As I gaze out my Hulk's bridge windows, I see a vast mining fleet destroying a millenia old crokite asteroid. What sights has this old rock been privy to? What battles have been fought near it, or even over it? If only rocks could talk.
But they can't, so I chuckle as the plethora of mining lasers break it apart into manageable sizes for my haulers to take back to the station deep inside my wormhole, all while I check Jita prices on my screen and mentally count my incoming isk.
So, while my Rorqual compresses and packages our various ores for shipment to high sec, let's talk about my mining fleet setups. I'd love for you all to leave comments about how and why you do things while mining.
To start with, I add my boosting ship to Wing Commander, either the Orca when the number of hulks and retrievers do not warrant the use of the Industrial Module on the Rorqual, or in the Rorqual when most of our members are on and mining with us.
Squad Commander has to have Leadership 5 so that they can boost the large numbers of Hulks that are on with the Rorqual. The Commander also has to not be an alt, as they are in charge of warping the fleet away at the slightest sign of danger. All fleet members are also directed to make a Recall Drones macro so that they can quickly attempt to call their drones back in the event of an emergency warp-out. If drones are left, so be it, the ships are far more important, and I'll bet some people have lost them attempting to let their drones get back aboard.
Each of our corporation hulks is outfitted the same. Three Strip Miner ones in the highs, Mining Laser Upgrade IIs in the lows, a Small Shield Booster II and an Invul II Booster in the mids along with a Cap Recharger. We fly with Low Friction Nozzle Rigs and Mining Drone Augmentor Rigs, for aligning speed and mining yield improvements.
Why Strip Miner 1s, you ask? I covered it in an old post, but I'll restate why I use them: Convenience. Every thing you need trucked into the wormhole is another piece of weight on the transport coming back in. Mining crystals do actually weigh a good bit, especially when you get a bunch stacked together. A fleet really going after gravimetric sites can burn through crystals at an astonishing rate. And if you want T2 crystals, those are an added expense and huge addition in training time. I decided that training Refining Eff V on all my characters was just too long of an investment to get those T2 ABC crystals.
The other reason has to do with those of us that mine with multiple accounts, but still lies under the convenience line. When a crystal breaks, you have to figure out which client it broke on. And then what do you do to get another crystal? Is your Orca in field with a load of them? Is your hulk going home to get more crystals? What happens when you need to switch to a different roid type? Yep, you've got to swap out all your crystals. And since all the ores except mercoxit are present, that's alot of crystals on standby, especially when you're fielding 10+ hulks.
Of course, I might find the time to get all these characters to Ref Eff V, and I might just start being anal about mining yields again. Maybe then I'll deem the expense of crystals to be worth the time saved. But right now, I'd rather it all be more convenient.
So you've got your booster, who should be sitting quietly doing something either afk or anything not involving warping, at the POS. You've got your haulers, either Iteron Vs, or Impels, or even transport fit Orcas. Whatever your choice of haulers, they should be quickly shuttling that ore back to the POS as quick as they can warp back and forth.
So you've got the operation going, but is it safe? Of course, in wormholes, your operations are never safe. An incoming K162 can spill nullsec PvP fleets onto your unsuspecting mining gang in 30 seconds or less. So you need someone to scan the whole wormhole down, every signature, and identify everything before you get started. Extra wormholes you don't know about can spell the death of all of you or even your POS, if you can't get back in.
I don't mine unless I have only two wormhole sigs in my system, which will be my known statics, and only if I know they are closed. At the least, an open wormhole will have to be crit and have a large mobile warp disruptor sitting on it, and at best, having someone in a cloaked ship sitting there to listen for wormhole activation.
After it's all scanned down and you are 100% sure there aren't any nasty visitors poking around, assume that there are. Designate a couple people as the DSCAN hitters. They need to have probes on their Overview settings, everyone already does have them cause you're in a wormhole, right? And they need to be hitting DSCAN as much as possible. Like as much as the game will let them hit it. This means they should be your lone miners, with no alts. You can't rely on the haulers, they are passing through too much of the system and may miss what goes on next to you while they are more than 14 AU from you. So it has to be one of your solo miners, banging away on DSCAN, because YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!
If you don't believe me, you can reference my old post whereupon I lost three hulks, a Covetor, and all four pods.
Your hauler choice depends on how many mining vessels you have going at the field. If you have four or five, an Iteron V or an Impel, or your Deep Space Transport of choice for the 38k cargo space. Your hauler should neve hang out in the field, and should either be continually making hte back and forth trip to your X-Large Ship Assembly Array and the field, or waiting til there's a full can in the field.
I have been using our Orca to haul lately, and I know I cautioned against it before. I still caution against it. Unless you have multiple people hitting their DSCANs and enough mining ships crushing roids to start stacking up cans your hauler can't handle, then you shouldn't use an Orca. I have mine warp stabbed and a cloak.
I've been reading a certain stealth bomber blog lately and the pilot, Chessur, looks down upon wormhole denizens who jetcan mine. In this, I tend to agree, especially after reading his stories of popping the cans of miners after he's killed them. So I'm going to adjust my hauling capacity from now on to make sure I'm not stacking up cans, as I have done in the past. Hence one of the reason I've began using my hauling Orca in the field with us. If you don't have a hauler that can keep your cans empty, it's probably not a good idea to be mining in a wormhole at all.
The risk of losing both your ship and what you've mined are too great.
A note to close out this post. If you haven't heard the latest forum flame going on, it has come to light that there has been talk of taking the ABC ores out of wormholes. Whether this is true or not, I advise you all to weigh in on the discussion at this forum post about it. You can find my opinions on it there.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Tuesday, July 12, 2011
Mines of Madness
Well we finally got back into the mining swing of things the past couple of days. We had a Common Perimeter Deposit and we cracked it open. Lo and behold, it spawned with an extra 50k Crokite roid!
We knocked that and all the ABCs, along with mining a bit of some of the higher ores before calling it quits, happy that we got as much as we did out of the site.
Next day, I checked the site. Not only had most of the site respawned, but a 75k spodumain roid had spawned along with it! Again we hopped into our hulks and chewed through most of the site again, and called it a day feeling pretty darn good.
The next day, I warped to the site again....and found both spod roids had respawned along with alot of the high sec ores....so we hopped back into our hulks and chewed away at it til we couldn't chew no more. Suffice to say we had our mining fix for awhile.
Today this site despawned, to my dismay. I was hoping to see a continuation of events, but alas, it was not to be. Now we're left with a mining dryspell again.
Has anyone else seen this behavior before? I thought we were incredibly lucky to get the 50k crokite roid to start, but then the site partially respawning AND the 75k spod spawn. I've never had a site "partially" respawn. By that I mean it didn't respawn the arkonor, bistot or crokite. Everything else.
Maybe a new mechanic to make wormholes more profitable for the industrialist again? We'll have to see if this continues on a regular course. I'll be keeping track, that's for sure!
We knocked that and all the ABCs, along with mining a bit of some of the higher ores before calling it quits, happy that we got as much as we did out of the site.
Next day, I checked the site. Not only had most of the site respawned, but a 75k spodumain roid had spawned along with it! Again we hopped into our hulks and chewed through most of the site again, and called it a day feeling pretty darn good.
The next day, I warped to the site again....and found both spod roids had respawned along with alot of the high sec ores....so we hopped back into our hulks and chewed away at it til we couldn't chew no more. Suffice to say we had our mining fix for awhile.
Today this site despawned, to my dismay. I was hoping to see a continuation of events, but alas, it was not to be. Now we're left with a mining dryspell again.
Has anyone else seen this behavior before? I thought we were incredibly lucky to get the 50k crokite roid to start, but then the site partially respawning AND the 75k spod spawn. I've never had a site "partially" respawn. By that I mean it didn't respawn the arkonor, bistot or crokite. Everything else.
Maybe a new mechanic to make wormholes more profitable for the industrialist again? We'll have to see if this continues on a regular course. I'll be keeping track, that's for sure!
Friday, July 8, 2011
/eyeroll
*This is not to be interpreted as a general bitch against Eve, the time it takes to fully play the game, or the people in it! It is more indicative of the plethora of situations and people you can have and meet in Eve!*
Aaaahhh, so finally I can get down to the business of exploiting our wormhole like we should be doing.....maybe I'll just take a break and do something non Eve related for a couple days.....what is this? A text message from Soulofchaos. There's someone in our wormhole doing our sites. Well that's no bueno.
And so began a cat and mouse game that we had lost before it had started because I had put off getting onto Eve that day. You don't take a break from Eve, Eve takes a break from you!
So we saw a drake on scan, wrecks also. But no combat sites were coming up. The visitor was at one of our radar or mag sites. I threw out some combat probes and placed them on one of the two sites close to where the wrecks were, and presto! 100% hit, and off I warped the fleet!
And the fleet landed at the radar, with the drake already warping away. Curses, he must have saw the probes. I should have bubbled instead of tried to grab the target lock with the focus on the Devoter. Oh well, you learn from every experience.
Except for our visitor who decided to mouth off in local. Who was in a one man corp with no alliance. I guess that's probably why, so he can be an eve troll. But, as stated, he got away, and took our sleeper loot with him.
If I had scanned for the day, I could have knew which sig was the K162 he came from and could have bubbled it and got him. But, oh well, you can't play Eve all the time.
So, next day, we decided to take care of the few remaining radars that had been hanging around that "we were going to get to", and decided to try out the "if you clear it of sleepers and leave it through downtime, they will respawn". Well, 16 hours later, no respawn, just the site and cans are still there. Can I call the theory busted yet? No, will wait til 24 hours an dthen it'll be busted. Will let you know. Finished off the combats and called it a night.
Next day, SSDD. Took out the few combats we had with Freethinker, then Jared Knight got on and we decided it was time to do some mining. So we opened our Common Perimeter Deposit and found a 50k Crokite asteroid! Added to the 20k Crokite it normally spawned, we siphoned all the ABCs off this evening and earning an easy 350 mil. Can't wait to get that refined and out to sell. In the meantime, all of our precious metals have sold on sell orders in Jita for a good amount, which I should really keep better track of in the future.
Aaaahhh, so finally I can get down to the business of exploiting our wormhole like we should be doing.....maybe I'll just take a break and do something non Eve related for a couple days.....what is this? A text message from Soulofchaos. There's someone in our wormhole doing our sites. Well that's no bueno.
And so began a cat and mouse game that we had lost before it had started because I had put off getting onto Eve that day. You don't take a break from Eve, Eve takes a break from you!
So we saw a drake on scan, wrecks also. But no combat sites were coming up. The visitor was at one of our radar or mag sites. I threw out some combat probes and placed them on one of the two sites close to where the wrecks were, and presto! 100% hit, and off I warped the fleet!
And the fleet landed at the radar, with the drake already warping away. Curses, he must have saw the probes. I should have bubbled instead of tried to grab the target lock with the focus on the Devoter. Oh well, you learn from every experience.
Except for our visitor who decided to mouth off in local. Who was in a one man corp with no alliance. I guess that's probably why, so he can be an eve troll. But, as stated, he got away, and took our sleeper loot with him.
If I had scanned for the day, I could have knew which sig was the K162 he came from and could have bubbled it and got him. But, oh well, you can't play Eve all the time.
So, next day, we decided to take care of the few remaining radars that had been hanging around that "we were going to get to", and decided to try out the "if you clear it of sleepers and leave it through downtime, they will respawn". Well, 16 hours later, no respawn, just the site and cans are still there. Can I call the theory busted yet? No, will wait til 24 hours an dthen it'll be busted. Will let you know. Finished off the combats and called it a night.
