Undocked

Suit Up! From flickr user Tom

The stars aligned and I spent three glorious hours zipping around Oto, helping pew-pew 51 Templis CALSF ships into dust before losing my Catalyst (3M isk ship with 16M loot in the hold...smrt!). Our fellow Gal Mil corp "Rapid Withdrawl" put together a sizeable fleet of cheap but effective Catalysts and we cut through their even cheaper Cormorant/Kestrel/Merlin fleets, with the odd

We close a few plexes and kept our eyes several pirate Snuffbox capsuleers that harassed both sides. They dropped fighters on us a few times, giving us the chance to kill a couple of these super-drones. They were using the soon-to-be-history "Skynet" technique, which I'd never seen in action before. Unfortunately our fleet booster lost his 400M links ship, a Loki, but in fairness Snuff also kill the CalMil booster ship too, a few minutes later.

I tried repeatedly to get my video software to record but it was in flaky mode and insisted that it couldn't. Dang it.

I'm starting to tire of industry a bit, but I've begun writing a program to help me find the juiciest opportunities. Eve Online has an extensive API that allows programmers to access price data, so I'm doing what hundreds of people have already done: write a glorified spreadsheet that will identify stuff selling cheap/expensive etc. I'm using Delphi XE7, a language for which no shared libraries exist (AFAIK), but it's been easy to write my own after having watched several videos on REST/XML support in Delphi.

Final February Profit Report

Meh. Not so hot. With all my knees-bent, running-about-advancing behaviour I didn't do much trade at all. Eve Mentat says I made 1.8B ISK profit. 650M in Jump freighters, 470M in rigs, 300M in datacores and the rest spread across other categories. My financial picture is bit muddied by increased item swapping between characters, but its small scale enough not to chase up...just a quiet month for trading.

Jump Freighter prices have been less profitable, but they're cheaper, on average, than they were in the last couple of months. So I'm trying something new; I'm buying them for 6.3 to 6.4B and waiting for the sell price to drift up towards 7B, which they all do over time. It's a bit riskier since my isk is tied up for longer, but I think that low price is a good point to get in. At the moment I own 4 (I sold two of the ones I bought earlier this month, but bought more.) And there's still 13B of stuff sitting in the hanger. A lot of the apparel I bought has dropped in value, so I'm waiting for spikes to get rid of it...that's not a great idea, actually. If I sold it for what I could get for it now, I'd be able to buy another couple of jump freighters.

But I had fun running chained distribution missions to increase my Caldari standings. My broker fees at Jita went from 0.54% to 0.34%. When I buy and sell a 6.5B Jump Freighter, that's 100M instead of 130M...I'm still paying 0.9% taxes, which I can't reduce without a 13 day train to Accounting V.

I also bought some new ships for my main to pootle around in. A blaster fit Proteus, for running level 4 faction warfare missions, and Asteros for running relic and combat sites. I took my first short dip in a wormhole in a Helios and survived a gate camp, and learned how to use the cloak/mwd trick. Oh, and I helped in the final push to recapture Heydieles for the Gallente.