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!

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.

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?

List of Items for Reactions Utility Tower

While thinking of setting up a 2nd tower for more polymer and utility I came up with the below tower.

Tower with 2 polymers and booster reaction

It fits on there but with minimal defense online mostly relying on guns and the energy neut for tackle.

I get tower notifications on my phone and I am typically within reach of a computer so if that happens it would not take too long for me to start on lining more defenses. The booster stuff will be offline unless I find a reliable source, so that would just be more defenses online.  Spreading out the 'loot' makes it more tedious for an attacking force to take down the raw EHP.

The way I see it the equation for fun when bashing towers is

(value.of.loot*chance.of.loot) - (boring.as.hell*N.Towers) 

Increasing N while decreasing chance/value.of.loot makes sure it is a negative overall experience. Two towers to camp reduces the chance.of.loot since a cloaky hauler has more chance of making off with loot and bashing a large tower sucks to begin with let alone doing it multiple times.

All combine with a C1 wormhole makes it reasonably safe, especially from the perspective that the effort and resources an attacker would have to put in would be far greater than the value of what they get out. There is always the perceived value of tears to worry about. Tears could be thought of as adding absolute value to the  above equation thus changing a negative result into a positive. In those cases it does not matter how negative the tower bash is, as the end goal of getting the towers down trumps all. With a dedicated force it is just a matter of reducing losses as much as possible.

The other side of N towers is the fun part. As many tower managers know logistics is not fun, so finding someone to share in the duties is in my opinion critical to scaling up if there is a want / need to do so. I would love to set up a few towers to hand them over to people so they can make isk and then myself move into something like T3 production from the results

How the mother of drones taught me a few things

Story Time

So I was scanning in lowsec, getting some practice and trying to possibly find something for my exploration corpmate and I to do. He was praying to the Eve gods for a 5/10 and I was itching for some isk,  after learning the group that pushed us out of the 6/10 had gotten a corpum A type EANM and some other loot totaling 1.1 billion. Eve being the Eve we all know and love provided a 5/10 in a sick and twisted way.

https://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Outgrowth_Rogue_Drone_Hive

First was the multiple levels of paranoia.

1. Ran across a gate camp in lowsec, corpmate said "never seen that before(in that area)"
2. Getting to the complex with combat ships, opting to take two Proteus and leaving the Sin behind
3. Running the complex thinking "Someone is going to come at any seconds and take the complex and get the great faction loot"

Second was six rooms of 50km gates, this would prove to be more annoying as we ran the site.
Third was the site layout, Empty rooms, easy enemies and OK Xth Tier Overseer Personal Effects drops getting me excited for the final boss and the 'possible' faction drone mod loot!

Finally got to the boss room, with a large group of webbing NPCs, some battleships and some cruisers. Overall not a big deal with two of us, if something gets under our tracking we can shoot the npcs like monkeys picking off parasites from each others backs. Then, he disconnects... I am thinking that the whole room will agro and I will have to warp out and go all the way back through all the gates. He reconnects apologizes on coms and he comes right back into the last pocket with me, great news! Then, he disconnects again this time for longer. He logs back in and is back at the beginning. Here I am with 2 webbing drones that I cannot shake. I do not want to take the whole pocket on when I am being webbed, so I warp off and start over from the beginning. I had a MWD fitted and he had an AB, so we both got to the end and started to run the site.

Once we were both in the last room it was textbook stuff. One group agro, pop the frigs, trash the cruisers, melt faces on battleships. I was thinking that there were only two battleships left, he points out that the boss is the giant tower I had not noticed. I was 55 KM away from the 50 KM locking ranged webbing missile lobbing tower. I backed off, we killed the last battleship. He starts in trying to get to his optimal and gets webbed and missiles are firing, his tank holds. I get in my optimal and start blasting away with short range ammo, through shields, half way through armor and then shields are back full, armor is back full. Both of us short range ammo, combined DPS of 700 cannot break the tank. We back off and assess the situation. Apparently this thing has huge amounts of structure and reps back crazy amounts of shield and armor, oh fun.

This is where the 50 KM gates across six rooms becomes really annoying. Blackops battleship was not fit with a prop mod other than MJD slow-boating through the acceleration gates. It was cloaking when it could for extra speed when not occluded by large really cool looking, but now annoying large collide-able objects. I have five Ogre II's some curators and miscellaneous medium and small drones. The curators are 42 + 15 within range of the tower so I decide to try and use the Ogres, send them in, this time we are doing enough damage to start chipping away at structure! This is replaced by the fact that it started shooting the drones, then one Ogre went down, so I sent out a hammerhead to replace it. This turned out to do something interesting that is added to my mental list. The tower focused on the hammerhead II and it was speed tanking it! This allowed us to basically sit at 0 and pummel the thing without worry of getting shot at. Another 15 minutes later and it explodes, here comes the faction drone loot! Except there wasn't any, some drone alloys and a 15th tier overseers effects. A whole lot of work and risk for 50 million isk in loot.

