Monday is Patchday

Just a quick update (still editing that wall'o'text down to some reasonable posts).

Apocrypha 1.3 is on the way (cliky the link to get to the patch notes).

Of note for T3 and wormhole buffs:

• Several changes have been made to fix the cost of Tech 3 production: the volume of some gases required will be halved; the drop rate of the Neurovisual Input Matrix salvage item has been increased; and the material requirement for the power conduits has been switched from carbon-86 to Scandium Metallofullerene.
• Reverse Engineering will see several improvements. We are increasing the drop rate of Tech 3 datacores, increasing the runs on the blueprints from reverse engineering jobs and increasing the presence of radar sites in wormhole space.

and:

• Multiple changes have been made to the anchoring and onlining of starbase modules and structures. All offensive starbase structure anchoring times have been reduced by 50% and all offensive starbase structure online times have also been reduced by 50%. Defensive starbase structures such as hardeners will have their anchoring, online and un-anchor times reduced by 50%. Finally, all starbase tower un-anchoring times have been reduced by 50%.

This means that by tuesday-wednesday we should see the start of a flood of T3 stuff pooring into Jita. I suspect that the market manipulation attempts on modules should decrease over the weekend as we now have a deadline for when the T3 can flow again and the "well I can wait till after monday to pick up my T3 hull/subsystems" mentality takes hold.

We'll have to wait and see how much the changes reduce the bottlenecks of T3 reverse engineering/manufacture. The results should be good for the customer though and we should see a bit of a reballancing of the value of reverse engineering vs materials. As CCP rightfully observed, one of the big bottleneck was the BPCs. As everyone gets into reverse engineering with the better results this should drive down the value of rellics and datacores "I've still got 200 runs left of loki engineering subsystems, no need to reverse engineer any more of those for a while". Although since there is not control over the result, we may see the prices remain relatively high as a lot of people keep trying for the "best" sub-systems in any particular ship/position (with the corresponding pile up of less popular ones).

Yikes

Well, got a wall of text, but it needs to be split into multiple posts and organized. I'll feed that one out later in parts.

Farewell Simba

This is to note the passing of Simba the very first Assault Frigate I ever owned. As the very first assault frigate I ever owned I over-rigged it in order to make sure it could fit dual T2 medium shield extenders. My more PvP oriented jags usually made due with a single medium shield extender in order to fit the web/scram one really wants on a heavy tackler/dps machine. Not to mention much less expensive rigs - if any.

Didn't notice the 2nd spawn apearing in a bonus room in the plex - so started warping out too late. Then ran into an object (doh!). Needless to say I did not get to warp in time.

In other news, this weekend saw my first invented and built T2 ship. A Claw interceptor. This is an after effect of getting my research alts firing on all pistons (they get me the bpcs) and running some invention jobs from my stockpiles of datacores (man those are running out fast). None the less this represents another sign post in my development as an industrialist.

Ah well my next Jag will be built by myself. Just need Frigate Construction 5...

Relaxing in WH space

Well as the settled system I was operating out of went to a high sec island, giving me the excuse not to travel to HQ I needed, I was able to get some serious WH bouncing going. Found that there were 3 wh connected to the system.

1st one was the standard exit to high sec. An island this time. *shrug*
2nd was an X702 leading to low sec. Meh, didn't feel like ganking pirates.
3rd was an other Wormhole system. Humm now we're talking.

Ok, time to go exploring, I let another pilot running combat sites in the settled system know and off I go in my trusty probe of easily replaced scanning (It really doesn't feel Minmatar unless you're flying something that could be blown up by sneazing on it).

Quick tour of the system map and the relevant planets reveals that this system is un-occupied. Had an M267 connection to our own system, so still no clue what class I'm in. Pop the probes and cloak up...

Plenty of anomalies but only 5 sigs, anomalies indicate this is probably a class-5 or 6. Running down the sigs I find 2 more wh's and 2 sites (1 ladar - can't gas mine personally and we have plenty of reserves of those gasses - meh, 1 radar - but we don't have the forces present to go for it - bummer). Both wh go to further wh systems (incidentaly confirming that I'm in a class 5 atm).

At this point the other pilot joins in for some wh exploration in his Helios. He picks one of the new holes and I pick the other.

Once again a non-inhabited system. Woah, reverse of the previous system, plenty of sigs, few anomalies. Once again I fire up the scanner and start running down the sigs. Eventualy i find 2 grav sites, an other ladar site (meh again) and a 0.0 connection (again incidentaly confirming that I'm in an other class 5).

My buddy got unlucky and the hole he chose went to an inhabited system. After almost "oopsing his ship at a POS", he comes back and heads for the new wh system I'm in with the intention of exploring in 0.0 for shits and giggles.

At this point I decide - humm about an hour and a half left before it's time for bed, time for a few jet cans of Arkonor. So I kick off one of the grav sites (i.e. warp to it so that it's spawn cycle kicks off). Head back to the settled system and grab my Jaguar, while dropping off wh bookmarks of the route to my hauler alt. Back and kill the spawns (updating the alliance wiki with spawn information as i go), back for a salvager, salvage the stuff, back for one of the spare covetors and settle in to suck on some Arkonor.

