Retail Therapy

From flickr user Amit Chattopadhyay

After a couple of hours wrestling with the abomination that is iTunes on Windows 8 (albums only shown as tiles without enough room to read the whole name, "Find" function that doesn't work, invisible process for transferring songs to devices) I did some shopping in Eve. A couple of weeks back I had assembled the parts I needed to make a couple of my own ships that complied with fleet doctrine. This saved me a few million on the corp contract cost, and left ships for those who needed them more than I did.

So this time I went a bit bigger, spending about 200M ISK overall. I think I bought enough parts to fit out 15 copies of our three most commonly used fits: an Atron, a Tristan and an Algos.

I made a spreadsheet (wouldn't be Eve Online without spreadsheets, right?) to keep track of the components used, some of which are used by more than one fit. I used eve-central.com to determine where would be the best place to buy each component; I mostly stuck with Jita, Algogille and Dodixie but made a side trip in a case where the cost and quantity justified it. I used pushx.net to ship from Jita and I did the shopping and transport myself from Algogille. I tell ya, the trip BACK,with 60M ISK worth of stuff, felt a lot more dangerous than the trip out! I haven't been to Dodixie yet, but will go soon. I have all the Tristan hulls, and most of the Atrons, but no spare Algos hulls yet, so I'll have to sort that out sometime soon.

I also set up some buy orders that will, hopefully, acquire these components at an even lower price than I just paid, though I've actually been trying this for a few weeks without success. I've placed the order AT the trade hubs this time, so perhaps they'll get more attention.

I estimate that this will save about 80M ISK on the ships I'll make myself, versus buying them from corp contracts.  The question that kept nagging at me in the two hours or so I spent doing it was "Is this really worth it? Or should you go out and run plexes/data-sites and make the extra money to buy the ships on contract?" In the end, though, I'm glad I did it and will be able to do it again more smoothly next time. I had a new experience, though a bit of a mundane one, and tested my organizational abilities. I don't think I missed any components, and I also had time to stop at Caslemon and purchase another round of datacores and get them shipped to Jita.