Archive for March, 2010

Invention Journal – Operation Falcon

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

So after Mynxee got me thinking about my numbers on the invention run I had a bit of emo rage last night.  So I lost 175m in this attempt, and that number will only be so nice once once the remaining ships sell at current market value.  Chances are given the market in EVE that I will lose more on this venture.  After reaching out to my invention consultant Mode, he quickly pointed out my many flaws in the process.

I now have a solid plan that I am code naming Operation Falcon.  There are some iffy things with this plan that I still need to sort out.  The most important part is that I am going to need a POS to do this correctly.  Funding a POS will mean that someone is losing some stuff to generate the ISK.  While it isn’t a secret that Larz and Nam are very well off ISK wise, it is not know that Larz and Nam do not keep the ISK laying around, it gets invested or things get bought with it.

So how do I go about getting a POS together?  Option 1 which has been very slow going was for Nam to grind up Amar standings and just anchor a tower on our own, Larz is nuetral to Amar faction so it wasn’t going to be that hard.  The problem with this approach is that Nam is only about 3.51 with Amar right now and I don’t think I have many more L4′s in me.  Option 2 was to bring someone into the corp that had the required standings and wait the 7 days.  This wasn’t so bad of an idea, but I don’t want to pay for this service :) and my buddies are all busy in 0.0 ATM.  Mode offered his new copy alt corp as an option, but that would involve no PVP for Nam (more on that later) and we would need to close Larz Corp.  The copy corp would have a tower to do my required copy jobs, and the alliance towers would handle all my ME/PE work.

So what is this great advice/plan Mode developed for me?

First he has bought and is researching T2 BPO component prints for me, these will be used to build and not buy required parts for my Falcons.

Next is to purchase a total of 9 Blackbird BPO and research the crap out of one of them.  The other 8 will serve to make BPC’s for invention and the 9th one when not in a copy slot will build the Blackbirds required for the Falcons.

Finally it is alt time.  Larz will serve as the Falcon builder (install the T2 BPC of the Falcon for manufacture), and he will also do the invention job on the BB BPC’s.  This leaves me short on having someone to run the copies on the Blackbird BPO’s and someone to build parts.  Thankfully the BB BPO doesn’t require skills to copy so I am taking the alt of Larz (Beth Smith) and she will handle the BB copy jobs.  To train this alt from nothing currently to BB copy alt is 12 days of training without implants.  Now I need to figure out what to do about part building, and that is where Nam comes in.  Nam has many of the starter indy skills inplace already and it wouldn’t take terribly long to get him up to part builder.  He also has a null alt (dir in a diff corp atm) that might be used to supply parts as well.  The only downside to this is that it would stop Nam’s combat training for a while to get his skills in the right location to build parts.  This will also sting because he won’t be able to leave the general building area as he will need to continue running jobs.

Most importantly is a change in lifestyle for Nam if this goes down, no more low sec PVP or anything to draw attention to the indy alliance.  Not sure how to choke that one down yet.  Nam will be needed by Larz to build parts, or I have to make another alt on Larz and train all the building skills up.  While that is an idea it moves the start date of the op to later as all these alts will have to share training with Larz who also still needs to train skills.  It will appear that I will need to close Larz Corp and move Larz and Beth to the new corp, that also leaves the question of what to do with Nam?  He could move into HellHounds or he could stay in Larz Corp as the only person.

What to do, what to do?

Invention Journal

Tuesday, March 30th, 2010

Since I last spoke on the subject I have had a bit of success with invention. My total T2 BPC stack for my total first round was 5 Falcons, 2 Cerberus, and 1 Basilisk.

Then came the fun part building these suckers. After a review of ISK I decided to build a falcon and the Basilisk then quick sell them to fund the other builds. Now knowing that I am not the spreadsheet kinda guy I don’t remember exactly what the build costs were on these two, but I was broke after them. The quick sell netted about 170m total and to build the rest of the ships I had to take a loan from Nam for 220m just for parts.

Once I moved everything back to my building station I was in distress to find I only had 4 build slots skill wise. A buddy from my 0.0 corp spoke up about purchasing the 2 cerbs at market value so that was 2 slots, wounder what is going in the others? So 2 Falcons and 2 cerbs are cooking, going to sell the cerbs quick and the Falcons are Jita bound. I will then cook the remaining Falcons and move them to Jita. Once all that sells I will take notice of my ISK and see if I made any profit at all.

Anyone looking into this some advice from this noob:

  • Get a POS quick and have the fuel for 3 months purchased.
  • Take note of the parts for your builds that can come from reactions and get a supplier, somethings are very expensive and my builds needed between 4000 – 6000 of the expensive parts.
  • Have your skills for efficiency and speed trained before you start.
  • Stock your BPC’s for invention prior to beginning, or before you anchor the tower get a BPO and copy them like crazy. Depending on where you are and the people you know you might need to setup your POS for this if you cannot find slots, account for this in your fuel.
  • Train a copy and build alt quickly.
  • Plan on being broke and investing heavily in parts for your builds.  I learned this lesson the hard way since I don’t buy this stuff normally.
  • Pick something that has good volume on sales.
  • Start with modules if ships are outside your budget.

