Rambling Thoughts On the Brink of April

Another month passes, and ultimately, another month passes in the life of Karox, intrepid explorer, manufacturing mogul and general annoyance to Angels everywhere.

Firstly, yay me, I finally broke 20 million skill points a few days back. If only I'd not taken that year long break a while ago I'd have done that a long, long time ago, but never mind, live and learn, how was I to know I'd be back.

Secondly, it seems that the last Blog Banter post was my hundredth on the blog. Woohoo for milestones.

I'm still stalled on my training for Command ships. However, im finally going a bit more focused on Exhumers, and I'm now 10 days from finishing Mining Barge 5 (already having done Astrogeology 5) and from then I'll get Exhumers skill to finally use that Hulk that's been sitting in my Hangar for months (which I've been secretly wanting to fly a while since it was my first hand-made Tech 2 ship)

Been using the skill queue to good effect as well, training up a few prerequisites for the Tech 3 subsystem tech skills (mainly science skills, and the other racial starship engineering skills) but since I've only done levels 1-2 of these via the skill queue, theres still lots of training ahead of me - Metallurgy was raised to 3 so far, but still need to get that to 4 before I can even train the Reverse Engineering skill.

I need to start deciding how to spend my time though from now for the next few months - do I refine my skills in one area, or (the more likely choice) just dot around from thing to thing and never really become specialised at anything (and therefore take forever and a day to get there) - Tech 3 manufacture isn't on the cards yet material wise or skill wise, so I dont know why im worried too much about getting those, suppose its a 'its new and I want to do it' mentality without thinking through the realistic options.

I'm hoping to spend more time on my combat side, even though I now have an alt (well.. have had one for a fair few months now, its sitting at just a little over 10 million skill points) specialised in Minmatar ships with limited charisma (yay pre-patch Achura) for combat use, but thats far from finished at the moment. I dunno if I should keep Karox as a support/industrialist character, but I'm still focusing on Caldari/Gallente with Karox and Minmatar and (eventually) Amarr with the alt (I know, I know... old racial enemies ship types on each character, it just worked out that way when I created Karox wanting to fly Gallente ships but heard that Caldari made good mission runners to get income when I first started)

I've still yet to get lost in a wormhole (I've had a bit of a tentative look around one or two of them, but nothing substantial). Tell you the truth, I'm a bit scared of it. Not in a 'yah boo sissy' way but rather the fact that I'm needing to access my science and industry stuff on a daily basis or thereabouts, and I dont get much time to log in daily (I can pop on for an hour or so every morning, and limited longer periods after work) so need to be able to access everything in a very quick time - having to find a way out of a wormhole and then back from wherever I end up at would just be a massive inconvenience for me. Add to the fact that I don't have a clue as to what ship to bring on the wormhole expedition either - I've got a Drake set up that should be ok to solo low level stuff with, but it cant really exploit the better things found in wormholes (archaeology sites, gas clouds etc) and only has 1 salvager, so thats going to be very slow going if and when I do kill stuff.

I'm definately considering going to Fanfest this year, but it seems the Early date has caused a bit of a ruckus and some people who were intending to go now can't because of the earlier than expected date, and i'm a bit worried that I'll get there and will end up not knowing anyone (hell... 50k plus people out in space at any one time, and probably 4-5 times that in total active accounts means a lot of people that could end up there, and I only know about 10-20 of them outside of corpmates)

Anyway, I think thats enough rambling for now, got a lot on my mind, including moving a fair few combat vessels to a lowsec base to start getting out and about again, I've been cooped up in the science and industry service station for way too long it seems.

Blog Banter 6 - Times, they are a changing

This month's topic comes to us from Quintrala of Speed Fairy . She suggests to "write a short fiction story about the dissolution of the BoB alliance. It could be from BoB's point of view, the Goons', by neutrals in 0.0, civilians in Empire, NPCs or even rats. Write about before, during or after the coup; give us stories of market, war, people or love. In-character or roleplay. We want to know what happened, from those fictional characters that, in your mind, were part of it."


Karox sat with his head in his hands, staring blankly at the console, the breaking news on the Galnet screen flashing up stories:

'Breaking news, Band of Brothers Alliance has been dissolved' it flashed again and again, minor updates to the main body of news as the information trickled down from reporters who clone jumped to nearby systems in order to get in on the information soon.

