EVE-fail

Loot pr0n

2012-01-29T16:39:00.000-08:00

Went out to null for some exploration (using the minimize trick to avoid crashes). First site of the day is a 6/10 and bam.

Drop is worth 3458m at the time of writing.

Incursion tears: Epic edition

2012-01-22T15:40:00.000-08:00

So anyway. You've probably heard of the incursion interdiction, in which people are forming fleets to kill sansha motherships, forcing incursions to despawn instead of letting the incursion runners farm them for days. This - even before they started killing moms - has produced an endless ocean of tears on the forums, to rival even the ice interdiction. And these are the very best sort of tears, the ones produced by highsec 'elitists' with an entitlement complex. The sheer, sadistic joy of watching them curse the gods and shake their tiny fists in impotent rage is intoxicating.

On saturday the incursion griefers rolled out and shut down all the highsec incursions. Three more popped up overnight, and by euro prime the mom sites were available. The interdictors rolled out again, and this time I joined up in a shitfit tempest.

We formed at 2100, hit the first site, and BTL contested it and tried to suicide gank us with ECM and smartbombs. The fun was doubled!

We lost a guardian to the gank attempt, they lost their ships and somehow managed to pod their own fc. We finished the site, burned to the other two incursion sites and took them out too, cackling madly on comms all the while. It took 1 hour and 50 minutes to end all three of them, completely shutting down highsec incursion running.

May need to open in new tab

Now, serious business. Incursions are good because they get people to people work together. The incursion interdiction is also good because it is emergent, player generated content where people work together, as well as the most fun I've had in eve in years.

If you'd like to join in, here's how you do it:

Join:
Channel: Grief the bears
Teamspeak 3: 178.32.239.141

Fleets seem to roll around 2000

If you just want to harvest tears, watch the 'btl pub' and 'the ditanian fleet' channels, and the forums.

What is this I don't even

2012-01-19T05:42:00.000-08:00

You see this?

That kestrel has been sitting in otsela since WI lost geminate.

Two years ago.

MFW

2012-01-18T17:00:00.000-08:00

That hull was built with minerals purchased before the patch. I don't know how much they cost precisely, but the profit is around 700 million. Give or take 50.

So how was your day?

Blog design: How to be slightly less terrible

2012-01-15T00:44:00.000-08:00

Everything in this post is probably covered in even the most basic 'how to blog' guide, but most eve bloggers aren't especially ~professional~. Hopefully someone will find this useful.

In this post I will be linking examples of what I'm talking about. This is done to provide illustration, not as a callout, so don't get butthurt.

Ads:

Nobody likes ads. If you aren't making actual money, get rid of them.

Text color:

Most of your readers will be subscribed using a newsreader. When the newsreader imports your posts, it will usually change the default text color to black and display the text on a white background. However, if you manually change the text color, the newsreader will use the manual color.

This means that if you change text in a post to a color which is hard to read against a white background, your readers will have a hard time reading it.

Put another way: Never, ever, ever use yellow text. More generally, any color which isn't easily visible against both light and dark backgrounds should be avoided. If you must change text color, mid-range blues and greens are usually okay.

Gadget creep:

You can have your blog display popular posts and blog stats and pages and followers and a search box and links to every eve blog in existence and every eve site in existence and labels and a profile and the tweet fleet stream and seven different ways to subscribe, but that doesn't mean you should. What you're actually doing is drowning your content under a river of crap.

If you don't personally use a gadget, get rid of it.

Example

Labels:

Labels should be useful tools for your readers to find different types of posts. This means:

Labels should be meaningful, not something you make up on the spot. Define them for yourself in advance.

Labels should be applied consistently. Clicking on a label should display every post relevant to that label.

Labels should be widely applicable. If you have 100 labels and 90 of them are only used for one or two posts, you're doing it wrong.

Example

Banners:

If you have a huge banner causing your content to start halfway down the screen, you're doing it wrong.

Example

If you have multiple banners, you're doing it wrong.

Example

If you have a text title, then a banner above or below the title, you're doing it wrong. They should be co-located.

Example

Backgrounds:

Backgrounds should not be brighter than the content of the blog. It's visually distracting.

Example

Unless you really know what you're doing, don't try to use a static background image. If you think you know what you're doing, test it on multiple monitor sizes anyway, and even then make sure the image fades to the page background color.

If you have a background image or colored background, be extremely careful using transparent backgrounds for your posts. If you must do this, the transparency should be very slight (e.g. 5-10%) and you should be very careful that it does not interfere with reading.

Blag update, part 2: Theme warrior, labels, guides

2012-01-14T23:07:00.000-08:00

Wasn't actually planning to keep going, but it seemed like the right thing to do.

All unecessary objects have been removed from the template.
Blog list has been trimmed aggressively.
Labels for all posts are now correct and consistent. All useless labels have been removed. Some of the remaining labels are specific to files which are currently unavailable, however.
All labels, with descriptions, have been added to the 'Label index' page.
All still-useful guides have been added to the 'Guide index' page.
Added favicon. Didn't turn out like I'd hoped, and I am undecided as to whether I should use the default blogger icon. This will probably be revised repeatedly.

One hundred

2012-01-11T08:23:00.000-08:00

"One hundred what?" you ask. One hundred posts? One hundred million skill points? One hundred million page views on Equestria Daily?

No, no, and... yes, actually, and at almost exactly the same time, but that's not what I'm talking about.

I just delivered the 100th capital ship from my manufacturing project. To my deep and abiding shame it was a phoenix, but at least margins on them are unexpectedly decent right now.

The first ship was a chimera, delivered on July 15 . That was about 5 months ago, which gives us an average of 20 ships per month.

I'm okay with that.

Generic new layout post

2012-01-11T05:26:00.000-08:00

Got tired of black on white and changed to white on black. It just looks better.

Plus, screenshots stand out more. Though screenshots with a lot of whitespace (like spreadsheets and EFT) stand out more in a bad way.

Whatever. I expect I'll end up reverting it after not too long.

Capital manufacturing update: Full stop

2012-01-07T18:13:00.001-08:00

The effect of this notion? I very much fear, 'twill make doubtful all things which were formerly clear

-Schrodinger's Cat, by Cecil Adams

In my december monthly financial report I mentioned that something had gone horribly wrong with my spreadsheet. Today, we discuss what.

Basically, component quantities.

When crucible hit, drone bays were removed from dreadnaughts. Then, for each 5 drone bays which were removed from a dread, 1 was added to the carrier of the same race. What I didn't notice was that the changes didn't stop there. Possibly I should read the patch notes more closely next time.

Since I build components for runs well ahead of where my blueprints are, it took a while for the effects to be seen. In Mid-late december I found myself running short of components when I shouldn't be running short of components. This prompted me to check my blueprints against my spreadsheet, and what I found was that different components had been added to dreads, in numbers which I suspect are equal to the number of drone bays removed. This is what was causing me to run short.

This prompted a full check of all my other blueprints, and I discovered that carrier components had also changed, but only a little -- they had two or three components removed total, of similar types to those added to dreads. I suspect that the number of components removed from carriers was equal to the number of drone bays added, though I can't prove it.

So I had to:

-Change the base component quantities for each carrier and dread on my spreadsheet, and make sure they gave the correct answer for the materiel level of my blueprints.
-At this point my spreadsheet was chill, so I just had to update ship prices and margins on the little thingy what tells me which ships are better but doesn't really affect what I build.
-With that done, I still had little idea how many components of each type I had too many or too few of, so I put a hold on new runs and and waited for ship builds to catch up so I could see where I stood in terms of components.
-I was short of some components, so I had to build the ones I was missing. Minerals for this ran around 520 million, which I've subtracted from my monthly profit spreadsheet as a correction. I also ended up with 5 extra components of different types.

By the way, if you think capitals are really expensive right now? They aren't. Other than chimera, archon, and revelation, margins are looking frankly depressing.

Depressing blog meme: Days logged in

2012-01-03T00:41:00.000-08:00

The eve server keeps track of how long you've played on each account. It can be retrieved thusly:

EDIT: There is an easier way:

https://api.eveonline.com/account/AccountStatus.xml.aspx?keyid=_____&vcode=_____

Where underscores are replaced by your API key ID and code respectively. 'logonMinutes' is the relevant data field.

My highest active account has 243 days since 10/2008. My first account (currently lapsed) started 10/2007, but I have reason to believe this one has more time on it.

Alternate method below

Quit eve
Go to the eve directory
Start logserver.exe
Go to file->new workspace
Start eve and log in to the account you want to check.
In the log server, go to edit->find, toggle the 'search up' radio button and search for the term 'charUnboundMgr'
This message will probably be split across two log entries, and be above a message starting with a yellow circle with an exclamation point in it.
Read along the entry until you see 'None, None, None, None'. The number just previous to that is the number of minutes you have logged in on that account. Take that number, divide it by 60, and divide that by 24 to find days played.
Note: Exiting the log server before the client will cause the client to crash.

EDIT: With some people trying this it looks like we're getting variable results. Keep in mind that the 'charunboundmgr' message is split across two lines in the log server. If you can't find the four nones, the message also contains two fields which are either 'true' or 'false', and the number is immediately after the second one. In the screenshot, the message split before the 'e' of the second one.