Helping Others

Monday, March 29th, 2010

WTF helping EVSCO? Don’t they hate you or something?

Well last time I checked that was the case, but in the end I don’t hold a grudge and they are trying to protect their interests. With that in mind I will call attention to a need they have, a new server. I personally have been their before working on open source projects with crap hardware wishing to have something better.

I would encourage readers to visit their Pledgie site and donate to their cause and help them get some better hardware. In the end it helps us all as many of us either feed from or use their hosting services.

Click here to lend your support to: EVE Service Corp (EVSCO) Server and make a donation at www.pledgie.com !

So I will throw this out so it doesn’t get asked, yes we also plan to add to the cause, we are just waiting on the right time to apply funds, I wouldn’t ask you to do something I also wasn’t willing to do myself.

Thanks

More Work, Better Service

Monday, March 29th, 2010

So I thought I would share with you all some changes we have cued up over the next 2 weeks.

First we are finally going to upgrade our database server to the latest version, we had talked about doing this sooner but the outages we were having put this on hold. That will be addressed soon.

Next thing we have in mind is addressing our stalled accounts, we have a few people that signed up for service and are lagging behind in payments. We sent out notices a while back and know we are going to remove their accounts if they are not settled.

Also on the radar is a DB consolidation. When we first started some of our services were not added into the main data store, but setup in single fashion. This was mostly due to we didn’t know how fast we were going to grow, we learned. This process is really quick and should only cause a brief outage on the services when it occurs.

We are also going to look at formally moving to EDK3 from EDK2, we made the data changes to handle the new content, but we never formally deployed the codebase. We are doing internal testing on the deployments now to smoothly roll them out and not lose anything.

There is a possibility that this upgrade cycle will also see an upgrade to our Word Press clients, but as they are on a pretty current version that might not happen as quickly as the other stuff.

There are other backend changes that will occur as well, mostly related to DR and the CRON jobs we run. Right now they are taking longer than we would like them too.

As another side project, in the next month or two we are going to test a deployment of 2 non-Windows OS servers in our test center. The goal of these two machines will be to test our hosting services on their OS for speed, and to test out the MySQL cluster software for real time DR instead of the backup process we currently run on the Windows servers.

We would like to formally extend a much needed congrats to BC for getting their systems back online, we all hate to see hardware failures like that. Also we will formally extend our services to them for mirrors for their projects if they would like to take us up on that, not sure if any of them follow this blog, but we would be happy to help where we can.

Brutix A Boom Boom

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Not many ways to spin this one, but I am interested if others have a different fit. This one has seen many fights (and losses):

[Brutix, PVP]

7x Heavy Neutron Blaster II (Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge M)

Warp Disruptor II
Sensor Booster II (Scan Resolution)
Stasis Webifier II
10MN Afterburner II

2x Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
2x Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Damage Control II

Medium Anti-Explosive Pump I
Medium Anti-Kinetic Pump I
Medium Anti-Thermic Pump I

5x Hammerhead II

[Statistics - Namroc Smith]

Effective HP: 41,983
Tank Ability: 18.68 DPS
Damage Profile – (EM: 25.00%, Ex: 25.00%, Ki: 25.00%, Th: 25.00%)
Shield Resists – EM: 12.50%, Ex: 56.25%, Ki: 47.50%, Th: 30.00%
Armor Resists – EM: 74.44%, Ex: 63.42%, Ki: 73.58%, Th: 73.58%

Capacitor: Lasts 5m 48s

Volley Damage: 2,346.40
DPS: 671.50

Arazu – 0.0 Ratting Gallente Style

Monday, March 22nd, 2010

I faced this challenge not too long ago when Nam was caught with his pants down in the Outer Ring area. With a -7.8 sec status it was quite difficult to move on in the game as I didn’t want to focus on PVP then.

After reading posts from others about using a stealth bomber to rat I gave it a go. Three days I spent with that blasted ship and I learned something, 0.0 ratting was never meant to be done with a SB.

With some thought on the problem and some isk to burn I decided to go with an Arazu for the ratting. Good tank against the rats, decent DPS, and cloak.

Here is the fit I used to solo triple BS spawns in 0.0:

[Arazu, PVE]

3x Heavy Ion Blaster II (Antimatter Charge M)
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II

10MN Afterburner II
2x Heat Dissipation Field II
Ballistic Deflection Field II
2x Large Shield Extender II

Damage Control II
Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
2x Shield Power Relay II

2x Medium Core Defence Field Purger I

4x Hammerhead II

Effective HP: 74,365
Tank Ability: 492.53 DPS
Damage Profile – Guristas (EM: 0.00%, Ex: 0.00%, Ki: 83.63%, Th: 16.37%)
Shield Resists – EM: 12.50%, Ex: 56.25%, Ki: 88.19%, Th: 87.67%
Armor Resists – EM: 57.50%, Ex: 23.50%, Ki: 72.38%, Th: 58.56%

Capacitor: Lasts 2m 48s

Volley Damage: 505.20
DPS: 161.50

Now as this is tanked against the rats I was facing out that way and the stats reflect that. Having the cloaked warp saved this ship more times as I can count, and it didn’t take long to get my sec repaired.

