Building capital ships like a boss, part 10: Selling your ships

Seeing this post first? Go to part 1.

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships (you are here)

Another easy one. Put them on the market and wait for somebody to buy them. There are a few things I've noticed, though:

• Capital ship prices vary quite a bit over a matter of weeks. If you think the market price for a hull is low, consider hanging on to it for a while. Odds are you're right.
• Sometimes a bunch of one hull will get dumped on the market and the price will fall to barely above mineral price. When this happens, just wait it out.
• Sometimes it doesn't pay to be the lowest sell order on the market. If the lowest sell order is 100m below the next lowest, odds are you're better off undercutting the second lowest rather than the lowest.
• When mineral prices go up, not everybody who sells capitals has the presence of mind to reset their sell orders to somewhere above the new mineral price. In this situation I recommend holding and waiting for the market to catch up. This can take weeks, however.

...and that's all I have to say about that. This is the last post in the series.

Building capital ships like a boss, part 9: Actually building stuff, finally

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally (you are here)
10. Selling your ships


This is the easy part. Build the components, then build the hulls. There are a few notes which can be made, though, mostly common sense stuff:

• Start the components you need the largest numbers of first. If you or the station run short of slots, this will increase efficiency.
• If you have duplicate component blueprints, you can either build half the components from a run with each blueprint, or use one blueprint for one run and the other for the next run. I recommend the latter: It's easier, and after the first run the efficiency is the same (though there may be corner cases where this isn't true).
• You'll want to track the status of each of your blueprints. See section 6 for a simple way to do this.
• You'll want to track which components and hulls from which runs you're working on. I track this on my spreadsheet just using a list of components and hulls in each run and some color coding, like so:

Go to part 10: Selling your ships

Building capital ships like a boss, part 8: Moving minerals

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals (you are here)
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships


So let's say you have your blueprints in your building station. Now you need to get minerals there. There is more than one way to do this.

The simple way:

You have a freighter, a jump freighter, and a cyno alt. You move the minerals to the adjacent highsec system with the freighter, light a cyno with your alt, and jump them in with the jump freighter. This is what I do.

This is almost completely safe, since while in lowsec you're always in jump or dock range of something you can use to escape if a pvp scrub shows up.

It is possible to move up to 3 JF loads of minerals per 10 minute cyno activation, or 108 million units. It takes me about an hour to move minerals for 4 hulls from highsec to low, and I do this about once a week.

One advantage of this method is that you can build in a 30% refining station, while people who use mineral compression presumably need a 50% station. This means that it's easier to find stations where you won't have a lot of competition for manufacturing slots.

A disadvantage is that it requires a second account. And a jump freighter.

Mineral compression:

   

EDIT 2012-2-1: I now have a mineral compression guide up.

 

If you don't want to do it the simple way, you need to use mineral compression.

Mineral compression is not a topic with which I have personal experience. The short version is that you can take minerals, manufacture them into certain modules which have a much smaller volume than the minerals required to build them, then move the modules to lowsec and reprocess them back into minerals with almost zero loss.

This allows you to compress minerals to 1/28th their original size, allowing you move 30 million units in a cloaky hauler (3 loads for a carrier; 5 for a dread), while a jump freighter plus mineral compression could move about a billion units -- enough for 7 dreads.

Thus, you can move meaningful quantities of minerals to lowsec without needing to own a jump freighter and a second account. You can move them yourself with a cov ops hauler, or contract black frog freight, who will charge you 90 mil for a jump from jita to in-range lowsec with 5b collateral.

However, there are several downsides to this:

• You need to manufacture the items you use to compress the minerals. This means you have fewer slots available to build ships.
• You need 7.0 standings to reprocess the items without 'we take' loss. If, like me, you refuse to grind standings, you could buy a character with standings from the character bazaar.
• A station with 30% reprocessing rate will probably have unacceptable refining inefficiency.

Details about mineral compression, such as which items to use, can be found in the following posts at:

K162space
Jester's trek
A scientist's life in eve


Go to part 9: Actually building stuff, finally

Building capital ships like a boss, part 7: Location, location, location

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location (you are here)
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships


So. Where to build?

Picking a region:

Broadly speaking, you want to build and sell your ships in a region where you can sell all the ships you build, and where you can get the best prices. Let's start by counting how many capital ships are sold per month in the major trade hub regions, plus lonetrek because there is also known to be an active capital market there.

