Not bad

After 3 sessions of Incursion and having run 34 vanguard sites, I'm up 310mil isk over the weekend.  Unless I'm totally mistaken that should make 45k ish Concord LP when those incursions finish up (if they do - no clue how that works).

This meshes very well with my 149mil isk investment in my Scimitar.  So overall I'm ahead 160mil which is rather good considering am now over 1b again and on the 22nd of November I was at 209mil...  Ah yes, EVE is like getting on a bicycle.  Just takes a while to knock the rust off is all.

I must admit I like incursions - going in with a fleet reminds me of other MMOs where you do things as a group. People from other MMOs are going to find it rather familiar territory (with of course eve specific idiocyracies - like the danger of suicide ECM boats breaking up your rep chains).  Out of all the activities in EVE Incursions are probably the activity that bears the most resemblance to other MMOs.  The only problem is that with a requirement of having 3 logistics pilots for the first tier that actually pulls in isk, it's pretty much strictly for the veterans instead of something that could be used to ease other MMO players into EVE.  Ah well.  Another lost design opportunity in EVE.  We should be used to those by now.

As I look forward to a more relaxing evening than concentrating on keeping fellow pilots alive in incursions I'm feeling pretty good about returning to EVE.  At this point my plans post-patch are pretty set.

1) Get the fuel pellet BPOs
2) Get the Tornado BPO.
3) Convert existing fuel reserves into the new format
4) Get the 3rd account re-activated and that pile of un-researched BPOs researched (I need to consider some character moves so that the corp/research characters are all on the same account - gah)
5) Get a suitcase carrier
6) Get an isk reserve buffer
7) Head back to 0.0

On the skills front, I'm doing some emergency shoring up of drone skills (What? I can't fly T2 logi drones??? Damn it! - not to mention the T2 mining drones for that vanguard site -.-;).  I'll get back to the carrier skills once that shoring up is done.  I may slip in Command ships soon though as I killed off all the pre-requisites.

That should keep me going for a bit.

I will point out the irony of wanting to be in 0.0 but being unable to generate the income necessary to progress there in 0.0.  Good design CCP.

First serious Incursion

So I log on this morning and "head to the sound of the drums".  I.e. get in my Scimitar and open my Journal and pick a likely incursion in high sec.  So off I go to the Amarr one.

All in all a rather buys time but we hit 9 sites and got the rewards for 7 of them, so this prety much brought me about half way to pay for the Scimitar I just purchased for this endeavor.  I got lucky and there was a good FC on hand.  A Black Legion pilot - I remember those guys from the days I was in Rage back in Vale of the Silent.  They hung in nearby Geminate at the time.  At any rate, as soon as he had his 3 logi pilots, namely to other Scimitars and myself and the knowledge that we had 4 tracking links between us, he got 4 faction battleships and 2 T3 to go with his Sleipnir.

All in all it was a very good first run.  I can tell that part of the job is going to be being able to know what the spawn patterns are for each site as in this case with solid logi and dps the FC was able to burn the sites as fast as possible and we were able to keep everyone alive.  Less logi support and we would probably have been better clearing out the waves although that would have taken longer.  So taking notes for when I get my own pilots together for this one day.

So for the afternoon:  Make the rest of the isk spent on the Scimitar up and start making forward progress toward more isk for Tornado BPO and a Nidhogur.  Not to mention all the skill books for capital modules I need to acquire and command ship skill as well.

Looks like I'm back.

Preparing for Incursions

As I got home from work, I did the usual PI (now planning on manufacturing a medium minmatar control tower) run and then proceeded to grab an incursion fit for the Scimitar.  Noticed that what looks like a canonical fit is acr based instead of ccc based like my current 0.0 fit scimi.  So I decided to simply buy a new one and fit it out as indicated.

So off to jita and 150mil isk later I'm tooling back to my high sec base in my brand new scimi - 4 large repers and an ab and it's all cap stable - woot.  Noticed I can't use T2 logi drones and immediately slapped some skills in to begin addressing that.  Carrier 3 should finish as I sleep.

The idea is to see if I can get in on some Incursion action over the weekend.  Time will tell.

Off to bed for now.

Oh right, the two alts also had PI going...