Next day, SSDD. Took out the few combats we had with Freethinker, then Jared Knight got on and we decided it was time to do some mining. So we opened our Common Perimeter Deposit and found a 50k Crokite asteroid! Added to the 20k Crokite it normally spawned, we siphoned all the ABCs off this evening and earning an easy 350 mil. Can't wait to get that refined and out to sell. In the meantime, all of our precious metals have sold on sell orders in Jita for a good amount, which I should really keep better track of in the future.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
ORCAS......ON FIRE.
I woke up and checked my DOTLAN to find jumps yesterday. I headed out in my scanning Anathema and found it, a deadly unknown wormhole.
Hmmm. That's not good. I had 17 jumps. Probably using my hole as a transit point. My high sec was probably also open. Checking the other side found only a Buzzard and an industrial somewhere nearby. Well, time to log in the Orcas and get this sucker closed!
Got my two Orca pilots fleeted and jumped into my Pilgrim in case of trouble and headed back to the deadly connection. I cloaked and settled up 11k meters off the wormhole, near my optimal for disruptors and my neuts. I jumped both Orcas through.
Uh oh, it went to half. Hmmm.
Upon arriving on the other side, I saw a ship cloak quickly, too quick for me to see the ship type.
Double uh oh. I better log on some help. I boarded the Devoter and sent the Chimera and Thanatos to their out of shield bookmarks and assigned fighters to the Devoter. I also logged on my Oneiros pilot and prepared to warp her in 60k off my Pilgrim, also assigned with fighter support.
The Orcas both dropped cloak and three ships immediately dropped cloak along with them. I recloaked one Orca, as they both are fit with prototype cloaks, but the other was too close to the wormhole.
Facing me were two Nemesis' and a Hyperion battleship. Time to bring the Orcas home and hope they don't have multiple points on those ships, as both Orcas are double warp stabbed for just this such event.
I initiated warp on the Oneiros and had the Devoter sitting on the wormhole. I recently refit the Devoter for a maximum tank fit with dual reppers and an active armor tank. She also had no guns. So my firepower was going to consist of 15 fighters or the drones on the Pilgrim, and the modules on the Pilgrim. I was fit with multiple neuts and range disruptors, so the Hyperion wouldn't be too much of an issue for the Pilgrim, at least. It was the Devoter and the Orcas I had to worry about.
As the Orcas jumped through, I dropped cloak on my Pilgrim and aligned both carriers towards the fight just in case it went extremely badly. Right behind them came all three pulses of the enemy ships. No more. At least for now I knew what I was facing.
The enemies sat in cloak while I aligned both Orcas and obviously sized up the situation. Did I mention they were Russian? The wormhole had five russian POSes in it.
As one they dropped cloak and opened fire. The Hyperion started shooting at the Devoter, and he was fit with blasters. I immediately had all her tank turned on and orbited at 2k, going about 400m\s. I went ahead and hit the bubble, as I was prepared for a longer duration fight. Both Orcas are fitted with active shield tanks and can take a generous amount of damage, so I had both of those going.
Both stealth bombers launched bombs at the same Orca, and timed them quite well. They blew through all of the Orca's shields, so they must have been shooting torpedoes as well. I quickly turned on all the large armor reppers on the Oneiros and kept the Orca easily at full armor.
At the same time, I set all 10 fighters onto the Hyperion, decided to range and tracking speed disrupt, in case he switched targets, which at about that time, he did, to the Orca that had taken the most damage. I sent my five Acolyte 2s at one of the Nemesis', and it dropped into half armor and fled through the wormhole. The other flew back towards the wormhole, as it had flown out of range trying to keep on the Orcas.
All this time the Firbolgs and Dragonflys ate at the Hyperion's armor while my multiple neuts must have brought his cap lower and lower, until finally, realizing he wasn't going to crack the Orca, with his armor falling rapidly past 50%, the Hyperion and his Nemesis buddy, who was himself into hull, both faded back into the wormhole from whence they came.
Leaving me, two Orcas, and a swarm of buzzing fighters looking for targets.
Hmm, this wormhole had already lost a bunch of mass. I brought two more Orcas back and it didn't go crit. The chances are that they were heading for reinforcements. Doing the mental math on the wormhole, I decided it must have gone to half with the second Orca jump, meaning I should have enough mass left to put an Orca through and back one last time. If not, I and it's pilot were in trouble. This Orca had an Anathema in it, so if he did get stuck, the pilot could get away.
Probably.
So I took down the bubble, sent the wounded Orca home and jumped the other one back into the fire.
Upon re-coalescing onto the enemy side, I at first found no one waiting. The wormhole had gone to critial mass, and one jump home remained for me. As I waited out the timer, I realized that the Hyperion could go back if it were here, stranding me on purpose, because it most likely already had my high sec bookmark!!!!
I kept clicking jump, and it counted down from 14 seconds. At about 7 seconds, an enemy fleet arrived and the Hyperion uncloaked about 5k away from my Orca. One of the Nemesis had returned, along with a Tengu, a Hound, a Broadsword, a Typhoon, and a Thanatos of their own!
Come on come come on come on come on ohshitohshitohshit!!!!!
3.....2......1.....JUMP!
With a huge sigh of relief, the wormhole spasmadically closed behind me, shutting in the face of the russian fleet that was ready to rip apart my insolent industrial command ship.
Orca Jesus strikes again!
I headed quickly over to the B274 and found that it looked untouched. Hmm. I'll close it just in case someone is outside and they decide to launch a vengeance fleet. :)
So that hole closed, and I decided it was time to take some stuff to Jita to sell. Hopping back into the scanner, I headed outside and found I was only six jumps from Jita!
I loaded up the Orcas with our PI, most of it Precious Metals, Cryoprotectant and Biotech Reports, along with some Melted nanos. The haul was about 446 mil. Of cours,e I had to immediately spent 100 mil on POS fuel, and added to the 200 mil I spent on POS fuel for the C3 POS, we were only net 100 mil.
But, it looks like our bill for fuel will be going down significanly. Jared Knight has an alt he is spending alot of time on ice mining with, and has contracted over 173k helium to the corp, which will save us over 100 mil in POS costs. Thanks Knight!
Oh, and the Revelation is finished.
Hehe. I took it out on it's maiden flight, visiting Freethinker while he was doing a combat site. This thing is HUGE. And it's easily one of the best looking Amarr ships. Now I just need to buy some giga lasers for it.......WHAT! 50 mil PER laser!?
*BPCs purchased*
Hmmm. That's not good. I had 17 jumps. Probably using my hole as a transit point. My high sec was probably also open. Checking the other side found only a Buzzard and an industrial somewhere nearby. Well, time to log in the Orcas and get this sucker closed!
Got my two Orca pilots fleeted and jumped into my Pilgrim in case of trouble and headed back to the deadly connection. I cloaked and settled up 11k meters off the wormhole, near my optimal for disruptors and my neuts. I jumped both Orcas through.
Uh oh, it went to half. Hmmm.
Upon arriving on the other side, I saw a ship cloak quickly, too quick for me to see the ship type.
Double uh oh. I better log on some help. I boarded the Devoter and sent the Chimera and Thanatos to their out of shield bookmarks and assigned fighters to the Devoter. I also logged on my Oneiros pilot and prepared to warp her in 60k off my Pilgrim, also assigned with fighter support.
The Orcas both dropped cloak and three ships immediately dropped cloak along with them. I recloaked one Orca, as they both are fit with prototype cloaks, but the other was too close to the wormhole.
Facing me were two Nemesis' and a Hyperion battleship. Time to bring the Orcas home and hope they don't have multiple points on those ships, as both Orcas are double warp stabbed for just this such event.
I initiated warp on the Oneiros and had the Devoter sitting on the wormhole. I recently refit the Devoter for a maximum tank fit with dual reppers and an active armor tank. She also had no guns. So my firepower was going to consist of 15 fighters or the drones on the Pilgrim, and the modules on the Pilgrim. I was fit with multiple neuts and range disruptors, so the Hyperion wouldn't be too much of an issue for the Pilgrim, at least. It was the Devoter and the Orcas I had to worry about.
As the Orcas jumped through, I dropped cloak on my Pilgrim and aligned both carriers towards the fight just in case it went extremely badly. Right behind them came all three pulses of the enemy ships. No more. At least for now I knew what I was facing.
The enemies sat in cloak while I aligned both Orcas and obviously sized up the situation. Did I mention they were Russian? The wormhole had five russian POSes in it.
As one they dropped cloak and opened fire. The Hyperion started shooting at the Devoter, and he was fit with blasters. I immediately had all her tank turned on and orbited at 2k, going about 400m\s. I went ahead and hit the bubble, as I was prepared for a longer duration fight. Both Orcas are fitted with active shield tanks and can take a generous amount of damage, so I had both of those going.
Both stealth bombers launched bombs at the same Orca, and timed them quite well. They blew through all of the Orca's shields, so they must have been shooting torpedoes as well. I quickly turned on all the large armor reppers on the Oneiros and kept the Orca easily at full armor.
At the same time, I set all 10 fighters onto the Hyperion, decided to range and tracking speed disrupt, in case he switched targets, which at about that time, he did, to the Orca that had taken the most damage. I sent my five Acolyte 2s at one of the Nemesis', and it dropped into half armor and fled through the wormhole. The other flew back towards the wormhole, as it had flown out of range trying to keep on the Orcas.
All this time the Firbolgs and Dragonflys ate at the Hyperion's armor while my multiple neuts must have brought his cap lower and lower, until finally, realizing he wasn't going to crack the Orca, with his armor falling rapidly past 50%, the Hyperion and his Nemesis buddy, who was himself into hull, both faded back into the wormhole from whence they came.
Leaving me, two Orcas, and a swarm of buzzing fighters looking for targets.
Hmm, this wormhole had already lost a bunch of mass. I brought two more Orcas back and it didn't go crit. The chances are that they were heading for reinforcements. Doing the mental math on the wormhole, I decided it must have gone to half with the second Orca jump, meaning I should have enough mass left to put an Orca through and back one last time. If not, I and it's pilot were in trouble. This Orca had an Anathema in it, so if he did get stuck, the pilot could get away.
Probably.
So I took down the bubble, sent the wounded Orca home and jumped the other one back into the fire.
Upon re-coalescing onto the enemy side, I at first found no one waiting. The wormhole had gone to critial mass, and one jump home remained for me. As I waited out the timer, I realized that the Hyperion could go back if it were here, stranding me on purpose, because it most likely already had my high sec bookmark!!!!
I kept clicking jump, and it counted down from 14 seconds. At about 7 seconds, an enemy fleet arrived and the Hyperion uncloaked about 5k away from my Orca. One of the Nemesis had returned, along with a Tengu, a Hound, a Broadsword, a Typhoon, and a Thanatos of their own!
Come on come come on come on come on ohshitohshitohshit!!!!!
3.....2......1.....JUMP!
With a huge sigh of relief, the wormhole spasmadically closed behind me, shutting in the face of the russian fleet that was ready to rip apart my insolent industrial command ship.
Orca Jesus strikes again!
I headed quickly over to the B274 and found that it looked untouched. Hmm. I'll close it just in case someone is outside and they decide to launch a vengeance fleet. :)
So that hole closed, and I decided it was time to take some stuff to Jita to sell. Hopping back into the scanner, I headed outside and found I was only six jumps from Jita!
I loaded up the Orcas with our PI, most of it Precious Metals, Cryoprotectant and Biotech Reports, along with some Melted nanos. The haul was about 446 mil. Of cours,e I had to immediately spent 100 mil on POS fuel, and added to the 200 mil I spent on POS fuel for the C3 POS, we were only net 100 mil.
