Monthly financial report (December)

I said I thought this would be a good month, and I was semi-right. Net worth increased a lot, but monthly net profit is looking anemic. What happened?

Lots of things, actually.

Net worth increased by more than manufacturing income for the following reasons:

-Exploration, which I made a post about. This accounts for 2.4 billion isk of income.
-I added a new field in net worth for tengus, since I have three of the damn things.
-Increasing capital module prices. Many of these are trading at 25-50% over their values a month ago. Since I stock these in my building system, my net worth increased.
-Increasing freighter and jump freighter prices added about 1.1 billion isk of paper value.
-Seven ships with large margins have sold and increased my net worth, but are rolling over to next month on the spreadsheet. I estimate 1.7 billion isk of profits on them, which would bring my net profit for manufacturing to 4.8 billion.

Expenses this month included 2 plex (830 million) and a few subcapitals (~600 million).

I predict next month will be average. It should be above average since so many ships are rolling over from this month, but something has also gone horribly wrong with my manufacturing process. More on this in a few days.

Topics in 0.0 ninja: Exploration in hostile sov space for the chronically risk-averse

EDIT 2012-12-15: With the Retribution AI, using bombers for ninja exploration is still possible but much more expensive. See this post for details.

Increasingly awesome title edition~

Alas, this is the end of the 0.0 ninja series unless I find something else to do there. That probably will not happen in the near future.


Introduction:

In terms of isk/hour, 0.0 exploration is pretty much the best money in the game. It is a fairly specialized profession, and not many people do it -- you need the right ships, the right skills... and you need space to do it in, or so many people think.

This guide will describe a method for doing limited 0.0 exploration with only cloaky ships. Using it you will be able to drive out to the edge of the galaxy, grab a billion isk of exploration loot, and drive back to jita, all in essentially perfect safety.

This guide is specific to guristas because they are what I'm familiar with, but the methodology should be adaptable to other factions (especially serpentis).


Method:

This method relies on dual boxing two cloaky ships, a tank and a damage dealer.

The tank is a nullified, cloaky tengu which scouts, scans, and tanks, set up similarly to my old 'worst tengu fit ever' exploration utility fit.

The damage dealer is a stealth bomber. These do excellent damage for their size, have a cov ops cloak, and can hit out to 60 km with t1 torpedoes.

It goes like this: The tengu goes first, since it is much more likely than the bomber to survive a gate camp. You take the ships out to 0.0, find safe systems, and scan down sites. Once an appropriate site has been located the tengu warps in first and pulls all the aggro, the bomber follows, and they get to work. Just watch local and d-scan for hostiles dropping probes.

How far you go into 0.0 is up to you. Any system that doesn't have something nasty on d-scan is usually fine, though in systems with heavy traffic or people in local it's more likely someone will try to scan you down. The further you go from empire and pipes, the less likely it is you'll be interrupted. Personally I'm quite fond of tenal.

I just do day drips, since I have to go return to highsec on a near-daily basis, but operating out of an NPC station where you can buy ammo would really streamline the process.

Doing a site
(may have to open in new tab)

Fitting:

Without further ado...



If your skills aren't awesome enough to be cap stable with that, you can totally switch out the boost amp for a cap recharger. It just means sometimes it will be necessary to orbit with the AB on to reduce incoming damage.

In the tengu's cargo you should carry about 6000 heavy missiles, then fill the rest with torpedoes to resupply the bomber. This should result in both ships running out around the same time.

If you don't feel like training astrometrics 5, you can switch the t2 probe launcher for a sisters probe launcher.

Also of note, I strongly disrecommend using any ship other than a tengu for this. Fast align time is key to a T3 surviving gate camps in 0.0, which means armor tanks (proteus, legion) won't work, and the loki has slower align time and a much worse tank. The tengu will definitely work for caldari and gallente damage types, and non-caldari rats are said to be much easier to tank so it may also be able to handle minmatar or even amarr; however, I haven't tested these.

EDIT: It is actually possible to get the loki align time down to just 0.1 second slower than the tengu, and for sanshas damage it has a better tank.



The second target painter is nice, but with cov ops 4 it isn't really necessary unless you're shooting cruiser hulls or elite frigates a lot. If you want to drop one for a salvager, analyzer, or MWD you can. Archaeology and salvaging sites are pretty worthless, in my experience, but salvaging dread guristas is sometimes worth a few million and an MWD would be really helpful if you do end up jumping into a gate camp (see evading gate camps in a cov ops ship).

EDIT: You can also fit a MWD by using a kmb-50 implant, which adds 3% CPU and costs 22 mil. Worth it.

The codebreaker is for ladar hacking sites (see H-PA Crash Crew), which are fast, easy, and can drop the nanite control skill book, which is worth about 250 mil. Except for drone regions, all or nearly all 0.0 regions have ladar hacking sites.

We use a manticore here because it receives a bonus to kinetic damage, which is best for guristas rats. You will want to match the bomber to the type of rats you're shooting.


Limitations:

This method severely limits the types of sites you can do. Sites which do AOE damage (e.g. guristas military complex) are completely out of the question. Sites which have multiple spawns, which may target the bomber, (most hacking and salvaging sites) will be very tricky. Sites where you have to kill large numbers of elite frigates or cruisers (e.g. guristas fortress) will run you out of torpedoes after only a few sites. Sites that the tengu can't tank (maze) will just plain kill you.

So what does this leave us?

Fascinatingly, with guristas this removes almost all the worthless sites, and fewer than half the high value ones. We are left with four easy, predictable, high value, and fairly common sites: DED 6/10, 7/10, and 8/10, plus LADAR hacking sites. We'll just have to see what sort of earnings these sites can provide for us.


Results:

So, does it work? Well, so far I have spent 19.4 hours doing exploration this way, and retrieved 2440 million isk worth of loot. This comes out to 125m/h.

(This figure does not include travel time to/from jita; or bounties, which I estimate totaled a hundred million or so)

Due to the highly variable nature of exploration income, 19 hours is not enough to take an accurate baseline. However, I have extremely extensive experience with guristas exploration, and my feeling is that this figure is pretty reasonable.

EDIT: After doing several more runs of this and tracking isk/hour in a general sort of way, and after the release of deadspace invulnerability fields, I think that figure might be somewhat low. Figure more than 125, but definitely less than 200.

Thoughts:

It's profitable, easy, and mostly safe. I feel confident that the long term isk per hour is higher than that of a pretty good highsec incursion fleet, and personally I find it much more enjoyable than incursions. Intermittent and randomized rewards mean it feels like less of a grind, standard rats don't switch targets so you don't have to be paying attention every second, and there are no fleetmates or FC to worry about. Plus, there's just something very relaxing about a quiet 0.0 system. Maybe I've spent too much time out there, but highsec and low are just too cramped for me to ever feel comfortable.

Also, excitement! Sometimes people try to kill you and stuff!

tl;dr more money, more fun, more interesting

Heavy industry 2

I've made this post before, but now there are moar. Seeing all that running in parallel is a nice feeling.

Capital manufacturing status update #1562546

Oh god the world is burning edition.

Well, the markets anyway. Trit and pyerite are up a bit, but mexallon is really interesting, and it's affecting me, which I consider a personal affront. Mex price is up two thirds since the patch, and now when buying minerals it's the largest component of a ship's mineral price.

To illustrate, here are the current mineral prices for my last buy order (in millions):

Tritanium: 1058
Pyerite: 360
Mexallon: 1337 (yes, really)
Isogen: 275
Nocxium: 605
Zydrine: 165
Megacyte: 285

Before the patch, the mexallon would have cost 785.

