Pushing My Luck Too Far

After being away on holiday for a week I decided to make as much of a full day of EVE as I could today. I logged on before downtime to get a fix on the current sigs in my home system. Amazingly there were four grav sites kicking around. I was later told that these sites just wouldn't die and had been with us for too long now. The fifth sig was also bookmarked making my life nice and easy. I logged off and had lunch.

Logging back in a little while later found a corpie off into C4a scanning a route to hisec. I pottered around with other corp administrivia while she took care of scanning. Flashing from the 'Local' channel eventually caught my eye and it was a message from someone cheerily announcing they closed our static. I checked whether my corpie was home or not. She wasn't and now had no route home. Right, time for me to ignore the admin stuff and get to work  to find a route while she did the same.

A quick check revealed a sixth sig had cheekily appeared in our home system while I was doing paperwork. Checking C4a I found it had a static C3 somewhere. It also had pilots in a Curse and Tengu. I watched for a little while to see if they would turn into easy targets. They didn't and as I had a job to do I quickly got bored waiting and headed off to inspect our K162.

The K162 lead me to a class 3 wormhole with a static hisec. Music to my ears. I quickly scanned it all out while also watching a Badger do nothing interesting, then a pod do nothing interesting, then an Orca... You get the picture. The static hisec turned out nice and close to both Jita and Amarr. My corpie got herself back home safely while I exported some sleeper loot acquired by the corp over my holidays.

With such an easy route I then started to export all the corp PI purchasing I possible could. After eight return trips I then decided I should probably fly in some POS fuel. My first run went great but on the second run I landed on and jumped through the hole from hisec at exactly the same time as a Proteus did. I wasn't overly bothered by this as I could just jump back to hisec. I waited out the session timer, reapproached the wormhole and clicked the jump button. Strangely I didn't jump back to the safety of hisec. Instead I received a warning on my screen about being polarized. My brain processed this message as if jumping would make me polarized rather than the actual message that I was already polarized. It took three attempts before I recognised the wording of the error to actually say "You're screwed".

Bugger.

After getting my pod to safety I convoed my executioner to thank them for reminding me of the dangers of polarization. I had a nice chat with them talking about their life in a C6 and the relative ISK increase in payouts (about 50% greater per pilot). Eventually I bade them farewell and logged off. My intel informed me that the killer logged off about five minutes after me so I waited around an hour then flew back in with a perfect copy of the deceased Iteron V. Given it wasn't mine I figured I should probably replace it.

Lesson learned: Watch your polarization timers and don't work too fast.

Loot buying

One of the features of my corp is that we buy any and all loot, gas and ore acquired through the running of sites in wormhole space. Of course, we take a cut for the hassle of shipping it out and selling it but folks are welcome to move things out themselves if they so choose. The main advantage for us running this scheme is this helps ensure a fair distribution of proceeds from wormhole activities to all that took part. Giving the corp 'pocket money' is an added bonus which only really benefits the corp members anyway.

We've always used a google docs spreadsheet for splitting the loot proceeds. In the old C2 it was filled out by the person responsible for payouts; in the current C4 it was the responsibility of the person who did the salvaging. There was always the danger of accidents in deleting the formulae which did all the calculations, and that did happen a couple of times, but the spreadsheet worked well. At least, it worked well for the submitter of loot.

Payday comes every two weeks and that basically meant I would spend a good hour or two tabulating all the payouts per person per op so the spreadsheet could add it all up. Talk about RSI? I think that was possibly the only task I've encountered due to EVE that was more laborious and repetitive than setting up five planets of PI. And with the PI you don't redo it twice a month. So I took it on myself to create a web-based form with a database back-end to do all the heavy lifting. This would save me loads of time and wear out less mice in the long run.

Leave all melted nano-ribbons here please.

After a couple of false starts because I got tied up on the auth side of things I eventually got going. My go-to language of choice is PERL as I've been writing in that for far too many years. It didn't take too long to design a decent database and create the submission form off the back of it. Of course, if people are submitting loot then they'll want some form of receipt showing what they put in and what it's worth. Again, not particularly hard. Then I added in the admin side of stuff, listing the submissions, confirming them, listing payout values. Crap, did I just spend 25 hours doing all this?

So once it was fully functional I had to make it pretty. It's a fact that HTML without style is, well, style-less. These days the entire world+dog is using Bootstrap, from Twitter. Given the clean look it produces I wasn't about to go against the grain. Bang goes another 25 hours while working out how to convince PERL to make nice webpages (unheard of, I know) and then doing so.

Testing is important so I unleashed a copy of the new site onto my corpies. Most people were happy during the testing except for one slight problem - the in-game browser doesn't support basic auth. Yes, I'd copped out of writing a proper auth system and was replying on something  not supported. Oops. Time to learn about cookies I guess...

Cookies were implemented in a day around other my real life stuff and I had a very shiny website that worked in-game. So I put it live and it seemed to work. Within a day I had four feature requests - a reference ID, adding notes, viewing past submissions, viewing everyones totals (i.e. a leaderboard). The reference ID was easy as it was already in place. The others are all done now except for the leaderboard. I just wonder how long it will be before I save the time doing payouts that I just spent creating this masterpiece.

The whole admin side is still pretty ugly as only I'll see that. There are also a few things I need to drop to the database to do, such as correcting item counts in submissions or adding missing members to a submission. It also assumes everyone gets an equal share as that's how we do it in Z3R0. All these things can be fixed though, when they need to be.

PI Revisited

Hmm, I appear to be a bit late with this post. Must be two or three hours time delay between W-space and K-space. Well, that seems like a good excuse for slacking off so I'm sticking to it.

Since some changes were made to the capacity of the storage buildings available on planets I decided to try a different layout on my extraction planet.

Compact Layout

This new layout isn't a million miles away from the previous layout I used. In the old layout I used the launchpad as a central hub for all storage. The main drawback from that was capacity and lost product if space ran low, which it did from time to time. With this new layout I funnel all extracted materials into a storage building. The storage building is then used to feed the eight basic factories. Finally, the basic factories deposit their product into the launchpad ready for export.

This new layout means I now have a constant storage capacity for both factory input and output rather than an ever decreasing capacity for input depending on how much output was stored. It also means I can wait twice as long before doing an export run to my planets - with the old set up I would starting thinking about collection when the launchpad got to about 50% capacity.

I envision a similar layout for factory planets. All input materials will be imported and moved to the storage facility where they will go through the same pipeline and be ready to collect from the lauchpad. The only difference should be in the number of factories, although I may require more than one storage building. More about that once I've tried it.

Setting Up

Having completed my move into our new class 4 wormhole system it was time to start setting up some mining operations on the planets. We are quite fortunate to have a good selection of planets to work with, however this means I have too much choice what to actually make. As a result I sat doing nothing for far too long without making any decisions.

I know, I'll just make POS fuel while I decide what I should actually do.

The problem with sticking to POS fuel is that, while we need a reasonable reserve, it is rather bulky to just keep manufacturing and storing. Sensible limits will have to be created otherwise we'll be fuelling POSs just to store fuel. So for the short term this is a sensible option, but I need to make products refined to a higher level.

Ideally I should make products that are of some use to my industrial friend, Dhal, so maybe I'll just ask him what he wants to do. That way he'll suffer the financial hit of purchasing expensive blueprints, and not me.

Is this not pretty?

In the end, I only set up two planets as the process to do so can be quite repetitive and boring. It would be nice to just employ a foreman down on the planet to make sure stupid things like not routing the output of a process didn't result in it vanishing mysteriously. But these are the challenges we face until this particular capsule interface is deemed worthy of an upgrade.