But, it looks like our bill for fuel will be going down significanly. Jared Knight has an alt he is spending alot of time on ice mining with, and has contracted over 173k helium to the corp, which will save us over 100 mil in POS costs. Thanks Knight!
Oh, and the Revelation is finished.
Hehe. I took it out on it's maiden flight, visiting Freethinker while he was doing a combat site. This thing is HUGE. And it's easily one of the best looking Amarr ships. Now I just need to buy some giga lasers for it.......WHAT! 50 mil PER laser!?
*BPCs purchased*
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Updated PI Chain
Well I finally decided during the last week before the craziness, that I was going to actually check the numbers on Wetware Mainframes because they just didn't "feel" right.
And I was right. After doing the numbers, I concluded we were losing money by turning all of it into P4 Wetware Mainframes. And then I found EVE Tools which did all the work for me and told me I was right. Seems like everything EXCEPT the Wetwares in the chain was profitable, just not them. Go figure.
So I cut the head off the top of the chain, and am busy making Cryoprotectant, Biotech Reports, and Supercomputers, since we were completely tooled up to do these things anyway.
So I should see a serious marked improvement on PI profits next time we hit Jita. And it looks like they will, again, make up most of our profits, as nanoribbons have been few and far between of late. Looks like we've got a dry spell.
And I was right. After doing the numbers, I concluded we were losing money by turning all of it into P4 Wetware Mainframes. And then I found EVE Tools which did all the work for me and told me I was right. Seems like everything EXCEPT the Wetwares in the chain was profitable, just not them. Go figure.
So I cut the head off the top of the chain, and am busy making Cryoprotectant, Biotech Reports, and Supercomputers, since we were completely tooled up to do these things anyway.
So I should see a serious marked improvement on PI profits next time we hit Jita. And it looks like they will, again, make up most of our profits, as nanoribbons have been few and far between of late. Looks like we've got a dry spell.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
Revelation Commenced!
In all the madness of late, both in and out of Eve, I started the production on our new Revelation Dreadnought. A quick update, there's 3 days 2 hours left until that puppy is ou!
Saturday, June 25, 2011
Report:Your Starbase in J144725 is under attack!
I don't even know where to begin with the events that unfolded today. I started my day mostly as normal, but the few things I did out of the ordinary made things either highly more annoying for me to get defense to my wormhole, or actually severely hurt the attacking force. I only still hold our class 3 through exceptional luck and coincidences. I salute the attackers, Sephray Industries, for a very well planned assault that should have succeeded.
I really only have our new alliance, Talocan United, and their allies in Transmission Lost, to thank for saving our wormhole. Without their quick reaction to the invasion, they would certainly have returned their home to their ownership. But I digress, for it is an interesting tale, and I hope I do not miss the details.
I have always thought there was something odd about the C3 wormhole that I bought it a kind of backroom deal last month. I expected to find drugs and dead bodies inside. But instead I found null sec K162s, busy high sec connections, and dangerous unknown corridors that led to places I dared not tread. But from all these came the greatest threat: knowledge that we lived inside.
Over the past month or so, I noted that we just seemed to have alot more traffic than was normal, that mayhaps someone was inside, opening holes and letting people in. I wasn't certain, but I was right all along.
I woke up late this morning, not knowing the attacking force was already at work, and in fact counting on my hours of normal play. I logged in, messed around with PI a bit, and did not bother checking the evemails that were, in retrospect, obviously sitting in my Notifications box, trying to tell me I needed to pay attention.
I logged off.
A few hours later, I decided to log in and do some scanning for the day, which I normally do when I get up, but had neglected to get it done til late. Wait, what's this in my inbox.....under attack? For HOW MANY HOURS!?
I quickly shifted accounts, finding a group of ten battleships and stealth bombers at work on my POS guns. Panic began to set in, but I calmed myself, I had the high sec already scanned from yesterday, didn't I? Yep. A short warp later, and no wormhole. Rats. Well better start my scanning then. Over the course of my scanning, I ended up with four wormholes. I contemplated what to do.
Taking stock of the situation, I realized I had two PI alts and a scanning alt in the system. The scanning alt could not fly a cov ops, nor was there one in system. I had Onyxs on scan near what had to be the static to high sec. I decided I couldn't lose the scanner, so fitted out a magnate with the single afterburner I had, and prepared to try to bust the gatecamp.
By this time, I had already mentioned in alliance that our POS was under attack, and the response was amazing. We had been members of Talocan United for less than a day, I hadn't even gotten a bill for dues yet, and they mobilized a large fleet and waited for me to find where the high sec exit was. I was quite embarassed that I had allowed such a large invasion to go un-noticed, even in my secondary wormhole, and on top of that I did not have the tools to try to extricate ourselves of the situation.
By that time, I was warping the poor Magnate to it's fate, and hoping at least the pod would make it into range through the bubble.
I landed 18 km out from the wormhole and aligned and pushed the afterburner button as soon as the interference from warp dropped. I rocketed up to 800 m/s and managed to catch the hole campers off guard. At near 10k, they began to lock me, and near 7k the rounds began to fall, but barely was my speeding ship's shields were scratched when I was through!
I called out the system to the alliance and the fleet was moving. As I sat outside in high sec, metaphorically huffing and puffing, a number of ships jumped out. Orcas. Yep, they were trying to close the hole.
Bah, it'll take alot more than....uh oh, more Orcas. Maybe they can.
At that point, alliance and ally ships started showing up, and we all started bumping the huge industrial command ships away from the wormhole. Annoyed and obviously not getting in, they warped off. More alliance members showed up and took the fight inside, driving out the few enemies who were camping inside, ceding control of the WH to us.
And by "us", I mean loosely "us". All I had by then was Sgt Ramerik in a Magnate. :) But it was a FIERCE Magnate!
Back in the C2, I was blissfully unaware how I'd "forgotten" I had the B274 open the previous day, so it was long gone, and I had to scan to even get out of my home. And did I mention I was in a HURRY?
Finally I was on my way with a few choice ships, a Legion, Devoter and the Anathema. 22 jumps later, we arrived and headed in to help in any way we could.
The alliance had it pretty wrapped up by then, and were sieging their POS and holding negotiations. In the end, they came to an agreement that let them leave the wormhole, with the option to join the alliance.
Turns out this corp had lived in this Class 3 before, and had been run out by a massive Russian invasion. And then the bastard russians sold the wormhole to me. Oooh, dirty, I got some on me. Ick.
So after chatting with one of them, Greygal, at some length, a convoluted web of intrigue and stalking emerged. Apparently they had been watching me for 11 days prior to their assault. They had found the best spots to sit for my guns, they had scouted out my corp's characters and playtimes. They had followed me around high sec trying to get a spy in our C2.
And they should have won. I had no assets in system, no backups in place, none of the things I normally have set up to at least mitigate anything that happens. I was lax, and a trifle lazy. They used excellent intel opportunities, planned the operation down to the fine details. They were undone only by chance, and my lack of posting of late. Just a few factors changed, and they would have carried the day.
I was quite impressed by their tenacity, and hopefully we will cross paths and not lasers in the future.
The insaneness of the day carries on, and it's far too late now. I know details have been lost, and to be frank, forgotten.
I really only have our new alliance, Talocan United, and their allies in Transmission Lost, to thank for saving our wormhole. Without their quick reaction to the invasion, they would certainly have returned their home to their ownership. But I digress, for it is an interesting tale, and I hope I do not miss the details.
I have always thought there was something odd about the C3 wormhole that I bought it a kind of backroom deal last month. I expected to find drugs and dead bodies inside. But instead I found null sec K162s, busy high sec connections, and dangerous unknown corridors that led to places I dared not tread. But from all these came the greatest threat: knowledge that we lived inside.
Over the past month or so, I noted that we just seemed to have alot more traffic than was normal, that mayhaps someone was inside, opening holes and letting people in. I wasn't certain, but I was right all along.
I woke up late this morning, not knowing the attacking force was already at work, and in fact counting on my hours of normal play. I logged in, messed around with PI a bit, and did not bother checking the evemails that were, in retrospect, obviously sitting in my Notifications box, trying to tell me I needed to pay attention.
I logged off.
A few hours later, I decided to log in and do some scanning for the day, which I normally do when I get up, but had neglected to get it done til late. Wait, what's this in my inbox.....under attack? For HOW MANY HOURS!?
I quickly shifted accounts, finding a group of ten battleships and stealth bombers at work on my POS guns. Panic began to set in, but I calmed myself, I had the high sec already scanned from yesterday, didn't I? Yep. A short warp later, and no wormhole. Rats. Well better start my scanning then. Over the course of my scanning, I ended up with four wormholes. I contemplated what to do.
Taking stock of the situation, I realized I had two PI alts and a scanning alt in the system. The scanning alt could not fly a cov ops, nor was there one in system. I had Onyxs on scan near what had to be the static to high sec. I decided I couldn't lose the scanner, so fitted out a magnate with the single afterburner I had, and prepared to try to bust the gatecamp.
By this time, I had already mentioned in alliance that our POS was under attack, and the response was amazing. We had been members of Talocan United for less than a day, I hadn't even gotten a bill for dues yet, and they mobilized a large fleet and waited for me to find where the high sec exit was. I was quite embarassed that I had allowed such a large invasion to go un-noticed, even in my secondary wormhole, and on top of that I did not have the tools to try to extricate ourselves of the situation.
By that time, I was warping the poor Magnate to it's fate, and hoping at least the pod would make it into range through the bubble.
I landed 18 km out from the wormhole and aligned and pushed the afterburner button as soon as the interference from warp dropped. I rocketed up to 800 m/s and managed to catch the hole campers off guard. At near 10k, they began to lock me, and near 7k the rounds began to fall, but barely was my speeding ship's shields were scratched when I was through!
I called out the system to the alliance and the fleet was moving. As I sat outside in high sec, metaphorically huffing and puffing, a number of ships jumped out. Orcas. Yep, they were trying to close the hole.
Bah, it'll take alot more than....uh oh, more Orcas. Maybe they can.
At that point, alliance and ally ships started showing up, and we all started bumping the huge industrial command ships away from the wormhole. Annoyed and obviously not getting in, they warped off. More alliance members showed up and took the fight inside, driving out the few enemies who were camping inside, ceding control of the WH to us.
And by "us", I mean loosely "us". All I had by then was Sgt Ramerik in a Magnate. :) But it was a FIERCE Magnate!
Back in the C2, I was blissfully unaware how I'd "forgotten" I had the B274 open the previous day, so it was long gone, and I had to scan to even get out of my home. And did I mention I was in a HURRY?
Finally I was on my way with a few choice ships, a Legion, Devoter and the Anathema. 22 jumps later, we arrived and headed in to help in any way we could.
The alliance had it pretty wrapped up by then, and were sieging their POS and holding negotiations. In the end, they came to an agreement that let them leave the wormhole, with the option to join the alliance.
Turns out this corp had lived in this Class 3 before, and had been run out by a massive Russian invasion. And then the bastard russians sold the wormhole to me. Oooh, dirty, I got some on me. Ick.
So after chatting with one of them, Greygal, at some length, a convoluted web of intrigue and stalking emerged. Apparently they had been watching me for 11 days prior to their assault. They had found the best spots to sit for my guns, they had scouted out my corp's characters and playtimes. They had followed me around high sec trying to get a spy in our C2.
And they should have won. I had no assets in system, no backups in place, none of the things I normally have set up to at least mitigate anything that happens. I was lax, and a trifle lazy. They used excellent intel opportunities, planned the operation down to the fine details. They were undone only by chance, and my lack of posting of late. Just a few factors changed, and they would have carried the day.