Monthly financial report (December)

2011-12-31T20:01:00.001-08:00

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

2011-12-26T15:08:00.000-08:00

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 5000 heavy missiles, then fill the rest with torpedoes to resupply the bomber. I haven't actually managed to run out of ammo yet, but 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 faster 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).

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.

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

2011-12-22T19:17:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-22T02:40:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-19T12:00:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-12T10:00:00.001-08:00

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.
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 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 20 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

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

2011-12-05T05:08:00.000-08:00

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

2011-12-04T06:37:00.000-08:00

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?

2011-11-30T07:37:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-30T03:17:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-28T22:40:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-26T23:29:00.000-08:00

Signal boost because manly tears.

WinterUpdate by DavidKMagnus

Capital manufacturing status update

2011-11-26T01:17:00.000-08:00

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

2011-11-10T22:52:00.001-08:00

"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

2011-10-31T18:53:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-25T03:09:00.000-07:00

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?

2011-10-24T05:55:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-21T22:34:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-21T11:24:00.001-07:00

Fucking math how does it work

...I want the door back

2011-10-19T18:04:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-16T15:12:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-15T02:50:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-03T02:39:00.000-07:00

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

2011-10-01T16:34:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-30T17:25:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-28T17:02:00.000-07:00

...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

2011-09-24T00:30:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-20T23:05:00.000-07:00

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

2011-09-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

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)

2011-08-31T22:44:00.000-07:00

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

2011-08-25T15:29:00.001-07:00

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

2011-08-22T21:08:00.001-07:00

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

2011-08-18T17:56:00.000-07:00

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.

Spreadsheets so alone

2011-08-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

It had to be done.
I don't know what it means.

Heavy industry

2011-08-11T20:31:00.001-07:00

That's basically what's happening right now. All those are set to finish in the next 10 days.

My goal should be to have all ship blueprints in production at all times, and at the moment I'm pretty close -- two carrier blueprints aren't in production at the moment because things are still out of whack from when I only had one drone bay BPO. This will probably still take a few more weeks to resolve.

Dreadnaughts are proving to be interesting. I've decided that I probably won't produce phoenixes for now, because the margins just aren't very impressive. I might get into them in a few months if it turns out that my component blueprints are underutilized and if I have the spare isk (things are looking good on the spare isk front).

The naglfar is interesting. The margins look awesome from sell orders, but the volume is extremely low. I put the one I used to fly on the market about a month ago; it hasn't sold, and there are about five other people selling them and pricing their order to lowest on market multiple times per day. On the other hand, selling straight to buy orders I would make about 148 mil -- as much as selling a phoenix via sell order, and with less taxes. If my component blueprints are indeed underutilized, this will probably be my first option.

Not pictured are research jobs, freighters and freighter components. Freighters are currently in a similar state to carriers, with two out of three hull blueprints not in manufacturing at the moment. It takes about 10 days to build a freighter, and about 10 days to build the cargo bays for a freighter using one blueprint, and in about a month I'll have a 1:1 ratio of cargo bay to freighter blueprints, so this too should resolve.

300% profit guaranteed!!! (smug edition)

2011-08-07T19:11:00.000-07:00

The game.

Capital manufacturing status update

2011-08-04T03:37:00.000-07:00

Two weeks ago, in my previous post on the subject, I said that I was starting to do capital manufacturing and that it was only partially set up. Today it's still only partially set up, but a lot more so.

The manufacturing alt corp is up and running, and soon most of my manufacturing and research jobs will be installed on behalf of the corp.

In July I finished two build runs (a 'run' being an instance of me buying minerals and moving them to the building station, and 'finished' happening when the ships built from those minerals are sold), for a total of 4 ships, and currently I have five runs in various stages of completion for a total of 13 ships: 7 carriers, 2 rorquals, 3 freighters and a dreadnaught.

Build progress

Ideally one would like to have all ship blueprints in production at all times, but at the moment I'm experiencing component bottlenecks with drone bays and cargo bays, having only one researched blueprint of each. A second original blueprint of each of those each will be finishing research in the next 12 hours, though, so hopefully this issue will be under control soon.

I'm now starting dreadnaught manufacturing, as my siege array and turret hardpoint blueprints finished research a few hours ago (launcher hardpoint is finishing tomorrow), and I plan to pick up minerals for another dread or two later today. Unlike the other capitals I do not have BPO for dreads, and this is okay because highly researched dreadnaught BPC are pretty cheap. The dreadnaught market is sort of peculiar -- they mostly have good margins, but they sell very slowly. In some cases, like the naglfar, if I already have one on the market I can sell straight to buy orders, but in others (phoenix) the buy orders are actually lower than the mineral cost.

Also, I lack a fenrir BPO. I suppose it isn't surprising they aren't being sold much, since there are decent margins on freighters at the moment. I'll just have to wait for one to show up at a reasonable price.

Finally, in terms of me always being right, in my monthly financial report poast three days ago I asserted that I would be making more per month than the 450 mil I made in July. So far this month I have made 50% more.

Thanks google

2011-08-02T17:46:00.000-07:00

I am the number one search result for "eve fail" "why eve fails" and "the california state automobile aSSOCIATION GOING TO HELL".

I actually didn't mean for that to happen.

Monthly financial report

2011-08-01T02:03:00.001-07:00

That's right I am carebear like a boss now, all up in the spreadsheets n' shit.

But serious, now that I'm doing manufacturing I actually sort of need to track this stuff.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN

I made 450 mil in july, which is enough for 1 plex. I need to make enough for 2 each month.

Fortunately july has very little to do with earning potential from manufacturing, and I'll actually still be making a lot more from copying than this shows.

300% profit guaranteed!!!

2011-07-30T06:44:00.000-07:00

Check this out:

3500 AUR = 1 plex = 365 million isk

3500 AUR = 365 million isk

1000 AUR = 104 million isk

Men's 'Precision' Boots = 1000 AUR = 104 million isk

Oddly enough, although almost everything in the AUR store follows this approximation (easy version: aur/10 = isk value in millions), the boots have actually been selling for around 50 mil over the last month (they are pretty ugly...). But, check jita prices for the boots today.

Since everybody got 1000 free AUR, and since the boots are the only thing that costs 1000 or less, a lot of people got the boots and put them on the market, and suddenly there are sell orders under 15 million. If somebody were so inclined they could pick up a bunch of boots now, wait for the free AUR thing to finish and the market to equalize, and make a pretty decent profit.

Just saying. My guess is it will take a really long time for the market to equalize, since a) everybody got 1000 aur and b) aur store items seem to be fairly slow movers, but opportunities like this don't come up every minor content patch.

Selling a supercapital using a third party

2011-07-25T21:52:00.000-07:00

I set out to sell my nyx because I'm not using it and could use the isk. Originally I was thinking darkness or chribba, but they weren't available while me and the buyer were on and we agreed to use somer's third party service.

The buyer put up a passworded pos in the system. He and somer warped to the pos; he transferred the isk to somer; I warped to the pos, ejected, and he got in. He verified the fittings and somer transferred the isk to me.

It went down like this (edited for brevity):

Buyer> isk sent
Somerset Mahm > Confirming I've received 23b ISK. You're clear to join fleet
Autumnries Mahm > what's the POS password, please?
Buyer> ******
Buyer> clr to warp 0m to me
Autumnries Mahm > POS entered successfully
Me > warping now
Me > Okay. If it's a trap and the nyx dies, I get the money. If it's stolen by a mysterious third party who has the password, I get the money. If the fit is wrong, I get the nyx back.
Autumnries Mahm > correct :P
Autumnries Mahm > on all counts
Buyer> i am ready to enter
Autumnries Mahm > Okay, I see Nyx in shields. Buyer: again, please verify that everything is correct, as this is your only chance to do so while being secured
Autumnries Mahm > Since this is your POS and you won't leave immediately, once you confirm everything is okay, I will release the money
Me > Oke, ejecting. Don't press self destruct, don't press self destruct....
Autumnries Mahm > okay, Nyx is empty
Autumnries Mahm > and now Buyer is in it
Autumnries Mahm > Please check fit :)
Buyer> in the ship
Buyer> everything is here
Buyer> thank you very much
Me > Thank you.
Autumnries Mahm > okay, great!
Autumnries Mahm > I'm now sending the money to [me]
Me > I have the isk

What I'm doing now

2011-07-20T01:11:00.000-07:00

I mentioned a few weeks back that I've gone back to empire and am changing direction in my gameplay. I've been sort of putting off posting about it since I'm still working out how the whole mess is going to work, but I guess now is as good a time as any.

Short version, instead of being 0.0 elitepeeveepee, or indeed any pvp at all (for the forseeable future), I'm going to be doing science and industry.

LIKE A BOSS

Fortunately, I have some pride so I won't be sitting in jita and adjusting market orders by 0.01 isk. I'm awesome, you see, so I'm going to be building capital ships, mostly in lowsec, and I'm going to be doing it from BPOs.

