Monday, January 19, 2015

Things I did not know / realize

Something is going wrong, I need backup, I ask corp to un-dock and warp to me at 0. Except I am MWDing around at 2k/s. They un-dock and hit 'warp to 0'. Issue is, by the time they are aligned, at speed and in warp they land on a point I was at 40 seconds ago, which is now 80km off.

Lesson:
Align before warping to someone, or cancel warp and do it again after aligned at full speed.

Need to jam something, but not make them freak out and leave before the fight even starts, so the link ship stays docked. Issue is, 20 second cycle timer means if links were to un-dock and start right after the cycle starts there is another 18 seconds left in that cycle before the link bonuses apply.

Lesson:
There is no fleet if its just one person in space, have links out and on as soon as possible.



Thursday, July 24, 2014

Crius First Pass, Industry

Making sense of it all

There are weeks of content for me to sort through and internalize. First a few random notes
  • You can only use one team at a time
  • Bidding on teams is cumulative
    • Bid 1 million isk to start. 
    • Someone outbids at two million isk 
    • Putting in a bid of three million isk will then be a four million isk bid (original one + three adjustment)
    • To bid three million in that situation the first bid is one million the second should be for two million not three. (original one + two adjustment)
  • Using a rapid equipment assembly array will at least add one unit to an item. The 5% penalty is rounded up

For my first pass I am looking at an old favorite, player owned station defensive batteries.


POS modules can now be made in the (Rapid) Equipment Assembly Array

From the dev blog (dev blog)

“Two specific notes: firstly, we are now rounding materials per-job rather than per-run, so savings of less than one unit can often be realized with a long enough production run. Secondly, to prevent weirdness with T2 builds in particular (for example building 10 Paladins from 9 Apocalypses), every run requires a minimum of one unit of every listed material.”

Blueprints that have one unit of each of the included materials

  • All the ECM batteries
  • Warp scram / disrupt
  • Energy neutralizer / web
  • Medium and small laser batteries, hybrid batteries, projectile batteries
  • Cruise and torpedo batteries
  • Large autocannon, blaster, pulse laser battery
What is not included
  • Large artillery (2,1,2)
  • Large railgun (2,1,2)
  • Large beam laser (2,1,2)
  • Citadel torpedo battery (2,2,2)
(Broadcast Node, Organic Mortar Applicators, Self-harmonizing Power Core)

The specialist teams that give bonuses to Starbase Defense module ME percentages are, well pretty much useless. The four long range large weapons could be stacked with bonuses to materials used in large production runs to save a few input items. Issue is, selling the very slow moving items will take more to sell with opportunity cost and price fluctuations than the specialist savings would supply.

Perfect ME is still 0 for the first group, and teams have no effect. Each item can never have less than 1 of any input, so making 300 it still takes 300 of each item. There may be an edge case where you can use a rapid equipment assembly array and stack on enough discounts to negate it, but the only thing you gain is build speed. Build speed is nice, but I find it is rarely the bottleneck. Hiring a cheap starbase defense team with bonus to build speed is alright, but I find moving X modules is harder than actually making X modules.


Near useless ME bonus for Starbase Defense

That is not to say the ME savings is useless on all of the POS categories, the POSes themselves have a high material requirement which are now effected by ME on the BPO and ME from bonuses. Looks like I am going to have to research all my Tower BPOs now.
Another tower BPO I had with ME

Snapshot of Material requirements

  
EVEMon Perfect ME Levels are now not so perfect

    
Above, research at a POS in a highly utilized system. Below Research at a POS in a pretty much empty system.





The expansion reminds me of when I first started getting into industry, so much to learn and figure out, all so exciting!
On the other hand my tried and true isk generating methods are in question and my wallet is not getting the usual inflow from industry. If Eve was my supermodel wife, she would be planning a divorce with the way cash flow is right now.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

New Expansion Craze

Correct me if I am wrong...

