Loot pr0n

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.

EDIT: Prices on the invulns are dropping quickly, but I managed to sell it for 2.46b.

What is this I don't even

 

You see this?

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

Two years ago.

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

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.

Generic new layout post

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.

My favorite kill ever

It's this one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Crippled

Freighters suck.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EDIT: Hence the title of the post.

Problem-solving time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My plans, all of them

...are the subject of this post.

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

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

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

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

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

And so, on to the projects!


Project 1: Capital manufacturing.

What: Building capital ships.

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


Project 2: Capital component research

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

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


Project 3: Trade

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

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


Side project: Top secret

What: I can't tell you.

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


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

EVE FAIL PODCAST111

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

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

Mediafire mp3 2:03 3.3 MB

reference

Thanks google

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.

Firesale

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

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.

Ragequit and loose ends

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.

General update, including DRF vs NC

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.

Learning more in five hours than five years

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.

Longpost: A detailed discussion of my personal financial plan, past and present

(seriously, you don't want to read this.
The nobody cares tag exists for a reason)

Eve is playable with widely variable amounts of in-game wealth. I've speculated that players could be stratified into different wealth classes, but the idea never really goes anywhere because it's boring. At the extremes though, there are people get excited when a kill drops T2 loot because it means they can now afford to replace their rifter; and on the other end there are the super rich, people with trillions of isk in their wallet who will never have to worry about being able to replace their ship, even if that ship is a titan.

A discussion about people's attitudes toward isk-making would probably be more interesting, where they fall somewhere on a spectrum between those who only make isk so they can afford their next pvp ship and the hardcore carebears whose only goal is to accrue ever-increasing amounts of isk. I don't know very many people though, so this won't be the subject of a future post either.

Anyway.

Personally I'm about two steps below the super rich on the first measure and pretty far toward the carebear end of the spectrum on the other. There is a critical difference between me and the hardcore carebears though, which is that I consider isk a means rather than an end. I want to fly expensive ships, and isk lets me do that.

(of course, then I need to be able to afford to replace that expensive ship...)

One year ago I had accrued 13 billion isk in cash and was planning to get a supercarrier, stop carebearing and have some fun; after all, I would never be able to afford a titan or anything. Things changed, though: Flying a supercarrier stopped being practical (temporarily); I invested my excess isk in capital blueprints in order to turn money into even more money; my earning potential increased; and nyx BPC prices went through the roof.

The ridiculous prices nyx bpc were pulling made it possible to make money, real money, copying blueprints and I decided to invest further in this area. Affording a nyx BPO takes a fair amount of work though, so I resolved to stop as soon as I had enough blueprint income to afford everything I would ever want. The number that I arrived at was 4 billion isk per month, and I started carebearing intensively toward this goal.

Four billion isk per month is a lot of money. Invest the first 40 billion in two more supercarrier BPC, to sell when you need to replace a titan, and you're home free. You can buy all the plex you need to play eve for free forever and have enough left over that you'll never have to fly anything but T3 ships and machariels.

Six months ago, earning 4 billion per month from blueprint copying would have required four nyx plus a few carrier or freighter blueprints. This would have been doable, running around 80 billion isk -- about equal to my total assets today.

Unfortunately for me, nyx BPC prices have fallen significantly and today this would require eight nyx BPO. Trying to earn that sort of isk is not practical for me in the medium term, and I suspect BPC prices will continue to fall as everybody able to build supercapitals buys and researches their own BPO for manufacturing.

My plan for retiring on blueprint income is no longer practical, so it's time for a new plan.