Forge (jita): 631
Lonetrek (n/a): 238
Domain (amarr): 154
Sinq laison (dodixie): 57
Heimatar (rens): 42

Forge has by far the largest market volume. I attribute this to the jita effect -- everybody goes there to sell because everybody goes there to buy, and everybody goes there to buy because everybody goes there to sell. I would also postulate that selling in forge is similar to selling in jita -- the volume is high, but you can usually make better profits somewhere else if you know what you're doing.

The real question is whether so few capital ships are sold in other trade hub regions because nobody buys there, or because nobody builds there. It's not uncommon to see zero units of a hull on market in some of those regions, and if you decided to build there you could set the price to whatever you like and make hilarious isk.

That, or everybody would keep going to forge and your hulls would sit on the market forever. If somebody tests this, let me know.

Picking a station:

I'm not even going to go into all the considerations to look at when picking a station, but here are some things to keep in mind:

• You want a manufacturing station with enough free slots that there won't be wait times once you start building there.
• It should be adjacent to a highsec system.
• If you are using a jump freighter, you need to make sure that you can warp from the station undock to the highsec gate without getting stuck on the station. That would be no fun at all.
• Buyers may prefer ships which are closer to the regional trade hub. Plus, if you're hauling minerals to the adjacent highsec, closer is better.
• If you are using mineral compression you probably want a station with 50% reprocessing instead of 30%. More on this in section 8.
• Mods and fuel in local. If there are capital mods and fuel for sale in the same system, people may prefer to buy ships there so they don't have to haul fuel and mods from the trade hub. If there aren't, you may choose to stock your system with them; I do this, and while it's usually impossible to tell whether somebody bought there because the mods and fuel were available, there is decent money in it. Unfortunately I am unable and/or unwilling to quantify my trade profits.
• Other things equal, it may be preferable to maximize the number of different alliances' jump beacons which are in range from your building system. More on this topic can be found in this post, though weirdly enough a strong majority of the people who buy capital ships are not from nullsec alliances. This probably should not be a major consideration.
• Is the system full of lowsec elitepvp scrubs who camp your highsec gate and kill cynos? That's annoying.

Go to part 8: Moving minerals

Building capital ships like a boss, part 6: Spreadsheets

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets (you are here)
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships


There probably aren't any more spreadsheet screenshots to post, so we might as well get around to posting the spreadsheet.

Here you go (LibreOffice Calc).

To use it, you must first go to the 'capital ship components' sheet and enter the material levels of your component blueprints. Then, go to the 'build tool' sheet at R2 and edit the component requirements to reflect those of your ship blueprints.

The actual production part of the 'build tool' sheet consists of three parts:

Component tool: Enter quantities of ships in the 'quantity' column and it will tell you how many components you need.

Mineral buying tool: Tells you what quantity of minerals you need to build the components shown in the component tool, and whether it is cheaper to get them from sell orders or with a buy order.

Blueprint tracker: I use this to keep track of the status of the ships I'm building. The 'next run' column is so you can build the next run's components while the hull is still under construction.

 

(my personal copy, with builds in progress)

The spreadsheet also includes the component calculator you saw in part 3, the hull blueprint material level table from part 2, a profit tool where you put in mineral and hull prices to see profits, and a sheet named 'component calculator' (which is the production area of the original spreadsheet) where you can select a ship and material level to see the component requirements.

Note: Whenever the spreadsheet accounts for tax, it assumes 1.25%.

Note: It's possible that the mineral quantities read slightly low. I'm not actually sure this is true - it's not easy to test during production - but when you're buying minerals you might want to round the third digit of the quantity upward to be safe.

Attribution:

The original spreadsheet came from here.


Go to part 7: Location, location, location

Building capital ships like a boss, part 5: Moving capital blueprints safely

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely (you are here)
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships


Okay, let's say that you have a bunch of capital blueprints. You want to move them from point A to point B, and sooner or later one or both of those points is going to be in lowsec. How can you do this safely?

-Some people might think that a cov ops frigate is a good tool for this job. If you think this, you deserve to die without ever understanding how or why.
-A stealth bomber, fit for tank, would be measurably less bad but still woefully inadequate. Similarly a cov ops hauler.
-People exist who use orcas to move high value cargo, since they have high EHP and the corporate hangar bay cannot be scanned. Some of them even do this in lowsec, using the cloak-mwd-warp trick to evade camps. The latter individuals are idiots.
-A stealth recon would be a good possibility, but you can still do better.