What's causing the mex price to increase? Well, it first spiked right after the patch, which isn't surprising. What's odd is that it has kept going up despite returning to fairly average sales volume. That says speculation to me, though with a war supposedly starting in the drone lands we may start to see an actual supply interruption.

As to the effect of this, the short version is that ships which had low margins before now have zero or even negative margins. The after tax profit on an obelisk right now is negative ten million isk -- at least on paper.

What's really happening is that capital ship prices lag mineral prices by about ten days. Thus, if prices continue to increase, by the time a freighter built with minerals purchased today is delivered and put on the market, freighter prices will have have risen to a point where there is an acceptable profit margin. You can check freighter prices on the market right now and see this happening: Charon prices went vertical 10 days after mexallon did, and as of today they're up by 70 million isk per unit. I just sold one built with minerals purchased before the mexallon spike for a profit of 138 million (before tax).

Trouble is, though, when prices go up, they often come back down eventually; and in the absence of increased demand or changes to the game mechanics, I have to suspect that's what will happen with mexallon. When it does, people who bought mex when it was high really will wind up selling ships for negative profit, which makes me nervous about buying minerals to build freighters right now.

At the same time this is happening, margins on freighters have been pretty miserable for a number of months, and I've been considering tearing up my freighter production line and switching to only jump-capable ships. The margins on them are just better; even with the mineral price increase, and with more components being added to them when the patch hit, carriers are still showing a profit on paper, and they usually have the smallest margins of the jump capable capitals. Plus, I could use the extra production slots from my freighter builder anyway.

So that's what I'm doing. I have three freighters finishing, which should fetch nice margins because their minerals were purchased before the patch, then I'm halting production. The blueprints will go into research until I need them, probably after the fuel block changeover, at which time I anticipate selling them in order to buy component blueprints to research and replace my current set with.

The liquidity freed up by dropping freighter production will buy two component blueprints, capital computer system and capital siege array, which I am experiencing bottlenecks in at the moment. These are the last two components which are used in significantly higher quantity than any others, and once I have them it would take another seven (arguably nine) component blueprints to increase production measurably, at which point I would have nearly two full sets.

In fact, with those two I will have arrived organically at a selection of component blueprints which I had earlier used a spreadsheet to observe might be useful -- a balanced selection of 21 blueprints which will allow me to build two rorquals and one of each carrier and dreadnaught every 16 days. Adding another 9 blueprints reduces this time to 11 days, but also means training another production character.

So anyway, that's how my day has been.

Topics in 0.0 ninja: Grinding sec status in hostile space the safe and easy way

Every so often I hear horror stories about the sec status grind, usually from a lowsec piwate looking to return to the promised land of jita. And usually, they aren't going about it in a very effective way.

So, let's say you need to grind sec status and you don't have safe 0.0 space to do it in. This post will provide a solution.


Forward:

This guide is not intended to describe the absolute best way to grind sec status. The purpose of the 0.0 ninja series is to impart some knowledge about 0.0 and describe a few things that can be done there in relatively safety.

This guide is specific to guristas rats. Apparently it is possible to do this with other types of rats, but guristas are what I'm familiar with.


Sec status:

The way that sec status gains work is that for every system you kill one or more rats in, every 15 minutes you receive a sec status increase for only the largest rat you killed. Bigger rats mean more status increase.

Since you want to find big rats, the best place to do this is 0.0. NPC 0.0 has lower sec status and therefore more and better rats, but it's also infested with elitepvp scrubs. Player sov space, once you're past the entry points, is safer, but the grind will be a bit slower.

Since you only get a status increase for the biggest rat killed in each system, you want to kill rats in more than one system. Ideally, you would prefer to find a circuit of systems which takes more than 15 minutes to go through while killing one large rat in each.

Finally, the fast talk skill gives a 5% bonus per level to security status increases. Putting a few levels in this could save quite a bit of grind.


The ship:

It works, I promise.

• It is somewhat of a tight fit, so if you're having trouble with it, switching to lower meta launchers or using a PG rig or cheap implants will help.
• The dual prop setup is because you need an MWD to evade gate camps and an AB to tank guristas.
• The thermal shield rig is because when guristas rats do significant amounts of damage to you, it will usually have a thermal component. Some smaller ships can hit you with hybrids, which are therm/kin, and some guristas ships fire thermal light missiles. The rig is nice to have, but not strictly necessary; during my test run I used a PG rig there.
• The target painter is a big help against frigates, cruisers and BC. More on this later.
• In case you were wondering, passive recharge.
  

Finding space:

You'll probably be looking for a loop of systems, and it may be desirable to have a nearby dockable station to resupply or reship at.

The UBP constellation in geminate could be a decent possibility. I'm not familiar with the locals, but the constellation forms a 7 system loop and the FDZ NPC station is one jump away.

Conversely, it may be desirable to operate further from an NPC station and any pipes, since the further you go from highsec and NPC stations the less likely you are to run into bubbles and pvp ships. Up to you.

UBP constellation -- route highlighted, FDZ circled

Getting there:

Aside from user error, the most dangerous part of this method is the possibility of running into a gate camp. Last week we covered what to do if you jump into a gate camp [link], but to reduce the likelihood of encountering a camp in the first place you should use the star map's ship kills, pod kills, and pilots in space overlays to determine whether something unpleasant is likely to happen along your route.

For 0.0 entry systems, which are the most likely to be camped, fewer than 10 people in space and only one or two pod or ship kills in the last hour usually indicates that there is not an active camp there.


The method:

Once you reach your target area, it's time to get to work.

1. Warp to a belt at 10. If there is a battleship spawn with no elite frigates or elite cruisers, proceed to step 2. If not, proceed to the next belt/system.

• Warping at 10 keeps you from landing on the belt beacon, which can decloak you and/or prevent you from cloaking.
  
• Warping to a 0.0 belt at any range will often result in being decloaked, which starts a 15 second recloak cooldown. However, there are rarely any objects actually at 10 km from the beacon, so I recommend staying uncloaked while warping, then cloaking after you land if something unpleasant is on grid.
• The reason for avoiding elite frigates and cruisers is that they will fuck you up.
• If there are a few hostiles in local and wrecks in the belts, don't panic -- almost all belt ratters are macros and will safe up as soon as you enter local. Just watch d-scan for anything you think might not be a macro, and be prepared to gtfo.

2. You might have noticed that the tank on that bomber is paper thin, and it is. Your AB and hardener are your tank modules, so activate them and orbit the battleship you want to kill at 30 or whatever.

3. You can tank battleships all day, but not smaller things, so kill the small stuff first. Frigates, destroyers, cruisers, and battlecruisers should take 1-3 volleys per ship if you have halfway decent skills.

To make it clear what the damage differential is like, here are ranges for volley damage you'll be taking from each class:

Frigate/destroyer: 10-20
Cruiser: 5-25
Battlecruiser: 14
Battleship: 2-5

4. Being careful not to run into any asteroids, and keeping your transversal up (guristas battleship guns won't volley you, but they can land hits if you let them), kill the battleship.

• If your cap skills aren't great, you may find yourself running out. Turn off the target painter and you'll be cap stable.

5. Move on to the next system and start over. Passive recharge will repair your shields between systems.

Once you have the basics down you can start to get fancy - perhaps not always killing the small stuff before going for the battleship - but do wait until you're confident that you know what you're doing. With this setup, when things go wrong they go wrong fast.