Here's how it's going to work:

First, I now have a personal corp for building. When building capital ships it's helpful to have more than 11 manufacturing slots, so I will have two characters in this corporation. Capitals are a 2-stage process, manufacturing capital components first and then the ship when the components are done, so all the minerals and parts will be kept in a corp hangar, and jobs will be installed on behalf of the corp and delivered to the corp hangar, which makes manufacturing with multiple characters much easier. All the lowsec manufacturing and market orders will be accomplished by the two characters in this corporation, isk will be kept in the corporation wallet, etc. And nobody else will be allowed in.

A third character, in NPC corp to avoid any possible wardecs, will be used to move minerals from jita to the lowsec building system. Moving minerals will be accomplished thusly:

First, the ships to be built will be indentified. Using the power of spreadsheets the mineral requirements for those ships will be found, then the minerals purchased. The expensive minerals will be moved directly to lowsec via jump freighter(to avoid possible ganks), but first everything that doesn't fit in the JF will be moved via freighter to a highsec system adjacent to the lowsec building system. After the jump freighter moves the high-value minerals to the lowsec building system, it will then jump via gate to the system with the low value minerals and back to the building system until all the minerals have been moved. This saves a lot of jump fuel compared with jumping from jita to lowsec repeatedly, plus I can get in two loads of minerals for each cyno cycle.

Since the third charcter will not be in my corporation, it won't be able to help build in lowsec. Instead, the third character will build freighters (and probably orcas later on) in jita, using the freighter to move minerals to a station with shorter manufacturing wait times than the 4-4 station.

So uh, that's my project at the moment. I've been afk-working on this for a couple of weeks and it's only partially set up; the situation currently is that the third character is currently the CEO and sole member of the building corp, jita manufacturing won't even start for another 10 days and the two lowsec building characters are only partially trained. I have gotten some ships built, though, and sold two carriers at 20% profit. The jerk-head who told me I was wrong about the margins on carriers when I commented about them several months ago on somebody else's blog can suck it.

My goal with this is to at least be able to pay for plex on two accounts, and I'm confident it will do so once things are up and running. It would also be nice if I could turn a decent profit beyond that, which we'll see about. If things do work out, I've identified some other business opportunities which spare liquidity can be invested in. Plus I still want a titan.

EDIT: This is my second ever post using the 'industry' tag. The first was in december of 2009.

The method works!

2011-07-15T17:44:00.000-07:00

So, convert a video to .bik and put it in the right folder with the right name and you can watch it in CQ. This raises all sorts of possibilities. You could use it to watch combat videos...

(click to embiggen)

...instructional videos... have CQ-only music...

ooooorrrrrrrrr you could use it to watch ponies.

(click)

(click)

(don't click)

CQ and incarna are now fully justified.

I was there

2011-07-07T16:18:00.000-07:00

So CCP is starting a new media site thing and encouraging players to send things in.

Did anybody not immediately think of this?

Firesale

2011-07-05T21:17:00.001-07:00

Since I'm changing direction in eve, I'm selling off unused assets. I have started by gathering my stuff which was in empire and putting it up for sale, and at the time of writing I've sold about 3.2 billion isk worth of items and still have 2.6 billion on the market, plus a bunch on contract. That's just from empire, and some stuff I evacced from 0.0 -- an evac which was incomplete because I was hardly playing at the time. Also, it doesn't include capitals.

I'm discovering some interesting things in the process, mostly about how things can build up when it's faster to make money to buy new stuff than it is to move old stuff. I have in jita 58 units of 1400mm artillery, 30 t2 (3.1 million each) and 28 'scout' (5.3 million each). I found two battleships I haven't used since before I left highsec three years ago; dozens of battleship BPC which I was using for manufacturing in 0.0 1-1/2 years ago; and dozens of researched ammo, drone and (cheap, e.g frigate) ship BPO (npc price to anyone who wants them).

I haven't even started on items stuck in 0.0. There are a more of those.

A lot more.

My future... in SPAAAAAAAAAACE

2011-07-03T18:30:00.001-07:00

So about a month ago I said that I was going to let my accounts lapse because I'm not playing. Instead of doing that, I'm going to pursue a new direction in eve. One that doesn't require much time investment or commitment.

I am letting one of my accounts expire, my 'main', who is my capital and super pilot. I'm also getting out of pvp for the foreseeable future and doing my own thing. Say, something I can do in a few hours a week while at work. More on this in a few days.

What this means for the blag I'm not sure. Some of the things I'm looking into I won't be posting about, and most of the rest will only be interesting for like two or three posts. I guess we'll see how it goes.

CSM done good

2011-07-02T15:31:00.000-07:00

So, we got everything most people wanted. All wrapped in vague timelines and corporation speak of course, but anybody who didn't expect that probably can't type and breathe at the same time.

Newai. If you're reading this you've already read the official poast and trebor's post, watched the video and read the reactions, so I'm not going to go on at length.

But, you remember back when the blagosphere was sperging with nerd rage about mittens in particular and the new CSM in general? And when I said that the CSM would be good and mittens was a very effective politician? [1] [2]

Yeah, I'm going to take this opportunity to rub it in, and gloat a little. I didn't get where I am without being petty and vindictive.

Exploration income

2011-07-01T02:08:00.000-07:00

Poasting old stuff crew checking in. Before the NC died I did exploration for income for about a year and a half. I ended up using two characters, one with a scout/scanner/tank tengu and the other with a golem for DPS. In July of last year I started keeping track of weekly income with the intent to make a graph at some point.

Here's the graph.

Income from exploration is highly variable, but I usually made a minimum of 100m/h. My best run was 400m/h averaged over 10 hours, and my worst was 40m/h averaged over 8 hours, which was a really impressive outlier.

Guristas are shit for exploration. I don't even like to think how much more isk I could have made doing angels or sansha instead.

Easiest 147 mil I ever made

2011-06-28T18:57:00.000-07:00

Somebody accidentally bought a spare capital jump drive BPO in jita, and marked it down 147 million from NPC price to resell it.

I bought and relisted it at NPC price, rounded down to the nearest million.

Step 3: Profit!

Not the first time I've seen something like this happen. One time I saw an archon BPC on contracts for 30 million when they were going for 90, but I let that one go because I figured it was just a scam I couldn't figure out.

To the person who keeps track of this blog and is wondering why I'm still doing things when I said I would let my accounts lapse, I might not be quitting completely. More on this in a few days.

Rioting

2011-06-25T12:25:00.000-07:00

Protests continue into their second day. Numbers dropped below system cap during russian prime, but as I type this jita has been pegged at 1600 for about 6 hours. 800 are reported in amarr, and apparently there's a titan in rens. I don't even know what that's about.

Jita

As the threadnaught approaches 300 pages and OVER 9000 posts with no reply from CCP, forum discipline has eroded and ponies have become rampant.

I've lost 5 newbie ships to smartbomb hits, been podded twice and this is the most fun I've had in eve since H-W. So 'acquire' the song Miami, by Sublime, from a sketchy russian website, put it on repeat and join in the chaos. We'll either fix this shit or burn it down, and either way it's going to be awesome.

Channel 'mass-protest'

Derp

2011-06-25T04:01:00.000-07:00

It had to be done.
I don't even know what it means.

Subscription trends

2011-06-24T21:35:00.000-07:00

Repost from mass-protest channel.

(click to view without sidebar overlap, if anybody's not viewing this via a reader)

Dear retards,

2011-06-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

You don't have to buy the monocle. Please shut up.

Seriouspost though, the prices do seem a little high; I would never spend $70 on a vanity item. Sure, I would spend a billion and a half isk if I wanted something, but I'm old and rich and it's not real life money. Other microtransaction games (specifically global agenda, which I've been checking out the past few days) sell functionless vanity items for like $5. At that price the monocle would cost 100m isk, which would greatly increase demand. I would probably get one just to check it out.

The key concept here is profit maximization. When selling things you don't want to set the price too high or too low. If the item is free you make no money no matter how many units you sell, and if the item is too expensive you make no money because nobody buys. I suspect eve's vanity items are strongly toward the 'too expensive' end of this continuum at the moment.

Ragequit and loose ends

2011-06-10T03:42:00.000-07:00

I'm going to let my accounts lapse.

I haven't been playing for the last 3 months and I'm busy with real life. I pay for game time with isk, which means I'm wasting 1.2 billion per month, and since I'm out of 0.0 there's no need for me to stay subscribed when I'm not playing.

(before anybody other than me says ragequit, I'm not particularly rage-y. I'm a supercap pilot; I could get into any alliance in the game. I just haven't been playing)

There are still some things I'd like to do, so odds are I'll re-sub in a few months when I have time. If not, I've had a pretty good run. I've taken part in a large part of eve history, and been a part of something special with the NC. I've been in many major wars; I saw the end of the infinite war. I was in the biggest fight in eve history, and all three of the biggest supercapital fights. I took structure damage flying a nyx in combat. I've earned over a hundred billion isk.

Would have liked to fly a titan, but somebody just had to invade us before my order went through. Oh well.

Happily, when you drop an account CCP sends you a survey, one part of which asks why you quit, so I get to use this as a platform for my issues. My answer will be:

"Persistent failure to take action against reported macros, and nerfing 0.0 to fuck while ignoring things that are actually broken, like technetium and supercarriers."