My solution is thusly:



Features:

Covert ops cloak
Aligns like a frigate
Dual stabbed
Freighter-level EHP
Fully passive tank
Neut and guns in case something does go wrong

Note: Without the interdiction nullfier subsystem, this fit is not appropriate for nullsec.

I have been using blockade running tengus similar to this for years. I won't say I've never been targeted, or even shot at; but I will say it only happened when I allowed it to, and that I have never once been in danger.

Of course, caution is still due, so don't afk in jita with billions in your cargo. Also, people who aren't familiar with cloaking should practice to see how quickly they can hit cloak after initiating warp without it failing to engage. That skill will save your life.


Go to part 6: Spreadsheets

Building capital ships like a boss, part 4: Researching your blueprints

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints (you are here)
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships


Now you've got a bunch of blueprints. Most of them probably need research. Where will you do it?

Stations:

There are many NPC stations with research slots, and you could use those.  Unfortunately, most of them have long wait times for ME slots.

If you want to go the NPC station route (I did), one thing you can do to save time is use a station which is not in highsec. I've since moved on, but I did all my initial research in Kourmonen, a system with 5 research stations which is two jumps into lowsec in the bleak lands. You can usually find wait times under 10 days there.

EDIT 2012-8-17: Note that kourmonen has become a hot spot in faction warfare, which could make moving blueprints there more dangerous. Use the 'kills in the last hour' map overlay to determine if there is active fighting in your route. However, also note that system upgrades add research slots to stations, and on the rare occasions when the system is actually upgraded there will often be slots with no wait time or very low wait time.

EDIT 2012-8-19: It is often possible to find very low wait times in the genesis and aridia regions, but getting to these stations often involves a long flight through lowsec. The regions are mostly empty, but the lowsec entry systems are sometimes camped.

Research tower

Remember when I said you'd probably want a corp? This is another reason why. If you have adequate standings to a faction, you can put up a tower in highsec and do research there. This should be substantially faster than doing it in a station, though also more complicated and expensive.

Note: Don't put blueprints in the tower. Train scientific networking and install them from a station.

This is fine if you're a scrub mission runner, but doesn't really work if, like me, you can't be arsed to grind standings.

EDIT 2012-4-18: However, there are ways to get around this. Once a tower is anchored you no longer need standings to the empire to keep it running. You can take advantage of this mechanic in the following ways:

-Corp creation service. Somebody with high standings to a relevant empire creates a corp, you join and put up a tower before standings update. They leave and make you CEO.
-Standings updating: All your characters with standings to the relevant empire leave corp, somebody with high standings joins, and once your corp's standings update you will be able to anchor a tower. The standings person leaves, your alts come back in.
-You could buy a character with high standings from the character bazaar, and use it to make your corp and set up a tower before your other characters join.

New eden research:

There is, in fact, an alliance dedicated to putting up highsec research towers. What you can do is have your corp join the alliance, and then use research slots on towers put up by other corps in the alliance (apparently this actually works as of a few patches ago).

The problem with this is that NER is a well known highsec science and industry alliance, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were wardecced on a regular basis. One solution would be to create a second personal corp for research alts; or, you could finish all your research before you start moving minerals around.


Go to part 5: Moving capital blueprints safely

Building capital ships like a boss, part 3: Component blueprints

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints (you are here)
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships


So you know which ships you want to build. Now you need the component blueprints to build the components so you can use the ship blueprints to build the ships. Which component blueprints? How many? Researched to what level? Help!

Here's a table of which components are required for which ships, how much they cost, and where you can find them.



EDIT 2014-5-24: The naglfar no longer uses the launcher hardpoint component.

That's not the whole story, though. Ships use more of some components than others, so you are likely to need duplicates of the most common blueprints in order to build efficiently. How many and of which blueprint depends on your selection of ship blueprints, but the method to work out how many components you need is as follows:

-Make a spreadsheet.
-Make a list of how many components of each type are required to build all your ships.
-In a second column, list how many component blueprints of each type to get.
-A third column is set to equal the number in the first column, divided by the number in the second column, multiplied by 2.866, divided by 24. This is how many days it will take to build the components for all your ships (with component PE 20).