Thusly:

1. Income. I will continue to earn isk the old fashioned way. Since there is no longer a finish line, this will happen at a somewhat more relaxed pace.
2. Expenses. Instead of rushing to get nyx BPO isk will be used to buy whatever is needed, with an emphasis on fun. Machariels will be avoided because they are not cost effective, but T3 are in.
3. Blueprints. Spare isk will still be invested in blueprints. Since supercarriers no longer have a significantly higher MMPB (monthly income, in millions, per billion isk invested) compared to carriers I would start by filling my research slots with carriers, then trading up to blueprints with a higher monthly income though possibly lower MMPB. This goes: Carrier (31m/mo, 32 MMPB), rorqual (76m/mo, 23 MMPB), supercarrier (584m/mo, 35 MMPB (decreasing)), titan (1180m/mo, 18 MMPB).
4. Supercapitals come first. Blueprints are to be liquidated as necessary in order to buy or replace supers. Everything else is cheap and can be covered by normal income, passive income or even petty cash from bounties.

Finding a better carebear ship

For the purpose of making isk I run plexes with two characters, one in a scout/scan/tank tengu and the second in a maelstrom to do damage. I've been using this setup for a while and have made a pretty decent amount of isk off it, but have now finished pvp training on the alt on my damage dealer's account and have some time to invest in my carebear. I have long suspected that the damage dealer was the weak part of my pve setup, since the maelstrom was selected purely on the basis of what my damage dealer, a repurposed pvp character, could fly. My purpose with this post is to find a better pve ship, which I will then train for. No amarr ships can be evaluated because of their damage types, which is unfortunate.

When it comes to carebearing, two things are important: Income per unit of time, and effort. Finding a balance is important; the maze is the most profitable guristas plex, but with my ships and skills it takes a lot of effort. For this reason I don't run it. An example of low profit, low effort would be running plexes or anomalies in an ishtar, which requires practically no interaction with the game but takes forever. Belt mining is an example of low profit, high effort as you have to watch local every second, move to new roids, haul ore, etc. Personally I'm in a higher profit bracket with a somewhat low effort, running every guristas plex except the maze quickly (mostly) and easily.

In evaluating ships I have arrived at four values which will be most useful in evaluating a ship:

Some guristas battleships orbit at 52 km. The DPS the ship is calculated to do to one of these is the first field.

Some battleships orbit at 32 km. The second field is the DPS done to these ships.

Elite cruisers orbit at 17.5 km. The third field will only shows the EFT damage. For turrets this is very low because of tracking, though in practice there are tricks to reduce their angular velocity so that turrets can hit for near full damage. With a little luck, a maelstrom can kill an elite cruiser in 2 volleys.

Finally, there is price. This is a rough estimate of how much it would cost to buy and fit the ship.

Artillery maelstrom:
DPS at to battleship at 52 KM: 630
DPS at to battleship at 32 KM: 620
DPS to elite cruiser: 117
Price: 150 million

This is the ship I'm using right now. It's pretty nice and I like the volley damage, but I'm hoping there is something better out there.

Similar ships which I have considered and rejected include: Arty+cruise tempest, arty+cruise typhoon, rokh, megathron and hyperion.


Dominix:
DPS to battleship at 52 KM: 673
DPS to battleship at 32 KM: 697
DPS to elite cruiser: 165
Price: 150m

The dominix is interesting. With railguns in addition to sentry drones it does slightly more damage at range than the maelstrom. Using light drones instead of sentries it still does 551 dps, and it has slightly higher tracking as well. Unfortunately it has to be stationary to use sentry drones, and this adds a level of complexity above the maelstrom. In terms of hitting elite cruisers, the same tricks can be used.

Verdict: I'll pass. Does not represent a meaningful improvement over the maelstrom.


Autocannon machariel:
DPS to battleship at 52 KM: 728
DPS to battleship at 32 KM: 877
DPS to elite cruiser: 707
Price: 1000 million

The autocannon machariel does great damage at long range, and with autocannon tracking it will eat elite cruisers alive. There are two problems though, which are the price -- way too high for a ship without a real pve tank -- and ammo consumption. With a rate of fire around 4 times faster than an artillery fit ship, finding ammo (in tenal, where the market is dead) and having to go back to station to restock would become annoying. There's also the killboard issue if something unfortunate were to happen: People expect failfit ravens, but machariels are a whole different level of horrible.