Results:

Using this method for two hours I was able to achieve a ~massive~ sec status increase of 0.15, from 4.2 to 4.35. Sec status increases more the lower you are, though, so this is unlikely to be a representative figure. If any -10s out there feel like getting some real numbers, that would be pretty chill. Forum threads from the distant past speak of people going from -10 to 0 in a few days, though this may not be reliable data.

Yup.

Topics in 0.0 ninja: Surviving gate camps in a cov ops ship

Jump into camp. Wat do?

I'll tell you. You'll still die, but at least you'll die trying.

Key:

Surviving camps on the in gate


Situation 1: Single interdictor with warpable object

You jump through the gate, and there's an interdictor sitting on the other side (or a mobile warp disruptor and interceptor, whatever). Fortunately for you, in the direction opposite the interdictor from you there is a planet or other thing you can warp to.


1. Align to the planet.
2. Wait about a third of a second.
3. Hit cloak, then MWD.
4. Wait until you're out of the bubble, then warp to the planet.

• Note: The third of a second wait is because if you cloak too quickly, it will think you're still gate cloaked, the cloak will fail to engage, and you will die. The time required may vary depending on your real-world location, so test this before you actually run into a gate camp. It is the same length of time it would take the warp activation cap use to show up if you were to hit warp instead of aligning, so spend some time watching that to get a handle on it.
• Note: An MWD can still be activated for several seconds after engaging a cloak.
• Note: Normally you would never warp to a planet or other non-gate object at 0. It would be excusable in this case, but if you want to avoid it you can change the default warp to distance while gate cloaked, then change it back to 0 once you're in warp to the object. Forgetting to change it back will get you killed, so don't forget.

Situation 2: Single interdictor without warpable object

With no object which you can warp to as soon as you get outside the bubble, burning directly away from the interdictor will just get you caught. So.


1. Double click in the opposite direction of the enemy tackler.
2. Wait about a third of a second.
3. Hit cloak, then MWD.
4. Turn 90 degrees so that the tackler burning at you misses.
5. Once you're out of the bubble, warp off.

• Note: The reason you should start out by burning directly away from the enemy tackle is that it takes a few seconds after activating the cloak for your bracket to disappear, and you don't want them to know which direction you turn.
• Note: I recommend turning downward. Tacklers often loop around a few times trying to catch you, but rarely go downward.

Situation 3: Torrinos gate in EC-, e.g.

You treat this just like situation 2, except it's more dangerous. There are mobile warp disruptors in a large area around the gate, and there may be many objects which you need to avoid on your way out of the bubbles.  Since you can't get out of the bubbles before enemy tackle reaches you, the method from situation 1 cannot be used.



Situation 4: Reapproaching the gate

Say you want to jump back instead of trying to get out of bubbles.

1. Wait 10 seconds for the session change timer to expire.
2. Double click slightly to one side of the gate, such that you will pass through the jump radius.
3. Wait about a third of a second.
4. Hit cloak, then MWD.
5. When you get close to jump range, spam the jump button.

• Note: The reason you don't approach the gate directly is if a tackler is sitting right on the gate, it can bump a cloaked, MWDing cov ops just by approaching the bracket when it appears. This doesn't happen often, but it does happen. If there aren't any tacklers sitting right on the gate, you can probably just approach.

Surviving camps on the out gate

Now that you're in the system, if there are hostiles in local that aren't accounted for you you get to worry about them being on the out gate. Out gate camps usually take the form of a drag bubble.

The way drag bubbles work is thusly:


1. Someone tries to warp from the in gate to the out gate.
2. Behind (or in front of) the out gate, and in line with the in gate, a hostile has anchored a mobile warp disruptor.
3. The mobile warp disruptor catches the person warping to the out gate, causing them to land on the edge of the bubble.
4. The hostile has also positioned a number of cans on the edge of the bubble, in order to to decloak any cov ops ships that get drawn in.
5. The hostile sits nearby and kills anything that gets caught.


Situation 5: Drag bubble (easy)


1. There is a hostile in local, so instead of warping directly to the out gate, warp to somewhere within directional scan range of the out gate.
2. Use d-scan to check the out gate. If you see a ship and a mobile warp disruptor in the direction of the gate, it's probably a drag bubble.
3. A warpable object exists which is not in line with the out gate and any other gate. Warp there.
4. Warp to the out gate. Because you are not in line with the drag bubble, you land on the gate.


Situation 6: Drag bubble (hard)

The situation 5 drag bubble is easy to evade, so people who use drag bubbles love to put them in systems where the out gate is not in d-scan range of anything else, and everything is in line with the drag bubble. Here's how you deal with that.


1. There is a hostile in local, so don't warp directly to the out gate. Instead, warp to the planet (or whatever) closest to the out gate.
2. You aren't in d-scan range of the out gate. Hit control-space over and over really fast. While doing this, every few seconds tell your ship to warp to the out gate. Every time it tries to initiate warp, it will eat some capacitor. Pretty soon your cap will be dry and the 'insufficient capacitor' message will appear.
3. Wait a second for your cap to return a little, then warp to the out gate. Make sure the out of capacitor message appears so you don't actually warp all the way.
4. You will come out of warp somewhere closer to the out gate, hopefully in d-scan range. If not, rinse and repeat.
5. Check d-scan. If you see a hostile ship and a mobile warp disruptor, it's probably a drag bubble.
6. Wait for the hostile to leave local, or otherwise be unavailable to shoot you. Go make a sandwich, you're going to be here for a while.
7. Warp to the out gate.
8. If you're going to visit this system again, MWD off 150+ kilometers at a 90 degree angle to the line between the gates and make a bookmark.
9. Okay, you can jump now.


Situation 7: Drag bubble (hard) (easy)

Just like situation 6 except you have a bookmark 150+ km from the out gate and not in line with the gates.



1. There is a hostile in local, so don't warp directly to the out gate. Instead, warp to the bookmark.
2. You now have eyes on the gate and and are at a point where you can warp to the gate without landing in the bubble.
3. Trololol


Situation 8: Surviving (usually) all types of camps without bothering with any of that

1. Get a tengu.
2. Fit it for align time, and with cov ops and nullification subsystems. Maybe a couple warp stabs if you're feeling fancy.
3. You now align like a cov ops, can warp while in bubbles, and are not affected by drag bubbles. The game.

Updated blog pack statistics

Boilerplate: I don't have particular feelings about the blog pack. This post exists because checking the health of the blog pack has become sort of a tradition.

Previous statistics post here.

Now that the blog pack is under new management, let's see how things have changed.

Short version: Pretty much all the statistics look healthier. Despite eve going to shit this past year, average posts has held steady. Blogs with no pvp content, or just no content, have decreased. Blogs with no posts in the previous month have decreased.

Long version:

I've changed what data I collect a little since last time, and now I think the categories are good enough to re-use next time. Where possible I'll compare the number of blogs in a category to the number last year.

Format:
Statistic: Number of blogs (number of blogs a year ago)

Total blogs: 39

PvP content:

Indy focused: 1 (n/a) (k162space: hero indy)
Minimal or no offensive pvp: 14 (25)
Solo/lowsec/FW/pirate/wh/small gang: 21 (20)
0.0/large fleet: 3 (5)

Type of content:

Non-eve blogs: 3 (n/a) (A Ghost Blog, 5 non-eve posts to 4 eve posts; Eve A to Z, 7:3; Roc's Ramblings, 9:1)
Only news reposts and banter blogs: 0 (5)
General stuff: 33 (n/a)
Exceptional original content: 3 (n/a)

EDIT: I may have been less than rigorous about the 'reposts and banter blogs' category. May need to redo that.