I was quite impressed by their tenacity, and hopefully we will cross paths and not lasers in the future.
The insaneness of the day carries on, and it's far too late now. I know details have been lost, and to be frank, forgotten.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Sleeper Clearing Vengeance
After dragging through all the PI I could stand for one day, I and Soulofchaos opened up our C3 connection and found a sleepy system. According to DOTLAN at least. Warping around I found an Amarr Control Tower with a Buzzard and an industrial sitting inside the shield. It was undergunned for my tastes, with only 14 guns. Oh well, we're not equipped to go POS hunting. Yet. *insert evil laugh here*
So upon scanning for combat sites....ZERGOMGWTFBBQ!? Over 20 combat sites appeared on scan. What does this look like to any Mad Max Wormholer with decent ships and skills?
LUNCH BUFFET!!
It was time to go Return to Thunderdome on these sites. I hopped in my two Legions, popped in a second medium repper and a faction thermic resist plating to close the hole, and with Soul flying his Tengu and a cloaky Noctis, we headed in.
Two hours later and over 300 NPCs killed, we flew home with 553 million isk in loot!
Boy are they going to be mad when they log in......
But you can't complain if you don't run your combat sites and someone swoops in and takes them. You weren't there to defend them.
Speaking of that, we seem to have ten combat sites of our own sitting here....
So upon scanning for combat sites....ZERGOMGWTFBBQ!? Over 20 combat sites appeared on scan. What does this look like to any Mad Max Wormholer with decent ships and skills?
LUNCH BUFFET!!
It was time to go Return to Thunderdome on these sites. I hopped in my two Legions, popped in a second medium repper and a faction thermic resist plating to close the hole, and with Soul flying his Tengu and a cloaky Noctis, we headed in.
Two hours later and over 300 NPCs killed, we flew home with 553 million isk in loot!
Boy are they going to be mad when they log in......
But you can't complain if you don't run your combat sites and someone swoops in and takes them. You weren't there to defend them.
Speaking of that, we seem to have ten combat sites of our own sitting here....
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
Wierd Goings On
Well the past couple of days have been eventful, to say the least. I'll start off with our new PI numbers. I managed to get our current items out to Jita, the load consisted of 80 Wetware Mainframes, which was a couple days work and turned out to be worth 74 million isk. I also took out our 31 melted nanos and assorted sleeper loot. We haven't had very many grav site spawns lately, with only an Isolated Core Deposit being in our home right now, and we just can't seem to get to it.
I am pretty happy with the PI isk returns so far. Is it really more profit effective to just do P2s on all our characters instead of turning them into P4s? Does the new depletion system mitigate the ability to just turn out huge numbers of, say, precious metals? Honestly I don't know, and don't want to focus on the numbers. Another item that influenced my decision to go with P4s is the lowering of amounts that the buy orders took in for Precious Metals. Sure, this could have been a hiccup at the time I was doing some of the research, but when we began dumping larger numbers of excess POS fuel on the market, I actually saw an effect just from us, so hopefully doing P4s is going to mitigate those things.
Surely that's not all that's gone on! And you'd be right.
Yesterday I and Soulofchaos opened our static C3 and found a pristine C3 with no inhabidants. There were only 8 combat sites, so we decided to hit all of them. During this excursion, the Eve servers were experiencing huge issues with the DDOS attacks, and were acting quite squirelly. After completing two sites, I saw an Orca on scan and we started looking around for it since we knew there were no POSes in system. We actually found it at the wormhole leading to our home system.....wait what?
We were in scan range of the wormhole, never saw any scan probes, and the hole had only been open for 30 minutes or so. How did this guy get a bookmark for our hole? Things got stranger as we fired up the lasers. As the ship got into hull, I called a halt to our shooting and tried to communicate with the pilot. We didn't have any warp disruptors on any of our ships, so I had been using the Damnation with it's MWD to continuously bump the ship off it's warp out. Apparently I was not vigilant enough and it got away.
I headed back home and swapped out to the Anathema, which I have fitted with warp scrambler, webber and a single laser so it can catch other cov-ops ships, and combat probed the Orca down. We found him sitting at what appeared to be a former WH bookmark he had kept as a safe spot. Who was this guy? So we lit him up again, this time destroying the Orca and popping the pod. As soon as I moved in to peer into the wreck, the wreck and corpse disappeared and the Orca rebuilt itself and floated in space. It proved invulnerable, and unboardable. Again, this was coinciding with the attacks on the servers, and windows started no longer updating and many things went wrong with the game, so I'm sure this was part of that.
We gave up on the Orca and headed to bed.
This afternoon, we headed back in to the C3 to look around, and lo and behold the Orca was back. I quickly tried to find him without combat probes, and then an Anathema appeared. At first I thought it was some sort of server echo of my own ship, but it was named in the same fashion as his Orca, named to look as a planet on a quick observation. Both ships then disappeared and the Orca pilot logged out.
Hmmm.
I and Soul decided to get back to running the combat sites again, and I noted we had four hours remaining on the EoL wormhole home. As we warped around, the Orca appeared on scan AGAIN, and the nthe Anathema. However, no probes ever appeared. After another fruitless search, the ships disappered. I scanned down a C3 connection and the high sec, but he was nowhere to be seen. And then Soul informed me our way home had collapsed. That's odd. So we spent the next hour or so opening our high sec connection and heading home.
Later that evening, we decided to open our static C3 yet again, this time finding an inhabited system, with one large Amarr and a Small Gallente POS. The Amarr tower had ships floating in it but the Gallente tower was offline.
And it was Russian.
We got together a combat fleet and decided to take out the Ruskie POS. Suffice to say it turned out to be a learning experience for all of us involved, as both Freethinker and Jared Knight logged in to help shoot at it. Every now and then the neighbors would log in a single ship, once a Cheetah, the second time a Legion, and look to see what we were up to. Since we weren't attacking them, they left our fleet well enough alone. Two hours later the POS exploded and we helped ourselved to the few guns that were still there.
So we've got a new kill on the board, the Russian Spartans are down a POS they probably had already written off, but I'll rest well knowing there's a nice burned piece of metal with a red star on it floating out there now.
I am pretty happy with the PI isk returns so far. Is it really more profit effective to just do P2s on all our characters instead of turning them into P4s? Does the new depletion system mitigate the ability to just turn out huge numbers of, say, precious metals? Honestly I don't know, and don't want to focus on the numbers. Another item that influenced my decision to go with P4s is the lowering of amounts that the buy orders took in for Precious Metals. Sure, this could have been a hiccup at the time I was doing some of the research, but when we began dumping larger numbers of excess POS fuel on the market, I actually saw an effect just from us, so hopefully doing P4s is going to mitigate those things.
Surely that's not all that's gone on! And you'd be right.
Yesterday I and Soulofchaos opened our static C3 and found a pristine C3 with no inhabidants. There were only 8 combat sites, so we decided to hit all of them. During this excursion, the Eve servers were experiencing huge issues with the DDOS attacks, and were acting quite squirelly. After completing two sites, I saw an Orca on scan and we started looking around for it since we knew there were no POSes in system. We actually found it at the wormhole leading to our home system.....wait what?
We were in scan range of the wormhole, never saw any scan probes, and the hole had only been open for 30 minutes or so. How did this guy get a bookmark for our hole? Things got stranger as we fired up the lasers. As the ship got into hull, I called a halt to our shooting and tried to communicate with the pilot. We didn't have any warp disruptors on any of our ships, so I had been using the Damnation with it's MWD to continuously bump the ship off it's warp out. Apparently I was not vigilant enough and it got away.
I headed back home and swapped out to the Anathema, which I have fitted with warp scrambler, webber and a single laser so it can catch other cov-ops ships, and combat probed the Orca down. We found him sitting at what appeared to be a former WH bookmark he had kept as a safe spot. Who was this guy? So we lit him up again, this time destroying the Orca and popping the pod. As soon as I moved in to peer into the wreck, the wreck and corpse disappeared and the Orca rebuilt itself and floated in space. It proved invulnerable, and unboardable. Again, this was coinciding with the attacks on the servers, and windows started no longer updating and many things went wrong with the game, so I'm sure this was part of that.
We gave up on the Orca and headed to bed.
This afternoon, we headed back in to the C3 to look around, and lo and behold the Orca was back. I quickly tried to find him without combat probes, and then an Anathema appeared. At first I thought it was some sort of server echo of my own ship, but it was named in the same fashion as his Orca, named to look as a planet on a quick observation. Both ships then disappeared and the Orca pilot logged out.
Hmmm.
I and Soul decided to get back to running the combat sites again, and I noted we had four hours remaining on the EoL wormhole home. As we warped around, the Orca appeared on scan AGAIN, and the nthe Anathema. However, no probes ever appeared. After another fruitless search, the ships disappered. I scanned down a C3 connection and the high sec, but he was nowhere to be seen. And then Soul informed me our way home had collapsed. That's odd. So we spent the next hour or so opening our high sec connection and heading home.
Later that evening, we decided to open our static C3 yet again, this time finding an inhabited system, with one large Amarr and a Small Gallente POS. The Amarr tower had ships floating in it but the Gallente tower was offline.
And it was Russian.
We got together a combat fleet and decided to take out the Ruskie POS. Suffice to say it turned out to be a learning experience for all of us involved, as both Freethinker and Jared Knight logged in to help shoot at it. Every now and then the neighbors would log in a single ship, once a Cheetah, the second time a Legion, and look to see what we were up to. Since we weren't attacking them, they left our fleet well enough alone. Two hours later the POS exploded and we helped ourselved to the few guns that were still there.
So we've got a new kill on the board, the Russian Spartans are down a POS they probably had already written off, but I'll rest well knowing there's a nice burned piece of metal with a red star on it floating out there now.
Monday, June 13, 2011
Planetary Interaction Take Two
It looks like I'm getting about 20 Wetware Mainframes a day, so I'll be replacing a couple Barren planets over to Wetware Mainframe production as I can sustain the PI input to them. If I could get up to 50 a day I'd be extremely happy with around 50 mil a day passive income!
Ran 11 combat sites yesterday with both Legions supported by nine Firbolg fighters. Everything dies pretty quick to that amount of firepower. I salvaged 19 nanos from it all, so that's not bad. I shoot for 2 a site, so I was pretty much on target for my expectations. Less and I'mm annoyed at the RNG gods. :P
Plan on running our two radar sites today. It's been AGES, probably near a year, since we've seen a Talocan ship. Here's hoping I get one.
Ran 11 combat sites yesterday with both Legions supported by nine Firbolg fighters. Everything dies pretty quick to that amount of firepower. I salvaged 19 nanos from it all, so that's not bad. I shoot for 2 a site, so I was pretty much on target for my expectations. Less and I'mm annoyed at the RNG gods. :P
Plan on running our two radar sites today. It's been AGES, probably near a year, since we've seen a Talocan ship. Here's hoping I get one.
Friday, June 10, 2011
PI Production and Corp Letters
I've been pretty busy with setting up PI in our new C3, only doing P2 products of all types for now in preparation for more serious production down the road. I've also set up a Wetware Mainframe supply chain in our C2, having it running now. Logistics are fun!
I made a Jita run today, to both sell and pick up the last needed mexallon needed for our Revelation and POS fuel. I sent out the following corp mail to our members to keep them apprised of what's going on.
Hopefully more time will materialize and we can get back to C3 raiding soon.
I made a Jita run today, to both sell and pick up the last needed mexallon needed for our Revelation and POS fuel. I sent out the following corp mail to our members to keep them apprised of what's going on.
