry???

I got tired of seeing ships on scan, so I gathered all my largest ships on five accounts and headed to the WH and got it to critical. No more visitors. :)

We had two Class 2 wh entries two days in a row, so I thought maybe it was a static, but no joy on that, it's gone and nothing replaced it today. Oh well.

Rearranging PI to get the most efficiency I can out of it. I've never had the trouble of having too many raw materials before!

Back to mining my massive Spod.

Forgotten Heathen Out.

Monday, July 26, 2010

Completely New Experiences

Well, we've done it. We have a Large Amarr POS setup inside our wormhole. I've used the past few days to jump in my combat ships and just returned with some Retrievers to get started mining. We've got an Intensive Refining Array and a Large Ship Assembly array set up, and I can't wait to get them going.

I also brought in a bunch of Advanced Command Centers and am in the process of setting them up to do POS fuels.The amounts I'm pulling are almost all in excess of 3k, the highest I've seen is 3571, on a five hour rotation. I won't be doing five hours after this initial kickstart, but those numbers all look phenomenal. I aim to supply my POS and make extra enriched uranium for sale outside the hole to finance the rest of the fuel.

Did one combat site yesterday, and they aren't kidding you can't use drones. They are immediately targetted. So our sentry drones are kind of useless. Good thing we are well trained in guns.

Only two melted nanoribbons so far, but the majority of my isk output will be coming from mining operations, and I can't wait to start those. These are some of the biggest asteroids I've ever seen.

Oh, and found a WH to a Class 2 today, inhabited. Will have to keep an eye out for WHs to sell.

Forgotten Heathen Out.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

And Wormholes!

So I finally got fed up searching for a wormhole when one of the wormhole merchants came up with this wormhole: J102849. So I bought it!

The fact that it had all the planets needed for POS fuels is what really hooked me. Yeah, it's a C1 with a low mass limit. That works both for and against me. For in that people won't be bringing in battleships, while I plan on manufacturing some for us to use in the hole for protection, which may be overkill. Against me in that I can't bring my Orca or rigged Hulks into the system, and any ships I make will not be able to get out of the hole.

I see alot of people selling wormholes with ships trapped in them. It does add to the flavor of the wormhole, but everyone is trying to get the price of the ships out of the wormhole too, and this isn't right, in my opinion. I'm going to pull together the minerals to make the ships in the wormhole itself. I'm going to use the ships, they're not for sale, so really I'm paying myself for them and they are paid for when I make them. It's not the "minerals you mine are free" arguement, because I don't believe they are, I'm just saying you expect these ships to stay with the hole, they belong to it after you decide to make them, and expecting full price for them along with the hole is ridiculous.

It has a static high sec exit, which is nice, but I'll have to take care of everyday to keep any poachers out. I've got my scanning alt inside to make sure I can't be kicked out, and I'm deciding what kind of a POS I will put up!

I'm extremely excited!

Forgotten Heathen out.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Some of that Asteroids Profit thing I mentioned!

Well, spent some time mining yesterday. I normally mine a couple belts in my home of Usroh, and yesterday was no different.

Here's my standard mining op. I ran an Orca, three Hulks and two Retrievers. Normally I have access to another Hulk, but Nick has been off somewhere running some missions so we can all have access to jump clones.

I fill the ore hold and cargo bay, which amounts to 142km3 of space, I start jet canning with the hulks, and let the 'trievers finish the Orca off, then join them in on cans. Once I have an amount of cans in space I'm not comfortable with sitting there, I swap out a Hulk for a rigged Iteron and start hauling back to our POS. Once all the cans are down to one, I jump him back into the Hulk and start again. Rinse, repeat.

Today was really no exception, and after a couple of hours or so, I closed down the op, went and got my freighter, and jumped it all to my manufactory at Yuzier, three jumps away.

Total amount was near:

40 million Tritanium
4 million Pyerite
1 million Mexallon
500k isogen
200k Nocxium

So I put that in with all the minerals I already had and ran a bunch of manufacturing jobs I had to hold off on due to Hulkageddon, and decided to check mineral prices.

Prices weren't terrible, Pyerite had fallen, Trit was up .20 or so. Mexallon had also fallen. Well rats. So I took a trip over to Rens to see the mineral market there.....and was pleasantly surprised.

Isogen has gone up quite a bit since I looked at it last, and trit was priced pretty nice.....so I loaded up the freighter with the majority of my trit and isogen and sold roughly 40 mil trit and 1.5 mil isogen for 170 million isk!

That's certainly my record for a mineral run, for sure.

I decided to head to Alakgur and try my hand at mining out the omber in all the fields, and ended up a 2 hour op, including jump times on all my ships, and sold all the minerals for about 50 mil. The difference in isk earned are due to a number of things, first, I spent less time mining and more time moving ships. Second, all the asteroids in this area of space are mined out alot, so they spawn very small. I was burning roids after just a couple cycles. That was the majority of my difference right there.

So I've concluded that I'll stick to my corner of roidspace, as I'm pretty happy with it. It respawns every day huge and happy, and almost no one contends me for it.