• Note: 'Exceptional original content' is a highly subjective category.
• Note: 'Not actually an eve blog' is triggered when less than half the posts on the front page are about eve.

Posting stats:

Total posts in November: 257

Most posts in November: 50 (Jester's Trek) (Runners up: Tiger Ears, 30; Eveoganda, 25)
Average posts in November: 6.4 (6.5)
Median posts in November: 2 (n/a)

Zero posts in November: 5 (12)
One to four posts in November: 21 (16)
5-10 posts in November: 6 (n/a)
11+ posts in November: 6 (n/a)

Front page apology for not posting more: 1 (n/a)
Longest time since last post: 2 months (4 months)
Link outdated or blog no longer exists: 0 (3)

Insightful commentary on the insurance changes

Since the ice interdiction started, highsec scrubs have been making a lot of noise about wanting suicide gankers not to receive insurance. And with crucible, they got their wish.

Since they're so fired up about it, one has to assume that they think it will change something. I'm not really sure where they would get that idea.

See this guy? I like him because he gets eve.

To celebrate the insurance changes, I bought a talos.

Killmail

The end.

How many stars in the sky?

Answer: About 3.3 million.

Ever since the new star field came out a year or so ago, I've been vaguely impressed at the number of stars that appear when you zoom the camera in. It has to be a repeating texture of some sort, of course, but it's still pretty impressive.

Today I decided to find out very approximately how many stars are in the sky box.

Step 1: Get a nice linear ship and an aesthetically pleasing patch of sky.

Step 2: With the camera aligned with the axis of the ship, zoom in.

Step 3: Put the cursor at one side of the screen. Right-click and drag the cursor to the other side of the screen. Zoom out. Using the ship as a reference, estimate how many degrees the camera has turned.

That looks like about 45 degrees to me.

Step 4: Find out how the width of the screen compares to the width of the arc covered when dragging the mouse across the screen.

This is accomplished by zooming in, placing the cursor at one edge of the screen, dragging the camera one screen-width and taking a screenshot. The distance in pixels from the cursor to the edge of the screen, divided by the monitor width in pixels, is the number of screen-widths in a 45 degree arc.

Screenshots don't save the cursor position, but I was able to use UI elements as landmark. The answer is about 160 pixels, so with a 1650x monitor there are 10.3 screen-widths in a 45 degree arc.

Step 5: Find the surface area of the sky sphere, measured in screen-widths.

10.3 screen-widths is 45 degrees. A circle is 360 decrees. (360/45)*10.3 gives us a circumference of 82.4 screen-widths.

Putting 'sphere circumference 82.4' into wolfram tells us that the surface area of the sphere is 2161.

(that's 2161 1650x1650 pixel squares)

So all we have to do is find out how many stars are in a 1650x1650 square. But that's a lot of stars, so instead we'll find out how many stars are in 1/10 that area.

Sqrt(1650^2/10)=521

So we take a zoomed-in screenshot, mark out a 521^2 pixel square, count the stars and multiply the answer by 2161*10.

That's 152 stars. 152*10*2161=3.3 million stars... within a fairly wide margin of error.

November monthly financial report

Comments:

Told you this would be a good month ^_^

I think next month will be a good month too. Probably not as good, though.

Capital manufacturing milestone

An update that almost means something edition.

I just put up a buy order for minerals for another run of capital ships (run 47: chimera, nidhoggur, rorqual, naglfar). This is something I do a lot, but this run is special because it means that for the first time ever I have two of each type of ship I build in production at the same time ('production' starts with buying minerals and finishes when the hull is delivered) .

It would have taken a few more weeks for this to be the case, but I've stopped production on obelisks and, more recently, thanatos, because there's no profit to be made in them at the moment. Thannies have had low margins for a long time, probably because they're the ship that every new capital builder wants to make (EDIT: Or because they're shit), and after the oxygen interdiction hit the margins dropped from below-average to nearly zero . Not sure why obelisks are having a problem, but freighter margins are never that great.

Below is a shot of my blueprint/run status/priority/margin/run mineral cost tool. You know, because that sort of thing is interesting.

Right click and view image or open in new tab for full (grumble)

EDIT: I was looking at that and noticed that the profit figure seemed off. Turns out the tax modifier was in the wrong place. Correct profit numbers would be 17 mil for thanny and 5 for obelisk. Margin is still correct.

The total value of minerals in my manufacturing process right now, including three hulls currently on the market, is 24 billion.

Now that manufacturing is fully funded, I plan to move forward with my other projects soon (tm). The first thing I'll be doing is researching replacement capital component blueprints, because my current set sort of sucks. Planning to set up a small tower (to start with, anyway) for this, so I'll wait for the fuel block changeover before starting.

Winter update

Signal boost because manly tears.

WinterUpdate by DavidKMagnus

Capital manufacturing status update

The first naglfar rolled off the assembly line in my new system. They use some capital mods that I hadn't been stocking already, so I figured it was time to get around to properly stocking the system. So I did.

(3.6b total)

The goal is to stock enough of each mod to fit 2 ships that use them, and just restock whenever I bring in minerals for a new production run. This loadout does that, though I am thinking of switching up to 20 of each type of fighter.

One interesting thing is that isotopes sell pretty quickly. At first I brought 100k of each type, but they sold in a matter of hours at a 20% markup over jita. So, I switched to 400k units and marked them up 30%.

In theory there's an opportunity to make a semi-meaningful profit there, but I'm not a trader; I'm providing isotopes in order to make the system an attractive place to buy a ship, not to supply people who already own them. I figure I'll increase the markup by 10% each time until they sell slowly enough to not be a bother. A large markup should prevent people from buying hundreds of thousands of units just to have a stockpile, but to somebody buying a few tens of thousands of units in order to move a ship somewhere it doesn't represent a significant amount of isk.

In other news, manufacturing is going pretty okay. I predicted this would be a good month, and it has been. I haven't sold as many ships as I would have liked, but after the recent price spike when crucible changes were announced I started building dreads flat out. They're slower to build than carriers and the occasional rorqual, like I was doing before, but they make up for it with larger margins.

Unfortunately, the price spike seems to be starting to wind down. Phoenix, moros and (arguably) naglfar are peaking now, the last ships to do so, while everything else has started to come down. Fortunately, I'm ~clever~ and started to prioritize phoenixes, moros, and naglfar when revelations were peaking, so hopefully I can catch those spikes and make next month as good as this one.

Moar searches which brought people here

"I'd better get this one out of the way before the game mechanics change" edition.


"eve how long does it take for supercarrier to kill carrier"

About 100 seconds... assuming no lag, rainbow bomber damage and that the carrier is not running a local rep.

The longer version is that a carrier has about a million hit points, and a nyx does about 10,000 damage per second. A carrier can generally rep a thousand or so damage per second; however, a triage carrier set up for local rep can rep a lot more, usually enough to tank one supercarrier.


"what does it take to take down a carrier in eve?"

See above. Carriers have a million hitpoints and can rep 1-3k dps, or up to 20-30k while in triage. If you can find a solo carrier, you can probably get away with logi and a couple battleships with neuts fit.


"eve naglfar what is it used for"

Pimpin'.


