Bits and Bobs, This and That

Narcotics Warehouse, India

Refuge --> Narcotics Warehouse

My main activity of late has been testing how quickly I can run Serpentis Refuges so I can find lots of Narcotics Warehouse escalations (difficulty 3 out of 10). I can then run those with corpmates or solo, or give bookmarks to corpmates if I'm unable to play.  I'm now running the Refuges with a Vexor Navy Issue; the five sentries with three Drone Damage Amplifiers make short work of them - about 2 minutes each. The escalations are up to 10 jumps away, so I take my railgun Algos there with 3 warp core stabilizers to give me a reasonable chance of avoiding gate camps. Once there I make a safe, deploy a mobile depot and put my fighting shoes on. I'll put both my fits at the bottom of this post.

Here's why I've chosen this combination of sites: Refuges are plentiful in highsec and often overlooked. They can be run quickly and seem to have about a 1 in 9 chance of escalating. The Narcotics Warehouse site has four rooms and the first can be bypassed by having a Traffic Management key in your cargo. That means anyone who probes me down and wants to chase me will have to clear the first room themselves, or know the site and go get a Traffic key too. That gives you a nice buffer of safety, unlike other sites where interlopers can reach you immediately. I think this will produce a really nice results, having a 10M isk ship producing 30-100M of loot per site.

So last night I ran two of these sites and it was a very interesting experience. I took a blaster-fit Algos Ane (a low sec island in the middle of Essence) and Aeschee. I thought Ane would go easily, but locals seemed to know and hate Aideron, naming our CEO, a present and a past pilot and insulting them. I figured this wasn't going to go well, and it didn't. They probed me down, so I refit my warp core stabs and left. They even tried to catch me on the other side of the out gate. Back in highsec I saw another Refuge so I ran it, got a nice, and quite rare, 70M Shadow Serpentis loot drop!

Here's where I had a brain fart. The route to Aeschee took me through the Genesis region; just before jumping into Villore, a know heavily gate-camped system in Essence, I decided that dropping my 70M of loot in Genesis was inconvenient (because I use public contracts to move loot around) so I'd just take it to Villore and drop it there. And I forgot or didn't care that I was not wearing my Warp Core Stabilizers. This was really quite stupid. I jumped into Villore and got caught by a Garmur and Legion. I'm just glad the 70M loot didn't survive - hah! If I'd had my stabs fitted I'd have slipped away. Next time, fit the stabs and avoid Villore if at all possible.

I was expecting Aeschee to go badly too: it's Shadow Cartel's home system and a Sisters of Eve mission hub; how could an Algos go undetected for 15 minutes or more?  Luckily my Narcotics site and my safe spot were both out of dscan range of everything in system. I ran the site (badly, as it turned out) for about 30 minutes and never saw anyone on dscan, let alone scanner probes. I picked up about 30M from this site.

Why did it take so long? The idea of putting blasters on the Algos didn't work - I had imagined the rats all swarming close my ship, but they stayed a little too far away, even with Null ammo. I had to leave at one point because I couldn't tank the incoming damage. I'll switch back to railguns for the next attempt, keep my distance and pick them off.

Fightin' 

I joined an RDraw fleet that was running Faction Warfare level 4 missions in stealth bombers, we had a slow start but eventually got rolling. Gallente pilots usually have problems running FW missions because the Caldari rats use jammers, but the jams were defeated by having large numbers in fleet. We accepted missions in a limited area of the war zone to minimize travel - five people requesting them, came up with about 20 missions total, yielding about 65k LP at the end, which I've already spent on high-grade spur implants that trade nicely at Jita if you're patient.

I also helped with RDraw attack on a Carpe Noctem Gila fleet, I derped and warped to 0 in my Griffin but got on 2 kills worth 1B isk :) We won the fight and the FC kindly directed dps ships to send 2M to each logi and 1M to each ewar, which was a nice way to do it. Next time, warp at range!