Finally, readers may wish to note that the server which hosts files and screenshots on this blog has become unstable and will likely be taken offline soon. No data will be lost, but if you want to save any screenshots or files, or are hotlinking anything, now is the time to take care of it. The actual blog is hosted remotely and will remain available.

DRF vs NC: Finis

2011-06-10T01:15:00.000-07:00

So, it's over. The NC is dead. The DRF, along with PL - for whose services they can now outbid anybody else - 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.

Not that I'm bitter or anything ^^

DRF vs NC: Well, shit

2011-05-31T17:30:00.001-07:00

Had a red pen today for supers and caps. Got 200 caps in fleet and an unknown number of supers logged off. Enemy had 50 titans. We stood down.

Welp.

DRF vs NC: Skirmishes

2011-05-25T19:16:00.000-07:00

So far, the DRF have not made a serious push to take tribute. PL and possibly Tri (ncdot) have moved to venal, where naturally they are trying to take tech moons. The difference between now and january, is that now they can call on half the galaxy for support whenever we outnumber them.

There have been some fights, but nothing major.

Today we were trying to take down a hostile tower a blue system. It was cyno jammed, and we had capitals and supers in system and they didn't, but we were outnumbered about 3 to 1. They jumped in and our subcapitals, carriers, and supercapitals with the exception of nyxes fought them on the gate. Nyxes were stationed on the cyno jammer to rep it when the hostiles tried to take it down, and indeed one of their fleets broke off and engaged the jammer.

It dropped very slowly as our subcapitals were killed off, and as it got close to being incapped the FC ordered supercapitals to log off by stages, first a titan that he thought would be primaried when the hostiles came in, then the rest of the titans a few minutes later, then the supercarriers. In what I am convinced was half luck, half brilliance and half lag, for a total of 100% awesome and 50% not awesome but it worked out for us so that's okay, this plan actually worked, and when the jammer went down and the hostiles dropped 150 supercapitals on us, they got no supercap kills; though a wyvern had been lost to subcapitals earlier.

It would have been really spectacular if I didn't have a good idea how much luck was involved, but it was still pretty impressive.

EDIT: MM KB still broken, link removed.

General update, including DRF vs NC

2011-05-16T20:20:00.001-07:00

War news first.

The DRF have taken the rest of vale and geminate, and the sitaution has stabilized. They reinforced a couple of stations in tribute but as far as I know didn't make a real attempt at taking them.

Hitting tribute brought DC into the war on our side. The DRF responded to this with denial of service attacks against NC communications infrastructure (jabber, etc.), proving once and for all that they are cheating scum.

The current situation is that nothing important is being reinforced. We haven't started a counterattack, and the enemy haven't made a serious push into tribute. Fighting is mostly over towers.

In general eve news, CCP have decided to nerf jump bridges by limiting them to 1 per system, meaning you have to use gates alternating with jump bridges. This makes them basically completely useless except as shortcuts; the only way to move safely is with a carrier or nullified T3. I already have them, but fucking over players who are poor, have low sp or don't multibox seems sort of stupid.

The real mystery to me is why they're dicking about with jump bridges instead of fixing technetium and supercarriers, which are actually broken.

As for me personally, I'm at sort of a crossroads where eve is concerned. I haven't been playing lately.

This is partly because I'm a super pilot, and super pilots are permanently on "standby" while anything important is going on. So I got out of the habit of even getting in subcapital fleets at the beginning of the war, and every fleet where I actually got to do something turned into superlag bullshit which made me instantly bittervet.

So, I haven't been playing. I'm also not sure I want to, which is made more interesting by the fact that my corp is closing at the end of the month due to director fatigue.

I'm going to try and get in fleets over the next few weeks to see if I even find it fun any more. If I do, I'll find another corp in razor or MM. If not, I'll probably just let my characters lapse into NPC corps. I'm working on setting up a capital shipyard, and some time to focus on that would be nice; if I move to another NC corp, I'll probably just take combat characters and my holding alt, and leave carebears out for now.

While I was writing this I actually got in a fleet and there was a fight. We lost and I'm not sure what we were fighting over, but it was sort of fun.

Coalition map update

2011-05-07T11:18:00.001-07:00

Blue: Caaaserol et. al
Green: NC+DC
Orange: Tri + coven
Pink: DRF

Notes:

I am not actually sure the people taking space in delve/PB/querious are all blue to each other, but it seems like a reasonably assumption. PL are colored with them because I'm lazy, not because they're allied; let us say that this is a territory map.
PL are colored with the rest of that mess because I'm lazy. Let's say this is a territory map.
Imperial order are apparently attacking immensea, so I colored them with AAA.

Comments and corrections welcome.

DRF vs NC: We're fucked

2011-04-24T13:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday a station came out of reinforced in vale. We formed up about 700 guys and got in system first. When the station came out, hostiles jumped in 154 supercapitals.

We can't compete with that, not even close. So what happens now?

1. The NC dies. Russians take all the technetium, have infinite supercarriers and take over all of 0.0 so they can macro and RMT in peace. Eve dies.
2. The offensive stops at some point. We will keep fighting, of course, as long as we have the will; the dominion system makes taking defended sov difficult, and if we can save one timer out of 5-ish the enemy have to start over. PL's contract will end at some point (rumored to be only for geminate and vale) and it's possible the enemy offensive will run out of steam.
3. DC goes all-in on our side. I don't think even this would actually give us enough supers to go toe to toe, but it would let us offer much more resistance. Maybe even enough to stabilize the front lines.

As for me, now is the time for a partial evacuation to minimize risk exposure. Combat ships and fittings stay, of course; so does isk-making infrastructure, which I keep in one station and ensure it can fit in a carrier. Capitals other than the evacuation carrier, ships I'm not using and other high value assets all go to lowsec.

I'm doing this prematurely, mind you; but prematurely is the only appropriate time and it's as much a psychological thing as it has to do with the actual value of the assets assets. Being prepared to lose space, knowing that you can do it in a controlled manner and that you have resources to fall back on, enables you to face impending doom without losing perspective; whichever way the war goes, it goes according to plan.

What I actually suspect will happen is that the DRF will take geminate and vale, PL's contract will end and NC leadership will remove their heads from their asses and turn all that technetium into supercarriers and/or hire PL.

DRF vs NC: General war update.

2011-04-13T20:19:00.000-07:00

[02:21:51] Ezekiel Sulastin > 02:21:37 Combat Your Aurora Ominae hits Pith Usurper, doing 2786850.4 damage.

-Combat operations in tenal

Not a lot of progress one way or the other. Evoke and tri (NCdot) are attacking pure blind a little and being stonewalled by goons, who haven't been involved in the east because they suck.

(I actually love goons, but we're losing stations over here...)

In geminate, the russians bought PL for 600 billion. So far PL have rode bikes and blueballed.

tri/evoke/PL did reinforce about 10 CSAA in vale and tenal, but didn't come to fight when they left reinforced. We're saving the last one as I type this, and since there's no battle report I made a map for you.

Red: Attackers
Blue: Defenders

Exploration site guides: Guristas Military Operations Complex

2011-04-07T00:11:00.001-07:00

Guristas Military Operations Complex is the 7/10 guristas DED site, one of two guristas sites which were added with incursion 1.4. I've only run it once -- the guide will be updated eventually once I've gathered statistics. It appears to be easy and fairly valuable.

The site consists of five essentially identical rooms, connected by acceleration gates. Each room contains the same numbers and types of NPCs, give or take -- 10 each of frigates, battlecruisers and battleships. All enemies aggress on warpin.

In addition to the standard NPCs, the third room contains a dread guristas cruiser, the fourth room contains a dread guristas battleship, and the 5th room contains a "dread guristas commanding officer" and a stasis tower. The dread guristas commanding officer is an overseer rather than a faction spawn, and drops 20th tier overseer effects worth 61 million. Presumably he can also drop deadspace loot (probably pith c-type) and dread guristas loot, though he didn't do so on my first run.

NOTE: GMOC contains no elite cruisers or elite frigates, so target jamming is minimal.
NOTE: The overseer has a moderate tank of around 3-400 DPS, a large buffer and is immune to electronic warfare including target painters.

Room 3

Room 5

More about mittens

2011-04-06T03:34:00.001-07:00

Every single person who has been crying about mittens needs to read the entirety of seleene's post. Then they can STFU, and maybe even do some thinking and research next time instead of sperge-blasting mindless goon hate.

You could try to hang onto the theory that the CSM won't get along with CCP. That's called chasing a sunken cost, and it's dumb. Go ahead though, I'll actually get more satisfaction from mocking you when we start seeing results than changing your mind now.

Even more searches which brought people here

2011-04-04T05:30:00.000-07:00

"tengu fit with lasers"

I don't have anything to say about this, I just wanted the world to know that someone actually had this thought.

"eve ragnarok implant use"

For a shield titan you'll use a 5% cap recharge implant and a 5% shield implant (unless you can get the new 6% implants). For slots 1-5 you'll probably want mobility implants, either align time (nomad) or speed (snake).

"where can i set a nyx bpo to research"

Their natural habitat is Gallente space, but you're better off finding them in jita. So many people got them after dominion that the BPC are worthless now, and researched BPO are being sold on contracts for NPC price.