Verdict: A major improvement over the maelstrom, but too exotic for pve use.


Artillery machariel:
DPS to battleship at 52 KM: 787
DPS to battleship at 32 KM: 760
DPS to elite cruiser: 114
Price: 1000m

Improved peak dps but with the same tracking issues as the maelstrom plus the fail issues of the autocannon mach.

Verdict: No.

The vindicator is a similar ship which I considered and rejected.


Javelin torp raven:
DPS to battleship at 52 KM (javelin): 569
DPS to battleship at 32 KM (T1): 892
DPS to elite cruiser (T1): 392
Price: 150m

Torpedo ravens do a whole lot of damage, but have very short range. I'm lazy and so absolutely will not chase pve targets around, but using javelin torpedoes combined with missile range rigs and good skills it is possibly to get the maximum torpedo range up above 52 km. Because target painters fall off at 45 km the damage at that range is actually slightly lower than the maelstrom, but relatively few guristas battleships actually orbit that far out. At close ranges the raven does significantly more damage than the maelstrom, as well as decent and much more consistent damage to elite cruisers.

In addition to the damage bonus missiles mean never having to worry about falloff or tracking, which represents a very significant decrease in the amount of effort involved in plexing. The downside is that smaller ships will be hit for less than maximum damage, though based on the DPS to elite cruiser EFT doesn't think this will be a major issue.

There is the challenge of getting javelin torps out to tenal, but the number which can be hauled back after taking loot to jita is practically limitless.

Verdict: Definitely worth looking into.


Torp golem:
DPS to battleship at 52 KM (javelin): 697
DPS to battleship at 32 KM (rage): 1138
DPS to elite cruiser (javelin): 543
Price: 650m

With a target painting bonus and 1/3 more base DPS, the golem does more damage at long range than the maelstrom, hilarious damage at close range and hits elite cruisers for nearly as much as the maelstrom's peak damage. It also represents a very significant improvement over the raven.

Verdict: I hate missiles with a burning passion and would never use them in subcapital combat, but principles are less important than money.


So, that's that. The golem is much better then every other ship I had even suspected might be worth checking. My plan was originally to test the torp raven first, but the difference in training time is only a week.


EDIT: Torp Rattlesnake:
DPS to battleship at 52 KM (javelin): 568
DPS to battleship at 32 KM (T1): 738
DPS to elite cruiser (T1): 585
Price: 650m

By popular demand!

You'd think with the number of rattlesnake BPC I find that I would have at least bothered to check it, but I didn't. It looks pretty similar to a dominix that uses missiles, and I was surprised to learn that it has a torpedo range bonus.

Between the 52 and 32 km battleship ranges it averages the same DPS as the dominix. An interesting feature is that it does the most damage to elite cruisers of any ship other than the autocannon machariel, though this number does depend on switching out to heavy drones.

Verdict: Arguably superior to the dominix, but suffers the same issues as a result of reliance on drones. The golem is a superior damage dealer, which is what I am looking for and thus remains my choice.

New ship: Nyx

Earlier I mentioned that I had a nyx on order and talked about the fittings. This post is the fun part.

Today my nyx finished building so I jumped to my clone with slave set and other supercap implants, which I had prepared and moved to a convenient 0.0 station along with my nyx fittings.

The transfer was pretty simple. Trusting the people involved is key: The corp I ordered it from is a long-time core NC corporation, and the CEO vouched for the person delivering the ship. At that point I felt comfortable to go ahead with the transaction, though they would have accepted a third party service.

The ship was in a POS with a password set, known only to myself and the person delivering the ship. I warped in, sent the isk to the corporation, the pilot ejected and I boarded. Carefully moving to an alliance POS in there system where my fittings were located, I then bludgeoned a corpmate into letting me use his SC to refit as my holding alt is still several days from being able to fly a carrier.