What you want to do then is adjust the number in the second column so that the number in the third column is 10-ish. Maybe a little more if your ship blueprints are heavy on rorquals, since they take longer to build than carriers or dreads.

Confused yet? Good. This tool is included in my spreadsheet (see part 6 of this guide). Here's how it will look for someone building one of each carrier and dread, plus a rorqual, all at optimal ME:

By the way, it's okay if you have a few more total blueprints than manufacturing slots. You'll always need fewer of some components than others, so some runs will be shorter and the blueprints will have some downtime. It's like overbooking an airplane flight, except you only have yourself to be angry at when things go horribly wrong.

Material level:

What material level should you research components to? Up to you, but here's a table with build costs and savings for a rorqual at different levels of component research. This is from before crucible, and today all the cost and savings numbers will be twice as large.

I decided to go with ME100. It's a nice round number, and also happens to be a sweet spot for reselling component blueprints on contracts when you decide to get rid of them.

Production efficiency level:

Okay, how about production efficiency?

Here's a table with time per run and time savings at several PE levels.

I went with PE20.


Go to part 4: Researching your blueprints

Building capital ships like a boss, part 2: Ship blueprints

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints (you are here)
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships

Introduction:

To build capital ships, you will need two types of blueprints: Component blueprints, which are used to turn minerals into capital ship components, and ship blueprints, which are used to turn components into ships. This post is about ship blueprints. Does that seem backwards to you? Tough.

When to get ship blueprints:

When you're looking to start up capital ship manufacturing, you should start looking for ship blueprints early. If you're contemplating it in a serious way at all, right now would be a good time to start.

Capital ship blueprints take a very long time to research (6-15 months) compared to component blueprints (3 months). Although it is more than possible to build on a poorly researched blueprint and make huge profits, that would not be very bosslike.

Ship blueprints on average cost more than component blueprints, but you'll be buying many more component than ship blueprints. Thus, if you don't have the isk on hand for all the blueprints you need, you can research your ship blueprints while earning for the component prints.

How many ship blueprints to get:

How many blueprints you can build on at once depends on how many manufacturing slots you have. As an extremely general rule, you can get away with three ship blueprints for each character with 10 manufacturing slots. Maybe 4 if they're all carriers.

How to get ship blueprints:

Researching ship blueprints from nothing takes a very long time, so I strongly recommend getting researched blueprints from contracts or the sell orders forum.  DO NOT just jump at the first thing you see, though -- patience pays off. If you watch long enough, sooner or later somebody will come along with a well researched blueprint for a reasonable price.

Which ship blueprints to get

This is exactly the sort of thing you need to to determine for yourself, but there are a few notes that I should make:

Carriers are decent entry-level ships to build. They require half as many minerals as other capitals, their blueprints are cheap, they sell quickly, and they almost always have solid margins. You will, however, make less per hull sold than rorquals or dreads.

-The archon is the best carrier to build. It sells quickly, and always has wide margins.
-The nidhoggur also frequently has wide margins, but it sells the most slowly of all the carriers.
-The thanatos is the most popular carrier, but is also built by the most people. The margins can be depressing at times.
-The chimera is the best looking carrier, but it has below average margins.

Rorquals are a little harder than carriers to build, requiring twice the minerals and two additional component blueprints, but they sell quickly and almost always have good margins. Sometimes somebody will dump a bunch of them on the market in Akora in forge, driving the price down, but I've learned to hold them when this happens and wait for the price to increase.

Dreads are a bit peculiar:
-The moros is probably the best dread to build. It sells quickly and always has wide margins.
-Next is the revelation. It may actually be more popular, but more people build them and occasionally the market will get swamped.
-The naglfar, while clearly the most awesome dread, has by far the lowest sale volume of any capital ship. On the other hand, very few people build them, either. As long as you don't mind waiting a while for them to sell, the margins are usually good.
-The phoenix is a shitty dread, but enough people fly caldari that they do sell. However, historically it has been common for the market price to sit right at mineral price. A phoenix blueprint is a very questionable investment.

Where to get blueprints:

Capital ship blueprints are seeded in regions owned by their respective empires. If you can't get them from contracts, or if you are so far out from starting your manufacturing process that you want to start from scratch to save isk, you can find them in this table.

