"WTS Office Slot". And ore.

It took a few short hours for all the offices in Thera to be snapped up by corps, some of whom even wanted to use them. The others evidently wished only to profit from the demand. "WTS Office Slot" was being spammed in local. Very enterprising! Unlike all those wormhole miners who, I have decided, are lazy bums because none of my market orders for ore have been filled and it has been AT LEAST twelve hours.

I decided to take the advice of a helpful forumite who mailed me (thank you) with a suggestion about shipping in compressed ore rather than relying on local production. This was useful because I really don't have much clue about this sort of thing. But once on the right track, Zappity is a relentless bloodhound!

Here follows Zappity's noob manufacturing primer. After all, I need something to do while flying my Stratios back to the lowsec Thera entry from Jita. I half knew all of this stuff but the last couple of days have been useful in putting it all together:

1. Ore is what miners get from asteroids with their shovels (or whatever they use). The base ore types (Gneiss, Arkonor, Veldspar etc) also have two enriched variants (Bright Spodumain, Dense Whatsit etc) which have 5% and 10% more minerals in them.

2. Hmm. Rancer is in the route. Oh well - what’s the worst that could happen?

3. Ores can be compressed at a POS with a Compression Array. There are probably other ways to do it as well but this can easily be done a single jump out of Jita. Plenty of moons. I packed a small POS, some Caldari charters and a bit of fuel into a freighter along with a Compression Array and about a million cubic meters of ore. It compressed down to just under 8,000 cubic meters which fit comfortably into a Viator. That means you could fit, um, HEAPS into a DST!

4. Deimos, Hurricane x 2, Hyperion. Bugger. Still gate cloaked, though, and they are about 15km off. Align away, cloak, burn, disappear! Ha! And safely in warp.

5. Ores contain minerals of different types (tritanium, pyrite etc) which are what you actually build things with. The minerals can be refined or reprocessed (or something like that) from the ore.

6. You can improve the amount of minerals you get from  refining (or is it reprocessing?) by getting better standings with the corp that owns the station you are refining at. In this case, it means The Sanctuary missions in Pure Blind.

That’s about it. Except for that Heretic's bubble plus gang on the top station. That would have been troublesome if I'd been foolish enough to warp straight to the station. Really, these guys just aren't trying.

Don't worry everyone. The magnificent Gank Stratios is now firmly installed in the system, which seems somehow fitting given the lore. I promise I'll try to kill something next time. I don't want that Stratios anyway.