This seems crazy!
Line one, seems like 16% less time on recon ships. Nice, but 250 million nice? I really really doubt that.
Line two, 1% on Marauders, OK lets look at this a bit.

...or not, since Eve Isk Per Hour crashes on load.

So assuming sell price of 1,060,000,000.00
1% is  10,600,000 per, so you would have to make 23 of them just to make up the team price?

This needs a look at in a proper tool, but it really does seem to me at first glance like new shiny ships that go for way more than they are worth the first week or so.


More of the systems have the big red bar than the smaller red bar, which , why is it red then? Should it not be green if it is lower?

Also lab costs in a system without research is maxed ? This is based on POS labs only? Wow jobs are really odd as far as what they consider 'a lot' of jobs in a system over a given month.


Monday, July 7, 2014

Bubbles, Pods, and Implants

Weekend roam!  Being horrible at PVP I died, but still loads of fun. First time out blew up to ishtars in my T1 cruiser. I had planned on coming out in a command ship with a larger fleet but turnout was low so I swapped down. This however presented a problem for me as I had jumped into a clone with a 50 million isk Armored warfare mindlink. I was trying to fly back to hisec to reship from npc 0.0 in my pod.

Bubbles, bubbles everywhere, people love to have fights that are totally one sided only showing up if they know they can win. Seeing what drops into a bubble is a great way to do that, and my pod dropped in as they expected. Someone pointed me as I waddled out of the drag bubble. They did not shoot me right away, they were waiting for their buddies to get in on the kill.

Opened character, clicked Augmentations, right clicked on the leadership implant, unplugged

Serves you right for trying to jam as many people in on a pod kill mail as you can.

Pod went from 50 mill to 0

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Transporting maximum amount of tower fuel in an Iteron Mark V for wormholes


Preface
This is all predicated on a C1 wormhole which has mass limits disallowing battleship and higher from jumping through. This can be applied to any size wormhole but there may be more efficient ways of transporting fuel into larger class wormholes such as an Orca, or a freighter.

Why Gallente?
T1 industrials are split up into three categories, Cargo, agility, and specialized. All races have a cargo and an agility industrial. Minmatar and Gallente have the specialized haulers. Minmatar have ammo and Gallente have PI, mineral, and ore. There are simply more options on the specialized haulers for Gallente so level 4 or 5 goes further than the other races. Not saying that others cannot be used, but starting from scratch on a character I would always go for Gallente.


Ship itself is relatively inexpensive weighing in at 15 million for the hull, rigs, cargo expanders, giant secure containers and a few token mid slots. Giant secure containers have an odd attribute where they hold 3,900 m3 but only take up 3,000 m3. This works great for items that fit inside the 3,900 m3 giving extra free space. Only down side is a ship with GSCs cannot be put into a ship maintenance array without first removing the GSCs.

Fuel is 5 m3 per block

Level 4 Gallente industrial
35,666 m3 raw or 45,566 with 11 GSCs
7,133 and 9,113 blocks respectively for an increase of 1,980 or about two days on a large tower

Level 5 Gallente industrial
37,152 m3 raw or 47,952 with 12 GSCs
7,430 and 9,590 blocks respectively for a gain of 2,160 or three days on a large tower

Viator Transport
10,279 m3 raw or 12,979 with 3 GSCs
2,055 and 2,595 blocks respectively adding 540 blocks or 13 hours of run time on a large tower


Comparing Transport Methods

If a character can fly a Viator they can fly an Iteron Mark V, some comparisons are below.
  • Much safer to fly a Viator, especially through hisec since it cannot be cargo scanned
  • Viator (or any cloaky hauler) is great for hauling fuel that is needed right away or if the goal is to haul something out safely, going in with fuel is a great idea. Fuel is always needed and a hauler should not generally go into the wormhole empty
  • Viator max fuel is 13 hours vs 72 hours of fuel on the Iteron Mark V. 10 Iterons for 30 days of fuel versus 55 Viator trips for the same 30 days
  • Cheaper hulls on the Itteron Mark V. If the ship is lost, hopefully on the return trip when empty the isk loss is 1/10th  the cost of a Viator
  • Not exactly related to Iteron vs Viator but, the skill requirements are lower for Iteron Mark V. This allows more characters to join in on the fuel hauling sharing the work
My vote goes to the cheaper hauler when a freighter is available for setup (detailed below). Ideally waiting for a good connection before launching the plan.