Note that rorqual blueprints are a very special case, in that they are only seeded in nullsec, in ORE stations in outer ring. NPC price is EDIT: 2.94 billion, and you probably will not find them for that price in jita. I'll leave it up to you how to solve this problem.

Material research

What material level should you research your ship blueprints to?



Highlighted in green is the material level I recommend. Pink is the optimal material level, if different. This chart is from a few months ago; at the time of writing the ME0 price and ME savings are about 75% higher.

You may notice some inconsistencies in there. There are reasons for these, and I don't feel like explaining them. You're a big boy and/or girl and you can make your own determinations about material level.

You may also wish to note that although high ME is awesome, if you end up with researched components while your ships aren't quite there yet it may be better to go into production early. A couple of million isk is a very small portion of the profits you'll make each run.

Production efficiency research

PE1 cuts carrier and dread manufacturing time from 11 days 20.4 hours to 10 days 16 hours, or 11%. 11% faster building means 11% more profit over time, so get all your prints to at least PE1.

In the meantime...

If you end up with well researched ship blueprints before your component blueprints are ready, make copies and sell them in jita.


Go to part 3: Component blueprints

Building capitals like a boss part 1: Introduction

EDIT 2014-7-24: With the release of Crius, literally nothing in these posts can be used any more. Do not try to use them as a guide. It will not work.

 

EDIT 2016-03-20: New guide here.

At least two blogs have posted capital building guides, but they both use the word 'copy' at some point. Here we're going to do it right.

EDIT 2013-6-8: I now have some minimal guidance for building from copies. If you want to start production with less than 24 billion, please see this post.

This guide will be split into several parts covering different topics:

Index:

1. Introduction (you are here)
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships

About this guide:

This guide does not comprehensively cover every single thought that there is to have about capital manufacturing. A reader who wants to use it is expected to be able to use problem solving, to evaluate whether or not a process will work for them, and to run the numbers themselves instead of believing what they hear on the internet. Basic spreadsheet skills are also likely to be useful.

It will cover exclusively the building of jump-capable tech 1 capital ships (carriers, dreadnaughts, and rorquals), from original blueprints, in lowsec, for profit. Many of the tools it provides could be useful for building from copies, for building freighters and orcas, or for building in wormholes or nullsec, but these things will not be covered.

The guide's posts are arranged in the approximate order you want to think about the various topics when setting up capital production.

Also, it's going to be extremely boring. I know blogging ~best practice~ is to throw in pictures whenever possible, but I'm going to ignore that and go with a wall of text interspersed with spreadsheets.

The short version:

There is a nontrivial amount of money to be made building capital ships. Also, once you get it up and running, it requires very little time investment to keep going. As a highly profitable, low effort, non-grind-type profession which also doesn't require you to adjust market orders by 0.01 isk, it is literally the best thing in eve.

You can expect margins of 25-35% over mineral price. How much you make per month depends on how many manufacturing slots you are able to run; at the time of writing I have 30 slots and make 3-7 billion per month, though I often have a number of slots going empty because of a component bottleneck.

Requirements:

One of the reasons that capital manufacturing is so profitable is that it has high barriers to entry. Big ones include knowledge (most people have not run the numbers; and most people think that building a capital ship is a big, difficult task), isk (capital blueprints are expensive), and risk aversity (zomg moving expensive things through lowsec).

It takes a while to start up a capital manufacturing process, so you don't actually have to meet all the following requirements before you start looking for blueprints (more on this in part 2), but some minimum requirements and some recommendations are below:

Minimum requirements:

Capital ship construction 3 (4 for rorquals)
One building character
24-ish billion isk
Freighter

Recommended:

As many building characters as you can fit on your account/s
Jump freighter and cyno alt (preferred) or cov ops transport plus mineral compression ability
Personal corporation so that your alts can work together via a corp hangar
Blockade runner tengu (see part 5)

Scrapmetal processing (if using mineral compression)
Advanced mass production 4 (10 manufacturing slots)
Advanced laboratory operation 4 (10 research slots)
Metallurgy 4 (20% faster ME research)
Accounting skills (to reduce tax)


Go to part 2: Ship blueprints

Blog design: How to be slightly less terrible

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.

• Example
• Decent example

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.

• Very bad example
• Nearly decent example

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

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

Increasingly awesome title edition~

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


Introduction:

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

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

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


Method:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fitting:

Without further ado...