"why does PL hotdrop"

My theory is that they like killing things.

"mining with a gallente mothership"

Kill yourself.

"eve can a super carrier be insured?"

No.

"eve how good is a nyx"

Pretty good.

"eve ccp dreads now shit?"

Yes.

DRF vs NC: CSAA save

2011-04-02T07:21:00.000-07:00

DRF reinforced a RAGE CSAA and it came out this morning. Fortunately rage hasn't been disbanded recently, so the system's strategic index was full up and there was a cyno jammer keeping the hostile super fleet out, while we could bring in capitals via jump bridges. The fighting started before downtime and I got in fleet immediately after.

Getting in system was fun. I came through the bridge 25 km from the pos shield just as about 170 hostiles landed next to me. Unfortunately the hostile FC wasn't a complete retard, and instead of trying to take down my nyx popped two carriers that were slowboating toward the shield first. They did shoot me for a while and I got down to about 10% shield (in an armor tank) before they switched targets. A third blue carrier was pulled back from structure as the rest of our caps moved outside the pos shield and got the spider tank going.

In total we lost the two carriers, and a bunch of battleships apparently mostly before downtime. After the third carrier was saved we pretty much owned everything we could tackle. Most of the fighting was on a stargate as we bubbled a hostile fleet that jumped in, and the final score looks to be about 3:2 in our favor plus we saved the CSAA.

There are another 2 CSAA in reinforced, which we would have to screw up to not save. A couple of our outposts are also in shield reinforced, coming out in euro/US time minutes from the CSAA. We might let the outposts go to armor RF to save the CSAA.

EDIT: It looks like I got on 66 kills today. Thank you, ECM burst!

An "oh shit" moment

But I got better

Killboard -- 34b killed for 20 lost

DRF vs NC: Brief geminate update

2011-03-31T00:13:00.000-07:00

In the aftermath of the DRF reinforcing everything in geminate we lost two outposts, out of 7-ish which were reinforced. This isn't as bad as I had expected, so maybe they aren't quite confident to use their supers in EU/US time routinely. As mentioned in my previous post one had a horrible timer and was a foregone conclusion, and I guess they picked up one of the 6 which came out during euro and US time. At the moment the DRF have 4 outposts in geminate, which are all reinforced constantly what with :time zone war: and shit. At the moment there are also like 18 hostile towers reinforced in geminate, probably mostly technetium moons since there's no other reason there would be so many. As I recall from the atlas invasion there are like 12 or 16 in the region, which should come out around 50 billion isk per month.

CSM 6 results: Suck it, bitches

2011-03-27T07:51:00.000-07:00

So the CSM results are out, and they are delicious. This year 0.0 has decided to organize for the purpose of being represented in the CSM, which has caused a diverse selection of nobodies on the forums to cry and whine about the vast nullsec conspiracy to control the CSM.

Well you're goddam right we're going to control the CSM if we feel like it. The ability to organize people is what wins elections, and we're better at it than you.

So suck it.

With the election over and the tears harvested, we now return to our regularly scheduled programming.

(the results are 7 nullsec players and 2 others, by the way)

DRF vs NC: Another superfight that it looks like we lost

2011-03-25T18:36:00.000-07:00

Apparently while we weren't watching the DRF reinforced everything in geminate, something like 8 outposts. Today I was reading a goddamn book for the first time in forever (not bitter, grumble) and ignoring subcapital fleet messages when I missed a supers log in message and the first thing I heard was superfite now.

This was in late US time in our staging system, and apparently it went badly for us. Numbers were even in local but what I hear is that our supers were dying and theirs weren't, same as last time. I managed to load system, but didn't even get to warp in before our supers were ordered to log off. I'm hearing that we lost a titan and at least one supercarrier, but there may well have been more before I got on comms.

Talk about troubling. If their super blob can now winbutton in frick'n US time, the strategic situation starts to look grim. Structure app says half our outposts are coming out of reinforced in euro time, half in US and some retard timed one outpost for downtime, so we're almost certain to lose that one and we're really going to have to get the blob motivated to save the others.

I have to admit that I've been neglecting the game a bit -- a touch of bittervet syndrome after the last three times I logged in were all 4+ hour supercapital superlag garbage. I think I'll move a carebear alt or two out here and get in on some subcapital fleets. I've been wanting to try out this shield maelstrom thing, and one of my alts is like 8 days from hictors, which could be interesting. Taking a thousand-dollar supercarrier into laggy bullshit is stressful, even if they are disposable.

EDIT: No super losses are showing, but the finally tally is 1 erebus and 1 aeon lost.

Killboard

Blueprint copying update

2011-03-22T03:39:00.000-07:00

Followers may recall I own some capital blueprints, which I make copies of to sell.

A year ago supercarrier blueprints were where it was at, but now it looks like we've reached something of a denouement in that market as they've all fallen below a billion isk (their pre-dominion value) except for the wyvern. A year ago nyx BPC were going for 3.3 billion; today they're 790 million. Interestingly the wyvern is the most expensive supercarrier BPC, with an MMPB (millions of isk per month per billion isk invested) of 27; I expect this is because with nyx and aeon being the only supercarriers actually worth flying few people invested in wyvern BPO, while a lot of people are caldari specced.

In the rest of the BPC market pretty much the only thing worth investing in are archon and thanatos blueprints (currently 40 MMPB), whose BPC have been fairly consistently worth more than chimera and nidhoggur BPC (currently 23 MMPB). The only other sub-supercapital with more than 25 MMPB is the orca, and that won't last.

If you have the cash titans are looking pretty good, and demand actually looks to have increased a bit. Leviathan BPC are over 3 billion for the first time, like, ever, and the other three are sitting at 8-10 billion, which is 22-27 MMPB. Avatar and erebus are probably the best investment opportunities; ragnaroks die more, which in theory could increase demand but more likely will make people stop flying them, while the avatar has the highest EHP and erebi are necessary for armor bonuses.

DRF vs NC: Another biggest supercap fight ever, part 2

2011-03-20T08:23:00.000-07:00

After downtime everybody rushed to log in, and both sides loaded at the same time. We warped to the station immediately, lit cyno there and jumped in some more caps. A single hostile nyx warped to the station and we killed it.

The system was laggy and horribly bugged. Joining fleet lagged clients out and made outstanding calls never go down ever again.

After a while the node just sort of stopped. I'm used to lag, even extreme lag. I was in uemon when we lost all those titans; I was in LXQ when local broke 3000. This lag was much worse.

Supers were eventually ordered to recall drones and warp to friendly towers, and eventually we jumped out. This left system control in the hands of the russians while we had a bunch of supers blackscreened or logged out and not disappearing from space. At the time of posting we have lost at least 3 supercarriers. At this point we know the hostiles will retake and rep the station, so we're back to where we started.

There were two problems today. The first was engaging hostile supers on their tower. The second was leaving system and letting our supers get killed.

Sorry. There were 99 problems today, and 97 were CCP. The first four of CCP's problems are as follows:

1. Not letting the node die when it was broken.
2. Joining fleets in a laggy system makes clients stop working.
3. Ships do not disappear after 15 minutes after logging off. Or ever. Sometimes even in non-laggy systems.
4. I'm going to throw botting in here for the heck of it.

Confirmed dead:

Blue:

tish magev aeon
xan fenix nyx
lord dooks aeon
??? ???

Red:

drakul pensignton nyx

Superenemies

2011-03-20T04:47:00.001-07:00

DRF vs NC: Another biggest supercap fight ever, part 1

2011-03-20T04:10:00.000-07:00

This is getting annoyingly routine.

Today the o2o station came out of its' last reinforced timer during russian prime. If we can take the station and anchor a TCU we take the system.

We formed about 70 supers and got in system about 2.5 hours before the outpost came out. Local was about 1100, with reported 300 reds, when reds jumped in another 600+, including probably over 100 supercapitals. Around 3 hours before downtime we decided to engage, warped on grid and it was on.

The fight was on a hostile tower. Apparently they didn't blackscreen enough, and we lost an erebus to the doomsday volley. We kept with it, but they had more numbers than us and hostile titans could re-enter shield when they were primaried. Targets eventually did go down, oh-so-slowly, and the final tally was 7 blue titans lost for 4 red titans and 2 nyx killed. Part 2 is expected to happen after downtime.

At some point during the fight

Confirmed dead:

Blue:

bodynak erebus
countrywv erebus
daos leghki erebus
fuzion erebus
sammaster ragnarok
salvoxia ragnarok
lord deighton leviathan

Hostile:

miss shifty avatar
james kavourarias erebus
dimple knotwise erebus
melony814 erebus

drakul pensignton nyx
intensive nyx

killboard - isk ratio is broeken

EDIT:
(04:14:15 AM) rawr-shva-altrinsic: Dimple, James, Wallace2004, lipix were all there
(04:14:39 AM) 42-ukc-reza-najafi: sala said they got new ones
(04:14:43 AM) 42-ukc-reza-najafi: didnt get reimbursed

macro empire 4 ever!

Superfriends

2011-03-18T22:01:00.001-07:00

Problem?