This is a noteworthy event for me for a variety of reasons. It's baby's first supercapital of course, it's the best looking ship in the game and it's something I've always wanted to fly, but more importantly I have crossed the line of what I thought I could ever achieve. When I first started playing I thought flying a battleship would be a major achievement. I thought that maybe someday, if I kept playing, maybe I would end up flying a carrier, though probably never a dread. I was certain that I would never fly a supercap.

Transfer


Fitting


This is an internet spaceship

It's not perfect: I need to get the remote ECM burst trained, the drones need some serious work and carrier 5 would be nice.

But you know what? That looks pretty good to me.

Battleships are expensive

In the aftermath of the fight in CYB yesterday it has turned out that I received two lossmails for the same ship, due to desync, and two platinum insurance payouts, totaling 122 million. Back in the day ship replacment usually consisted of a free or cheap hull and the insurance money would cover modules and rigs, give or take a couple million, so in a decent alliance members could replace battleships essentially for free.

After receiving a tempest hull from ship replacement for 20 million I went to fit it out, and discovered that this costs a lot more than it used to. Sixty to eighty million just for the rigs. Seven for 2 1600mm plates. It used to be that the fittings were about half the total price of a fleet battleship, but today a tempest hull costs 72 million while the total price for hull, rigs, modules, drones and insurance comes out to 215 million. Even with double insurance and a cheap hull, replacing the ship put me out about a hundred million.

The medium range tempest fit that we're using is pretty okay, but maybe I'll go back to flying logistics. They're a lot cheaper, even if they are :effort:

In which I nearly participate in a banter blog

This month topic is brought to us by L’Dene Bean of Nitpickin’s who asks: Why, and how did you pick your corporation? Is your loyalty solid or just until a better placed organization “recruits” you. The shorter version: Who holds your unshakable fealty and why?

In his posts on the nature of alliance failure cascades, Mittani observed that they occur when the organization that corporations or players identify with ceases to be the alliance. People don't like to believe they are bad at the game so when an alliance starts losing, corporations may decided it is the rest of the alliance which is fail and leave. Similarly a player may decided that their alliance or corporation is fail and leave or stop participating.

When WI lost all their space my corporation left the alliance and I left my corporation, but the organization I identify with never changed. I found a new corporation by checking with all the corporations in the alliances I was interested in, eventually finding a place in razor.

While my corporation are a fine bunch of folks, and while my alliance is the most competent I have been in, they are just the place I live. The organization to which I am most loyal is the northern coalition as a whole, for the reason that I actually believe the leadership has the best interests of the coalition at heart. I can be confident of this because they have spent years building the coalition into the uniquely successful organization it is today, cultivating a highly resilient cooperative model rather than the cult of personality which has failed so many alliances recently.

tl;dr nc rules atlas drools yes I'm bitter

New ship: Thanatos

Ew

I'll start by saying it: Gallente ships are the ugliest damn things in space. Amarr ships look okay, caldari are nice in the right light and I love the minmatar design aesthetic, but except for the nyx gallente is all shit, all the time. I've said that I can't tell the front of a moros from the back because the entire thing looks like ass.

The thanatos, in addition to being ugly, is a shitty carrier. The damage bonus is worthless for a carrier's role, amarr has a better tank and minmatar get a remote rep bonus. The thanatos' damage bonus makes it good at one thing though, which is carebearing.

I've been using a chimera for pve. By comparison the thanatos does 25% more damage, locks faster and is cap stable. As an armor tank it's also better against the EM torpedo in DG fleet staging, although amusingly the first fit I tried had trouble tanking the normal ships in the site when fit for the torpedo. Capital armor reppers are incredibly slow.

New fleet staging fit -- defence is shown for EM

Fitting for guristas it's a little weaker than the chimera - 5k dps tank instead of 7k - but this probably is not a big deal.

Guristas fit

You might note the smartbomb and neut in these fits. All PVE fits should have these: Some plex spawn large numbers of close-range tacklers which the smartbomb can kill quickly should a neutral show up, the neut will save you from getting tackled by a single interceptor like an idiot, and nobody should waste time training advanced drone interfacing past level 3 since it's only used for carebearing.