All Karox could think about were the knock on effects, the massive spike in Tech 2 raw material costs, already vultures were buying up all of the stocks of things like Ferrogel as far as the eye could see, relisting it all at 2, 3... 10 times its value a few days earlier.

Massive strife out in the badlands of 0.0 space wasnt anything new of course, alliances fought for territory all the time, but since the Band of Brothers alliance were well known for holding several key resource producing moons in their 'backyard systems' this was going to really screw up the process for getting the stuff out to the empire systems where they could be used for production.

Whilst the complexities of the incident were slowly gathering truth (or rumour, whos to know when politics are involved) the market speculators were going hell for leather to get their cut.

The Tech 2 market, already rocked a little earlier due to the 'accounting blunder' which saw a way to get a massively increased output on the reactors, was going to suffer in the short term... and until supplies were restored, prices would skyrocket as people relist what meager amounts they have at unrealistic prices to get their share of the panic buying frenzy.

Of course, the real reason Karox was holding his head in his hands was that after buying a Freighter a little earlier, he had used up pretty much all his liquid assets, and therefore couldn't take part in the mass market hysteria and make a killing like so many others would most probably achieve.

• Participants:
• Speed Fairy, The Hand of BoB
• CrazyKinux's Musing, No where to go...
• A Mule in EVE, Rolling to the Warzone
• The Ralpha Dogs, Two Tales of Glory and Honor
• One Man and his Spaceship, Times they are changing
• OZ's House of the Evil Dead, Every betrayal contains a perfect moment, a coin stamped heads or tails with salvation on the other side
• The Wandering Druid of Tranquility, Who the Hell are They?....
  
• I am Keith Nielson, He Gave Up the Stars

Need some help with Tech 3 production processes

I'm busying putting together my first draft for my future EON article on Tech 3 manufacturing, problem is that there has been some slight (and some significant) changes from the Test server compared to what there is on the live server.

The question I have is quite simple: When reverse engineering, are the decryptors (the racial ones that you need to put in every job to determine the type of BPC you get) consumed? What about the RAM Hybrid Tech ? Is it 100% consumed with each job, or partially consumed as all RAM units are classically?

A second question is what are the outcomes? So far I've seen a 3 run BPC produced as reported on the forums as well as all of the blueprints on the contracts system. Are the blueprints always 3 run, or do you get 1 run, 10 run, 20 run or more blueprints with good successes (as I know that the end output is vairable with reverse engineering)

Whilst the chances are that theres many people not done an actual reverse engineering job (me included, which is why im asking) im hoping that the greater Eve population could spot this blog and may be able to offer some insight.

I've still got a few months until I need to submit it, so I hope that I can get something a bit more tried and tested by then, but if I can get something semi concrete in advance, it will help with writing.


Oh and by the way, look out for my Tech 2 manufacturing article in the next issue of EON due in April.

First look at Tech 3 costs

I've created a spreadsheet to include a way to enter the costs that the market generates. Its not perfect (only includes the materials, not the costs of handling them and moving them along the production chain) but if anyone wants to use it as a starting block feel free.

Under the cost cells in the spreadsheet, you can enter your own values in the green coloured cells, but the grey ones are calculated from a previous sheet. This of course makes it the 'best case' where everything is generated from the ground up, if at any point along the chain, the parts are bought from the market rather than generated from raw materials, just alter the appropriate cell, it should filter through automatically.

They're entered now with current Jita prices of all the tech 3 parts, everything is still way too pricey at the moment as could be expected, but once prices calm down a bit it should be a good guide to make sure you arent getting ripped off.

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/0903/Tech_3_Parts_Sheet.zip


Also, Tareen Kashaar on the Eve forums has developed a new flowchart for the production of Tech 3 parts, which is much more comprehensive (and clears some of the errors that were there) from the originally Dev published one. This can be seen from the following link:

http://dl.eve-files.com/media/corp/Luggage/t3prod_flowchart.gif

Note that the 'known space' buyable parts (the reactions and the component BPOs) are available galaxy wide from Core Complexion Inc and Chemal Tech stations.

Premium Lite and the EeePC

I was a bit worried about my EeePC after the Apocrypha update, its hardly the most powerful machine out there, and whilst it ran Classic mode Eve acceptably (I would never have tried to fly in space and 'do stuff'), I was worried that the upgrade to Premium (or more specifically, Premium Lite) would be simply too much for the little guy.

I must say I was mildly shocked - after turning down all the settings to low, it managed to run, and I can still do station based activities with it, which was ultimately all that I wanted to do with it anyway. Go one for the little guy.