So making liberal use of the d-scanner, I settle in for some nice wh mining while listening to the further exploration adventures of the other pilot. The nice thing about being experienced is that we know when holes are dangerous and when not. All holes along the route stayed nice and stable all during the operation. 5000 units of Arkonor and 60000 of Scordite (just to finish off that last trip) later I head back to the settled system and log for the night.

Note that that was about 3 jet cans of Arkonor - current market value at what? 20mil per jetcan or so? Not bad for some relaxing exploration followed by some un-interrupted mining.

It's always fun when you go deep diving in wormhole space. You never know what you'll find - heck so far we've got a spare Thanny and a loaded Obie out of just such jaunts.

EvE and the Propaganda wars

«Il n'y a que deux puissances au monde, le sabre et l'esprit: à la longue, le sabre est toujours vaincu par l'esprit.» - Napoleon Bonaparte

EvE has it's wars. And as with real life, it's not always the strongest that win the wars but often the most tenacious. It is very interesting in EvE the way that sometimes the morale of the pilots has much more to do with who wins a war than the number of SP of the pilots.

Whether Kenzoku is retreating to empire or not, I cannot say. Goonspin would have us belive this to be the case. But I can't help feeling that BoB was conquered due to morale issues more than militarely. Goonswarm simply broke their will to fight.

I remember when the corp with obviously more senior pilots decided to place a POS in the system we had occupied. I knew going into the fights (putting the tower into reinforced and later assautling the tower as it came out of reinforced) that we'd take losses as we were inexperienced with POS assaults. Indeed we did. 8 Battleships died to secure that tower's death. We did managed to kill 2 Tech II cruisers, but I thought that with the losses we gave up we'd see them again. I remember thinking "Ok, this is the a PvP corp out of 0.0 and their indy friends, all they are looking for is fights so we'll see more of them soon enough, they still have a scout in system. We're giving them killmails they'll be back." Imagine my surprise when they failed to show up again. As it became apparent that they weren't coming back, I asked on of my CEOs: "Don't tell me we broke their will to fight".

Of course as Napoleon also pointed out that victory is easy, profiting from it is much trickier. Time will tell if the various victors (and the current lack of Kenzoku sovereignty is a yard stick to measure the victory by) can profit from the situation and cement their supremacy or whether they fall to bickering and strife. Time and the shifting landscape will tell.

Prognostication

As the third pilot in my alliance takes delivery of his Proteus, and with 3 Tengu in the slips, I take time to ponder the state of the T3 Project my alliance is running. With the changes to both the reverse engineering and manufacturing sides of the equations in the wings, we've put a halt to new manufacturing and reverse engineering. As I am sure other manufacturers have also done. Mainly because of the Carbon86 and Neurovisual Interface Matrix issues.

I'm currently slowly planing what levels of various Polymers we will need in preparation for the resumption of manufacturing. We may go ahead and start manufacturing T3 Components that are not affected by the upcoming changes. The nice thing about this pause in manufacturing is that it gives a bit of time for more of my industrialists to get better subsystem and hull coverage.

So how has this pause and projected changes affected the market in Jita you ask? Well the market manipulators went into overdrive. They spotted the window of opportunity created by the halt in new T3 construction prior to the changes taking effect and are manipulating the subsystem and hull prices higher until the changes hit tranquility.

For the long haul, there's going to be a hull shortage and a subsystem oversupply. That much is evident. We're getting BPCs in about the right ratio of 20:1 but they are only being lost at a 5:1 ratio.

However, given the reduction in cost of the individual hulls represented by 10 run BPCs coming from malfunctioning relics (a significant portion of the current cost of a hull is the BPC that it is made from) and reduced dependence on bottleneck polymers and salvage, I can easily see the day where a T3 ship OF CERTAIN CONFIGURATIONS, will be in the 300mil to 500mil range. But even with that, there will always be other configuraitons (FOTM ones) that'll cost 1-2 bil. This is inevitable.

The realy interesting part is that as more and more of the industrial base is at least capable of manufacturing T3 ships, we should start seeing an upswing in manufacturing of T3 subsystems and hull on the other side of the patch. The biggest problem so far has been skilling up to be able to manufacture the hulls and then getting a reasonable supply of the bottleneck items. With the changes coming up, he salvage situation should even out a bit (after a few weeks), and time taking care of the ability to manufacture the T3 stuff means that we should have a much more ballanced supply situation and a much larger pool of T3 hulls and subsytems BPCs to manufacture from.

But the T3 market is still going to be hosed for the next 3-4 weeks.

One of the great things, from my point of view, is that gettign the skills in place to manufacture T3 ships and sub-systems has resulted in some rather serendipitous completion of T2 manufacturing skills. I've been able to use T2 small and medium projectile turrets for a while now. I can finally invent and manufacture said turrets. And all the ammo for them. 14 x Barrage M BPCs will enure that. This recent spate of T2 goodness has but a bit of "pressure" on my datacore reserves however (read - wiped out certain ones) and I needed to swich around some of my research agents. That's par for the course in EVE.