:trollface:

DRF vs NC: Early morning killmails

2011-03-18T09:54:00.000-07:00

After slaughtering the DRF supers yesterday, we formed up this morning to kill the o2o ihub. Hostiles used their typical strategy of bringing triage carriers, but the tides have turned and today it was us that dropped supers on them. Thanks to ECM burst I got on about 55 killmails in 10 minutes, including krutoj in a triage carrier.

Enemy capitals as we arrived on grid

Killboard - 81 billion killed, 23 lost

After this was done we received information that the DRF had scheduled an evacuation op to lowsec. I'm not sure if they're giving up, or just getting out of the system because they can't hold it any more. In either case we killed the o2o ihub and now just need to take the station before we can get the systen back. It comes out of reinforced in late US time two days from now.

DRF vs NC: 20+ DRF supers down in o2o reverse uemon

2011-03-17T17:27:00.000-07:00

Including at least 8 titans. But first, a general update.

After we lost all those supers in uemon hostiles were using their own super fleet with impunity while we could only use subcaps. As you might imagine, this resulted in not getting a lot done. There were a lot of fights, many of which we lost isk-wise because hostiles could use triage carriers.

Hostiles hold station systems o2o and and UG-, which have been reinforced constantly since the DRF took them over a month ago. The effort to retake them has been hindered by several factors -- enemy supers, the large number of timers involved in taking space under dominion, and some sort of downtime bug which messes with timers and makes op scheduling hard.

Anyway, after a full month of accomplishing fuck all word went out to superfriends that our glorious leaders had hatched a plan to get our supers back into the fight and get revenge for uemon. Razor subcapitals also moved up from sendaya to help with the planned purge (rzr supers were already in gem).

On tuesday we messed up a sov transfer in vale. DRF made a play for the system and failed.

Wednesday nothing happened. We got in 020 with about 80 supers and 800 other blues and put the ihub into armor reinforced. DRF went to ug- with 80 supers and reportedly support numbers similar to ours. We did the mexican standoff thing for a couple hours and they went home.

After redeyeing that op, this morning I slept through three alarms and missed the formup. I woke up to super fight messages on jabber and got in fleet. Lag was being peculiar, and despite loading grid, launching bombers and activating modules I couldn't lock anything. After a few relogs targets started working and I got on the last few supercarrier kills.

Apparently what happened is that they were tricked into thinking we were jumping out, jumped in trying to catch stragglers and ended up in the middle of our super fleet and surrounded by dictors. After losing a few titans without killing any of our supers they switched damage to dictors and tried to get out. We apparently didn't lose any supers at that time, though several did have to get off the field.

Word is that Raiden. ordered their supers to jump out before the russians did, which I think is a particularly delicious note. I sort of have it out for them, because they have quite a sizable ego without any deeds to back it up and because they have it out for the NC. Right after uemon their leader-or-whatever announced that they would destroy the NC through a war of attrition, and I'm eager to mock their terribleness whenever they get around to actually fighting.

Yaay the destroyer was the FC for this op. I think this brings him up to 15-ish titan and at least 20 supercarrier kills in the last 2-1/2 months.

EDIT: The killboard is showing 7 titan and 13 supercarrier kills, but two titans and one supercarrier are reported confirmed dead without generating killmails. This isn't too surprising since there were three killmails that were never generated after the uemon fight as well. I'm starting to suspect there's a bug with supercap killmails.

EDIT: One NC titan died well after the fight was finished. The pilot had been unable to relog earlier after multiple attempts and the titan refused to disappear from space. Fortunately it was vuk lau's alt and he didn't want that already being replaced titan anyway technetium technetium technetium.

MORE EDIT: The NC titan that died apparently respawned after downtime and was boarded by a red.

Supars

Killboard -- will take time to sync

Probably also dead:
Silus Yarmon (Avatar)
Captain Chomp (Erebus)
Spartanetz (Nyx)

Learning more in five hours than five years

2011-03-14T21:55:00.001-07:00

Hark! For this is the first time I have made a non-eve post. Be grateful, ye masses, for I am a merciful god.

Today I learned how to multiply on a processor which is only capable of addition.

It turns out there's a trick, which is that multiplying binary numbers can be accomplished with a series of operations which does not at any point include multiplication. Check if one number ends in 1, add the second number to the result if so, drop the rightmost digit from the first number, move the second number one place to the left, and repeat until you run out of digits.

Homegrown assembly code, how adorable

In this example we multiply 27 and 32, ending up with 360 hex in register R7, which is 864 in real numbers. The loop takes 176 processor cycles.

You'd think a standard education would include maybe one month in which each day the basics of a different useful skill are taught. I'm pretty sure that month would be more useful than the remainder of primary and secondary education combined.

Screenshot sunday: Traffic control

2011-03-13T11:30:00.000-07:00

Click

Or at least a busy scene. I think this was from the kalevala campaign.

CSM advocacy, mostly

2011-03-10T13:05:00.000-08:00

Mittens' CSM thread is an interesting read. Especially the first six-ish pages, in which some anti-mittens posters made a variety of criticisms which really made me think. For example, one accuses mittens of lying all the time. Another accuses him of being a prolific scammer (and when mittens says that while he is fully in favor of scamming, he does not do it because he doesn't need the money, accuses him of scamming with an alt). Others say that he is in favor of the technetium situation, and that he wants a supercapital buff. It reveals a really fascinating divide between people who know anything about mittens and/or 0.0, and some sort of low information demographic who I assume are npc-sov dwellers.

Also it prompts me to give a meaningless endorsement to a CSM candidate, which I never thought I would do had I been asked yesterday. Somebody made a post that prompted me to look at the election forum thing. Grumble.

Back on topic.

Anybody who has been following mittens for a length of time can tell you the accusations listed are patently ridiculous. Not because mittens isn't a sadistic, metagaming bastard, which he is, but because he doesn't operate the way they describe. Of course mittens lies. He also bluffs, spins and trolls. But he knows when to lie, and when to spin, and he usually does it with a goal in mind. By examining his history we can see that his strategy has been to be honest when seriousposting, building a reputation for truth and accuracy, and then using that reputation to give immense weight to his words when he needs to use spin or trolling to manipulate morale or public opinion.

(he also does a lot of less purposeful trolling just for luls; forum warriors know what is a seriouspost and what is not)

I happen to have a perfect example of this on hand. I started following mittens back during delve war 2 (early 2009 IIRC) toward the end of the war, when bob (kenzoku) was trying to gain and keep a foothold in the east of their former territory. Mittens was posting daily war updates in goon forums to keep the rabble up to date. The 4/14 update was rather negative, and hostiles stole it to use as forum porn. Mittens noticed this (4/20), and proceeded to post it and all subsequent updates on CAOD.

(notice the politics here -- now the hostiles, whose alliance culture provided them little information as to the progress of the war, are getting accurate information from the enemy. This by itself is a cultural victory and hurts enemy morale, and when goons achieve something mittens can add trolling to the mix to further undermine the enemy's faith in their leadership)

I happened to save all those updates in a text document. They show mittens being honest (4/14 and most other updates), spinning hard and causing a massive turnabout in the war (5/21), trolling at the optimal time to undermine enemy leadership (6/5, 6/6) and undoubtedly lying at some point that I will never know about. The text file is here; it's an interesting read, and invaluable for anyone wondering about how mittens rolls. Copy-paste it somewhere with line wrap.

As well, if you haven't read his TTH articles you should probably just unsubscribe now, because you have already lost at eve; they are the seminal works about how successful corporations and alliances are made, how wars are won and lost, how and why failure cascades happen, and more.

The above I am providing as supporting evidence for my conclusion, which is this: Mittens is an astonishingly talented politician. Of all the people in eve he is the one who best understands how organizations are made, how they work, and how to galvanize them to achieve goals. He knows how to make things happen, and not just internally in the CSM.

His stated goal is to transform the CSM into an organization which can actually get things done, then use it to get action on the feature backlog -- those features which are broken or half implemented, or which were promised and then abandoned.

If that were to happen, it would make the game better. Mittens is our absolute best chance of pulling it off, and this is why he needs to be the CSM chair.

Supercarrier vs titan

2011-03-10T01:00:00.000-08:00

A lot of people get here via that search and it's time for an answer. I've written about supercarrier vs titan before, but that was in the context of deciding which to get. This post is a more general comparison.

In many ways, supercarriers and titans are pretty similar. They have almost the same EHP (33-57 million) and in theory do about the same DPS (8000-11000). The major differences are price, utility and how they do their damage.

Price:

Supercarriers, properly fitted, cost about 16 to 24 billion depending on hull price and on whether they are an armor or a shield tank. Armor resist mods cost more, and armor tanks use a slave set while shield tanks don't have equivalent implants.

Titans start around 50 billion (maybe as low as 42 if you get a really good deal), or 65 on the open market. The fittings cost about the same, though shield tankers often spring for officer invunerability fields, which come in 4, 8 and 18 billion isk variations, and titan pilots often use officer cap recharge mods. One figures a minimum price of about 56 billion, with a range about 2.5-4x as much as a supercarrier.

