The weekend crazies

You know it's been a busy weekend when you wake up Monday morning and look forward to a nice relaxing week of work.

Getting an alliance underway again is a lot of organizing, trying to recruit up my own corp at the same time is also "interesting". Coming up with a loot system for any alliance level T3 stuff is also "interesting". Also "Time consuming". Add to that cousins in town, an EVE meet, dinner with friends, exploring new aspects of EVE, etc etc etc...

"Ask me for anything but time" - N. Bonaparte

But as I finally have a moment to reflect back on this, I have to say it was overall a good weekend. I am going to have to herd more cats though. A good chunk of the alliance fell back into their existing ruts once the first two or three days of apocrypha wore off. To a certain extent I'm glad as I was not looking forward to the weekend's bloodletting as the PvP'ers discovered wormhole space in force. Also I think I need to get the loot handling system in place before we start doing regular expeditions. I also need to give time for everyone to get their ships together.

Ah the worries of a CEO... Funky to have them again after the last 6 months of just drifting from objective to objective. The good news is that with all the concentration on other things, I really don't have any of that "hurry up and finish you damn skill" effect. For me these day's it's more like "oh crap another skill is finishing, quick what's next on the plan before i forget".

I've got pics on my home rig, but don't have access to them atm so no pics with this post. Was just too tired to pre-load them in the draft of the next post last night. So no pics of the funky new artillery animation.

Hopefully as things get underway the crazy will slow down.

Woah, busy

Man have I been busy over the last few days. Forum posting, getting the alliance worked out, going on expeditions to wormhole space, figuring out how to handle expedition loot equitably, writing up expedition reports, working out manufacturing costs, working out new fits, learning the new scanning mechanic, looking at all the purdy new graphics....

Must get some sleeeeeeep

Apocrypha

Well it arrived while I was at work. And may I thank those who can get a hold of me while I'm at work for letting me know that they were going in when I was still stuck there... grrrrr...

Anyways It will take a few days to get into all the new content. We'll have to see how it all goes. So, what's been happening? Let's see:

Apoapsis Multiversal Consortium has official revived from mothball status. It'll take me a few more days to get my main installed in the exec corp but that's coming (needed to take the opportunity to create an alt corp with high standings). Too bad I hadn't realized they changed the corp standing mechanic. Characters have to be in corp 7 days to affect standings if they affect standings at all. Ah well just a couple of days. Then it'll be time to hit the recruitment zones.

I'm finaly 99% installed in my new home for the foreseeable future. The freighter and orca run made that much less painful. Still a few things left in the old home like that last can I can't fold up yet and some researching BPOs in a nearby system. I'll get those as they come out of research. Took one last zip of the old scanning system before downtime on Monday night.

So then there was the update. No specific horror stories. Worked fine for me, only problem was I run two clients and you can't update a client while another is working so my alt will have to wait an extra day to get back on. That's cool as he's got plenty of time left on the skill he's training so no panics there. I can see that I'll have to get him skilled up in scanning post haste though.

Some observations on the new scanning system:

1) Strength counts, finding things with my cov-ops (rigs and level bonus) was much faster than with a ship that had only a core probe launcher.

2) The core probe launcher works fine and in any squadron going to w-space a few should be on some of the combat ships in spare high slots.

3) The clutter of hits you get in W-space makes for difficult scanning down of any one particular site. Again strength of scanning and individual skill will make the difference.

4) Combat scanning down of enemy ships takes much longer (partially due to the newness of the system, partially due to the fact that it will take longer to scan people down unless you have the sites mapped out.

So after grabbing a core probe launcher BPO and rapidly manufacturing a single core probe launcher before putting it back in the oven to manufacture more, I manufactured more modules to outfit a T1 exploration Rupture. I got the rest of the people that were getting ready to do the same. The reasoning is simple. Until we get a real handle on how operations will conduct themselves in w-space risking valuable T2 ships on what can turn into a one way trip is contra-indicated. Also they are maneuverable enough to avoid battleships while strong enough to deal with the new rats in the kiddie end of the pool (we're exploring in high sec so most of the time we'll end up in relatively tame w-space systems - well the rats will be tame).