"eve can doomsday miss"

Yes. Sort of. More precisely, it is possible to prevent a doomsday which is activated on you from landing.

When a doomsday is fired, it takes about 30 seconds to land. If you have effects on you can see the doomsday effect hitting your ship shortly before the damage is applied, and have a few seconds to GTFO. If you manage to get off-grid, it effectively "misses."

It is possible that if a doomsday was activated on you the titan would start redboxing without there being a guns hit/missed notification. I can't confirm this, as it's understandably difficult to test, but if true it may be possible to use a titan overview to detect incoming doomsdays.

When titans are used against subcapitals, logistics, T3, fleet boosters and expensive ships (e.g. machariels) are prime doomsday targets, so their pilots try to detect doomsdays being activated on them and warp out when it happens, resulting in the doomsdays being wasted. T3 in particular can use interdiction nullifiers to make themselves immune to bubbles, and I believe this has been used as a tactic wherein nullified friendly T3 are deliberately bubbled to bait enemy titans into wasting doomsdays.

If you're in a capital, jumping out works too -- once the jump command goes through, you're safe. I once jumped my nyx out with 17% armor left and three doomsdays running on me, which would have killed me if they had landed.

October monthly financial report

EDIT: Yes october, I just forgot to change the month in the header and I'm too lazy to fix it.

Notes:

I said I was going to revise the spreadsheet this month, but I didn't. Maybe next time.

Increase in net worth is more than the profits I listed. This is largely due to isk from incursions, which I spent some time on at the beginning of the month.

Obelisk margins (in red) are pretty miserable right now, and haven't improved since the last sale. A 5% margin (minus tax, which is in the overhead section instead of the manufacturing section) is a profit of less than 30 million, which is just pointless. I'm holding obelisk production for the immediate future and putting the liquidity into things that make actual profits. It will probably only been a couple of weeks, knowing the market.

Despite having issues with production wait times and moving to a new system, I actually sold more ships than I expected to this month, though profits dropped a lot. I have a bunch of ships finishing in the next few days, and jump-capable capital prices are looking really good right now, so I expect next month to be a good month.

Instead of continuing to copy my supercarrier BPO, I'm putting them into research so that I'll be able to sell them sooner when prices start coming back up. This means that I won't be seeing any copying profits from them in the immediate future, once the final copy has sold.

Considerations when deciding where to build or buy capital ships

Short answer: Probably, although thalaka specifically has a very weak capital market for whatever reason. I'm not familiar with the nullsec dynamics in that area.

Long answer:

Probably. This was one of several factors when I was looking for my new building station, and this post is now about describing in excruciating detail this and similar considerations when deciding where to sell and buy capital ships.

Though, oddly, I hadn't actually thought to check the portion of players who buy my ships that are from 0.0. Checking a very small sample indicates a possibility that few 0.0 players actually buy capitals from the highsec market: Of the last 9 capitals I have sold, 6 were purchased by players with no alliance (3 in NPC corp), 2 were purchased by a SOMER character (lottery corp) and 1 was purchased by a person in a 0.0 alliance. I would be surprised if the proportion of 0.0-based buyers was actually that low, but I think we can be somewhat confident that a significant portion of buyers are not 0.0 based. A likely explanation for this is that most 0.0 players have access to corp or alliance capital builders who will provide ships to them for less than market price.

But let's say that I want to maximize convenience for 0.0-based buyers (I do). Convenience comes in several forms:

1. Price. Buyers prefer to buy cheaper ships, so I will price my ships below other ships for sale.

2. Location. As a 0.0 based buyer I would prefer to get back into my alliance's jump beacon network with the minimum number of jumps, so I will prefer systems which are in range of one of our jump beacons. Let's check two building systems in forge, maila and otsela. We will use a rorqual or dreadnaught with jump drive calibration 4 to see what is in range.



Now we cross-reference the systems in range with the in-game map with a jump beacon overlay to see what alliances have jump beacons in range of the respective systems:



Maila is in range of 2 regions and 5 jump beacon networks, and otsela is in range of 3 regions and 7 jump beacon networks. Both systems are in range of the FDZ npc station system. In terms of location, I would prefer to build in otsela.

3. Modules and fuel. Capital modules are bulky and are tedious and/or dangerous to transport to lowsec, especially if somebody doesn't have a covert hauler. Because of this, I will prefer to build in systems where capital modules, fighters and fuel are available, or stock them myself if they aren't.


To explore how these things might work in the mind of a buyer, let's run through the following scenario: We are a member of NCdot who wants to buy a pve fit thanatos for his macro. We have a cloaky hauler available and know how to use RF freight.

We start by looking at the market:


Starting with the cheapest ships first, we cross-reference the systems where ships are available with the jump range tool and the market for capital modules we need. We see that there is a ship available in akora, but it is not in jump range of our jump beacon network. If there were fighters and capital modules available in akora we might consider buying there and doing a lowsec jump to get into range of our beacons, but there isn't. We keep looking.

The second ship is in otsela. This is in range of our jump beacon network, but again there are no fighters or modules available.

Going down the list, the third system with a thanatos for sale is maila. This system has capital modules and fighters available, but the ship is more expensive than earlier entries and the modules, fighters and isotopes are above jita price. It is also not in range of our jump beacon network.

Having to import modules from jita is much more difficult than doing a lowsec jump, so in terms of convenience the ship in maila wins. But it's also more expensive to buy and fit the ship there, so we might prefer to do the price conscious thing, buy in otsela and move the modules etc. in, using RF freight to ship them to the adjacent highsec then shuttling them to the lowsec station with our cloaky hauler.


And that's how equstria was made.

Outsourcing capital component production: Yea or nay?

This is a very special sort of question. It has a simple answer, which is "no". But then you follow the line of thought and go "...huh." And you start looking at some numbers, and it starts to have a different and much less simple answer, which starts with "this probably isn't what you had in mind at all, but-", involves a lot of spreadsheets (from which the reader will be spared, fortunately) and might end with a complete re-evaluation of your long term plans, although though you can already think of four reasons why it probably wouldn't work. But if it did....

...let's start with the long version of the simple answer.

The most dangerous and tedious part of building capitals for me is jumping materials to lowsec. Capital components have a larger volume (by about 30-50%) than the minerals it takes to make them, so getting components from a different system (say, jita) would increase somewhat significantly the number of jump freighter jumps I need to make. In fact, most capital builders compress minerals into 425 mm railgun I, allowing them to move about 10 carrier builds worth of minerals in one jump, at the cost of what is reported to be very slight inefficiency. I haven't looked into this yet because I'd need to grind standings to fix reprocessing tax, research railgun blueprints, probably train another manufacturing character....

But let's say that I did outsource component building, stopped building components altogether and just got them in jita.

And for the sake of this discussion, let's say that I'm limited to the 30 manufacturing slots I currently have, and that a capital ship hull takes 10 days to build. I currently have 9 capital ship hull blueprints, and under optimal conditions can keep them all building at all times, which comes out to a theoretical maximum of 27 ships per month. This is pretty standard for a serious capital builder; the other two I know report building 21 and 28 ships per month.

First, we have to know if it's actually possible to get components at a reasonable price. Comparing my spreadsheet to jita prices for capital armor plates, I find that plates in jita sell for 5148 thousand isk, while at jita mineral prices it would cost me 5107 thousand to build one run. This is a difference of 0.8%, which is negligible.