It chugs along at a rediculously low framerate (prob about 2-3 FPS if the jerkiness is anything to go by) but hopefully that wont cause me too many problems with clicking the wrong button and making 1000 of an item when I mean to make 100 and other such comedy moments.

All in all, I'm a bit of a chuffed little bunny at that revelation.

Apocrypha: Day One Fallout

Unfortunately I had to go out yesterday evening, so didn't have much time to explore exactly what Apocrypha had to offer, but here are a few of the highlights and lowlights (is that even a word? I've only ever heard it used in management speak) of the patch as I see it:

1) The patching process itself was quite straightforward and the servers appeared to be up according to schedule - and they didnt seem to drop out at all. I did cheat a bit and download the manual patches during the day at work though so I've no idea how the autopatcher was going to work, since I didnt want to wait 4-6 hours to download 1.5 gb of data at home, since I had to go out, and I loathe to leave the PC on when im out of the house (I always worry that the things going to explode and burn the house down)

2) The probes - This was a bit of an annoyance. Firstly, I bought a whole load of Quest probes before the patch that were nice and cheap with a view that 'at least they will probably normalise the material requirements for the probes and put them at about the mid level of where the old ones sat' but upon looking at the new core probes that were in my hangar, they had about the same refining output as the old quest probes did. Thats good I suppose for those who want to make them from new, they will be nice and cheap, but it means that all my old probes, multispecs and all, which were quite expensive (14k-21k rather than the 3k of quest probes) have lost a LOT of value. This one was my fault I suppose since I couldnt be bothered to sit through loads of patching for the test server, so didnt bother with it to any great deal.

For some reason also, pretty much all of my 'combat probes' were missing - there was only 1000 in my hangar when there should have been about 4000 (taking into a mind that the old recon probes should have converted to combat probes) - these things were pretty expensive to manufacture since they needed some Strontium to make, which was quite an annoyance to see them all disappear. Add in the massive material loss with my 17k core probes (1000 of each of the 16 types of old probe and 1000 multispecs) that was a bit of a bad side.

3) Tech 3 manufacture - I was mildly suprised to find that all of the material requirements for the strategic cruiser hulls for each race was identical, and also that each race and type of subsystem share a material table, that should make the spreadsheets for these much easier to manage. Again, blame that one on not being able to log into the test server.

4) Attribute remapping - I decided to go for a nice balanced approach, and dropped my charisma down to the minimum and the rest with a slight focus on perception and willpower. Pretty much every thread on the first page of the 'skills' forum on the Eve Online forums is asking about the best way to set your stats, and loads of Achuras asking why they cant 'get rid of their 11 points of charisma since the minimum is 5' (its because they arent taking into account that the learning based skills cant be reduced, and when you tell them they need to actually raise charisma to meet the minimum 5, they go off in a huff.) Had a bit of a chuckle at that one.

5) Wormholes - A few corpmates went into a wormhole from lowsec yesterday and managed to get minced in seconds from a sleeper BS, seems that theres still a lot to learn about those lot.

6) Training queue - Works like a charm. Managed to train all the level 1 and 2 subsystem skills, gas harvesting to level 2, and then pop right back over to Astrogeology which I had set before downtime. Seems nice and straightforward to use, so im looking forward to not having to stop a skill with 2-3 hours to go when it would finish when im at work/going to bed in the future.

All in all, looking good so far.

Halada's at it again...

The other day, Halada, the author of quite possibly the most accepted undisputed mining guide for the Eve community is planning to release the third version of his guide, expanding into all facets of production, from mining to tech 1, tech 2, tech 3 and capital ship manufacturing, POSes, Outposts and Managing the markets.

He has said that it will be relased on March 10th, in line with Apocrypha going live, but he does state that the stuff directly related to the Apocrypha expansion will follow 30 days later, so that's giving him a bit of a barrier just incase anything changes from how its currently portrayed on the test server.

The announcement was posted on the Eve Online forums so if youre interested in keeping up with the countdown, and can suggest a suitable name, feel free to put in your thoughts.

As for me, I feel like I've had my nose put out of joint a little, since if he pulls this off, theres not much point in doing a dedicated Tech 3 production guide, since I dont think its worth my time trying to improve on something that, if its anything like his mining guide, covers pretty much everything in good depth. I'll enjoy reading it though and it's promised to be big, around 160 pages from last count or so he says.