Trade

T1 rigs are making 200-300k per unit profit, up to 300% profit in other cases, and various datacores and PI items all had price spikes...I made a killing. I spent the 800K LP I earned running FW missions a while ago, and those items are all sold too. I'm pretty sure I've reached my 100B net worth target, so whee! for that. I have 8 Jump Freighters again, but 20B cash to go with it this time and the prices are healthier. I'm holding out for higher prices yet :) I also found some skillbooks to trade using eve-central trade finder - it's nice to have a trade where one of the prices is fixed in stone, since you buy them from NPCs.

I found a nice way to help new pilots: I created a buy order for tritanium in a starter system and I'm sending 5M to whomever sells to me. I figure only actual new players will be mining in the perpetual "Asteroid Remnant" anoms in those systems...though so far nobody has written back to me.

Speaking of writing to me, I got an email in-game from a pilot who moved some of my public contracts around. He wondered what the hell I was doing and was it some sort of scam?! I guess not many people use that technique :)

Fits Used

This is a very tight fit, and is the next variation I'll be trying. Downsize it by swapping the MWD for an Afterburner, 125s for 75s or removing the Salvager. Rig to taste.

[Algos, Narc Warehouse]

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Damage Control II

Small Armor Repairer II

Limited 1MN Microwarpdrive I

X5 Prototype Engine Enervator

Sensor Booster II, Scan Resolution Script

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

125mm Railgun II, Spike S

Salvager I

Small Nanobot Accelerator I

[empty rig slot]

[empty rig slot]

Hobgoblin II x5

Hobgoblin II x5

Hammerhead II x1

--

This is the Vexor I used before getting a VNI for the job. It's almost as fast and will do fine. See my earlier posts for usage.

[Vexor, Highsec Anom Runner]

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Damage Control II

Medium Armor Repairer II

Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Tracking Computer II, Tracking Speed Script

Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron

Sensor Booster II, Targeting Range Script

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

Medium Hybrid Collision Accelerator II

Garde II x3

Hammerhead II x2

Hobgoblin II x3

Hobgoblin II x1

Hammerhead II x1

--

Here's m'new baby: 760 dps, leaning heavily away from tank and into gank. The VNI can only fit two guns and is NOT bonused for gun damage, so I went with 3 DDAs and only 1 Mag Stab.

[Vexor Navy Issue, High Anom Runner]

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Magnetic Field Stabilizer II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Damage Control II

Medium Armor Repairer II

Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Tracking Computer II, Tracking Speed Script

Phased Weapon Navigation Array Generation Extron

Sensor Booster II, Targeting Range Script

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun, Antimatter Charge M

[empty high slot]

[empty high slot]

Medium Sentry Damage Augmentor I

Medium Drone Scope Chip I

Garde II x5

Ogre II x2

Hammerhead II x2

Hobgoblin II x1

Running High-sec anomalies for fun and profit

If you travel through high sec you've probably seen at least a few low-traffic systems that had a lot of cosmic anomalies in them, piled up and unloved. They seem too easy to be worth running and don't pay very well, so why bother? Well, I found a few good reasons; there's a lot of valuable loot connected with these anomalies and you can easily run them in 2-3 minutes a piece.

Escalations

Most high-sec anomalies have a chance, I'd say about 5%, to escalate to a more lucrative mission, the kind you'd usually have to probe down. For example a Serpentis Refuge can lead to a Serpentis Narcotics Warehouse (3/10) and a Serpentis Den can lead to a Serpentis Hydroponics site (5/10).  These have a good chance of dropping much better loot, and only you know the location!  The escalation will be between 2 and 10 jumps from the original anomaly and can be in ANY security space. If you're lucky it will be in high-sec and you can run your mission without the threat of being jumped by pirates (see Jonny Pew video on this subject).

You'll know you got the escalation when you kill the last rat if you see a pop up message with the name of the site you've got a lead to. Then you look in your Journal (Alt+J) under the Expeditions tab to see what system it's in.

