Thursday, October 13, 2016

Zappity's Adventures: History of the zkillboard variety

Sigh. The dodgy hotel internet connection had dropped out again just before I was about to jump to the cyno and the login was taking ages. I was halfway through transporting P4 materials that I had harvested over the last few weeks (from market buy orders, obviously) out to nullsec in my jump freighter. Booooring. “Maybe I should do this in a couple of days when I have a better connection”, I thought.

The new industry structures were a good opportunity to make some ISK and I had prepared well with a researched set of component blueprints and what I guessed would be the required P4 materials. I already had more than enough minerals and was pretty much spot on about the components.

Logged back in! Finally! My cyno alt in the next system was already undocked and waiting for the jump freighter pilot. I lit the cyno and jumped the ship. I hit to dock button but was not greeted with Aura’s sultry “Docking permission accepted” message. Surely I had not disconnected again!

No, the connection was fine. The problem was that my cyno was 20 km from the Citadel. I had neglected to stop my cyno ship when the freighter had disconnected and he had been leisurely traversing the void in the interim. Of course, I hadn't paid any attention to this.

An even bigger problem was the nasty little lowsec Cormorant who had begun to take an inordinate interest in the proceedings. I was tackled before the fatigue timer would allow me to jump to safety.

The next few minutes were a race against time. Even under these circumstances the lone Cormorant was not disastrous. I was slowly creeping back towards the safety of the docking ring despite his bumps. However, more and more ships kept arriving on grid.

I reached 6.5km - almost there! - when a Machariel landed on grid. He knew what he was doing and I was soon heading away from the Citadel at an alarming rate.

The rest, as they say, is history of the zkillboard variety:

https://zkillboard.com/kill/56586044/

Oh well. These things happen. At least they were kind enough to return my goods for a reasonable sum. I need that stuff!

Thursday, October 6, 2016

Zappity's Adventures: The Pyerite Problem

I was considering what should be done with the immense stockpile of minerals I had accrued from the buyback program when I found over 300 Capital Cargo Bays in a station deep in the mining constellation in Fade. I hadn't noticed them before. Unfortunately, these are far too large to efficiently transport by jump freighter so I decided to use them up instead by building capital industrial ships.

People had been complaining that there were no Orcas for sale in the region so I built a few of them first. Naturally, they didn't sell. Then, mostly out of sheer bloody mindedness I put a bunch of Rorquals into the oven. The dire prognostications from the mining community regarding the rebalance (‘wtf fozzie ima not gonna go on grid who do you think you are’) was not comforting but I had confidence that the long-awaited changes would be enticing enough to soak up a mere ten additional hulls.

The other problem was pyerite. I had accumulated an enormous quantity of this hateful mineral as a result of the enormous popularity of bistot, an ore which is unfortunately rich in this substance. So I fired up my production queue again, this time with the purpose of making as much big stuff as possible. This soon led to a tritanium shortage (I had much more pyerite than tritanium) but this was overcome by purchasing compressed ore from Jita. A couple of dozen capital hulls later I had started to get on top of the pyerite problem, retaining a nice balance of minerals with which to respond to the upcoming industrial arrays.

And as for the Rorquals? They idled in station for a few days before the dev blog appeared. Then they all sold within 24 hours. People seem pretty happy with the changes!