As an aside people, if you're paying more than 60k for a core probe launcher I, you're an idiot. Because that's all it takes to buy the BPO, and manufacture a single one for yourself if you have the mere skill of Industry I...

In the end a small squadron of 5 T1 fit cruisers headed out to w-space. Some alliance members had been in earlier but I had been at work. Another managed to get himself stuck in w-space before logging off for bed. But after getting our T1 ships fit and read, off we headed to look for a wormhole. Afterward I realized that having a dedicated cov-ops might have been better for scanning speed, we were a small enough gang that I didn't want to sacrifice the combat power.

So I find a wormhole and off we go. Some jumping the gun just a bit. We're going to have a bit of a chat about combat discipline and just how suicidal that was when the rest of the fleet was not ready to come to your aid...

After finding out that yes indeed the system had others and that we needed to be careful as they out-massed us quite a bit we got to a safe to scan down some possible sites from. Note to self: get some decent overview settings because right now they are borked for wormhole space work. We eventualy found some sites and it was decided to send one of the cruisers back and switch out for a ships with gas cloud harvesting.

Although we eventually got chassed off we managed to get all our ships out intact with over 500 units of the C-84 gas which would be enough for 5h of reactions once we get either of it's complementary gasses. (C-84 is used in 2 reactions). At that point it was quite late and it was time for most of us to hit the sack and even though I ran into some invisible rats (must get overview fixed) we decided to head back to high sec anyways and get some zzz's.

Not particularly profitable but the experience gained was invaluable. I look forward to future expeditions.

Darned alt corp standing change

Well I found out that one of the changes that happend a while back and I didn't notice was he way that corp standing adjusts faction wise. Apparently you no longer need a storyline mission to kick it of - just 7 downtimes. grrrr.

This may delay getting me back in the alliance for a bit. Ah well.

And ugh, moving 200k m3+ of stuff is a pain.

This will probably be my last post prior to the Apocrypha patch, so remember to start a looooong skil.

Ka-Zinnnnng, Crash, Bang, booooom...

And there you see the shattered hopes of the tech 2 moon crud market. It was confirmed today that there will be NO moon minerals in W-Space.

After trying to project in my head the warfare consequences of moon minerals in W-Space I must admit that I'm of two minds about this development. On one hand I've got the part of me that says: "awwwww, no T2 moon crud", but then there's the part that says: "At least we won't be fighting the Russians for moons in W-space".

In the end I think it was the right decision. Exactly how this all pans out will really depend on the hybrid gas bottleneck. Pirates will be annoyed, it just cut down by half the amount of targets they could find in W-space.

Back in high sec

Well I managed to get all my ships up the pipe into high sec. Time to take the opportunity to make some alt corps with high standing before getting back into my main corporation.

Doh! forgot I need to get a storyline to kick that off once it's created.... Guess I know what I'm doing tonight (blitz mission running ftw).

[snip meandering diatribe]

Man good thing I made use of the edit button on that one. I think things will pick up as Apocrypha upsets a lot of apple carts. Especially since a lot of apple carts are already upset.

Bemused amusement

So I've been in 0.0 for over a month now. And up till this weekend I've been unable to make use of my manufacturing skills in 0.0 (various reasons just take it as a given). This was not particularly problematic for me as my reason to be down in 0.0 was to observe how 0.0 alliances operate on the PvP side of things as opposed to the industrial side of things.

My original intention had been to keep myself in T1 ships and modules by my own resources. Due to the lack of facilities available, I eventually donated the BPC collection to my host corp as a thank you for allowing me to experience 0.0. Since I will be going back up to empire sometime this week, I figured it would reduce the amount of stuff I need to bring up and at the same time.

Then I a saw "can anyone make xxx large ammo for our POS operations" in alliance chat. After re-directing him to the now holder of the BPCs, wouldn't you know it they needed someone with the manufacturing skills to actually make the ammo... So it was with high amusement that I got to gum up the available manufacturing slots at the instructions of various alliance CEOs for the next 4 days.

Once those jobs are done I'll be passing over the goods and heading on up to empire. Should be tomorrow night. At which time I will get busy with the preparations for un-mothballing the alliance. The web site has got it's initial configuration consisting of a forum, a killboard (oh the fun of updating it when Apocrypha comes out) and a wiki.

We'll see how it goes from there.