I had a lucky streak a few nights ago; my favourite high-sec target systems (0.5 and 0.6 security level) were crammed with Refuge and Den anoms. I cleared them in a couple of hours and had SIX escalations for my troubles (including one in high-sec). With only 24 hours to run them, and not fancying the prospect of dragging a big ship through lowsec, I offered them to corp mates. Nobody wanted them either, so I turned to Tweetfleet, the Eve-wide slack chat. Two people contacted me and I contracted them bookmarks to the sites (I had to travel to each one first and make the bookmarks) in exchange for a total of 170M ISK. That's a great result for a couple of hours of high-sec ratting!

Faction Rats

There's a small chance, much smaller than the chance of escalation, that the anomaly's waves of targets will end with a special rat making an appearance. This would be a Shadow Serpentis or Dread Gurista or Sentient Drone, for example. They will not be hard to kill and will contain special loot -- no travel necessary for this payout! The loot will most likely be a cheap tag (<200k isk) and 1000 rounds of faction ammo (e.g Shadow Iron Charge S), or Drone goo which isn't worth much. BUT I've also had three shiny drops, so the odds are you can find them too - I got a Serpentis Warp Scrambler (100M), a Rogue Drone 46-X and 43-X chip, which can be turned into an Astero BPC and Stratios BPC respectively. Or, y'know, sold for 65M and 235M instead. These happened during, I'd estimate, about 70 anomalies over a couple of weeks.

Loot and Salvage

At first I was very thorough about cleaning up these sites, hoping for a chance for valuable loot from the regular rats, but it never happened. Each Refuge or Den is worth about 200-300K in salvage and loot. The best item was a BZ-5 Caldari jammer, of which I found a few, worth about 300K. Drone sites such as a Gathering (4/10) are worth about 500K in salvage. After a while it didn't seem worth the time, but the most efficient way to do this, if you must, is to bookmark one wreck in the middle of the wreck field as you fight through all the sites. Then switch into a salvaging frigate with a Mobile Tractor Unit, salvage drones and salvagers. Warp to each bookmark in turn, and use the MTU, drones and salvagers as quickly as you can. Pro-tip: press "F" with NO targets locked to let the drones repeatedly find their own targets. You can also lock the farthest-away wrecks and force them to go out there, leaving the wrecks closest to the MTU for you to salvage.  If you have multiple MTUs, just drop one at each site and loop back to the first one for salvage and pickup. I'd assumed the Medium wrecks would have a better chance of good loot than the Small wrecks but that doesn't seem to be the case.

What Ship Did I Use?

This is a railgun Vexor with sentry drones and a flight of light drones in case the rats get close. You warp to 30km on the anomaly, deploy sentry drones then start shooting and DON'T MOVE! The light/heavy missile batteries will hit you hard a couple of times but they're your first target and will die fast. The rats will be around 30km from you, plus or minus 10km. It's a matter of luck how far you'll be from them; most of the time it's around 30km, but if it's 20km that's a bit too close; try and move away to about 25-30km before stopping. When you're standing still your rail guns will do a lot more damage...I think it's double what I was doing when I was orbiting my sentry drones.

The italicized items should be tech 2 variants if you can use them - I used meta versions because that's what I had lying around in hangers. I've never actually EFT'd this fit; it just sort of grew and evolved; hence the mix of armor and shield tank :)

Honestly, the fit is probably still TOO defensive; one by one I'm changing it by removing defense modules (ENAM, armor repair) and adding offensive ones (tracking/damage enhancers). The rats in these anoms are weak and your best defense is a good offense; kill 'em quick. The guns will hit (for me) between 18-38km (antimatter) and 25-40km (Uranium). The Gardes will hit between 18 and 48 km. This covers 99% of what you'll need, and you have Iron ammo (55km optimal) for the long-range shots and the light/medium drones in case the waves of frigates get past your defenses.

You'll never be scrammed or webbed, and most of the time you won't reach armor damage. I've gone with tracking speed scripts instead of range increase. The sensor booster speeds up the process of locking targets, which is handy because you'll be chewing through them fast. I have the drones set to Aggressive and unchecked Focus Fire, so they can spread damage if they want to.