(related: armor plates are probably the worst possible component to look at for this purpose)

So if I were to put in a bit of extra work, I could avoid having to build components. That in itself doesn't really do anything for me, but if we take the 'buy components, build capitals' idea to its logical extreme we get to some really interesting places. What if, with no component bottleneck, I could build capital ships in all my manufacturing slots? 30 slots at 10 days each is 90 ships a month. Which is, like, a lot.

...and obstacles at every step.

Second first off, capital BPO. This isn't actually much of an obstacle, but buying and researching BPO would cost about 30 billion isk and take about a year. Isk I don't have right now, but this is eve. Isk happens.

Second, liquidity. If I have 30 capital ships building at all times, I will probably have, at a very rough estimate about 60 billion isk of material (components, hulls) wrapped up in the manufacturing process. This is doable, but probably not until I can get rid of my supercarrier BPO.

Third, buying components. Using armor plates as a standard (as mentioned, probably a very bad standard) there are about 300 units available in jita for a reasonable price, and they move about 50 units per day. That's enough to build 4 capital ships per day. I would be building 3 ships per day, which would increase demand by at least 75% (probably more, since some of the movement is traders) and probably drive prices up enough to make this idea not profitable.

There are a few things I might try to mitigate this. One of them is people who build capital and supercapital component packs -- with the supercapital nerf there's a good chance these guys are facing a decrease in buyers, and may have spare component building capacity that I could yoink for a reasonable price.

Fourth, selling. The forge market sells 280 capital ships per month that aren't freighters, orcas or jump freighters. Demand for capital ships is inelastic to price, so dumping another 90 ships per month on the market will drive down prices, probably in a significant way. I would probably try to mitigate this by spreading my operation to multiple regions around highsec -- probably the amarr, rens and jita regions, plus maybe one or two others (I hear good thingsabout lonetrek). Conveniently, this would also make it easy to spread buying of components to the other market hubs.

HNNG.

This is all pants-on-head theorycrafting, but if somebody could make this work it would be pretty awesome. To the tune of 19 billion isk of profit per month, under perfectly optimal conditions.

My favorite kill ever

It's this one.

It's not a titan, it's not expensive, it's just a shitfit battleship. What makes it special is how he died: A single volley from yours truly.

(yes there are other people on the killmail, no they didn't do damage)

Volleying a battleship (EDIT: With guns, doomday doesn't count) is something that doesn't happen very often, even for titan pilots. A properly fitted battleship has more EHP than any titan can deal in a single gun volley (except sometimes the ragnarok). What allowed this kill to happen is the fact that the battleship was not properly fitted, allowing my naglfar's alpha (about 40k) to exceed its' EHP. Not many people can claim to have volleyed a battleship, and I am still vaguely smug about it.

I didn't post about it at the time because I was still being all :secret: on account of being in a 0.0 elitepvp alliance filled mostly with dicks, but I saw a nice kill today and it came to mind.

While we're on the subject of the naglfar, I'd just like to mention that I love the guns on that thing. The alpha is great, and they're also oddly good at picking off targets with low angular velocity. I once got three pod kills in a row (like this one) at a range of 150 km. Another time I killed a stealth bomber that was doing a bomb run.

...sorry, bit of a memory lane trip there. Here's to hoping they make dreads useful again.

...wat

Fucking math how does it work

...I want the door back

I may well be alone in this, but I didn't mind the door. Here's why:

Door:

No moving things
Graphics card fan not audible

Ship spinning:

Moving things
Graphics card fan audible

Crippled

Freighters suck.

When you undock a freighter from a generic caldari station and warp somewhere, if that 'somewhere' is to the right of your ship you're going to bounce off the station and fail to warp. So when an industrial type picks a station to freighter minerals to, they prefer stations where the undock is pointing at the place where they warp after undocking; or failing that, a point they can warp to, then warp to where they want to go (a bounce spot).

Jita is an impressively bad system for this. If you buy minerals in the 4-4 station, there is only one manufacturing station you can warp to without having to use a bounce spot. And undocking from that manufacturing station, you have to use a bounce spot to get to the 4-4 station without getting stuck.

(I'm going somewhere with this, I promise)

In lowsec, this is exacerbated by the lowsec aspect because if you fuck up you die. Therefore, when building in lowsec one very much prefers stations where you can warp a jump freighter straight to the out-gate after undocking.

In the lowsec system where I have been building capitals, there are two good stations. One has practically a straight out warp to the highsec gate, the other takes a while to align but also has somebody stocking it with capital mods so it's better to sell ships there.

I initially started building at the station with the capital mods, but pretty soon after I started somebody started repeatedly installing 10 day runs in every manufacturing slot. I moved to the other station, and that was good until the end of last month, when there started being jobs in all the slots. Not 10 day jobs, but there are always wait times now.

This is not okay. You could think of my capital production as a just-in-time process, where a delay at any stage holds up the entire system (this is actually completely untrue, but the analogy works). Short version, a wait time of a few days for production jobs to start has a really bad effect on the number of ships I can build in a month. Like say, a 4 day delay reduces the number of ships per month by 50%.

EDIT: Hence the title of the post.

Problem-solving time.

The first thing I did was decrease granularity. Example: I have two capital ship runs which each need 20 units of a particular component. If a 20-unit run takes 60 hours and the wait time on the manufacturing slots is 100 hours, it would take 320 hours to do two 20-unit runs; but I can also do one 40-unit run, which will only take 220 hours.

The second thing to help the situation was to farm out farm out component runs. There are two stations in the system which still have free manufacturing slots. If I can move minerals and components between the stations, I can avoid wait times. My jump freighter pilot isn't always available to move stuff in lowsec, so I trained one of my alts to fly a freighter and built a fenrir (fastest align time) from a blueprint copy. This is a decent stopgap measure, but not a solution. Unfortunately, the manufacturing slot situation isn't improving.

One thing would be to move my entire operation to a different station in the system. Unfortunately, both of the remaining stations result in the jump freighter getting stuck trying to warp to the out gate. So....

Move to a different system. There are 5 systems in forge which I could use for cap building, with a total of 11 manufacturing stations. Two of them have captial mods for sale. Conditions are better in several of these systems, and if I really have to I can even stock a system with capital mods.

I evaluated all the stations. Seven of them were bad for one reason or another, three are less than great and one looked pretty good, so that's where I'm moving.

Unfortunately there are no capital mods for sale in the system I've chosen. This is semi-important because the availability of mods makes your system a more desirable place to buy a ship. Properly speaking I don't have to stock it, but it's bad to have ships stuck on the market longer than necessary, so I will. Which will set my less short term plans back at least half a month, but whatever. I'm retired; it's not like I'm in a hurry.

Oddly enough, a capital manufacturing operation is highly portable -- all I have to do is change a few bookmarks and move my blueprints to the new system as my current runs finish up. NBD.

Almost like a real fleet

Minor update on incursion running. I've spent a few hours on it over the past two weeks, and the money is a little better than I had said -- 50m/h is the very low end of normal, while a good FC and fleet can make 100m plus LP.

I also got in on an HQ (40 man site) fleet. Unlike vanguard sites, which most fleets are for, HQ actually keep you awake. From a grunt's perspective it's almost like a real fleet, except there's no danger and targets are designated with tags instead of broadcasts. I have yet to see a ship die in an incursion.

Almost

EDIT: Blogspot is opening screenshots in the foreground and graying out the background, which resizes larger screenshots to ick on smaller monitors. Hm.

Incursions

So I read this post (if you're thinking of getting into incursions click the link, read the post and the guides it links).

