Making Our Mark

I thought our relocation into Fliet was going to lead to a suffocating siege, since Old Man Star had fallen into Caldari hands the very morning after we moved. After a few days, though, this has not been the case. We have run some aggressive fleets, actively stomping on all and sundry. We have 878 kills for the month and with two days to go we should top 900 easily. I flew logi for the past couple of fleets and generally did well, better than usual, with almost no mistakes of repping the wrong person etc. I did manage to get blapped in a spectacularly stupid way last night, when instead of warping to another plex (which I'd d-scanned myself and alerted the FC about targets there) I instead activated the gate we were sitting at and flew into a 20-strong fleet that made short work of me. D'oh!

It's been impressive to see how quickly we reship and take fights in a well-organized way. We had very few deaths last night as we tore through enemy fleets. Kirith Kodachi is holding an open fleet on Friday night, no PvP experience necessary, so if you'd like to try it, come and visit!

In trade news, things have slowed down for my Jita trading alt. She's still sitting on a fortune - 740M in cash, 2.4B in buy orders, but last night I got a bit greedy and lost a valuable purchase. I've been trying for days to get a prosthetic arm for 700M on a buy order and since I have Margin Trading III and had put down less than half that amount, I made sure I had enough cash in my wallet to pay the balance if someone tried to sell me one. Literally ten minutes after over-extending myself, spending that cash reserve to add extra buy orders, and intending to replace the money from my main's wallet, I get an alert that my buy order had failed due to a low balance. Damn! Five days of waiting and RIGHT THEN someone decided to try and sell me the damned thing. Oh well.  I cleaned up some stale orders, buffed up my wallet and placed the order again, and this time I'll make sure there's enough to pay for it. [Later that week: I got one! I've been trying to sell it for days now, unsuccessfully. There are several other people selling them too and on average only one is bought per day. So far, I've not been lucky enough to be the cheapest seller when a willing buyer comes along.]

Money's All Spent

From flickr user Profound Whatever

Money

I went on a bit of spending tear over the last few weeks, spending more than half of my wallet balance setting up my own ship supply chain. I made a Google Docs spreadsheet to track my inventory of the components used in four of our fits and noted an approximate price and best-priced source for each component. I could have tried to automate that part, but decided not to. I mainly stuck with Jita, but if a cheaper source was available close to our Yvangier base of operations I bought the supplies there and ferried it over myself.

I also set up buy orders for many of the parts: I have Procurement III so I can place these orders within 10 jumps of my current location. These buy orders usually sit ignored but I've picked up some bargains too: ENAM IIs for 250K instead of 900K for example. But mostly, even if I'm the top buyer, the orders are not filled quickly so this method shouldn't be relied on if you need the parts urgently.

I also spent a lot of acquiring datacores, which I have not yet sold. Most have been shipped to Jita and I'm waiting for either a price spike or for me to run out money, forcing a sale!

Fleet

We had a really good fleet last night and rampaged through Heydieles and surrounding systems for a while. I was in a Navitas and Exequror and did some good things, though I still messed up a couple of times. I've *just* now realized a common mistake I make: I lock a target and turn on the reppers WITHOUT first checking which of my current targets are selected.  As a logi pilot you always have the other logi and the FC pre-locked, so I have often started repping the other logi (who don't need it) instead of the poor bastard who needs armor! Now that I know how I keep falling into this mistake I hope I can avoid it.

I also discovered that you can turn off a particular armor repairer by clicking the icon that appears under the target, rather than trying to remember which of your three reppers is pointed at which target.

The best fight was against five Tech 2 ships (Pilgrim, Stabber Fleet, Arazu, Pilgrim, Arazu) - those are some pricey ships and we sliced 'em up good :)

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.

Flying Logi

From flickr user Jerry Bowley

Last night's combat was a bit different for me; I flew logi! That means I flew a repair ship whose job is to repair the armor of our fighting ships during combat, trying to keep them alive longer so we had more chance of winning. I was under the guidance of Huard Catanach and using our new Mumble voice software we were able to set up a voice channel for just the two of us to talk on. Huard was a good teacher and we repped our way through several fights during which both of us got killed (see 13-11-20).

Being in a repair ship frequently makes you the first ship to be targeted. Our FC knew this was the case, though, and we did the best we could. At the very least we distracted the enemy so our DPS guys could attack them while they were busy with us.

Another corpmate, Serenalen, hosted a class for Aideron Robotics pilots on logistics. If you're interested in logi, you should really watch it!

It's actually less pressure, I found, than fighting in a DPS ship.  You have only one job: repair people. You are expected to not leave the fight and if you die nobody is surprised; it meant you stayed till the last, nobly giving up getting on killmails in return for free ships. As the non-lead logi guy, I didn't even have to steer...I just ordered my ship to follow Huard and he made sure we stayed at the right range from the fleet.

There was one unexpected moment: one of our pilots came late to the fleet because he'd been out flying Very Very Fast in his interceptor, reveling in its new speed after the Rubicon update. Our FC jokingly targeted him and fired, forgetting that we'd all assigned drones to him. His shield melted quickly and Huard and I had to rep his armor while the drones were called off.

Heydieles is almost 60% contested, so we need to step up to the plate again and get that number back down!