If a number of rats get closer than 18km or so, pull your sentry drones in (it will be instant since you're right next to them) and deploy your light/medium drones. Move away if you wish, and let the drones clear the threat. Once you're safe you should recall them, stop the ship and deploy the sentries again.

The rigs are what I had previously installed on this hull for a different fit. I think I still need the Overclocker, but the armor pumps would probably be better replaced with offensive rigs instead.

[Vexor, Vexor]

Damage Control II

Magnetic Vortex Stabilizer I

Medium Armor Repairer II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Drone Damage Amplifier II

Tracking Computer II

Limited Adaptive Invulnerability Field I

Omnidirectional Tracking Link II

Alumel-Wired Sensor Augmentation

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun

250mm Prototype Gauss Gun

Medium Trimark Armor Pump I

Medium Trimark Armor Pump I

Medium Processor Overclocking Unit I

Hobgoblin II x4

Hammerhead II x3

Garde II x3

Uranium Charge M x3365

Antimatter Charge M x2398

Optimal Range Script x2

Tracking Speed Script x1

Iron Charge M x2000

You could experiment with variations; for example make it work at 50km with different sentry drone and ammo, then warp to 50km on the anomaly and see what happens.

First Experience with Wormhole Combat Sites

I had a great time with my Aideron Robotics corpmates last night! We run regular "Money Monday" fleets, where we look for PvE content and hope for sweet loot drops. It's a good formula and I'd encourage other corps to try it too.

You scan down all the signatures you can find and make corp bookmarks for the combat sites that are worth running. If you find a wormhole that doesn't have a recent history of activity (i.e ships getting blown up), probe down all the sigs inside it too. We even check where the exits go to in case there's good content there.

We used a Dominix battleships with remote armor reps, an Oneiros for more reps, Exeq Navy Issue and a couple of other ships. It was the first time I'd actually flown my Dominix, so the fit needed a little tweaking between sites. It was actually quite a juggling act to attend to the health of my drones, repping my fleet mates and dealing damage to the Sleepers...I was a bit awful at first and lost five drones pretty quickly. But I only lost another two through the rest of the night and got the hang of pre-locking them all, plus staying still in space so I could pick up my sentry drones as needed.

We only netted about 250M for the night, which wasn't great considering we did about ten sites in the wormholes and two Serpentis Phi Outposts (difficulty 4 of 10). The Outposts both let us down terribly: a meta 4 warp scrambler and an ordinary 200mm railgun! That was a surprise.

It was a nice way to spend a couple of hours, chatting with corpmates, and learning some new ship/drone management skills.

--

On the trading side, my Jita character is having a lot of success! I've sold two of the four Nomads I had, for 6.5 and 6.6B. There's been a nice spike in T1 rig and Planetary Interaction prices, so I've been cashing in on that.

Mixing It Up

From flickr user lintmachine

I tried some new solo activities in the last couple of weeks, including learning how to navigate wormholes, spending time in Nullsec (Venal region, Guristas NPC space) and trying to be a ninja-salvager in Osmon. Osmon is a mission running hotspot, where I never saw less than 70 people in local. They're mostly there running level 4 combat missions for the Sister of Eve and many of them don't bother salvaging or looting.

What these activities have in common, I've found, is that I like activities that have a small chance of a big reward, for very little risk. For some reason, at the moment, I like playing it safe!

Wormholes To Nullsec

It took at least eight wormholes before I found a connection to nullsec, so if you're going to try this method, be patient. I took a Helios out there into the ever-changing maze, and it was a weird feeling when I first logged off in one, knowing my route back to my home system of Fliet was gone.  But I pressed forward, using wormholes.es  as a reference. My nullsec exit was 20 jumps from Venal, but a look at the map revealed that the route there was, statistically, quiet. I made the trip there without incident (noticing, by the way, how many combat anomalies were around), found an NPC station, docked and jump cloned back to my main clone in Fliet.