I've heard that incursions are the best thing going in highsec, and had considered trying them. After reading that post and one of the guides, I decided to go for it. Fitted out a scimi -- logi are highly sough after in incursion fleets, and much cheaper than many of the DPS ships people fly.

I got into a fleet doing tier 2 incursion sites, which it turns out are not very difficult, and made 54m/h over 3.6 hours. So, easy money, and apparently much more profitable than missions. Unfortunately profit still scales linearly with time, which is something I've been trying to get away from with manufacturing, science and trade. Odds are I won't be doing these much in the long run.

If you decide to give incursions a try, I highly recommend getting at least a logi or tier 3 CR battleship before trying to get into a fleet. They can be somewhat selective.

Not one of the more difficult sites.

The ice must floe

So goons are ganking bots and people who are mining gallente ice (which produces oxygen isotopes), to fill the game with tears and fuck.

You can read the plan. There's been some discussion as to whether it's for real or not, and I was curious to know what was actually happening. So I checked.

The plan includes a list of target systems. Shortly after hearing about the project I checked a few systems and found no gankers, and about 10-20 miners in each ice belt. 12 hours after that, I went through the list and checked every (non-island) system. This is what I found:

• Ardallabier - 2 miners, down from ~15 earlier. Ganks ongoing.
• Brapelille - 12 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Jaschercis - 5 miners. These ones are trying to be tricky, using ECM drones, RR, and hulks instead of mackinaws. An alpha pest or maybe two smartbombers could kill them, but I hung out for a while and nobody took them out.
• Angymonne - 1 miner.
• Aydoteaux - 5 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Carirgnottin - 6... 5... 4 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Tolle - 1 miner.
• Ignebaener - A single miner, being bumped by a gank brutix while the brutix pilot mourned the lack of remaining targets.

Out of curiosity, I then re-visited the systems in reverse order

• Tolle - No miners.
• Carirgnottin - No miners.
• Aydoteaux - 3 miners, surrounded by exhumer and gank ship wrecks. I suspect they were replacing lost mackinaws from a stock in station. Obviously bots. Ganks ongoing.
• Angymonne - No miners.
• Jaschercis - 2 miners. No visible gank activity.
• Brapelille - 2 miners, ganks ongoing.
• Ardallabier - 1 miner, ganks ongoing.

Here's the goon killboard. The search tool shows 280 exhumer and mining barge kills in the last two days, which appear to have taken place almost exclusively in gallente highsec.

I'm gon' call it, highsec oxygen isotope production has been shut down hard. So what's going on with the market?

Well, as soon as the 'goonswarm shrugged' announcement was made, well before ganks started, speculation drove the price of isotopes up to about 3 times their previous price. At that point people started selling stock for hilarious profits, which caused the price to stabilize and even decrease. Some people who would have otherwise held their stock mistook this for a peak and also put their stock up for sale. Currently oxygen isotopes in jita are 1050 isk per unit, down from a peak of about 1300.

And what happens next? Two possibilities:

1. Goons stop killing miners, prices return to normal.
2. Goons keep ice production shut down, stocks are depleted and the price increases more. Possibly a lot more.

I'm betting on number 2 at the moment. It won't last forever, but things could be really interesting in the meantime.

Lastly, forums. There is a thread, and it is full of sperging goonhate, tears and some of the dumbest shit I've ever read. It's beautiful.

September monthly financial report

Notes:

-This sheet is way too long, and it's going to get longer in the future. I'm going to have to revise the format.

-Major expenses in September included 2 plex (about 800 mil) and a second freighter (also about 800 mil), which does not appear on the 'ships' section of the net worth section yet. These account for most of the difference between the 'monthly net profit' and 'increase in net worth' figures.

-I've changed how I figure mineral costs. The new method saves a lot of effort, and moves buy order fees from the overhead section to the outlay figure under manufacturing.

-A number of the ships sold this moth were spillover from last month -- in particular runs 4 and 5, from which 6 out of 8 ships were actually sold last month. Only two ship sales are going to spill over from September to October. Because of this, and another factor about which I will post later, I expect ships sold in October to decrease from this month's figure.

-Run 13 is much less interesting than it looks.

-'Approximate' and 'real' in the manufacturing runs -- only entries which are marked 'real' are used to calculate monthly profit. The 'approximate' numbers are for individual ships in multi-ship runs, and are slightly wrong while the 'total' figure for multi-ship runs is accurate. I am phasing out 'approximate' figures because :effort:. Getting rid of them means my net worth figure will lag a little, but I don't actually care about that.

My plans, all of them

...are the subject of this post.

First off, for the foreseeable future I do not intend to return to nullsec. I've considered returning in a limited capacity and just flying subcapitals or something, but there's nobody I want to fly with right now and I'm still feeling fairly burnt out on nullsec. So no.

Thus, for the foreseeable future my plan is to focus on building wealth. I have some plans for this, and these plans require a lot of capital. Alas, capital is not something which I have right now -- but this can be fixed!

You see, I have a lot of assets, and some of them are underperforming. Specifically, three supercarrier BPO which I have been copying, which have a combined NPC value of 52.55 billion. These each make about 100m/mo, and I could make a lot more than that if I sold them and invested the money elsewhere. Unfortunately two of them are nyx, which are currently selling for under NPC price (because everybody got nyx blueprints after dominion and now everybody wants to sell them).

From the looks of it, if I can find a buyer at all I'll be selling the nyx blueprints for about 0.6 billion under NPC price. Overall this isn't a loss, since copies have made me at least a few billion, but it does make me slightly sad. Oh well.

The third BPO is an aeon. There are none on contracts as I type this, so I don't expect to have any trouble selling it.

And so, on to the projects!


Project 1: Capital manufacturing.

What: Building capital ships.

Status: This is already making me lots of money (stay tuned for the next monthly financial report), but it isn't actually fully funded. Currently I have about 64 billion invested in it, and while I'm close to my theoretical manufacturing capacity another 8 or 10 billion would be nice, to round out my blueprint collection and get enough minerals to keep 2 of each ship on my spreadsheet at all times.


Project 2: Capital component research

What: Researched capital ship components sell for a fair margin over NPC price, and with three indy characters I could run 30 research jobs in parallel. Also, the blueprints I'm currently using for manufacturing are underresearched (ME30 PE10). What I plan to do is buy a set of blueprints of the same number and type that I currently own, get them properly researched and swap them out for the set I'm currently using. Then I'll put my current set of blueprints into research, and sell them when they're done. Then buy more blueprints, research and sell.

Status: Not yet started. Would require 28 to 30 billion to fully fund, but could easily be done a few blueprints at a time. I plan to get this started after selling the first supercarrier BPO.


Project 3: Trade

What: There are some opportunities out there to make easy money, but I'm not going to tell you what they are.

Status: Not yet started. Would require 8 billion to fully fund.


Side project: Top secret

What: I can't tell you.

Status: Currently colluding with two others to achieve goals. We're just getting started, and it probably won't pan out. Colluding is an awesome word, though.


So that's it. These are all the plans I have.

Seeking capital sellers in forge and lonetrek

I'm looking for anybody who sells capital ships in forge or lonetrek on a regular basis. There could be a bit of money in it, so if you or somebody you know fits the bill please convo or mail my alt 'ispia jaydrath' ingame for more information.

Sigh

Remember when I said...

So, it's over. The NC is dead. The DRF ... are an unstoppable juggernaut. They control more than half of player-sov nullsec (18 of 35 regions) even if they choose not to also take the DC's space; they control all the game's technetium if they choose to take the rest; and they have more firepower than the rest of 0.0 combined.