I would use different ships for this task had the system been more friendly, but given the challenge of local more than the rats this was the ship of choice.

I use a similar setup for PVP activities, actually 2 different ones I will share:

[Arazu, PVP]

3x Dual 150mm Railgun II (Spike M)
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II

Sensor Booster II (Scan Resolution)
10MN MicroWarpdrive II
2x Domination Warp Scrambler
2x Phased Muon Sensor Disruptor I (Targeting Range Dampening)

1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
Damage Control II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II
Signal Amplifier II

2x Medium Inverted Signal Field Projector I

5x Hobgoblin II
3x Warrior II

[Arazu, PVP2]

3x Heavy Ion Blaster II (Null M)
Covert Ops Cloaking Device II

10MN Afterburner II
3x Large Shield Extender II
Warp Scrambler II
Stasis Webifier II

Damage Control II
3x Shield Power Relay II

2x Medium Core Defence Field Purger I

4x Hammerhead II

Invention Round 2

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

9 more jobs completed today and a little better result, 2 falcons and a cerberus. Looks like I live to invent again.

The Mighty Megathron

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

Oh how I love this ship. I was so excited when I first learned how to fly one, and after I bought my first one, it sat in the hangar for another month before I could T2 armor fit it. My first mega I took out had T1 medium guns on it, as I had not yet trained the large guns.

I am still slacking a bit on my skill with this boat as I still rely on T1 large guns for it and T1 heavy drones, but none the less I have beaten a many of ships with this hull, and I will add lost a few as well.

Megas are quit unique in that you can balance the tank to dps ratio on them or go all one way.

Here is an example of a solo PVP fit I like to fly with:

[Megathron, PVP]

7x Modal Mega Ion Particle Accelerator I (Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge L)
500W Infectious Power System Malfunction

Warp Disruptor II
Heavy Electrochemical Capacitor Booster I (Cap Booster 800)
Fleeting Propulsion Inhibitor I
Quad LiF Fueled I Booster Rockets

3x Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Damage Control II
2x 1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane II

3x Large Trimark Armor Pump I

5x Ogre I

Effective HP: 101,115
Tank Ability: 16.63 DPS
Damage Profile – (EM: 25.00%, Ex: 25.00%, Ki: 25.00%, Th: 25.00%)
Shield Resists – EM: 12.50%, Ex: 56.25%, Ki: 47.50%, Th: 30.00%
Armor Resists – EM: 67.70%, Ex: 41.86%, Ki: 58.01%, Th: 58.01%

Capacitor: Lasts 2m 50s

Volley Damage: 2,658.14
DPS: 667.02

There is another fit I like to use in fleet fights, this one allows a bit more rounded approach to supporting your fleet and staying in the fight:

[Megathron, PVP Fleet]

7x Modal Mega Neutron Particle Accelerator I (Caldari Navy Antimatter Charge L)
Large Remote Armor Repair System II

Sensor Booster II (Scan Resolution)
ECCM – Magnetometric II
Tracking Computer II (Tracking Speed)
Stasis Webifier II

Damage Control II
3x Magnetic Field Stabilizer II
Energized Adaptive Nano Membrane I
2x 1600mm Reinforced Rolled Tungsten Plates I

Large Anti-Explosive Pump I
2x Large Trimark Armor Pump I

5x Ogre I

Effective HP: 93,827
Tank Ability: 16.63 DPS
Damage Profile – (EM: 25.00%, Ex: 25.00%, Ki: 25.00%, Th: 25.00%)
Shield Resists – EM: 12.50%, Ex: 56.25%, Ki: 47.50%, Th: 30.00%
Armor Resists – EM: 65.15%, Ex: 54.83%, Ki: 54.70%, Th: 54.70%

Capacitor: Lasts 2m 6s

Volley Damage: 3,307.90
DPS: 706.83

As you can see just covering the basics on the mega, it is a very impressive ship.

Going Back Home

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

I am pleased to announce that Nam has returned to Larz Smith Corp and is flying once again with HellFleet.

Invention Sucks

Friday, March 19th, 2010

So I am attempting to become an inventor. After much laughter from my indy buddy Mode, I informed him of my goal to make and sell T2 ships and he provided the usual stack o spreadsheets these types are known for.

After a few hours of moving the decimals around I figured on 9 attempts at a falcon would pad the pockets nicely.

I collected all the required parts for this and installed. Now back when I was getting stuff built for me I was use to a 2/4 hour wait and the job is done, glancing at the console I had to wait 2 days!!!!!!! for this to complete.

Ok, I can wait 2 days, and I did.

I am happy to report that 9 invention jobs for a falcon netted me 0 bpc’s today!

So far not very impressed at this system, and a little shocked as to how Jita can be so full of this stuff, yet it is so difficult to get a bpc.

Not to be put off with my goal I have promptly installed 9 more invention attempts today, so check back in 2 days for the result of this run.

Larz out.