Over the next week or so I jumped back to the Venal clone a couple of times, where the streets are paved with pirate relic sites...or so I thought. Despite combing through the backwaters with the least number of jumps I found only one site in about five hours of exploration. Clearly the few people in this area all have the same idea. What I saw the most of was combat sites, both in anomalies and signatures (the ones you have to use probes to find).  If you want to make money in Venal I would recommend taking a combat ship out there and running the anomalies.  I gave up on the area, though, taking my Helios into the first wormhole I found and getting back to Fliet.

My nullsec itch has been scratched and I don't see any reason to head back out there, not solo anyway.

Cosmic Anomalies

I've taken to running highsec anomalies on both my characters, mainly as a short, easy combat activity. They are 3/10 or 4/10 difficulty and you have a small chance of an escalation to things like a Guristas Scout Outpost or similar. The escalation may be in high-sec too, where they don't "naturally" occur, so it's a nice opportunity for a better reward. Johnny Pew just made a great video about this. The occasional Dread Gurista (or Shadow Serpentis) will appear in these ordinary anoms, and drop more valuable loot. 

If there's someone else in the site already, which can happen, I leave it to them. Other pilots are not so polite :) I'm not sure what the Eve-etiquette dictates here, but I'm fine with them staying; it's not a big deal to have some competition.

Osmon

In the spirit of looking for easy activities with a small chance of a big payoff, I turned to the Osmon system, six jumps from Jita and home to a Sisters of Eve level 4 combat agent. I'd seen it mentioned on reddit/r/eve as a good place to try ninja salvaging, wherein you invite yourself into someone's mission (via combat probes) and start salvaging their wrecks. If they are feeling generous, they may also abandon their wrecks and leave the loot in, so you can harvest the contents.

It occurred to me that asking permission was easy and risked only social embarrassment. With 150 people in local chat, I asked and got lucky right away! A Russian guy invited me to fleet and told me to warp to him. I entered the deadspace pocket as he was leaving, trusting his assurances that the rooms were clear and indeed they were. I picked up a couple of million in salvage and had a nice chat with him.

The next guy I had to find the old-fashioned way. I combat-probed a battleship down, one that was well-above the plane of the solar system, and warped to him. Surprisingly there was no acceleration gate. I tried to open a chat with the pilot who was there. He rejected the conversation...but all the wrecks turned blue! I thanked him in local chat and returned a few minutes later to pick up about 5 million in loot and salvage.

That was my last success, though. I was unable to find any other willing salvage donors, and the next three guys I scanned down salvaged their missions themselves. As I headed back to station to log off, though, I'd shot myself in the foot. I found one unlooted wreck at a site I'd bookmarked. It contained about 500K of loot, but I'd be suspect for stealing it. "I'm docking up anyway...it'll be fine." I thought. I looted the wreck and warped to the SoE station...where I saw a blue cargo container labelled "wreck location bookmarks" 10km off the undock! Unfortunately I was already docking, had 10M of cargo on me and really need to log off. Drat, a missed opportunity.

I did, however, have a lot of fun talking with the locals, and one guy sent me a nice donation, possibly for the entertainment value I'd offered. I ran a sales pitch from the "Space Litter Removal Service", which got some replies, but no offers, and we talked about web comics (xkcd and The Oatmeal).

The main thing I picked up, though, was some trade opportunities. I looked over the local market, figuring that with hundreds of mission runners there, they'd need some supplies. I found one good trade already and I'm looking for more. It's my first experience with trade between systems, and so far, so good.

Other Stuff

I finally sold a Nomad! I've written over the past few months about how I have an enormous sum tied up in 6 or 7 jump freighters, just as their prices went south. Well, the Nomad market is finally stirring and the price is close to 6.7B. I sold one and I'm holding on to the others, since there are very few sellers and there's potential for a 7B+ price to be reached. My three Arks, sadly, are still going for only 6B, which is less than I paid for them.  