Hindsight and things I learned:

On this particular site I would have fit blasters on my sin and a salvager and a mobile tractor unit in the cargo. While the two proteus were clearing  the rooms ahead the sin would have sat salvaging. This would have done a few things for us as I see it, the roaming band of +10 to local -10 to local would have not seen wrecks on Dscan if they happen to be scanning. It would have upped the isk gain from the site and finally it would have put the extra DPS we needed a lot closer.

Google, which after the fact said 'stay 50k away and it wont rep like mad' something to try next time. Alternatively send a single hammerhead after it to pull agro and punch it in the face with more DPS. For this particular site fit MWD for sanity and leave the towers if at all possible. This way they stop fast tackle from blitzing the gates, and everything else is going to take FOREVER to get to you in the later rooms. I would feel safer in the 5th / 6th room than I do out in a safe spot now that I realize how it works.

Times like this make me glad I manufacture / research / react for my primary isk and this is just for fun.

Passing gas

There are two general types of gas for drug reactions Cytoserocin and Mykoserocin. Not sure if CCP meant to follow the ABC style C > M but it works and is easy to remember. The standard and above boosters are 'illegal' in hisec and there is a chance at the gates that concord will confiscate them and fine you. The myko version makes the synth version which is legal in hisec but only gives a 3% bonus to whatever stat it is.

Looking around in lowsec I found 4 or 5 of the M sites but only one of the C site which had two ventures in it mining already. One of the miners convoed me after I decloaked and left the covo when he realized I was out of system. Lots of drug labs anchored in the area, I do not mean to drop the pun, but it seems like there is a cartel surrounding booster production / gas.

With one of the Holiday gifts being the synth drug the market has quite a few units of them out there. The popular ones still do OK relatively but finding a gas supply or stupidly low buy prices are needed to offset the costs involved. The boosters go from gas to pure version which is then cut down to the consumable version, but it uses a BPC which can get expensive. The synth version comes with a 1,000 run BPC in some cases while the standard and above come in 50 run variants. Synth is 25 million for BPC but it contains 1,000 runs. Standard Mindflood Booser is around 8 mill for a 50 run copy, Improved being a little over that at 10 million and Strong showing up with a staggering jump of 300 million for a 50 run copy. With that said on the strong booster, the people looking for the BPCs probably do not ever sell them so the stuff that ends up on market priced according to perceived rarity.

I set a goal to try and run some of the sites that could yield a BPC for the boosters. If I cannot find the gas reliably I can just buy from market since the BPC should boost the profit percentages. While out and about running DED sites can be profitable too, had a 6/10 running when a group of proteus with guardian logistics showed up and had to bail. They were nice enough to let me know that we missed out on a Ashimmu Blueprint and a Corpum A-Type Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane. Only a billion isk in loot...

Stuffing a tower

Two polymer reactions and one booster reaction on a large Gallente tower

Managed to stuff it all on there using coupling arrays to feed the minerals into the polymer reactions for some CPU savings. Still a bit hazy on how the drug reactions will work out, but it is worth a shot. 

Already have a plan for getting the drugs out of the C1 into hisec, and to lowsec without concord getting in the way. Now to find out if there is a market for this sort of stuff.

GASP! A reaction!

In my quest to diversify and having fun figuring out EVE I came back to wormholes. The expansion I started on introduced wormholes, they hold a special place in my heart.  Decided to start out slow, get some corpmates used to scanning and running around in a wormhole, started with a C1. So living in a wormhole, doing PI, usually necessitates a tower just to have that 'safe presence'. Issue is with a tower, it runs on fuel, fuel which is not free.

The last corp I was in  started out in a medium tower, then CEO bumped it to a large doubling fuel costs, this is in a C2 mind you. No killer sleeper loot, no awesome 'mineable' static just a lowsec static C2 with very very little traffic. Fuel ate up all the profit, which ate up all the fun.

This time around I went in with the idea of paying for fuel with reactions and PI. Had a blast figuring it all out and optimizing it all. 

Ended up with a large Gallente tower for the silo bonus with two polymer reactions running. Pays for fuel with enough left over for some decent profit.  

I will post more about the adventure but for now I will leave with some things I found useful. 

 Things I learned

• Make buy orders for gas
• Haul in a nano and or stabbed Miasmos
• Use a coupling array for the minerals in the reactions rather than silos
• This saves fittings for other things