I made a Jita run today, and for the first time PI products made up most of the sellable items! This was mostly, of course, due to our lack of grav sites and short time since our last Jita sell run, but normally PI products are only a slight blip on our ISK income.
I have begun PI production on Wetware Mainframes, with four produced so far. If for some reason, you are wondering which PI products to make to either make some decent ISK or to help out with corp production, I specifically need PROTIENS, BACTERIA, and BIOFUELS. This is due to us only having one Temperate planet, and most of my PI producers were set up to produce POS fuels. If you are looking to make quick cash or cash for the corp, precious metals are the best P2 product for straight sale. A large majority of the PI isk we just made was from precious metals.
If anyone wants to specifically help with Wetware Mainframe production, I am behind in Biotech Research Reports and Cryoprotectant Solution, thanks to Freethinker Zun pounding out Supercomputers. I currently only have a single planet with a single High Tech facility making the wetwares, and plan on bringing more online as we have the capacity to supply.
Jared Knight, please find the Nighthawk currently floating in the POS shield for you. There are Shield Gang Links in the Modules hangar. If anyone else wants to request a ship, please let me know, and I'll fit it in with our next Jita sale.
In other corp news, the capital components required for our Revelation are almost complete, and I should have production started on the ship by next week. In actual minerals i will have cost 1.273 bil. Actual isk cost to the corp was probably near 300-400 mil in trit, pyerite and mexallon. Also in production are a set of Fighters to go with the Archon carrier.
Next capital ship planned for is the Gallente Moros Dreadnought. That will most likely conclude our cap ship production for this hole for the forseeable future, as really any more than this is fairly insane!
Thanks for flying with Heretical Innovations!
Hopefully more time will materialize and we can get back to C3 raiding soon.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
The Visitor
We had an interesting day yesterday, full of wormhole closings, a few unexplainable jumps, and a C2 with a Russian medium POS with only six guns. The system had 17 combat sites in it and no activity on the NPC side of things. It appeared someone had jumped into this system, then out to ours through their static. So we managed to battle through about 10 of the sites, think hard about attacking the POS for fun, and decided to head home and to bed.
So today, we had more unexplained jumps. With the recent borking of scanning and bookmarks, scanning the wormhole and everything is a complete PITA. So I opened both statics and closed them. With that, we were ready to get going on our last grav site, a Ordinary Perimeter Deposit. Shortly after starting it, I had to head out, and the guys kept at it. I returned an hour later, saying hi....and asking who's Anathema that was on DSCAN? It wasn't one of ours, and most likely was the culprit for all the unexplained jumps, as the system was closed. All the miners jumped into combat ships and we scoured the system looking for the cloaker, and I decided to attempt to re-close the wormholes, just in case.
Both appeared to have not been warped to, so we tried to close them, only succeeding in critting BOTH of them. Damn +10% mass crap. And then the Anathema logged in again. We had ships at both statics, and I was in our Anathema scanning. I verified no other wormholes, but he disappeared before I could get the combat probes on him.
He made appearances three or four more times, only appeared for a moment, but never dropping any probes. His ship name was Cosmic Anomaly, with a symbol before the name. I scanned down all our ships and anomalies and waited for him to appear back into my combat probes. But he never did.
My theory is that he was only logging in, checking DSCAN, and logging immediately off. It looks like he had ample time to get out of the wormhole earlier today when we all weren't on, but didn't take the chance. So could he be casing us? Checking the times we're logged in to see what we're logged in on? /sigh Oh well, it's wormhole space, I'm supposed to be super paranoid.
I guess we'll find out if we're attacked. I just fit the Archon for remote repping, all the guns and ECM I can squeeze out of the power grid are online, which is quite a few. We'll pay close attention for awhile and see if our statics are disappearing.
So today, we had more unexplained jumps. With the recent borking of scanning and bookmarks, scanning the wormhole and everything is a complete PITA. So I opened both statics and closed them. With that, we were ready to get going on our last grav site, a Ordinary Perimeter Deposit. Shortly after starting it, I had to head out, and the guys kept at it. I returned an hour later, saying hi....and asking who's Anathema that was on DSCAN? It wasn't one of ours, and most likely was the culprit for all the unexplained jumps, as the system was closed. All the miners jumped into combat ships and we scoured the system looking for the cloaker, and I decided to attempt to re-close the wormholes, just in case.
Both appeared to have not been warped to, so we tried to close them, only succeeding in critting BOTH of them. Damn +10% mass crap. And then the Anathema logged in again. We had ships at both statics, and I was in our Anathema scanning. I verified no other wormholes, but he disappeared before I could get the combat probes on him.
He made appearances three or four more times, only appeared for a moment, but never dropping any probes. His ship name was Cosmic Anomaly, with a symbol before the name. I scanned down all our ships and anomalies and waited for him to appear back into my combat probes. But he never did.
My theory is that he was only logging in, checking DSCAN, and logging immediately off. It looks like he had ample time to get out of the wormhole earlier today when we all weren't on, but didn't take the chance. So could he be casing us? Checking the times we're logged in to see what we're logged in on? /sigh Oh well, it's wormhole space, I'm supposed to be super paranoid.
I guess we'll find out if we're attacked. I just fit the Archon for remote repping, all the guns and ECM I can squeeze out of the power grid are online, which is quite a few. We'll pay close attention for awhile and see if our statics are disappearing.
Monday, May 30, 2011
Wormhole Topic of the Week: PvE Ship Fits and How They Work!
I do not claim to be an expert on ship fits, or even on most ships. What follows is my experiences with ship fits, mostly Amarr and lasers, that work within the confines of wormhole space.
Before I ever moved into wormholes, I ran level 4 missions in battleships. I had an active armor tank and the mission rats lined up to be killed, and never switched targets. I was not prepared to deal with sleepers.
The first major large difference between fighting Sleepers and mission rats are damage types. In missions, you can look up the damage types of which faction your mission is against and fit accordingly. Sleepers aren't so easy to deal with. They deal "omni" damage, meaning all types. If you have a "resist hole" meaning one of your resists is alot lower than the others, they will exploit this. You can have 80s in all your resists, and 50 in one, then that's what the sleepers will hit you with.
Your ship type is also going to heavily influence your ability to add more DPS over tank, depending on your starting resists. T1 Battlecruisers are going to need to mount some serious resist increasing modules to be able to stick around in Class 2 sites. Base starting resists are why T2 cruisers and T3 cruisers are so much better at survivability in wormholes. They are much easier to fit for more DPS because they already start with good resists which mean less holes to plug. A couple Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane 2s and you're mostly good to go. Plug in a third resist specific module for the harder sites or Class 3s. More DPS also means less incoming DPS because you can whittle down the ships shooting at you faster.
Generally, in the Class 2 hole, looking at it from a perspective of soloing the sites, I would not take lower than 60% in all resists. I'd prefer over 70s in everything. But, depending on your ship, you'll end up with something probably lower than the others, that's just the way it goes. Having 4 in all your resist related skills is very reccomended. Every resist percentage counts.
Another aspect to your tank is your reliance on either an active or passively tanked fit. With an active tank, you are using hardeners that draw on your ships capacitor supply to boost your resists. If you have excellent skills for both capacitor power and in your chosen tanking resist skills, you can certainly make an active tank work. You're probably also in a Tengu or a Legion with those kind of skills. For T2 or T1 ships, passive tank is, imo, the way to go. Why? Because with recent changes to Sleeper AI, Sleepers now use energy neutrailizers. Even with fives in all your energy skills, a single neuting Sleeper BS can drag your cap down to dangerous levels fairly quickly. If you're solo, this can be a death sentence as you wildly try to align to the nearest planet to get away. Throw in a sleeper frig webbing you, and you could be pod-bound very shortly.
Because of this, I rely on a passive tank, which draws no cap to boost my resists, and both, for me, a Damage Control 2 and Medium Armor Repairer 2. Along with a single Imperial Navy EANM II, my resists are 69/60/77/88 for armor. Along with using a "speed tank", which I will discuss in the next paragraph, my PvE Legion can tank entire C2 Radar site spawns and kill them before it is in any danger. Will an Advanced Sleeper BS break this tank? Yes, if it survives for long enough, this tank will fail, both from incoming DPS and because of the Sleeper neuting. When I do Class 3 combat sites, I replace one of my three Heat Sink 2s with a thermic resist module, another with a second EANM 2, and the third with a second Medium Armor Repper 2. Then the only danger to the Legion is losing it's speedtank.
In essence, speedtanking adds to the amount of incoming DPS you can manage. The faster you can go, without using a MWD, the better your speedtank is. Using this in direct correlation with managing your transversal(you'll have to look that one up, it's got videos all it's own for explanation) allows you to significantly increase your tanking ability by negating some of the incoming damage.
A Zealot with an AB II and good Navigation skills can get up to the mid 500s, while a Legion with the same can do mid 600s on speed.
The speedtank and transversal is what allows solo capsuleers to complete C2-C3 sites alone. The instant loss of the speedtank, through sleeper webbing, puts you in immediate danger and webbing frigates should be killed immediately, except where they are the remaining trigger. Triggering the next wave before you are ready for it can result in the inability to continue the site due to complete tank failure upon warp-in. Example, if you warp into a Sleeper Data Sanctuary, destroy the trigger and do not destroy the three Sirius guns, you will be webbed in place by the frigates and the three sentry guns and the battleship from the second wave will crush your tank.
Which leads to the next suggestion, Download Unknown's Wormhole Tool. Knowing the triggers on the different combat sites is crucial to your ability to take the incoming DPS. You only want to deal with as little DPS as possible if you are solo. If you're in a giant fleet, go ahead and shoot it all.
So, in the end, as long as your ship is:
Cap Stable
Resists over 60%
Using a AB to speedtank OR
Using a passive shield regen fit
You should be fine doing Class 2 combat sites solo. If your aim is to do Class 3 and above, you need to increase your tank, as I did by adding more resists and more repair amount, or by adding group mates to deal more DPS. It's quite hard to solo Class 3 sites, but it can be done. The amount of risk it involves is up to you to decide what is acceptable.
Before I ever moved into wormholes, I ran level 4 missions in battleships. I had an active armor tank and the mission rats lined up to be killed, and never switched targets. I was not prepared to deal with sleepers.
The first major large difference between fighting Sleepers and mission rats are damage types. In missions, you can look up the damage types of which faction your mission is against and fit accordingly. Sleepers aren't so easy to deal with. They deal "omni" damage, meaning all types. If you have a "resist hole" meaning one of your resists is alot lower than the others, they will exploit this. You can have 80s in all your resists, and 50 in one, then that's what the sleepers will hit you with.
Your ship type is also going to heavily influence your ability to add more DPS over tank, depending on your starting resists. T1 Battlecruisers are going to need to mount some serious resist increasing modules to be able to stick around in Class 2 sites. Base starting resists are why T2 cruisers and T3 cruisers are so much better at survivability in wormholes. They are much easier to fit for more DPS because they already start with good resists which mean less holes to plug. A couple Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane 2s and you're mostly good to go. Plug in a third resist specific module for the harder sites or Class 3s. More DPS also means less incoming DPS because you can whittle down the ships shooting at you faster.
Generally, in the Class 2 hole, looking at it from a perspective of soloing the sites, I would not take lower than 60% in all resists. I'd prefer over 70s in everything. But, depending on your ship, you'll end up with something probably lower than the others, that's just the way it goes. Having 4 in all your resist related skills is very reccomended. Every resist percentage counts.
