First Time For Everything

Me in a Maulus with a busted overview

It was an unsettling night of firsts for me, though it turned out to be very successful AND I didn't lose any ships, which is a nice bonus.  I flew both a Maulus (e-war frigate) and an Exequror (cruiser repair) for the first time AND did it with a broken overview.

A couple of weeks ago I installed the test version of Eve, the one that lets you connect to their "Singularity" server where you can test ships and generally mess around.  It was odd that the default directory that this wanted to install in was the same folder my regular Eve client sat in, so I changed the test installation folder and let it go to work. From that point on the overview in my regular Eve client seemed to revert to its default factory settings BUT not every time I ran it, just sometimes! How weird is that?!  Last night it was totally nuts, having no tabs except a "Default", with neutral ships having no background color, so after the night's fleet action I uninstalled the Eve test client, rebuilt the overview and hopefully put the issue to bed. No more test clients for me!

The first encounter we had was a quick skirmish with a Vexor sitting on an acceleration gate. Our Maulus-heavy fleet encountered him and tried to take him down but several of his buddies showed up, killed one of us and chased us off. It was, as mentioned before, my first time in the Maulus and I was pleased to be able both use it and get out with half structure remaining.  We reshipped into cruisers and joined up with QCATS - our fleet of 18 ships, including me in a borrowed Exequror. For the loss of only one ship we killed nine of theirs: Condor, 2 Exeqs, 2 Harbinger, Maller, Oracle, Curse, Brutix. (see here on 2013-12-20 in Abune).

I tried to record video, but thanks to the Big Reset mentioned above, the Eve client was running DirectX 11 and my video recorder only works in DX9.

I've also made a spreadsheet to manually track the ship modules which I own that can be used to build our corporate ships. We pay a markup to our logistics guy, to make the effort of keeping us supplied worthwhile and I wondered how easy/worthwhile it would be to bypass that. There's only a 2M ISK savings on the Tristan, but a more substantial saving on the Algos. PushX.net will ship from Jita straight to my hanger for 7.3M ISK for up to 9000m3...I think I can make that work. Imagine having all the components for multiple ships just delivered straight to you from Jita without having to undock! Buy, ship, assemble, put up on contract, collect the money -- easy :) Hmm...on first look it looks like hard going. A 1B ISK investment buys me 65 completely fitted and delivered Algoses. Selling them at 2M less than our current offer yields about 90M profit. That's not nothing, but it's a lot of clicks to get those contracts up. If I buy less of them, the efficiency of the shipping costs falls and eats into profits even more.