Longpost: Preparing for war

(long for me, anyway)

With everybody preparing to come up and smash the north, it's high time I got my shit on an actual war footing. Ideally this means reducing your worst-case liability to only PvP assets, though this is rarely actually done. In order to prepare for the war I've taken the following steps:

1. EPIC CAREBEARING

Going into a war, it helps to have liquid currency. You need to have enough to replace, fit and insure ships, upgrade clones and so forth... and, if things go badly, get your isk-making infrastructure up and running in a new alliance afterward.

I expect to be on nonstop, mandatory deployment for a period of months, and to lose many ships including multiple capitals during this time. Deploying best-fit ships for the duration of a major war isn't cheap, and toward this end I spent a couple dozen hours over three days plexing. Tenal was kind to me, generating some 3.7 billion isk worth of saleable items (pictured below) and around 320 million in bounties.

Lewts, phat

2. SKILLS

As I won't be able to train Amarr T2 weapons before the war starts, I've switched to capital cruise missiles in order to be able to fly the alliance dread fit. Flying a modified fit might result in ship replacement being denied, and lacking the capital cruise missiles skill could mean not being able to use the missiles on a replacement dread.

3. CAREBEAR SHIT

Things which don't contribute to the war efford need to be moved to empire, or at least an NPC station. I left around 2 billion isk worth of mins, manufactured ships and exhumers behind when we lost geminate, and I'm not going to let that happen again. In sorting out my stuff I was actually able to put several plexing ships, rendered defunct by my new ishtar, on the market instead of moving them via carrier. I jumped saleable assets, a pair of hulks, a maelstrom and a can full of blueprints and skillbooks down to empire, leaving behind two plexing ships, a carrier and a jump clone, all in the same station -- risky, but I have scout alts and know how to exercise caution.

4. SHIPS AND FITTINGS

My hangar is stocked with ships of various types and ranges for different situations, and I've verified each of them to be fitted, loaded and ready to undock . Getting everything sorted out, including fitings, drones, a number of large CCC, ACR and trimark rigs and a bunch of fighters cost me a total of 590 million isk. Remember step 1? Yeah, that's why. The carriers aren't even insured yet; capital insurance is expensive - 220 million for a carrier - so they won't be until I need to take them out on an op.

Possibly more battleships than strictly necessary

And there you have it. This is it, the big one, the one we've all been waiting for. We know the enemy, we know the score and we're prepared for whatever happens. We know there's a good chance we won't win this fight, but we will NOT go down as easily as PL or goons. Here's to hoping for goodfights.


In pre-war news we're fighting Red Overlord a bit, who have POS somewhere over in west NC space. Recent events include a highsec freighter gank, doomsdaying a jump freighter and a lovely titan kill. Not a bad way to kick off a war.