Good ganks all round

We were deployed. It was something to do with C-J6MT which has been in the news so much lately. To be honest, I only had a vague understanding of the situation. I managed to move a couple of ships and was then busy for the rest of the week and unable to log in for the big fights. That was disappointing because there were evidently lots of good times to be had. Nullsec is pretty active at the moment, at least on this side of the map.

Regardless, I was finally logged in and looking for something to shoot. We headed out in T1 cruisers, absolutely assured of a fight because we had entosis modules to wave threateningly at their bits and pieces. Whoever ‘they’ were. Needless to say, they ignored us completely and we were forced to resort to killing a poor, lone Algos who we stumbled across at a gate.

Algos: https://zkillboard.com/kill/50216284/

Another familiar face! Prda Prda held his cloak after jumping through and had time to respond with a wry smile when I said hello to him in local. I concede that this was not exactly a fair fight but by this stage an Algos was completely irresistible for our bored mob.

And that was the extent of my deployment action. A couple of weeks later we were all back in Catch and hunting down a small Provi gang who had been reported in intel. Those dastardly Provi people! We hunted them down in a cruiser gang plus, for some reason, a Drake. I was really disappointed because he didn’t ask the FC if he could bring it.

The Intel situation was becoming increasingly complex, with the small cruiser gang a couple of systems out (refusing to fight us, undoubtedly because they were in terror of my magnificent Vexor), a separate fleet of 30 cruisers near HED-GP, and a worryingly strong Shadow Cartel gang heading up through Catch in our general direction.

Suddenly, one of our scouts frantically called for us to jump in and warp to him. He had tackled one of the Provi Caracals. Our hero was in the final stage of dieing to the Caracal’s light missiles when we landed on top of their newly arrived gang. It was a messy little fight. Our fleet was not particularly well coordinated in terms of speed or range and we ended up splitting DPS between stuff in the bubble and stuff at range. But we killed them all, including a Caracal and Maller that I collected the kill mails for:

Caracal: https://zkillboard.com/kill/50373189/
Maller: https://zkillboard.com/kill/50373195/

It was time for me to log off so I split with the fleet and started heading towards a nearby station system. I was thinking glorious thoughts about how many kill marks my Vexor would soon have as I jumped into the next system. Right into that Shadow Cartel gang. Oh bother, I'd forgotten about them.

Vexor: https://zkillboard.com/kill/50373461/
Pod: https://zkillboard.com/kill/50373475/

The annual scrape

“What have I been up to lately that will interest my dear readers?”, I asked myself, confidently upgrading to plural in a mad fit of optimism.

I have been market trading, an activity which coincides nicely with dodgy hotel internet connections. Sigh. I'm fed up with travelling, especially when such travelling involves an “Experienced Leader” course consisting almost entirely of being told by a gaggle of organisational psychologists exactly why you are so rubbish at, well, leadership.

Anyway, I decided to stock a few (hundred) of the more obviously missing items from the local market in my new alliance headquarters. I have station traded before, mostly in Jita and lowsec. An active nullsec alliance is pretty good in comparison to lowsec, roughly equivalent to Jita trading in terms of total profit on my relatively meagre total investment. Well, at least for someone who is fundamentally opposed to 0.01 ISK games - I tend to update about once a fortnight.

I set up a bunch of reasonable buy orders in Jita for a bunch of T2 mods and ammo. It was awfully expensive, even with Margin Trading V, because I really dislike changing orders and therefore prefer to set them up for at least 100m each. I then let them fill in their own time before carting the whole lot to their destination via a jump freighter straight out of Jita. Those are some expensive jump freighter loads!

At the other end, of course, I take the equally lazy step of ensuring that I always have a minimum number of each item sitting in the station. This means I can restock without having to visit Jita. It also means that I have a lot of ISK, about 60b, tied up in assets: a few dozen for sale, a few dozen in the nullsec station inventory, a few dozen in Jita. However, since these are all commonly used items which are easily turned over I am not overly concerned.

What I WAS concerned about, though, was running out of ISK. I may have gone a bit mad with the buy orders. They seem to be filling faster than I am used to, even at my relatively low bid price. So I decided it was time to give the hangars their annual scrape. I fired up jeve assets and had a poke about:

107,821,123 items (yes, there is a lot of ammo there)
1,266 average ISK value
54,708,484,070 reprocess value
136,525,483,768 total market value

I was surprised by a few things including a Nestor (I have no idea where it came from), a few Thanatos carriers (I traded them for a while), a couple of fit Protei in Amarr (that I had forgotten about), and an Obelisk that I never use any more. I put this lot up for sale and liquidated a bunch of now profitable speculation items.

The ISK crisis passed after a few days of increased sales and I settled down to watch the progress. My low effort methods result in turnover averaging about 1.5b/day. A minimum profit margin of 25% (hey, it’s risky!) equals a few billion each week. Good enough.