On a side note, I moved alot of my POS gear to Rens to sell, it's just not moving in Yuzier very fast, so I'll go for volume over price for a bit and see how that goes. We also saw the Corp Wallet breach the 1 billion mark! I've only seen it once before, when I spent 700 mil on the first Orca way back when.

Yay, now to see how long I can resist from spending it all!

Forgotten Heathen out!

Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Law of Averages

Well, again Murphy's Law caught up to me. Investigating a couple class 2 WHs today, one looked like it had a mining corp in it, so I decided to swing by the POS and get their corp name to maybe see if they would mind a second small mining corp in there with them.......

And I ran smack into a Warp Disruptor and got decloaked, right in front of tons of guns placed right around the Warp Disruptor. I survived two volleys with my Microwarpdrive going and a shield booster, but to no avail, and my trusty Anathema blew sky high. I winced, because I didn't know if POSes would pod you, and no one was on the turrets, so I managed to get away.

I guess I won't be asking Triton Manufacturing Corp if they would care for a neighbor. It's obvious they don't.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Back to Mining!

Yay, Hulkageddon is OVER! It's with a great relief that I can return to part of the game I love: mining. I know most people hate it, but I love the relaxed atmosphere. Of course that atmosphere can become a nightmare pretty quick, but for the most part, I enjoy the ballet of it. The different ships mining different asteroids, the hauling of cans back and forth, the command of a great endeavor. Okay, maybe it's not all that, but I still enjoy a well controlled mining op!

My alt account is finally in a Retriever, so bye bye to the Miner 2s on the Navitas. It's fun for a bit to use that little ship, but when the option to outmine it is present, efficiency demands the change! So with Gnicklas in a far off system earning corp standings so everyone can have jump clones, I've got; two hulks, two retrievers, an orca and one more hulk pilot who spends alot of time hauling in a rigged Iteron V.

So what do I love more than a full Orca? A full Corporate Array! I think I had it figured out to roughly 120 million isk per Providence load, so a full corp array is worth near 150-175, I'll price it when I do a freighter run today.

Honestly, I couldn't have imagined I'd be running seven accounts on one computer, which wouldn't be possible without my corpmate allowing me to use his, and vice versa, thanks Nick! I am in awe of how far I've come since mining in a Tormentor. The reward is very sweet!

Did some ice mining yesterday with my two Mackinaws, fueled up the POS for another couple of weeks. Considering switching my entire PI operation over to production of one high priced P2 product only, like enriched uranium, but still considering that prospect, as my arrays and POSes are selling slowly. Time will tell on that.

Anyway, back to hauling!

Forgotten Heathen out.

Friday, July 16, 2010

Amarr Small Control Tower

Just got enough Integrity Drones for the first run of my Small Amarr Control Tower! I continue to sell a Ship Array every day or so, here's to hoping people need small towers in my region! Price History shows them selling, so I'm looking forward to these BPOs paying for themselves!

More BPOs and Wormholes

Since Hulkageddon is still going on, although it does finally end this weekend, I've been doing alot of scanning. In that scanning I've come across many wormholes, every one of them with at least one occupant.

We're a really small corp, there's just two of us running, at the moment, seven accounts, so we're not really set up to fight with people that already live in these wormholes. In no way are we helpless, with numerous battleships and HACs between all of us, but we'd prefer to either have no neighbors or co-exist with a friendly corp.

So yesterday found me in a Class 2 Pulsar, excitedly finding my directional scanner clear. I zoomed out and thought, wow, here's an empty one! Wait, there's another planet track, so I zoomed out some more and flew to the next farther planet. Scanned.....Nothing! YAY! Wait, zoom out some more.....wow this wormhole was HUGE. Turned out there was yet another planet, the wormhole was like 200 AU across! And of course, there was a POS at the lsat planet. And a Catalyst cleaning up some Sleeper wrecks.

I tried to get the guy to speak in local, he ran back to his POS and got into a Drake. I tried to convo him, but he rejected. I guess everyone is super paranoid, with good reason. I scanned down his POS, and got yanked out of warp by a Mobile Disrupter Field. Luckily, I stumbled into one of several, all the others had Secure Containers in them to decloak people so the POS could light them up.

Ah well, I decided to give up and said in local I might be back with a POS, which I wasn't really planning on doing. No sooner do I head back to K-Space than I get a convo invite from a guy saying he didn't speak english very well, and that I could talk to the other guy in his corp later.

Didn't make alot of sense, as he wrote english certainly well. It sure felt like a ploy so he could close the WH, but I came back later and it was still there. *shrug* Oh well, I wasn't going to move in with a decidedly hostile looking corp already there. I know Eve is a nasty game, but setting a trap like that for cloakers is just below the bar for me.

So, BPOs. I decided yesterday that I need to be able to fling a POS into a wormhole pretty fast, and I've built 10 Corp Hangars and multiple Ship Maintenance Arrays in preparation for heading into one. I've got POS fuel and a fleet of Iterons, Bestowers and cheap scanning vessels at the POS, ready to go.