Another aspect to your tank is your reliance on either an active or passively tanked fit. With an active tank, you are using hardeners that draw on your ships capacitor supply to boost your resists. If you have excellent skills for both capacitor power and in your chosen tanking resist skills, you can certainly make an active tank work. You're probably also in a Tengu or a Legion with those kind of skills. For T2 or T1 ships, passive tank is, imo, the way to go. Why? Because with recent changes to Sleeper AI, Sleepers now use energy neutrailizers. Even with fives in all your energy skills, a single neuting Sleeper BS can drag your cap down to dangerous levels fairly quickly. If you're solo, this can be a death sentence as you wildly try to align to the nearest planet to get away. Throw in a sleeper frig webbing you, and you could be pod-bound very shortly.
Because of this, I rely on a passive tank, which draws no cap to boost my resists, and both, for me, a Damage Control 2 and Medium Armor Repairer 2. Along with a single Imperial Navy EANM II, my resists are 69/60/77/88 for armor. Along with using a "speed tank", which I will discuss in the next paragraph, my PvE Legion can tank entire C2 Radar site spawns and kill them before it is in any danger. Will an Advanced Sleeper BS break this tank? Yes, if it survives for long enough, this tank will fail, both from incoming DPS and because of the Sleeper neuting. When I do Class 3 combat sites, I replace one of my three Heat Sink 2s with a thermic resist module, another with a second EANM 2, and the third with a second Medium Armor Repper 2. Then the only danger to the Legion is losing it's speedtank.
Speed tanking is a form of tanking (increasing the survivability of your ship), that relies on you moving very quickly. This allows you to outrun the explosions of missiles and dodge direct weapons (lasers, hybrids and projectiles) by 'overloading' thier tracking speed, I.E moving so quickly that the turret can't move fast enough to point at you
Read more: http://www.bukisa.com/articles/217446_eve-online-speed-tanking-guide#ixzz1Nsbx1Yex
In essence, speedtanking adds to the amount of incoming DPS you can manage. The faster you can go, without using a MWD, the better your speedtank is. Using this in direct correlation with managing your transversal(you'll have to look that one up, it's got videos all it's own for explanation) allows you to significantly increase your tanking ability by negating some of the incoming damage.
A Zealot with an AB II and good Navigation skills can get up to the mid 500s, while a Legion with the same can do mid 600s on speed.
The speedtank and transversal is what allows solo capsuleers to complete C2-C3 sites alone. The instant loss of the speedtank, through sleeper webbing, puts you in immediate danger and webbing frigates should be killed immediately, except where they are the remaining trigger. Triggering the next wave before you are ready for it can result in the inability to continue the site due to complete tank failure upon warp-in. Example, if you warp into a Sleeper Data Sanctuary, destroy the trigger and do not destroy the three Sirius guns, you will be webbed in place by the frigates and the three sentry guns and the battleship from the second wave will crush your tank.
Which leads to the next suggestion, Download Unknown's Wormhole Tool. Knowing the triggers on the different combat sites is crucial to your ability to take the incoming DPS. You only want to deal with as little DPS as possible if you are solo. If you're in a giant fleet, go ahead and shoot it all.
So, in the end, as long as your ship is:
Cap Stable
Resists over 60%
Using a AB to speedtank OR
Using a passive shield regen fit
You should be fine doing Class 2 combat sites solo. If your aim is to do Class 3 and above, you need to increase your tank, as I did by adding more resists and more repair amount, or by adding group mates to deal more DPS. It's quite hard to solo Class 3 sites, but it can be done. The amount of risk it involves is up to you to decide what is acceptable.
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Mining Ops & Wormhole Maintenence
We added another member to the corp this past week. A friend of Freethinker and Jared's; Raphid. They spent much of this week working an Average Frontier site, which we all hate and despise, but it's still ore.
So we were very happy when two Ordinary Perimeter Deposits spawned! We planned and executed a mining op consisting of ten hulks, two Itty 5s and the Rorqual. We went full bore at it for a few hours and emptied the site of pretty much all the ore worth taking home. We're hoping it will spawn a decent mega roid and we'll get to mine that. Everyone had a good time, with me getting a bit frazzled with running three Hulks, both haulers, and the Rorq at the same time. That's alot of hauling!
So we shut it all down, and went our seperate ways, til near after midnight my time when I noticed jumps on DOTLAN. I had forgot I had accidentally opened a D382 sometime earlier while looking for the high sec exit. Loggin in I caught a Helios as it threw out probes and started scanning.
Well crap.
So I jumped in some combat ships, the Legion, Devoter, pulled out the Thanatos and assigned some fighters. Warped around looking for the Helios, hoping to bump into him, while I closed the D382 with dual Orcas. After that, he was still scanning.
Oh, I hadn't scanned the new B274 back down, guess I should do that. As I did that, I noticed the scan probes were clustered near it. So I jumped back into the Legion and warped the gang over to it and threw the bubble up as soon as I landed. Almost right after it went up, the Helios de-cloaked . I quickly locked him up and blew him away. His pod hung in space, not moving. I locked him up, but stayed my trigger finger.
"Nice kill. Can I leave with my pod?" he asked. I was quite surprised, and started to respond that that was the reason I hadn't killed him. As I hit enter he jumped out and quickly convoed me. His name was Sor'Val, and he thanked me for not podding him. He said he was surprised. I told him it was obvious he wasn't trying to find my sites and just looking for a way out, and he said yes, that's what he was doing. I figured the loss of ship for the trespass was quite enough.
So o/ to Sor'Val. Next we meet, say hi!
Oh, and the Archon is finished! My training to fly it finally lets me at the controls tomorrow! Support skills for another month. :P
So we were very happy when two Ordinary Perimeter Deposits spawned! We planned and executed a mining op consisting of ten hulks, two Itty 5s and the Rorqual. We went full bore at it for a few hours and emptied the site of pretty much all the ore worth taking home. We're hoping it will spawn a decent mega roid and we'll get to mine that. Everyone had a good time, with me getting a bit frazzled with running three Hulks, both haulers, and the Rorq at the same time. That's alot of hauling!
So we shut it all down, and went our seperate ways, til near after midnight my time when I noticed jumps on DOTLAN. I had forgot I had accidentally opened a D382 sometime earlier while looking for the high sec exit. Loggin in I caught a Helios as it threw out probes and started scanning.
Well crap.
So I jumped in some combat ships, the Legion, Devoter, pulled out the Thanatos and assigned some fighters. Warped around looking for the Helios, hoping to bump into him, while I closed the D382 with dual Orcas. After that, he was still scanning.
Oh, I hadn't scanned the new B274 back down, guess I should do that. As I did that, I noticed the scan probes were clustered near it. So I jumped back into the Legion and warped the gang over to it and threw the bubble up as soon as I landed. Almost right after it went up, the Helios de-cloaked . I quickly locked him up and blew him away. His pod hung in space, not moving. I locked him up, but stayed my trigger finger.
"Nice kill. Can I leave with my pod?" he asked. I was quite surprised, and started to respond that that was the reason I hadn't killed him. As I hit enter he jumped out and quickly convoed me. His name was Sor'Val, and he thanked me for not podding him. He said he was surprised. I told him it was obvious he wasn't trying to find my sites and just looking for a way out, and he said yes, that's what he was doing. I figured the loss of ship for the trespass was quite enough.
So o/ to Sor'Val. Next we meet, say hi!
Oh, and the Archon is finished! My training to fly it finally lets me at the controls tomorrow! Support skills for another month. :P
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Wormhole Planetary Interaction: Take One
Well, up til now all I've done PI-wise in my wormholes has been POS fuels only. With their prices absolutely in the tank,(doing the numbers, selling mechanical parts for 5500 is literally bleeding isk as opposed to selling P2s) I decided to look into P4 products that we can make inside Pretoria. We have Nano Factories, Organic Mortars, and Wetware Mainframes.
Looking over the prices, Wetwares are going for almost 1 mil each, so I've decided to give them a shot. To that end, I set up on the only Temperate planet we have and started production of the few materials I don't produce from POS fuel production: Bacteria, Biofuels, and Proteins.
Of course there's six new P3 products I don't currently make, so these go on another planet, and another Barren gets to be the P3-P4 production center.
Now hopefully my POS fuel production won't suffer, but the prices are so stupid low I can afford to just start buying the crap, honestly.
How much of a profit are my fellow wormhole industrialists making out there on PI? What have you found to be the most profitable vs time consumed?
Looking over the prices, Wetwares are going for almost 1 mil each, so I've decided to give them a shot. To that end, I set up on the only Temperate planet we have and started production of the few materials I don't produce from POS fuel production: Bacteria, Biofuels, and Proteins.
Of course there's six new P3 products I don't currently make, so these go on another planet, and another Barren gets to be the P3-P4 production center.
Now hopefully my POS fuel production won't suffer, but the prices are so stupid low I can afford to just start buying the crap, honestly.
How much of a profit are my fellow wormhole industrialists making out there on PI? What have you found to be the most profitable vs time consumed?
Thursday, May 19, 2011
New Gravimetric Mechanics?
I know I posted about this last week, along with the GM response, about the giant spod roid we encountered that subsequently disappeared. Well, we warped into a grav site this week and were happily mining our way down the list when we ran into a 35k bistot!
We are 100% sure we opened this site and it had not gone through a downtime. We've seen this a few times now, and this is the third I've documented. The GM claimed that the site mechanics haven't changed, but I've been doing grav sites for a long time now, and this is the only consistant time I've seen these roids occur with the site spawn.
Anyone else out there running into these yet? The bistot was not any bigger in actual size than the rest, so the only way we knew it was alot bigger was with a survey scanner.
We are 100% sure we opened this site and it had not gone through a downtime. We've seen this a few times now, and this is the third I've documented. The GM claimed that the site mechanics haven't changed, but I've been doing grav sites for a long time now, and this is the only consistant time I've seen these roids occur with the site spawn.
Anyone else out there running into these yet? The bistot was not any bigger in actual size than the rest, so the only way we knew it was alot bigger was with a survey scanner.
Wednesday, May 18, 2011
Wormhole Topic of the Week: Rorquals!
Over the past few months, I've gotten some questions about wormhole Rorquals. Wether it's worth it to build them, how to build them, how to use them etc etc. I, personally, have built two. So after Darth Normski mentioned I should write one, it seemed like a good topic for this week.
What Is A Rorqual You Ask?
The Rorqual. Ever since it was on the drawing board I've dreamed about owning and flying one. Big Mama Ore. The road to owning one in a wormhole you can't jump it in is very long and hard, frought with extremely hard work and peril. But at the end, is it worth it? Hell yes it is! Straight off the top you will earn 20-25% more for your minerals as opposed to refining them in the Intensive Refining Array.
A couple questions a corp should ask about wether it should decide to build a Rorqual or not. First would be, how long does the corp plan on staying in the wormhole? Building a Rorq can be a billion isk investment into the hole you're living in, and it can't be removed, only self destructed.(unless you live in a C5-6, in which case you're probably not reading blogs like this) You should plan on staying for 3-6 months to completely recoup your Rorq investment. If you're just hole jumping around, doing the nomad lifestyle, then this is not the choice for you.
Second question would be wether your corp can handle the logistics of building something larger than even a Dreadnought. The Rorqual takes MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of high sec minerals like tritanium and pyerite that you will never be able to mine out of your wormhole. It must come from outside. I already made my arguements about the two ways to build carriers, and they both apply here. Wether you bring the minerals inside and produce the components inside, or you build them outside and bring in components only, that's your decision. But is your corp up to it?
Why Should I Own One In A Wormhole?
So what does the Rorqual do to make it so indispensible to some wormhole types? It's foremost job is compressing ore. It does this by using a module called an Industrial Core module. While this core is turned on, the Rorqual can be used to compress ore.