Cost of Hauling

Huge downside is loss of isk from a hauler exploding
Taking the highest block cost a the time of writing from Jita sell orders

Caldari 18,200 isk per block


Gallente indy level 4 Caldari blocks
130 mill raw, 166 mill GSC
Lose an extra 36 mill

Gallente indy level 5 Caldari blocks
135 mill raw, 175 mill GSC
Lose an extra 40 mill

Saftey of Hauling
Going into a wormhole with a hisec connection is relatively safe. Going through normal space, especially the systems camped between trade hubs in a T1 industrial packed full of fuel is suicide. If someone scans the cargo and realizes what it is carrying they will follow in catalysts, thrashers and anything they can get to explode it, and it will explode.

Get a freighter pack in all the fuel and haulers with fittings and rigs and take it to the closest station system in hisec to the entrance, base out of that. If the rig cost is a concern on the trips one character can do a courier contract to the other to haul the ships assembled, preserving the rigs.

If available use multiple ships, either alts or corpmates, fit all of the ships and have everyone ready to go. Scout out the wormhole side with a cloaky alt, if clear send all the ships at once to the wormhole. Jump in, align and warp off. In my opinion a blitz like that is harder to catch than a single ship (cloaky or not) going in and out multiple times. Optionally the person scouting the wormhole side can fit sensor boosters with scan res scripts and webs to help the haulers to get to warp faster.

The main thing is to watch for anything on dscan. If somehow a bubbler manages to get past the scout and sets up a bubble have all haulers cancel warp and go back to hisec, which they should be in range for. Canceling warp is the first thing that should happen when pointed. That should allow the ship to jump back into the safer hisec area, if warp is not canceled it will not allow the ship to use the wormhole to get back to safety.

The harder to do, but more dangerous thing would be if a ship saw what was happening and set up a stop bubble between the wormhole and the tower, causing the haulers to drop out of warp right into the hands of the enemy. Doing fewer trips lessens the chances of this happening. A cloaky hauler can avoid stop bubbles by bounce off of random planets if paranoia strikes

It seems every time I try to write about Eve there are exceptions or things I could explain more / better and end up writing a huge monster post. This post is no exception and I have left things out so it should not be considered a be all end all guide, use at your own risk!

Monday, June 23, 2014

Fueling Up!

What seems like forever ago there were no 'fuel blocks' but individual items that were placed in a POS and consumed based on tower usage. Now its just blocks, 40 for large standard tower per hour in a wormhole (no sovereignty). Building the blocks inside the wormhole is cheaper if you have the right planets but it introduces complexity. Min / Maxing this in my opinion brings me to building fuel in hisec using items purchased from buy orders set up in smaller trade hubs. Exporting some of the lower items from the wormhole such as coolant, oxygen, mechanical parts to hisec turned into fuel blocks and returned to the wormhole.

Buy orders fill up with some babysitting, but I have to update other orders anyways. Stockpile a little of this, a little of that, produce the fuel then haul it in when there is a good static. Less to worry about, less to store inside the wormhole if it does go sour and most importantly more of my sanity kept.

Friday, June 20, 2014

Going to Eve Vegas

Going again to Eve Vegas, went the past two years had a blast and met some interesting people. Met CCP Guard, we all he had a few drinks at the open bar and my wife wanted to hug him like some sort small of cuddly animal, meanwhile he was talking about trying to get to the gun range to shoot automatic weapons. One of the highlights is playing Eve Valkyrie, there was constantly a line. I hope they get the custom engine, dubbed by Katee Sackhoff version up and going by October.

So they ask Why?

Well, Why not?