Utility:

A big deal has been made of the fact that SC do more things than titans. They kill capitals, they kill subcapitals, they rep, they tackle, they neut. Reps are probably the biggest deal -- a supercarrier can permarun 2 capital remote reps with minimal refitting or under lag, making supercarrier blobs annoyingly resiliant under some conditions.

In a fight titans only do damage. They can also titan bridge, which is very important but not useful in a fight.

Damage:

Titans and supercarriers do about the same DPS, but titans have several advantages.

1. Moar damage. Although the erebus and avatar have fairly anemic damage for supercapitals, the leviathan and ragnarok both do more than a nyx (with a standard fit). With a close-range fit the lev and rag do 50-60% more, which is sort of a lot.
2. Doomsday. With three million alpha, put enough titans in one place and you can kill a supercapital in 30 seconds. Doomsday also volleys dreads, carriers and subcapitals.
3. Lag resistance. Titans' guns and doomsday devices work like any other activated module, and can be cycled in lag. In my tests during extreme lag fighter bombers had to be recalled and re-engaged before they would fire again, which takes twice as long as cycling a gun.
4. Subcapitals. To kill subcapitals supercarriers have to use fighters, which are slow, basically useless at hitting anything smaller than a battleship (normal drones can be used for sub-battleships, but come on) and decrease EFT DPS by 75%. Certainly supercarriers can seriously ruin the day of an incautious subcapital fleet, but in practice they aren't very effective against subcapitals. Titans, on the other hand, can kill any subcapital with the doomsday, which never misses (unless the target warps, so choose wisely). Titan guns are also effective against subcapitals with low angular velocity. You might ask yourself why any subcapital would be stationary with titans on grid, but in my experience sorting overview by angular velocity with a decent hostile fleet on grid will always show a few with low angular velocity -- either they aren't moving, are moving mostly toward or away from you, or are distant enough that angular velocity is low. A good hit by an avatar or erebus does about 30k damage to a subcapital, rag up to 105k, while levi uses missiles and is ineffective against subcaps. Even without lag and assuming the target doesn't warp off fighters take quite a while to do that sort of damage.

Supercarriers do have one advantage, which is that they do full EFT damage to pos mods and sov structures, neither of which titans can doomsday. They're great for defanging towers or shooting sov structures, though useless for reinforcing towers.

Short version, titans are better in a fight. Maybe not enough to really justify spending 2-3x as much as on a supercarrier, but if you've got the isk....

A list of macros in tenal

2011-03-08T07:07:00.000-08:00

Two blue (with the same owner) and seven neutral. You might notice that 2 of the neutrals are offline; this screenshot was taken shortly after the patch today and I expect their owners hadn't gotten around to updating yet. I could wait for them to do so and get online, but I just finished checking the last of the systems with highly suspicious NPC kill patterns and feel like making a poast. I've reported the two blue macros to leadership, so we'll see what happens to them. I'll petition all of them after another day or so of watching their uptime, report what happens and then mock CCP when what happens is nothing.

Titan and hel keeled in counter-hotdrop

2011-03-03T21:07:00.000-08:00

Somebody poked jabber for carriers and supers tonight. We logged in, and we waited. And waited. And waited.

Then we jumped in and landed on a small hostile fleet on a blue jump bridge pos, consisting of some battleships, a ragnarok, a hel and three or four dreads. Not sure who they were; I don't recognize the alliance name, and they were marked neutral so they probably weren't part of the DRF forces. Anyway, apparently the story is that we baited them with an aeon, got bubbles up when they jumped in and then brought in our own fleet. The bait aeon says he never got below 99% armor. EDIT: But it looks like they killed a chimera.

P'pew

EDIT: Youtube

It's always heartwarming to see blue jump effects light up a grid like that. Interesting video there, taken by somebody's cap transfer alt. This is the first time I've embedded a youtube video in anything, but enough videos are made of fights I take part in that I might have to make it a habit.

Titan

Hel

Killboard

DRF vs NC: 8 white noise supercarriers down

2011-02-26T00:58:00.000-08:00

Except I'm not there any more. I'm in the south with the rest of my alliance, trying to get some of the rabble off the geminate bandwagon. Not that I'm mad or anything.

Anyway, yaay the destroyer did a counter-hotdrop and killed 8 WN supercarriers. Off the top of my head that's 18 supercapital kills he's FCd in the last two months. I think this puts us at 13 super kills and 16 losses for the geminate campaign, though of course most of our losses were titans.

EDIT: Youtube

Killboard

Whenever I clone jump out of my supercarrier we get a bunch of nice kills. This time it wasn't actually during the jump clone cooldown, or even when I was online or paying attention, but I start to suspect I could win entire campaigns just by repeatedly clone jumping in and out of the area of operations....

DRF vs NC: I spoke too soon, but we killed a titan so that's okay

2011-02-21T13:35:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in the edit on my last post, DRF look to have retaken o2o. It seems as though their TCU was never vulnerable (not sure why). After we left the system to shoot the k25 station they jumped in, flipped the station back and repped it. They then moved to k25, where after a short fight their supers drove NC subcaps off field and they killed our onlining TCU and flipped the station to red control. They left system though, and there isn't a TCU of their anchoring, so I anticipate we will likely take the system this evening.

After they jumped out somebody said in super channel that we had a titan tackled. Apparently he had logged off in k25 with aggression. I jumped on comms, got my scout alt in fleet and found somebody to warp to.

Never killed a titan while I had effects on before. It looks pretty good.

Killmail

DRF vs NC: Sorry kalle

2011-02-21T08:57:00.000-08:00

16:11:18 Notify The station O2O SOLAR STRONGHOLD has been captured by Incidental Damage corporation!

...you're still the biggest loser.

Following the capital slaughter in uemon fighting has continued in geminate. In my last post about the region I had stated that all stations had been saved, which turns out to be inaccurate. Enemy forces had fallen back to o2o and camped the system until their TCU could anchor, and they took that station. Further, the TCU which blue forces anchored in station systems K25 and 04 were bugged, and hostiles were able to take both systems without going through a timer. They also anchored TCU in two non station systems for some reason.

With the hostiles' heavy supercapital advantage we have essentually only used subcapitals; as a supercarrier pilot I have been on standby the entire time. I've considered switching out to subcapitals, but if supers get called we're going to need everybody.

Fighting has been mainly in o2o. We've burned a lot of ships there against hostiles supported by supercapitals and triage carriers, accomplishing strategic objectives but generally failing to achieve positive isk ratios. As of this morning all 3 hostile outposts were in armor reinforced, as was one blue outpost nearby.

Anticipating that I would sit out the fight again I got a scout-gu alt in o2o and set up a warpin on the station so I could watch the fight.

('scout-gu' is one of my standard fits, a cloaky/nullified tengu with istabs)

Not a fight

That didn't happen. The hostiles didn't even form up, and we retook the station without incident. I'll mention if anything interesting happens later on, but the failure to form would tend to indicate that they have abandoned the campaign. The last hostile station, 04, comes out of armor reinforced in just under two days so maybe something will happen then.

EDIT: It looks like reds are making a play for o2o. After blues went to k25 to hit the station they moved jumped to o2o and flipped the station back. I'm not familiar enough with soverignty to say for certain how the mechanics will work at this point. Either they have to anchor a TCU, which will take 8 hours and we could realistically try to drive them off, or they just have to rep the station in which case it's already back in their hands.

Currently they have 500 in o2o and blues have 700 in k25. Hostile supers are on o2o station so I'll be watching jabber for possible goodfites.

Super capital emo post

2011-02-17T23:44:00.000-08:00

There are a number of things about which I had considered posting prior to the supercapital slaughter in uemon but will sound totally whiny now. I'm going to get them all out of the way in one post.

1. Because of supers, the NC is not invincible.

This sure would this have been prescient. It's something I had thought about after hearing that AAA+atlas can field 100 supers. The NC is extremely light on supercapitals for its' size, being able to field only around 100. DRF+pets, at half our size (if you count DC), can also field 100. Atlas+AAA, together less than one-tenth our size, can field 100. Pandemic legion, less than 1/30th our size, has about 100 though not all in the same time zone. If only one or two of these entities allied against us we could accurately complain about being blobbed, because supers are all that matter these days.

2. Coalition supercarrier initiative.

The NC makes somewhere in excess of eight hundred billion isk per month from tech moons. If we don't want to die, we should take that isk and turn it into free supercarriers for everybody who can fly one.

3. One nyx per account

One often hears about DRF super pilots bringing multiple supercarriers to a fight, and by "multiple" I mean 5-ish. Cough botmasters cough. Instead of going for a titan, which tend to be primary, I should replicate their method and try to get a nyx on each of my accounts, ending up with 3 times the DPS and EHP for about the same price.

FAKE EDIT: This is now my medium-long term plan, assuming the coalition doesn't die in the meantime.

4. Supercarriers are overpowered.

This isn't news to anybody. I don't know if I've actually brought it up here, but on forums and EN24 I have been one of the "as a supercarrier pilot, I think they need a nerf" crew. Supercarriers are incredibly overpowered, having as much EHP and DPS as titans for one third the price.