I also wanted a Large Ship Array so I could produce some battleships inside the WH with the huge amount of materials I was going to be getting. After looking at their prices in my region, around 130 mil, I decided to go look at a BPO instead. I have a large cache of High Tech commodities for building the corp and ship arrays. So I travelled to Rens.

After arriving, I found that it was just 25 mil more for the BPO than for an array itself, so I looked around for the BPO, and almost every single one was in lowsec. Six jumps away was a high sec station. Right. After arriving, I noticed a large amount of low sec status people outside. Great. I'm in a shuttle. After perusing the BPOs for awhile, I decided to also pick up a Small Amarr Control Tower BPO as well. With the stockpile of materials I had, I could almost build 10 small control towers!

The people outside convinced me I had to buy a better ship, and the only thing at the station not priced 1000x normal price was an Executioner.

So after being chased a few jumps back to Yuzier with like 250 mil worth of BPOs in the bay, I breathed a sigh of relief and went about setting my PI up to make stuff for the new BPOs.

Still looking for that wormhole! Since Star Defender has noted that there are more unoccupied that lead to lowsec, I might head down there and scan a bit looking for the elusive empty hole.

Forgotten Heathen out.

Monday, July 12, 2010

PI and BPOs

When PI was coming out, I and my corpmate, Gnicklas, decided to purchase a number of the new POS related BPOs that we thought would be in relatively high demand.

We purchased:

* Ship Maintenance Array BPO

* Corporate Hangar Array BPO

* Advanced Mobile Lab BPO

That was to the tune of 300 million isk. We felt pretty good about those purchases and I've made about half of the isk back so far in selling the produced items themselves. I haven't managed to make any of the Adv Mobile Labs yet, as they take insane amounts of almost every Advanced PI good there is. But, I started making the missing commodities two days ago, so we'll see how it works into my existing production lines, which were set up for Ship Maint Array and Corp Hangars.

I am curious how all the other intrepid industrialists are doing their supply chains, so here's mine.

I currently own three accounts, all with Command Center 4 and Interplanetary Consolidation 4. (btw would love to hear from anyone who has CC V and how many extractors you can fit!)

My corpmate has two accounts, one with Command Center 4, the other with Three. We both have 10 planets each, all in a nearby lowsec pocket. We use his alt as a processor for all the raw materials, each planet of his processes four of the materials each. One of my alts has two planets for taking Processed Materials and turning them into Refined Commodities. My other alt then has two planets where I turn the Refined(Precious Metals, Silicon, Biomass, etc) into Specialized(Biocells, Livestock, Polyaramids, Transmitters) and then into Advanced Commodities.(Broadcast Nodes, Integrity Response Drones, Nano Factory, etc)

This system is of course turning out far more Advanced Commodities than I can use atm. I've run into small snags where I need more of one material over another, or run out of Proteins or Precious Metals, but overall I'm pretty satisfied with it and it's efficiency.

Of course, the one glaring issue is that all the raw materials are in lowsec. Everything else is in my home of Usroh. As you may have read, lowsec isn't going all that great due to my inexperience with it, and just terrible button pressing. So Star Defenders newest post caught my eye: Putting all the raw materials in a wormhole.

I'm still a fair wormhole newb, having never lived in one, only mined or did sites with my corpmate. I don't have any alts training up on scanning and PI, but now I'm considering it.

What with all the Hulkageddon going on, I'm spending alot of time scanning, looking for that perfect wormhole.

Forgotten Heathen Out.

Sunday, July 11, 2010

Hulkageddon 3: Summer of No Mining

Well, I got my Orca back just in time to......NOT UNDOCK IT. Thus began Hulkageddon 3, a player run event that, while I am the express target of, is actually kind of cool. I've watched lots of macro miners go down, while Hulk and mineral prices continue to climb. And all the while I've been selling destroyers, frigates and fit modules to all the participants. So it's pretty profit for me!

Alas, I had scanned down a couple very nice Grav sites right before it went live, so I'll have to watch them despawn until after the festivities. I also won't be using the Orca to haul PI materials from my hisec lowsec drop off point. I lost one damn Orca to stupidity, I won't lose another to some random gang who just wants to kill any Orca they find.

I do find the hypocricy of the whole event interesting. I sit in the chat channel for the event all day, and see people lament about all the macro miners, and how great it is to kill them, and that if the Hulk moves if it's targetted or if it warps out, it's not a macroer. But is there a distinction drawn between Macroer and Non-Macroer? Not a chance. Miners are miners, and therefore, all targets.

So all my mining vessels, all four hulks and various retrievers, associated haulers and the Orca, are all docked up and safe til this event is over.

Favorite quote on the Hulkageddon channel so far:

"We should do this all the time!" random noob ganker

"Then you wouldn't have any ships to fly, moron." Me.

Oh, and a o/ to Dwarf Paladin, who I saw in Hulkageddon chat doing much the same thing I was. Had a nice chat with him, and want to say thanks for serving our country! Stay safe!