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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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


Limitations:

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

So what does this leave us?

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


Results:

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

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

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

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

Thoughts:

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

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

tl;dr more money, more fun, more interesting

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

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

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


Forward:

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

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


Sec status:

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

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

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

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


The ship:

It works, I promise.

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

Finding space:

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

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

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

UBP constellation -- route highlighted, FDZ circled

Getting there:

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

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


The method:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


Results:

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

Yup.

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

Jump into camp. Wat do?

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

Key:

Surviving camps on the in gate


Situation 1: Single interdictor with warpable object

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


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

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

Situation 2: Single interdictor without warpable object

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


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

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

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

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



Situation 4: Reapproaching the gate

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

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

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

Surviving camps on the out gate

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

The way drag bubbles work is thusly:


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


Situation 5: Drag bubble (easy)


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


Situation 6: Drag bubble (hard)

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


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


Situation 7: Drag bubble (hard) (easy)

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



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


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

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

Considerations when deciding where to build or buy capital ships

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

Long answer:

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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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


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

We start by looking at the market:


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

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

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

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


And that's how equstria was made.

Exploration site guides: Guristas Military Operations Complex

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

Playing eve for free

"play eve free" was a search which brought several people to my previous post and I thought, hey, post idea.

The basics:

People can buy game time codes with real money (two months for 37 dollars/euros IIRC). These time codes can then be converted into in-game items called PLEX. You get two of them for each time code you convert, each of which adds one month of time to the account of the person who uses it. Plex are commonly sold on the market by people who want to exchange real-life money for game money, and they cost around 360 million isk right now. This means that if you can earn 360 million isk in one month, you can play eve for free.

There is an efficiency issue, which is that in most first-world countries people earn enough per hour that it is more time-efficient to pay for the subscription. As an example, someone earning 30m/hour missioning would take 12 hours to afford a PLEX, while earning 5 dollars (or euros) per hour in real life it would only take three hours to pay for a one-month subscription. Of course not everybody can find a job in this economy, much less one which actually pays the bills and where they can change their workload on a whim, so plex are pretty popular.

So: In order to play eve for free, you need to earn enough isk each month to buy one plex per account. Since you are working for the ability to play, there is a strong incentive to maximize your isk/hour. For this purpose I will cover the earning potential of some basic careers and passive income methods, as well as suggestions for some advanced careers.

In highsec the two entry-level occupations are mining and running missions. Mining in highsec on a single account is said to be worth 7.5m/hour, meaning it would take 48 hours of work to earn one PLEX. Missions earn 20-40m/hour, at which rate it would take 9 to 18 hours to buy a plex.

There are other things to do in highsec, of course, but they are harder to get into and may require a significant initial investment. Trade and manufacturing are big ones, supposedly worth billions per month for those who know how to make it happen. Another thing to look at might be invention, but I am even less than familiar with this.

EDIT 2011-10-20: Incursions in highsec make 50-100m/h plus LP, and they aren't especially hard to get into.

Moving out to 0.0 the numbers get bigger. Manufacturing can still be done, and although the margins are a lot higher the volume is generally quite small. Belt ratting in 0.0 is worth 30-40m/h and running anomalies in a carrier or golem should be worth an easy 45m/h not counting faction spawns or escalations. At 45m/h one plex will take 8 hours of work.

With the recent spike in megacyte prices mining in 0.0 is now almost worthwhile again. A solo hulk mining arkonor in 0.0 makes about 25m/h, while a properly bonused hulk with a hauler alt makes twice that, meaning earning 2 plex would take 15 hours in either case. With two hulks and one hauler three plex would take 12 hours.

One thing which is worth a lot more in 0.0 than other places is exploration, which is what I do. An accomplished carebear doing exploration on 2 characters can usually make a minimum of 100m/h (8 hours for 2 plex again), but a single lucky drop can be worth a billion isk and an exceptionally good day can pay for months of play time.

Passive income can be used to supplement primary income, or at higher levels could actually pay for one or more plex per month. For mission runners datacores from research agents can earn an extra 70-ish million per month, and planetary interaction can be worth more depending on where you do it. Kirith I believe makes around 300m/month doing PI in a wormhole, and has written about that a bit. You can even make extra characters on one account for the purpose of passive income -- three characters each earning 70m/month from datacores and/or 300 from PI would surely help things along, though there is a skill point investment which would have to be made.