Missions, and bye bye Cyclone

Friday night and Saturday consisted of lots and lots of missions. Managed to get a few good pics out of it. These consisted mainly mining missions since I'm running for MMC. Overall a good relaxing time was had. I was able to run some numbers on our potential Dominix project. It'll be cheaper than the Typhoon project. I'm leaning towards a 3 month project with a parallel startup a month or a month and a half into the project with more distribution of the production and mineral aquisition to the mining/manufacturing corporations. Also budget for 4 BS simultaneously. More on that later.

Funky asteroid in a mining mission.

Mining some bountiful bandine.

On the other front there is the problem that with the towers being where they are, and the amount of research I'm doing I'm actually not as mobile as people think I am. The level of production I'm maintaining and especially the level of research with it's scheduling issues takes up a good portion of my time. I can do things like mine or haul while I do these tasks but anything more strenuous is out of the question if I want to get these done. With 510+ BPO's that I own personally and another 38 or so owned by the LCSC (my corp), my research queues are always full. Expecially since I've switched over to "use BPC's for personal production" methods. This consists of leaving the BPO's in the station in the system where the towers are located and making copies for use in manufacturing stuff I need.

The reason for doing this is eventually I'll be able to go anywhere with copies instead of originals. Copy costs when you are not selling to the contract market are negligible. But the big thing right now is that it simply takes time to get all the BPO's researched. It's coming along but
we're not there yet.

I've also started the expansion of my product line. Things that are researched get max run copied. Things that aren't get in the list of things to research with an accelerated priority. Plus special orders also get a higher research priority. The issue is that with all my research skills being used flat out, it can take 24h to 48h to react to a change in priority. But such is life.

At the end of the day on Sunday, I decided to go and help Carbon Freezer with a combat plex he found. This turned out to be a Minor Sansha Annex. Those of you who have run annexes before will cringe to learn we jumped into the 2nd room with a Raven and a Cyclone... The first room went rather well. I taught carbon about the joys of npc coordinated hardener choice. I also learned that my Cyclone setup can handle 5 Sansha BS (slowly going down while waiting for the Raven to get back). 4 without a problem. Good solid perma-tank on that now deceased Cyclone. But it can't handle 9 BS, 13 Cruisers and 5 frigates (with warp scramblers). The Raven went down so fast they were on me before I finished my turn to warp. I saluted it as it went down. It was a good ship.

I stuck around to to look at the ores in the 2nd room. O... M... G... Everything except the Hebergite was in it's most condensed form. There were over 100roids of all types - Golden Omber, Rich Plagio, Fiery Kernite, etc... etc... etc... I almost cried... Discovering the trigger that makes this plex disappear would be a priority for the next few times we find one. As would being able to survive the 2nd room. Namely having a massively tanked BS with logistics support. And having the miners on hand to exploit the room once the danger point has passed but the plex has not been de-spawn triggered.

The end result of all of this of course is over the next few days I'll be re-building my mission Cyclone from the ground up. That was my 2nd mission cyclone since I've been able to fly the things. It lasted over 7 months.