How many Orca trips???

As those of you experimenting with wormhole exploration will by now know, establishing a forward base in a wormhole is rather fun. You end up with the feel of a wandering POS as it randomly re-connects to New Eden every day or so. And although a large corp or alliance will deplete the T3 resources of said wormhole system in relatively short order, it's still a useful forward base. On top of which my miners are finding it fun. Ores that they are not used to are to be found and asteroids that are not chewed up are plentiful. Very nice that.

So on the most recent move (i.e. the wormhole that was 6 jumps from Jita close up and the next exit wormhole was located) we found ourselves with a wormhole 6 jumps from our Alliance HQ and 2 jumps from a major trade hub. Can you say "logistical move time". I figured it would not last too long but OMG. By the time I went to bed last night various Orcas had done at least 7 round trips. And the hole was not even into critical! Heck the hole in Esoteria only took 2 round trips to close up. So there are some rather large and stable wormholes out there, you just never know what you've got till you start using it.

In other news I have now build 6 of the 11 T3 component types (76 components built so far) with more on the way by the end of the weekend. ATM I only have one polymer missing from the 9 and that will block 2 component types from being completed. But that should be do-able in short order. I suspect that by next weekend we will be selling T3 component packs on the market. I.E. all the components necessary to manufacture a subsystem or a hull on a single contract.

At one point I was getting worried with the ratio of combat specialists to gas miners I had was going to screw things up. But after runnign the number, nope I need my combat guys to kick it up a notch or two and get cracking. You don't need too many gas miners to bring in quite a bit of gas so that side of things is working fine. And I"ll be able to burn thru most of the orange salvage.

Oh right, as this has been going along and I've been digging into the numbers, some new descriptive terms have been emerging:

• Blue Loot (the new mobile bounties - think tags)
• Orange Salvage (looks like T1 salvage)
• Blue Salvage (looks like T2 salvage)
• Piramid Salvage (looks like some of the cosmos sleeper stuff)
• Comon Gas (1 cubic metre)
• Uncomon Gas (4 cubic metres)
• Rare Gas (10 cubic metres)
• Key Components (The six T3 components that use blue or piramid salvage)
• Common Components (the 5 T3 components that use only orage salvage)

The ability to manufacture hulls and sub-systems thought will take time to get online. The skills sets are rather on the steep end. There is quite a bit of cross polination with T2 but still:

• racial Starship Engineering V (so there are 4 of those)
• Cruiser Construction V
• Jury Rigging V

Not counting acquiring the new T3 manufacturing skills and their pre-requisites as well. The pool of characters that had all this ready to go before Apocrypha hit was probably quite small. These guys are going to make a mint for the next month or two.