Some people have been complaining about capitals being overpowered since forever. Pre-dominion I didn't think it was much of an issue (except for AOE DD) but today there's no role for anything but supercarriers and hictors. I'm going to to is make some suggestions that I'm confident almost everybody will agree with:

1. Subcapitals should be effective against capitals and supercapitals, but not more effective than capitals and supercapitals are against each other.
2. Supercarriers need a serious nerf.
3. Dreadnaughts should be useful in a capital fight.

I hate when people present ideas for fixing something they think is broken. For one thing it's pointless because CCP won't use their suggestions. For another their ideas are always stupid. I'm going to do it anyway though, just to get it off my mind.

Overhaul part 1: capitals
1. Titans need... a buff? This will make sense later. They should have 40-60 million EHP instead of 30-50. The doomsday bonus will be increased to 20% damage per level for a maximum of 4 million damage.
2. Supercarriers are ridiculously overpowered and need to be nerfed a lot. We will turn them into tier 3 capitals.
a. Damage should be reduced significantly. I propose 4000 DPS (5000 with nyx bonus), slightly more than a standard dread fit.
b. EHP should be reduced significantly. I propose 20-30m EHP, half as much as titans.
c. They should be made vulnerable to standard warp disruptors but not other forms of ECM. Maybe webbers.
d. Capital RR modules should be restricted to carriers in order to prevent invincible supercarrier RR blobs. Supercarrier high slots will be reduced by 2.
e. Supercarriers should be allowed to dock because of all the nerfs. Maybe it should be possible to build them in stations as well.
3. Dreads need an EHP buff to make them useful. Increasing their EHP by 150% gives them 5 million, a meaningful fraction of supercarrier EHP and enough to tank a level 5 doomsday.
4. Let's go ahead and increase carriers' EHP by 150% as well so they don't get left behind. This will give them 2.5 million EHP, still vulnerable to doomsdays.

I think that would balance capitals and supers a bit. Dreads that can tank for a few seconds, weaker supercarriers, carriers with a little more EHP to keep up with dreads. Now we need to make subcapitals useful.

There has been a lot of discussion about how to do this. The simplest way would be to just have capitals take increased damage from subcapitals. Subcapitals should do less damage to capitals and supers than dreadnaughts, the lowest-damage capital damage dealers. For the sake of this discussion dreadnaughts do 3500 DPS.

Let us say that in order to be a 0.0 entity you should be able to field 100 alpha maelstroms. And let us say that alpha maelstroms do 600 DPS (10,000 volley) with a cycle time of 18 seconds.

Overhaul part 2: subcapitals
1. Today a small battleship fleet can kill a carrier in just a few seconds, which I think is okay in terms of balance. Let's have carriers and dreadnaughts take increased damage equivalent to their EHP buff, giving them 1 and 2 million EHP against subcapitals and taking 18 and 36 seconds respectively to kill.
2. Supercarriers should have the largest damage increase from subcapitals. Let's have them take 300% increased damage, meaning the maelstroms will be doing 2400 DPS each, 2/3 as much as a sieged dreadnaught. Supercarriers will have 5 to 7.5 million EHP against subcapitals, taking 90 to 135 seconds for the maelstroms to kill compared to 540 to 1080 seconds today.
3. As the only supercapitals, titans should still be challenging to kill with subcapitals. 100% damage increase, taking 360 to 540 seconds to kill (unless somebody brought neuts).

DRF vs NC: NC dies horribly in biggest super fight ever

2011-02-14T16:29:00.000-08:00

Our glorious commanders were out running an ahac gang and hostiles brought some capitals. Jabber ping went out for caps+supers, our support killed their support and out capitals jumped in to kill theirs.

After jumping in

We killed a few dreads and carriers there, and once they were dead we warped to another cyno in system where a number of enemy supercarriers had jumped to one of their pos. The first one we primaried was in half armor and got bumped inside, but we got the second.

Nyx going down

That's when things started to go bad. Hostiles jumped in everything. We jumped in everything. Raiden. jumped in everything. Everybody called for everybody to log in everything and everybody jumped everything in. At the peak of the fight there must have been at least 200 supercapitals on grid.

UI off near beginning of the fight

From corpmate, brackets on during the fight

At the beginning only the hostiles had dictors on grid, and while we lost titans theirs could warp out. Eventually things stabilized, half because of increasing lag and half because we got some hics on field and killed some of theirs. We eventually managed to kill 2 titans and possibly a few other things.

First red titan dying

Second red titan dying

Lag started to increase again and more of our titans started going down. Eventually my outstanding calls just stopped completing, and when the oldest was 32 minutes I decided to relog. Before I got back in supers were ordered to jump out, so I canceled the login and logged in a second character on the same account in hopes that it would help the server recognize that I was logged out, and at this point it looks like I'm safe. It looks like we lost 9 titans and killed 2 titans and 2 supercarriers. As I write this hostiles are trying to get out and we are killing some that are blackscreened so it's possible we might get some more kills. Apparently we have a bunch of hostile supercarriers and a titan or two tackled, but the lag is so bad they would take a very long time to kill.

If the NC dies I'm totally blaming it on my curse, though I might change the time limit to 1.5 years.

Battlereport -- very broken but has links to killmails

DRF vs NC: First hours

2011-02-13T10:41:00.000-08:00

As mentioned in my previous post, Rebellion alliance (-R-), based primarily in Geminate, was disbanded shortly before downtime today and their space was immediately set upon by drone lands (DRF) forces. Reports indicate that large areas of geminate not controlled by -R- were SBUd.

Combat started immediately after downtime. Three of the six vulnerable stations in geminate were taken by DRF even before friendlies arrived on the scene. Hostiles are reported to have numbered 600 with around 100 supercapitals, much more than we could muster in the middle of the night with no warning.

Similar to the stella polaris sov loss during max 2 our goal here will be to take control of the area and kill TCU which are being onlined. If TCU can be killed before they online, the stations can be immediately retaken by friendlies and friendly TCU anchored; if the enemy TCU anchor we will have to go through the stations' reinforcement cycles to retake them. The enemy will set them to come out in their prime time, which for the mostly EU/US northern coalition is the middle of the night and early morning.

The early hours consisted of subcapital skirmishes, in QKTR (17b killed, 13b lost) and M-M (35b killed, 3b lost). The M-M battle apparently destroyed the bulk of the hostile support, and culminated in a node crash.

As this was going on cyno chains were being run from fountain to tribute, and around 1630 we finally formed a capital fleet and moved to a staging system in the area of operation. Numbers were weak at first, but slowly climbed until we had a full fleet of capitals and supers.

As of now capitals are on standby, support have killed one TCU and are working on others. I'm on different comms of course, but there has been no news of continued resistance after the fight in M-M. Hostiles have about 40 supercapitals standing by right now, down from 65 reported earlier and 100 at the start of the situation. At the moment this is shaping up to be more of a stella polaris situation where we recover all the sov, rather than a major disaster.

We now know that the rebellion disband was coordinated with the DRF deployment, and there is a question as to whether the deployment was because of the disband. If so, it is uncertain as to whether they will pursue a campaign against systems which have sov.

Rebellion alliance disbanded; Fountain roadtrip over

2011-02-13T03:01:00.000-08:00

14:12:37 Combat Your Tyrfing hits Serpentis Fleet Outpost, doing 6749.2 damage.

-Combat operations in Fountain

In reverse order

We spent about a week grinding structures in fountain. With the complete lack of organized resistance the region could have been taken by one guy in a bomber, but supercarriers made it faster.

Small numbers

Over the last few weeks the eastern front has been heating up, with several significant DRF incursions into geminate. These were turned back by eastern NC alliances including friendly russians Rebellion and Stella Polaris. In the last week DRF supercapitals have been reported moving to lowsec near geminate and the fountain deployment was cancelled to deal with the russian menace.

One hour before the time of writing the other shoe dropped. What I'm hearing is that an executor-director level spy disbanded Rebellion alliance just before downtime, dropping soverignty in two Geminate constellations including six station systems. Immediately following this large numbers of DRF supercapitals were reported in geminate.

It looks like things just got real. The first response fleets are moving out now, and I'm rushing to get alts and assets into position.

Dotlan -- Rebellion alliance

Fresh off the presses: PL in Delve

2011-02-11T13:00:00.000-08:00

Minutes ago PL was spotted moving a massive supercapital fleet to delve. This is of great interest to me as so far nobody has actually attacked delve. My understanding is that even NC leadership aren't aware who, if anybody, is planning to take it. AAA+co have only moved on querious and pure blind, and DC (along with NC superfriends ^^) have not moved beyond fountain.

Do PL plan to take the region, or are they just there for goodfites when somebody else does? Is this a revenge campaign against IT, who are rumored to have stiffed them on the pure blind contract?

The drama!

FAKE EDIT:

(1:40:08 PM) the_mittani: two scenarios for pl in delve
(1:40:24 PM) the_mittani: most likely: punishment for molle not paying them according to contract
(1:40:37 PM) the_mittani: he was 50b overdue last time i checked
(1:40:53 PM) the_mittani: scenario two: molle has shelled out even more to have pl defend delve for him. unlikely, but possible
(1:41:50 PM) ***********: three: they are there to hotdrop idiots using undermanned fleets reinforcing delve
(1:42:36 PM) the_mittani: put one and three together and you have a pl in npc delve situation