PI is low-ish maintenance once it's up and running.  But getting it up and running?  Yeesh.  Have the alts on a 4 day cycle.  I'll see how that works out when I have both toons contract their PI goods to my main and simply use the main to either do the further processing or selling on market.

Also did a run to Jita to get rid of more trash.

Not much else to say, everyone seems to be in the "get ready for the patch on Tuesday" mode.

More carebearing... And some rust... Lost of rust...

And I just reactivated one of my alt accounts.  In celebration I went and found a grav site.  Well more like I found it and then decided to celebrate my alt's re-activation with some light mining.  For those who are just stumbling onto my site for the first time and might be newbies (or PvP pilots - same thing as far as mining goes).  Gravimetric sites are exploration sites that contain mine-able asteroids.  The particular site I found was supposed to contain Kernite as well as the Omber, but obviously someone else wiped the Kernite before I found it.  Well waste not want not.  I killed the Omber to de-spawn the site.

I will note that once again DA RUST is showing.  Talk about embarrassing.  So I get to the site.  Start mining.  Damn!, a Myrmidon is on grid.  Ok, switch to my combat ship.  Face palm.  Oh right.  Need to offline the lasers and empty the cargo hold before the switch will happen cleanly.  so there's my hulk, sitting empty in space floating serenely when the rats come on in and wouldn't you know it target my hulk!

-.-;;;

Well THIS is most embarrassing.  So I get my alt to launch drones and take care of the rats while I shove the Loki back in the Orca my alt is flying and scramble madly to get back in my Hulk.  Good thing Low SP Myrm pilots are not likely to have hulk skills or someone would have been justified in sneaking off with my Hulk.

It's the little things.

The earlier part of the evening was spent finishing the setup of PI on some nearby planets and getting a T1 hauler of the appropriate cargo space/maneuverability setup so that I could finish off the work started yesterday.

Datacore run and some PI

So, last night I worked on my datacore situation.  It hadn't been as long as last time so the isk was less.  But it did allow me to setup another level 4 R&D agent which is the max there is with core complexion in high sec.  The 5th slot was occupied by a level 3 agent.  This brings my total of agents up to 5.  This should help out on the passive income stream, while I get to work on more active methods.

I also finished "bunkering up" for some T1 manufacturing runs.  This means having a mix ratio on hand that is good for most manufacturing tasks.  I like to run an inventory of 4000 Megacite at "bunker full" state with each mineral below that x4 the one above (so 16k Zydrine, 64k Nocxium, and so on down to 16mil~ish Tritanium).  Although the ratios are off for any specific faction manufacturing run, in the aggregate it works out quite well as a good "bunker" ratio.  What runs out first depends entirely on what I've been building and it allows me to pump out at least 2 BS without having to calculate "do I have enough materials on hand".  The idea is to build what you want then put up buy orders to re-fill the bunker, taking advantage of the buy/sell difference instead of simply deciding to build something and buying the minerals at the `sell` price.

Last but not least I got 2 planets of PI going to get some PI materials going as well (might as well, I`ll be in high sec for a bit after all.  I just setup a cheap high cycle (20h) one extractor setup.  Going to work on some math to figure out "at what point is it worth destroying the extraction head and buying a new one else where".  We'll see. 

I'm also starting to organize things among some pilots I know to get a core Logistical group together to go run some incursions after the patch.  The idea being that so long as 3-4 of us have Logi 5 and we have some DPS we trust, it is relatively easy to get DPS to run vanguard sites.

We'll see how those plans go.

Inter bus shuttles are going for HOW MUCH?!?

As I was cleaning up my inventory of "stuffs" I decided to look at the value of some of the one off stuff I've collected over the years.  Most of it are not worth moving for the moment.  But then I saw the Interbus Shuttle - only difference is a 20m³ cargo bay vs a 10m³ cargo bay.  It's going for over 200mil on contracts!.  Load up the Prowler with a bunch of meta 4's and that shuttle and haul ass to Jita.  Do the usual "cloak thru Uedama" on the way and there we go, iskies to replace the iskies spent getting the Minmatar Carrier skill.

A bit of light exploration and some Noctis work later and I hit the sack.  Going to have to do a datacore run soon as well.