A number of things about the Industrial Core. It's heavy, weighing in at 4k m3. As with all capital ship modules, be prepared for that. Also, make sure you know that it requires it's own skills on top of those required to fly the Rorqual, so just being able to fly the ship will not make you an ore compressing master of minerals. Requiring Mass Production V, Advanced Mass Production IV, this is some serious training in places your Rorqual pilot may not already be proficient, I know mine wasn't because you don't want your best miner flying this ship. He's going to spend all his time sitting at the POS, boosting and compressing. It really is best left to an alt or a professional Orca pilot.
When activated, the Industrial Core puts the Rorqual into "Siege Mode". It transforms the Rorqual into a non-moveable ore compression base for the duration of the cycle. Each cycle lasts five minutes. Notice I said "non-moveable". The Rorqual cannot move, to jump, to warp, to even ignite it's subspace engines, while in deployed mode. This, along with it being a massive slow cap ship, are the reasons to never take the Rorqual into your mining sites.
And when you activate the core, the Rorq "transforms", basically sitting up in a vertical position, switching it's storage bays and generally looking like an old toy I used to have from the Mega Force line. Loved those things.
The Industrial Core requires fuel, heavy water in the Rorq's case. You have the capacity to store 25k of heavy water in it's fuel bay. This will get you through 3 hours of boosting or compression time.
Initiating the Industrial Core also applies more mining bonuses for your boosted squad. With the core not engaged, cycle times with just the mining gang links going are 139.5 seconds and 22.593 range. This is on a character with Capital Industrial Command Ships IV. V takes a ridiculous 68 days 20 hours, so that's not on my training schedule.
With the Industrial Core engaged, the cycle time drops to 123.30 seconds and a range of 25.631. So it can save you alot of extra time with the core going, depending on how many mining lasers you are actually boosting.
To actually compress ore, you must have the Compression BPOs. I store mine inside the Rorq. You want four for each type of ore you'll be compressing, since the Rorq has only four production lines available. Ore to be compressed goes into the Rorq cargo bay. The more cargo room you have, the more ore you can compress at once. That is why I cargo rigged it and it has all expander IIs in the lows, giving me 126k of cargo room, which only allows me to do 7k arkonor, or seven "units" of compressed ark at a time. Each ore varies, so you'll have to check the BPOs to find out what the compression size actually is.
So with the core running, you fill your cargo with the ore you want to compress, right click your BPO and act like you're going to manufacture something from the BPO, which you are. Try to get the max amount of runs for the type of ore you have and it then takes five minutes to run the production. Run all four if you can, because you're eating heavy water to do this.
After you're done you can transport all your compressed ore out into k-space to your favorite refining station and refine it for 100%, or as good as you can get it. Generally we aren't picky and just hit the closest for a 5% tax loss. Compressed ore refines just like normal ore.
Doesn't The Rorqual Have Tractor Bonuses And Huge Storage?
Why yes, yes it does. It also aligns like an Endorian moon trying to get out of the Death Star's path.
Hint: it didn't make it.
So what's the proper way to use a Rorqual? It has tractor bonuses and that huge cargo bay, right? It can use mining drones and keep an entire mining fleet going. So should it be in the field? Short answer, hell no.
Long answer, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING GET BACK INSIDE THE FORCEFIELD NOW OMGWTFBBQ!
This is assuming you're in a wormhole, and you don't have a corp with 20+ members online at all times. If you can guard the miners full time, then sure! Go ahead and put the cap ship in the belt. As long as you are prepared to lose it, do what you wish with it.
If you're like me and mine, you don't have that combat fleet to keep the Rorq safe. So it's safety overrides all bonuses we may have for it being in the field. As such, we treat it like a big Orca. It stays in the POS force field at ALL times. At first, I tried looking up "Battle Rorqual" fits and such, and just found out if the Rorq engages anyone, it's most likely dead. It's not worth building another one to be lazy with this one.
To recap: The Rorqual does not leave the force field!
Logistics: Does Your Corp Have Them?
What does it take to build one of these suckers? To start, it needs everything that carrier I built needs. An X-Large Ship Assembly Array, Component Assembly Array if you're building the cap ship parts inside the wormhole, and TONS of minerals.
Here's what it takes in minerals:
It takes at ME4:
123 mil tritanium
28 mil pyerite
10 mil mexallon
462k nocxium
83k zydrine
36k megacyte
According to Eve Smith, it takes a current price of 1.3 BIL in minerals to make a Rorq. Over 600 mil of that is in high sec minerals that you cannot mine in sufficient quantities inside your wormhole. This entire thought process also applies to dreadnoughts you wish to make.
So, you need to be comfortable with the fact that you may possibly lose a 1.3 bil cap ship if you get invaded. For me, it's more of a question if I can pay for the Rorq in skills and experiences before I may be forcibly removed. So of course my answer was yes.
Everyone is going to come to their own conclusions on this subject, and a Rorq isn't for everyone. I probably wouldn't build one in a C1, but some people have and will do so again. If you've got deep roots in a system, no reason to not make them deeper.
What Is A Rorqual You Ask?
The Rorqual. Ever since it was on the drawing board I've dreamed about owning and flying one. Big Mama Ore. The road to owning one in a wormhole you can't jump it in is very long and hard, frought with extremely hard work and peril. But at the end, is it worth it? Hell yes it is! Straight off the top you will earn 20-25% more for your minerals as opposed to refining them in the Intensive Refining Array.
A couple questions a corp should ask about wether it should decide to build a Rorqual or not. First would be, how long does the corp plan on staying in the wormhole? Building a Rorq can be a billion isk investment into the hole you're living in, and it can't be removed, only self destructed.(unless you live in a C5-6, in which case you're probably not reading blogs like this) You should plan on staying for 3-6 months to completely recoup your Rorq investment. If you're just hole jumping around, doing the nomad lifestyle, then this is not the choice for you.
Second question would be wether your corp can handle the logistics of building something larger than even a Dreadnought. The Rorqual takes MILLIONS upon MILLIONS of high sec minerals like tritanium and pyerite that you will never be able to mine out of your wormhole. It must come from outside. I already made my arguements about the two ways to build carriers, and they both apply here. Wether you bring the minerals inside and produce the components inside, or you build them outside and bring in components only, that's your decision. But is your corp up to it?
Why Should I Own One In A Wormhole?
So what does the Rorqual do to make it so indispensible to some wormhole types? It's foremost job is compressing ore. It does this by using a module called an Industrial Core module. While this core is turned on, the Rorqual can be used to compress ore.
A number of things about the Industrial Core. It's heavy, weighing in at 4k m3. As with all capital ship modules, be prepared for that. Also, make sure you know that it requires it's own skills on top of those required to fly the Rorqual, so just being able to fly the ship will not make you an ore compressing master of minerals. Requiring Mass Production V, Advanced Mass Production IV, this is some serious training in places your Rorqual pilot may not already be proficient, I know mine wasn't because you don't want your best miner flying this ship. He's going to spend all his time sitting at the POS, boosting and compressing. It really is best left to an alt or a professional Orca pilot.
When activated, the Industrial Core puts the Rorqual into "Siege Mode". It transforms the Rorqual into a non-moveable ore compression base for the duration of the cycle. Each cycle lasts five minutes. Notice I said "non-moveable". The Rorqual cannot move, to jump, to warp, to even ignite it's subspace engines, while in deployed mode. This, along with it being a massive slow cap ship, are the reasons to never take the Rorqual into your mining sites.
And when you activate the core, the Rorq "transforms", basically sitting up in a vertical position, switching it's storage bays and generally looking like an old toy I used to have from the Mega Force line. Loved those things.
The Industrial Core requires fuel, heavy water in the Rorq's case. You have the capacity to store 25k of heavy water in it's fuel bay. This will get you through 3 hours of boosting or compression time.
Initiating the Industrial Core also applies more mining bonuses for your boosted squad. With the core not engaged, cycle times with just the mining gang links going are 139.5 seconds and 22.593 range. This is on a character with Capital Industrial Command Ships IV. V takes a ridiculous 68 days 20 hours, so that's not on my training schedule.
With the Industrial Core engaged, the cycle time drops to 123.30 seconds and a range of 25.631. So it can save you alot of extra time with the core going, depending on how many mining lasers you are actually boosting.
To actually compress ore, you must have the Compression BPOs. I store mine inside the Rorq. You want four for each type of ore you'll be compressing, since the Rorq has only four production lines available. Ore to be compressed goes into the Rorq cargo bay. The more cargo room you have, the more ore you can compress at once. That is why I cargo rigged it and it has all expander IIs in the lows, giving me 126k of cargo room, which only allows me to do 7k arkonor, or seven "units" of compressed ark at a time. Each ore varies, so you'll have to check the BPOs to find out what the compression size actually is.
So with the core running, you fill your cargo with the ore you want to compress, right click your BPO and act like you're going to manufacture something from the BPO, which you are. Try to get the max amount of runs for the type of ore you have and it then takes five minutes to run the production. Run all four if you can, because you're eating heavy water to do this.
After you're done you can transport all your compressed ore out into k-space to your favorite refining station and refine it for 100%, or as good as you can get it. Generally we aren't picky and just hit the closest for a 5% tax loss. Compressed ore refines just like normal ore.
Doesn't The Rorqual Have Tractor Bonuses And Huge Storage?
Why yes, yes it does. It also aligns like an Endorian moon trying to get out of the Death Star's path.
Hint: it didn't make it.
So what's the proper way to use a Rorqual? It has tractor bonuses and that huge cargo bay, right? It can use mining drones and keep an entire mining fleet going. So should it be in the field? Short answer, hell no.
Long answer, WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING GET BACK INSIDE THE FORCEFIELD NOW OMGWTFBBQ!
This is assuming you're in a wormhole, and you don't have a corp with 20+ members online at all times. If you can guard the miners full time, then sure! Go ahead and put the cap ship in the belt. As long as you are prepared to lose it, do what you wish with it.
If you're like me and mine, you don't have that combat fleet to keep the Rorq safe. So it's safety overrides all bonuses we may have for it being in the field. As such, we treat it like a big Orca. It stays in the POS force field at ALL times. At first, I tried looking up "Battle Rorqual" fits and such, and just found out if the Rorq engages anyone, it's most likely dead. It's not worth building another one to be lazy with this one.
To recap: The Rorqual does not leave the force field!
Logistics: Does Your Corp Have Them?
What does it take to build one of these suckers? To start, it needs everything that carrier I built needs. An X-Large Ship Assembly Array, Component Assembly Array if you're building the cap ship parts inside the wormhole, and TONS of minerals.
Here's what it takes in minerals:
It takes at ME4:
123 mil tritanium
28 mil pyerite
10 mil mexallon
462k nocxium
83k zydrine
36k megacyte
According to Eve Smith, it takes a current price of 1.3 BIL in minerals to make a Rorq. Over 600 mil of that is in high sec minerals that you cannot mine in sufficient quantities inside your wormhole. This entire thought process also applies to dreadnoughts you wish to make.
So, you need to be comfortable with the fact that you may possibly lose a 1.3 bil cap ship if you get invaded. For me, it's more of a question if I can pay for the Rorq in skills and experiences before I may be forcibly removed. So of course my answer was yes.
Everyone is going to come to their own conclusions on this subject, and a Rorq isn't for everyone. I probably wouldn't build one in a C1, but some people have and will do so again. If you've got deep roots in a system, no reason to not make them deeper.