But it's cool, keep partying about the NC being dead. I'm sure things will be so much better now.

You've seen it already, but this is a fucking epic infographic:


Nullsec is dead. The only pvp left is welpcat fleets in delve, and the whole point of those is that they don't matter.

Funny thing about being an ex-nullsec guy, I consider the state of null to be the most important thing in eve. Everything else is either completely trivial, or subordinate to the state of nullsec; and if nullsec is dead, it feels like eve is dead. No more wars, no more epic struggles. What's left, small gang pvp? Sitting in empire making money?

I can handle sitting in empire making money, but unless null revives at some point wealth will become meaningless because there will never be anything to spend money on. And then what's the point?

EVE FAIL PODCAST111

No, not really. This is a dummy post to help me find things later. Move along.

tl;dr proof of concept recording to test production method. Contains mostly lies.

Mediafire mp3 2:03 3.3 MB

reference

Monthly financial report (august)

Comments:

Number of ships sold: Only runs (which for my purposes may consist of multiple ships) which are complete appear on the report. This means that if a ship has been sold, but another ship in the same run hasn't been sold, the sold ship does not appear here. I sold 7 ships this month which do not appear on the report.

When the last ship from a run sells, I delete its' entries from my tables of manufacturing run mineral values and partial-run sold ships. This results in my total net worth figure increasing by the difference between the jita price of the minerals for the run and what I actually spent. At that time I also move the run to the monthly section of the spreadsheet.

Manufacturing liquidity figure: This is fun to calculate because of the issue with partial runs -- with multi-ship runs I don't know how much each ship costs, only the run as a whole. What I do in this case is calculate the jita price of the minerals for the ships in a run at the time I bought them (usually slightly more than I actually spend on the minerals, thanks to buy orders), and when a ship from a partial run is sold I subtract the jita mineral price from the manufacturing liquidity figure. This is subtracted from the total value of active runs (currently 19321 million) and divided by 1000 to find the manufacturing liquidity figure of 14.99 billion.

Overhead: A nontrivial portion of the taxes and fees figure are the result of my using buy orders to get minerals. It saves money overall, but the taxes from buy orders are lumped under overhead rather than being included in the build cost. So, like, the taxes and fees number is partially offset by larger margins in the manufacturing section.

Things which are not related to science and industry moneymaking do not appear on the monthly numbers section, so if I buy too many timecards and pretty dresses my net worth could actually decrease month-over-month. It could also increase more than ([monthly profit] - [2 timecards]) from sales of assets stuck in 0.0, mission running if I ran missions, that sort of thing.

Rixx Javix is a bad person in real life

I don't know what started these long and increasingly ridiculous posts about rixx javix, or why new ones keep happening, but it has come time for me to take a side.

Rixx javix made fluttershy cry. He also kicks puppies.

Oh god more spreadsheets

Is it better to buy minerals from sell orders, or to make a buy order? Find the answer, using the power of spreadsheets!

What is this I don't even? Well, instead of pasting all the maths here, since I doubt anybody would be interested, I'll tell you how it's used, which is the important part. Nobody is likely interested in that either, but whatever.

1. Once I know the mineral quantities that I need, they go in the 'units needed' row of the top table.

2. For each mineral I check the in-game market for two values:

2a. The per-unit price for the lowest-price sell order which fulfills my mineral requirements. This goes in 'market price' in the second table.

2b. The per-unit price which I would offer if I were to make a buy order, which is usually 0.01 isk above the current highest buy order of significant quantity. This number goes in the 'buy order price' column of the second table.

3. I then go to the 'buy order taxed' column of the second table. This figure is equal to the 'buy order price' column multiplied by 1.0075, which is the tax rate on buy orders (with perfect skills, of course), meaning that I can save money if there are any minerals for sale for less than that number. I check each mineral for cheaper sell orders, and buy them. The quantity purchased goes in the columns in the 'bought' section of the top table, and the 'still need' row and column change to reflect how many minerals I still need.

Usually the 'difference' number being red means I will not need to place a buy order for that mineral, and it being black means I will not buy anything from the market, but there are exceptions.

The screenshot above is for build #14 after I finished step 3. Note that 'bought' entries only appear for those minerals with red in the 'difference' column.

4. Once that is done, I make buy orders for everything that's left, then check back every so often and play the 0.01 isk game until my buy orders are filled. I used to have a rule against playing 0.01 isk games, but I rarely need to change the price more than maybe twice. Not exactly a huge time sink.

• Note: In case you couldn't tell, the 'difference after tax' figure tells me how much I save by making a buy order instead of buying from market. It's not exact, and isn't actually used for anything, but it is nice.
• Note: I'm not actually sure this is the best way to do things, and I am sure the spreadsheet could be cleaned up a lot. I just converted this from an impromptu tool which I had been using until now, and invented the process as I wrote the post.
• Note: The bottom table is arranged perpendicular to the top table, and in a different order, for ease of use.
• Note: The 'still need' column and row are identical. Having the data in both tables just makes things easier.
• Note: I round mineral quantities I buy up a little because my spreadsheet reads very slightly low when calculating minerals. This is periodically corrected -- when all component runs on my build tracker are in progress, I can see how much excessive minerals have built up, and those numbers are put into the 'bought' row of the top table when I start the next run.

Moar spreadsheets

My per-run-component-progress-spreadsheet-tool-thing (shown below) is good for keeping track of the progress of capital ship building runs.

Klikkin ter expander
(pictured here without color key)

However, it's not very good at all for telling me what ships I should be building components for next. Ideally one would like to have the components for the next run of a ship finish building before the hull from the previous run finishes, allowing one to keep the hull blueprint in manufacturing at all times. So I made another tool to track the status of blueprints.


In one or two previous posts I had talked about how I might be starting to get ahead of the curve on finishing components before the hull blueprints became available, and here you can (sorta, if you squint) see the actual status of this. EDIT: Basically, dark blue cells are where I'm winning. With two drone bay blueprints I can build drone bays for all 4 carriers in about 6 days, so I am quickly getting ahead of carrier builds (with the exception of an extremely unfortunate thanatos from build 5, which is a long story), but freighters are still lagging because I only have one construction parts blueprint in jita -- it takes 5 to 8 days to build the construction parts for one freighter, but only 10-ish days to build a freighter. Thus, it takes up to 24 days to build the construction parts for three freighters, which would be enough time to build 7-1/2-ish freighters if my three hull blueprints were fully utilized. I'm going to have to do the math on buying components from the market to fill in until my second construction parts blueprint for jita finishes research.

(Idea: Orcas require 7 types of components to build, but construction parts and cargo bays, which I already have the blueprints for in jita, comprise 2/3 of the components used. Instead of spending 5-ish bil and months of research on the other 5 blueprints, I could just get the other components from the market. If the price is right.)

Note that on this tool, when a 'get mins' magenta colored box has a date in it, that means I can leave off starting to build the components until that date, for whatever reason. In the case of the chimera, the drone bay blueprints, which are the longest part of a carrier build, won't be available until the 21st, so I don't need to get started on that yet; plus I'll want to pick up minerals for some other ships at the same time (thanatos, archon and probably two rorqual). In the case of the charon I need to wait for construction parts for the obelisk to finish (1 day left) and then do construction parts for the providence (another 5-8 days), and it will be trivial to have the rest of the components finished before the construction parts blueprint is finally ready for the charon build.