I'm looking forward to laying off the T3 manufacturing skills for a bit come early July. Get some ship handling skills in, gas mining, Salvaging 5, etc etc etc....

My alts also are going to run on rails for the next little bit as well. Once the main alt finishes scanning and refining and POS gunnery, one of my research alts will be going down the invention road, while the other two will get advance lab ops to 4.

First AMC Proteus

First AMC manufactured Proteus

Keeping it short this time. The pilot bought the hull and the project loaned him the subsystems for a few screenshots (we're manufacturing the subsystems he wants over the next few days).

Prepare for a dip in T3 availability

And Chronotis spake. And there are changes in the wind for T3 manufacturers. Prepare for a dip in T3 availability for the next month.

Let's look at what he said:

- Reverse engineering results will get better for Malfunctioning and Intact (more runs per BPC).
- More Radar/Mag sites.
- Better quantities in Radar sites.
- Reverse Engineering will give back more of the items on the failures, reducing failure costs.
- Some gasses are getting more dense.
- Power Conduits are going to use Scandium instead of Carbon-86.

That last one is going to be the big reason for the dip in production over the next month. This has been announced well in advance (at least a month in advance since the changes haven't hit Sisi yet). But if manufacturing is going to be cheaper in the future, it'll be worth waiting for the changes to hit Tranquility. Not to mention waiting with the less expensive Reverse engineering to hit Tranquility.

Expect the market to go up in the next month as producers hold off reverse engineering and manufacture for the most part till the changes are implemented. This should have some interesting effects on the T3 markets over the next month.

Your corp ship maintenance array and you

/me shakes the sleeper crud off his space overalls

Welcome to another installment of "that part of EVE most of you avoid". As Potshot discusses his corporation's preparations for wormhole space operations, I thought I would go over some stuff that might prove interesting for people colonizing wormhole space.

Ok, having lost a good chunk of readership to either "ewww - no pvp" or "POS Ops", for the rest of you we're here to discuss ship logistics when you have a POS in wormhole space and you're either in the corp or in the alliance that that corp belongs to.

The first thing to understand is that EVE ships are rather specialized. This has it's good sides and it's bad sides. The good thing is that by diversifying your ships the individual pilot is less likely to be without the means to continue playing. The bad thing is that eventually you end up with quite a stable of ships to move around if you want to be able to do everything your character is capable of.

This isn't so bad in high sec, where the stations have effectively unlimited storage, but in wormhole space your storage is limited to what you anchor and on top of that there is the logistical issue of getting that stuff in and out.

Then there's the concept of access. If you're in the same corp as the POS, your CEO/Directors may or may not have setup certain access to certain features of the POS. They will usually at minimum provide you with access to a common storage area in any corp hangar array. If you're just part of the alliance and your corp doesn't have access, about the only thing you may have access to is cans floating in space and/or a ship maintenance array (which can be set to alliance use).

So there's the situation, On one had for effective operations in any space your average pilot will use several ships all fit differently. On the other hand there's limited space at a POS and also the logistics of moving all these ships both in and out.

One of the very first problems we ran into operating in wormhole space is that everyone went "oh I need me one of to make my wormhole existance more comfortable". When everyone does it, and throw in an orca or two, and suddenly that ship maintenance array is chuck full of ships that just sit there. And if you want to move the POS there's no guarantee that they left them in a state that is shoveable into an orca. And the spare battleships that accumulate - it was a mess.

One of the solutions we've found that works is the concept of "loaner ships". These are simple Tech 1 Metalevel 0 fit ships that are geared for specific purposes. What possible special purposes could their be in a wormhole? Scanning down a sight or an exit, sure all ships can do it but astrometrics frigates and cov-ops are best at it. Mining, sure the mining gurus will bring thier bling bling hulks, but it would be kind of neat if there were some spare Retrievers, Covetors or mining cruisers lying arround for the average pilot to go grab a little of that Arkonor over there. Salvaging, sure the specialists will have their tricked out tech 2 salavagers for those hard to crack Advanced Sleeper BS wrecks, but it would be nice to have actual salvage destroyers to clean up your tipical battle field quickly post encounter. Spare PvP ships for people who just lost their good ones or came into the pos in a hauler. Spare haulers so random pilots can help out if all they came in was a PvP ship.

You get the idea. So instead of every pilot bringing every conceivable ship they would need, we put up a policy of "bring only your combat ships to the POS and borrow the utility ships". Specialist pilots will bring their specialists ships but at least the rank and file will be able to accomplish quite a bit in wormhole space without having to stuff the ship maintenance arrays full of ships that just sit there and do nothing all the time.

Because you never know when the decision may be taken to move the POS, keeping the ships able to be moved by Orca (i.e. dont' put modules in the holds - just ammo) so it won't be left behind if a move happens when you're offline is kind of important.

Should there be interest I can post some examples of "standard fits" for specific purposes.