Socializing

From flickr user lovelornpoets

Most of last night's activities involved plexing in quiet systems, trying to rack up LP before we drop into Tier 1, which everyone assumes will happen soon.  I took my cloaked Imicus out to two systems that were under Caldari control but showed little traffic. I used this ship because I was also hoping to find plentiful cosmic signatures that might yield data or relic sites.

It went pretty smoothly, though there were surprisingly few cosmic signatures to be had and I didn't run any sites. Instead I got about 40K LP from three plexes and had some nice conversations with three of my corpmates.

I tested the Imicus and it's 4 hobgoblins against the NPC that defends a medium plex. I was getting beaten up pretty badly -- I flew too close while trying to use my gun as well. Next time I'll just kite and let the drones do their work.  Kyle came in with an Algos and cleared the NPCs for me.  I also got interrupted by a Bantam that visited us at least six times during our plexing: he'd arrive and just warp out again. I could never be sure if he hadn't refit to carry guns so didn't engage and usually cloaked up till he left. There were also visits from an Incursus and Condor(?) but they didn't stay.

When you're running plexes in a quiet system you have a lot of time to just talk, if you want to, with people. One of my corpmates is in the Air Force, just returned from a year in Afghanistan. I'd hadn't met anyone who had served there so we talked about that for a while, and where he sees his career going. Another corp mate (who made it into a small plex with 4 seconds to go!) had played the Mass Effect games on the XBox with as much intensity as I had and we talked about that too.  It turns out that my guides to exploration (here and here) had given him the impetus to try it and he was doing well at it too! That was very gratifying to hear and I'm going to set up a "best posts" section to make my best advice easy to find.

Trade

I've got a good set of trade skills that I find very useful now: Marketing, Procurement and Day Trading all trained to level 3. It means that I can create AND edit buy and sell orders up to 10 jumps away. That means I can amass cheap goods through region-wide buy orders. How cheap? In my experience it's usually less than the manufacturing price of the item.  Then I can create sell orders AT the stations where those goods are piling up WITHOUT having to fly there myself. If there is a particular system I want to acquire the goods at, I can create a buy order just for that place instead.

I simply pull up the asset list (Alt+T), find the stuff, right-click and sell it at the price I want.  There are some items, admittedly not fast selling, that I buy for 4-6K and sell for 100K. They arrive steadily all day so I consider that an investment for the future; I could sell them where they are for whatever price I can get, or I could make an effort and move them myself to a system where they sell very well.

Ship Used

[Imicus, Data and Relic Sites]
Warp Core Stabilizer I
Nanofiber Internal Structure I
Damage Control I

Data Analyzer I
Relic Analyzer I
Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I
Cargo Scanner I

Prototype Cloaking Device I
Core Probe Launcher I, Core Scanner Probe I
75mm 'Scout' Accelerator Cannon, Iridium Charge S

Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
Small Gravity Capacitor Upgrade I
[empty rig slot]