Nothing to see here

I've been missing for a couple of weeks. I've not had anything exciting to write about. Sad really. I had a week away in the USA to give a best man speech at my friends wedding. It's surprising how tired I felt for a week coming back partly due to the five hour time difference. So tired that I actually stayed up to run the eleven accrued anomalies in my home wormhole. Fast forward several hours and several beers and I was rather drunk and babbling nonsense but we had eleven less anoms and up many hundreds of millions of ISK.

Other than that I've been fully in market mode. We had hoarded rather a lot of PI in our wormhole and a fortuitous connection to another wormhole in the alliance gave me the opportunity to move a few hundred million cubic metres of stuff to our alliance mate's C3. The plan was for me to use my alt who lives with them to move it out their semi-frequent hisec connections. Thankfully the CEO of that corp moved it all out while I was giving my bad speech leaving me the simple task of hauling it all to Jita and selling it.

What a lot of junk we had and now it's almost all sold. I never want to update a sell order again. I honestly don't know how people can be pure marketeers. I'm just not cut out for that. CCP should maybe think about forgetting about ISK fractions below 1000 ISK. Bloody 0.01 ISKers.

I've also had to catch up on my T2 BPC invention. One thing I'd love to know is why CCP insist on showing menu options that don't apply. Examples would be research options on BPCs or Invention on T2 BPCs. Given the client must know these are BPCs given it shows a different icon to BPOs or T1 BPCs why can't it also show a smaller menu. I know the UI is dated and slowly catching up, but those options should never have been displayed from day one.

This has been a bit of a stream of conciousness to prove I am still alive and I am still playing EVE. I'll leave you with a nice panoramic screenshot to enjoy. Hopefully I'll return next time with a more contiguous story to tell.

Goodbye Annoying Hangers

I read about the impending demise of corporate hangers in ship ages ago, so I was somewhat surprised to see a devblog only just appearing now. CCP tell us they are making this change to remove more unnecessary complexity from the system, which is something I fully support. As an added bonus, as I sometimes move stuff around in an Orca, I really like this change.

I never understood the reasons behind splitting up the Orca into so many different compartments when the Orca pilot is able to do what he wants with the contents of any of them. For me it has only ever meant I look through several tabs before finding what I'm actually looking for. Whenever I've dealt with accessing other peoples' Orcas they generally tell me what I'm looking for is 'probably in tab X but just rake around'.

For the few cases where access restrictions are required CCP have put more cargo containers sizes into New Eden. An Orca corporate hanger space is 40,000 m³ and CCP have conveniently added 10,000 m³ and 5,000 m³ containers. If you do want to restrict access simply put in three of the 10k m³ containers and one 5k m³ container to hold everything in. Doing it this way leaves 5k m³ of space where you can move stuff you want people to access. Simples.

Now, dear CCP, there are a handful of other places the breakdown into corporate hanger tabs needs removed. Whilst these corp tabs are essential in many POS modules, there are others where they are not needed. Eliminate these from mobile laboratories and their ilk and suddenly it becomes possible for alliance members to use labs for copying or invention. Eliminate them from other POS modules and suddenly reverse engineering and even manufacturing could be opened up.

If it was possible to remove the corp hangers from the Orca it could just be as doable to remove them from a handful more places.

Invention

I just realised it's Friday. There should be a screenshot from around New Eden here but clearly there isn't. To be honest, I've not spent much time undocked this week to facilitate the taking of interesting images from around New Eden. So, what have I been doing? Well, in one word, invention.

And what a time sink invention can be. I like to batch up my invention runs to give me a month of runway. I have about 160 BPCs to turn into about 60 T2 ammo BPCs and do five at a time. With a 40 minute wait between invention runs this basically means I sit at a POS running these with not enough time to go do something else productive, but too much time to feel like I'm being involved in the process. As a result the days just fly by.

Also, I tend to zone out and not pay attention to external interactions indicated on my pod interface. Each time I stir to set another round of invention on the go I find unanswered convos blinking at me. Often the convo initiator has given up on me ever replying. Saying 'hi' seems pointless after 20+ minutes of inactivity.

It would be nice to set a queue of invention tasks up - simply drop all the required materials in the right place and set it running - hint hint. Then Dhal could sit back and relax and Orea could get on with the serious business of stealing liberating Sleeper technology.

Science Bit

Within New Eden there are many pies to stick your fingers into. To this end I have a close friend, Dhal, who endures the noisy neighbourhood of Jita to fulfil his life goals of making ships and ammo. Some of it for me. Dhal's dream is to build strategic cruisers, but that is a long-term goal requiring ISK which he tells me is in short supply. Apparently learning the skills he requires takes a lot of ISK as well as time.

His current occupation is researching 'tech 2' blueprints. Apparently, once you have an original standard blueprint and access to a POS this can become a profitable area of work. The general flow is to make a copy of the original blueprint and then use the copy, along with relevant datacores, to hopefully invent a 'tech 2' item related to the original item. Sadly this only produces a limited run blueprint copy so invention is an ongoing task. Finally Dhal will take the blueprint copy and turn it into the finished item ready for sale. Of course this ties up more capital until the product sells.

In between each of these steps are long periods of waiting. Personally I think it all sounds boring and rather complicated. I prefer to leave the science stuff to him while I am out exploring the far reaches of wormhole space. I also never did understand why he doesn't just make a permanent copy of the 'tech 2' blueprints he invents but I don't like to ask again.