Monday, May 16, 2011
Leaving The Caretakers
I spent the better part of the past couple of days arming my new Large Amarr Control Tower with 20 ECM batteries, energy neut batteries, warp disruptors, etc etc. I think I have a total of eight guns online, small beam, small pulse, small arty, medium pulse, etc etc. I've got my scanning/industrial caretaker alt in system and have just loaded another week or so of fuel into a corp array. I'm ready to head home.
In the next week or so the plan is to train up a number of PI/industry alts to head into this wormhole and actively PI. Depending on how much time I find myself with will decide wether I'm going to go for P4 products, or do full on production of PI end products like POSes and such.
Had an interesting run in with a Russian in a Heron. I sent the Devoter home earlier today, and my Anathema was the only ship with any combat modules on it. I have it fitted to catch other Cov Ops ships, warp scrambler, web, target disruptor, and a Rocket Launcher 2. Unfortunately, my corpmate Gnicklas also uses this ship, and he has much better missile skills than I do.
The Russian came in, warped off, and proceeded to start scanning. I hopped around looking for him, then dropped some combat probes at the outer planet, out of DSCAN range. Very quickly had the planet range, so got a hit very fast and brought the probes in and pounced on him. Uncloaked in transit, had all my modules up and running.
Except my missiles weren't shooting. What do you mean I don't have the skills for those.....oh. There were T2 missiles loaded in the launcher that I couldn't use.
So I told the Russian he should probably leave now. He of course responded in russian, so I google translated. He got the point when I told him to leave in Russian. I unpointed him, he warped to the WH and sat there.
Я смотрю вы I said.
And then he jumped out.
No huge combat fleet came in, and he left local quickly. I'm now on my way back to our C2 with the cov ops and the orca I brought with. Can't wait to do some scanning, the static has been closed for days, so we'll see if anything spawned.
In the next week or so the plan is to train up a number of PI/industry alts to head into this wormhole and actively PI. Depending on how much time I find myself with will decide wether I'm going to go for P4 products, or do full on production of PI end products like POSes and such.
Had an interesting run in with a Russian in a Heron. I sent the Devoter home earlier today, and my Anathema was the only ship with any combat modules on it. I have it fitted to catch other Cov Ops ships, warp scrambler, web, target disruptor, and a Rocket Launcher 2. Unfortunately, my corpmate Gnicklas also uses this ship, and he has much better missile skills than I do.
The Russian came in, warped off, and proceeded to start scanning. I hopped around looking for him, then dropped some combat probes at the outer planet, out of DSCAN range. Very quickly had the planet range, so got a hit very fast and brought the probes in and pounced on him. Uncloaked in transit, had all my modules up and running.
Except my missiles weren't shooting. What do you mean I don't have the skills for those.....oh. There were T2 missiles loaded in the launcher that I couldn't use.
So I told the Russian he should probably leave now. He of course responded in russian, so I google translated. He got the point when I told him to leave in Russian. I unpointed him, he warped to the WH and sat there.
Я смотрю вы I said.
And then he jumped out.
No huge combat fleet came in, and he left local quickly. I'm now on my way back to our C2 with the cov ops and the orca I brought with. Can't wait to do some scanning, the static has been closed for days, so we'll see if anything spawned.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Well That Did Not Go As Planned II : Lack Of Hitting Scan Returns; The Final Wormfail
You really figure after awhile you've got this all figured out and no one is going to get the drop on you. Whoa boy howdy did I just get the rug pulled out from under me.
As I have mentioned lately, I've been looking for a C3. My priorities for it were it had to have a high sec static and all PI available.
Well enter a sale for this wormhole.
I was in love. Full PI, a single static meaning a single WH only most of the time to babysit, and if it turned into something really nice, it's a C3 with mercoxit in the grav sites. And he only wanted 300 mil for it.
I finally got in touch with the seller this morning, but I had a trip scheduled with my fiance's family, and he said he'd most likely have it sold by then. Oh well, no problem, I'll be back by 2100 game time, I'll look you up then. Kthxbye.
Our trip ended up taking much longer than expected due to a dead battery on the car I rode in, so I figured, surely the WH sold. And, yes, the seller said when I managed to get home and on, it had sold. Alright, np, good day to you sir.
Close convo. 10 seconds later another one pops up from the seller. "Wait." he says. "No, the C3 hasn't sold."
!!!!
SELL IT TO ME!!!!
So I bought it, transaction went smoothly, and I was in anchoring a medium temp POS and off I went to buy a large POS since I didn't have one sitting around like I thought. I bought a new Impel for the hole, and filled up the fuel on medium, but no strontium, the local trade hub didn't have practically any. No matter, I'll head back to my C2 and grab some of my extra, but I'll do that later.
What was that? Oh, that was nothing except my hopes and dreams being crushed, pay no attention!
I pick up some White Noise Generators and head back to the wormhole. I had my Anathema with combat probes out, my Devoter at the high sec hole side, Firt in the Impel setting up ECM, and Jelloshot in an Itty V with a corp array, ship array, and some more ECM.
My mistakes started piling up. I was too estatic. I had that "new wormhole" smell.
And that's when they struck. As Firt slowly flew around the outside of the POS shield setting up ECM, ships started appearing on his overview. WTF!? Well, it's an Impel, I can make it.....except that's a Broadsword and it just dropped a bubble.
Shit.
I started yelling on vent, and got two corpmates to log on, but they were both in the other wormhole with no bookmark out. I warped the Devoter away from the hole as soon as they finished Firt's pod off. Full Standard implant set plus Mining Foreman Mindlink. *sigh* Oh well.
So now the Itty and the Devoter are in the shield, and more people are arriving. A Hound, a Malestrom, a Tempest, an Armageddon. They start attacking my offline, as of yet not onlined ECMs, three in all. At some point in time I opted to anchor the corp array, but had not onlined, so did not have anything inside the POS to lose except all the fuel. And no strontium.
Okay, well whatdoidowhatdoidowhatdoido. My mind raced. Bring our combat fleet in? No, Nick counseled, they're fit for PvP only, and probably have massive DPS, and we aren't set up to deal with that in here. He's right. So I decide to ignore the ransoms in local and the attempts at convos, and warp the Itty and Devoter to the far side of the system and logoffski. This goes according to plan.
Except the part where I realize I've left the wormhole with Forgotten, the only person with a scanning ship in there and have travelled 17 jumps to Pretoria, where I had planned on getting my combat Legion. They have battleships in the C3, and could close the high sec at any time if they realize this.
OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG.
So I log on one of the scanning alts, and me and him head back the 17 jumps to the C3. The hole is still there. Whew. But the Broadsword is probably sitting at the hole, cloaked, waiting. So my plan is to jump in with Peturbo, the scanning alt in the Magnate, get him agressed, and cloak and head off with Forgotten in the Anathema.
K, one two jump!
And no one is there to witness my awesome plan. Very well. Get the scanning alt logged off and I proceed to find out where these fuckers came from. Yep, there's the K162 from another wormhole. A Typhoon shows up on scan and I get the warnings that Starbase Is Under Attack!
Oh well, have fun. I figure out there are no other wormholes and go play something else for awhile.
Fast forward a few hours. POS is gone. They actually expended the time to kill it. All I wish is that I had had the prescence of mind to yank as much of the fuel out as I could have. Oh well, my mind didn't work as fast as it could have.
So I can't put up the large POS I have in the itty's hold as there's only one anchoring attempt allowed per corp per day. So, the plan is to come back with an Orca full of my gear, it has warp stabs and a cloak. And more POS fuel. I am going to crit the hole, or get close to it. And try again tomorrow.
Crap, I need to buy some Oxygen.
As I have mentioned lately, I've been looking for a C3. My priorities for it were it had to have a high sec static and all PI available.
Well enter a sale for this wormhole.
I was in love. Full PI, a single static meaning a single WH only most of the time to babysit, and if it turned into something really nice, it's a C3 with mercoxit in the grav sites. And he only wanted 300 mil for it.
I finally got in touch with the seller this morning, but I had a trip scheduled with my fiance's family, and he said he'd most likely have it sold by then. Oh well, no problem, I'll be back by 2100 game time, I'll look you up then. Kthxbye.
Our trip ended up taking much longer than expected due to a dead battery on the car I rode in, so I figured, surely the WH sold. And, yes, the seller said when I managed to get home and on, it had sold. Alright, np, good day to you sir.
Close convo. 10 seconds later another one pops up from the seller. "Wait." he says. "No, the C3 hasn't sold."
!!!!
SELL IT TO ME!!!!
So I bought it, transaction went smoothly, and I was in anchoring a medium temp POS and off I went to buy a large POS since I didn't have one sitting around like I thought. I bought a new Impel for the hole, and filled up the fuel on medium, but no strontium, the local trade hub didn't have practically any. No matter, I'll head back to my C2 and grab some of my extra, but I'll do that later.
What was that? Oh, that was nothing except my hopes and dreams being crushed, pay no attention!
I pick up some White Noise Generators and head back to the wormhole. I had my Anathema with combat probes out, my Devoter at the high sec hole side, Firt in the Impel setting up ECM, and Jelloshot in an Itty V with a corp array, ship array, and some more ECM.
My mistakes started piling up. I was too estatic. I had that "new wormhole" smell.
And that's when they struck. As Firt slowly flew around the outside of the POS shield setting up ECM, ships started appearing on his overview. WTF!? Well, it's an Impel, I can make it.....except that's a Broadsword and it just dropped a bubble.
Shit.
I started yelling on vent, and got two corpmates to log on, but they were both in the other wormhole with no bookmark out. I warped the Devoter away from the hole as soon as they finished Firt's pod off. Full Standard implant set plus Mining Foreman Mindlink. *sigh* Oh well.
So now the Itty and the Devoter are in the shield, and more people are arriving. A Hound, a Malestrom, a Tempest, an Armageddon. They start attacking my offline, as of yet not onlined ECMs, three in all. At some point in time I opted to anchor the corp array, but had not onlined, so did not have anything inside the POS to lose except all the fuel. And no strontium.
Okay, well whatdoidowhatdoidowhatdoido. My mind raced. Bring our combat fleet in? No, Nick counseled, they're fit for PvP only, and probably have massive DPS, and we aren't set up to deal with that in here. He's right. So I decide to ignore the ransoms in local and the attempts at convos, and warp the Itty and Devoter to the far side of the system and logoffski. This goes according to plan.
Except the part where I realize I've left the wormhole with Forgotten, the only person with a scanning ship in there and have travelled 17 jumps to Pretoria, where I had planned on getting my combat Legion. They have battleships in the C3, and could close the high sec at any time if they realize this.
OMGOMGOMGOMGOMGOMG.
So I log on one of the scanning alts, and me and him head back the 17 jumps to the C3. The hole is still there. Whew. But the Broadsword is probably sitting at the hole, cloaked, waiting. So my plan is to jump in with Peturbo, the scanning alt in the Magnate, get him agressed, and cloak and head off with Forgotten in the Anathema.
K, one two jump!
And no one is there to witness my awesome plan. Very well. Get the scanning alt logged off and I proceed to find out where these fuckers came from. Yep, there's the K162 from another wormhole. A Typhoon shows up on scan and I get the warnings that Starbase Is Under Attack!
Oh well, have fun. I figure out there are no other wormholes and go play something else for awhile.
Fast forward a few hours. POS is gone. They actually expended the time to kill it. All I wish is that I had had the prescence of mind to yank as much of the fuel out as I could have. Oh well, my mind didn't work as fast as it could have.
So I can't put up the large POS I have in the itty's hold as there's only one anchoring attempt allowed per corp per day. So, the plan is to come back with an Orca full of my gear, it has warp stabs and a cloak. And more POS fuel. I am going to crit the hole, or get close to it. And try again tomorrow.
Crap, I need to buy some Oxygen.
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