My PI and datacore trades are doing well, and the wallet balance is now 23B. I'm aiming for a 100B isk total value before the end of the year...I'm around 85B isk now.

My Eve Weekend

My wife and son went out of town for a few days, which gave me two evenings and a weekend to play a lot of Eve. I had planned in advance what activities I wanted to focus on: PvE in combat sites, with the hope of getting an expensive loot drop at the end, pirate relic sites in wormholes or nullsec, and level 4 faction warfare missions, since my militia was in tier 3 and the loyalty point payouts came with a nice 75% bonus.  I also wanted to join my corps regular fleets and go out and shoot spaceships!

tl;dr I ran some sites with corpmates, flew with our fleets, did three rounds of FW missions, lost a 500M ISK Proteus and spent some time in wormholes.  I found very few pirate relic sites and the constant possibility of getting jumped by someone (which happened once, though I escaped) was a bit too much to want to repeat.

Vacation in dark places

Ace Rimmer - what a guy!

I'm on vacation with my family this week, so I thought it was a good time to get one of my main's clone into an exploration adventure. I put a couple of cheap probing implants in his head, jumped in a Helios and found a wormhole. I'm torn between running pirate relic sites in C1, C2 and C3 wormholes vs the same thing but in nullsec. I think I'd prefer nullsec, since I'll definitively know if anyone is in the system with me, thanks to the local channel.

It took me a couple of days (just a couple of hours of play time though) to get out of the first wormhole, since all the exits closed while I was out with my family.  The locals were very helpful, letting me what system their lowsec static had re-opened upon, but I was already in the next wormhole, searching for that elusive nullsec exit. I did actually start to run a relic site in this hole, but warped away when an uncloaked stratios warped in.

I've scanned five wormholes so far and found no exits to nullsec. This may not be as easy a way to get there as I'd hoped. I believe CCP recently reduced the number of wormhole-to-nullsec connections, to prevent their fleets from easily using them as shortcuts.

Being stuck in chains of wormholes means I also can't jumpclone back into my "main body", which is sitting in Fliet. If I can't get to nullsec soon I'll take the first exit that lets me find a station at which I can dock, then jump clone back to Fliet.

I found one wormhole today with three pirate relic sites: exactly what I'd been looking for! Sadly, my risk aversion told me that, with the killboards showing explorer ships being ganked there today, and a high-sec static exit, this probably wasn't a safe place to risk running relic sites.

--

August 5th

Success! I made the 21 jump trip across nullsec to the Venal region, docked up and jump-cloned back to Fliet. I had looked at the system map and it said there was almost zero activity along the route, so I took my chances and jumped. Only one system had anyone else in local, so it was an easy trip. Later I plan to jump clone back out there at probe/run relic sites.

It was kind of awesome to see new (to me) anomaly names, and find that they included maximum difficulty combat sites such as "Drone Horde", just sitting there un-run. I guess its true nobody runs drone sites.

* I tried to find a picture of Arnold Rimmer on vacation, touring the diesel engines on Red Dwarf, but couldn't find one :( Internet, you have failed me!

Asset Rich, ISK poor

From flickr user NoHodamon

Hi everyone, I'm back! I wasn't doing enough of interest to warrant posting, but that's changed and Ima start posting again. I have a long video of a fun and busy 3 days of Eve I played a few weeks ago. It's edited but needs a voiceover.

Trading

I seem to have found a small flaw in my trading plans: I'm doing a lot of "buy low" but opportunities to "sell high" are few and far between. As the price of Jump Freighters drifted downwards I acquired them for 6.3B or less. I assumed that the price of each would drift back up to around 7B, as they have all done regularly over the past six months.

Sadly no.  The prices just continued to drop (except on the Rhea, which I wasn't able to acquire)...and I now own eight white elephants. 4 Nomads, 3 Ark and an Anshar, which I picked up last night for just 6.1B.  When I checked the fuzzworks manufacturing calculator it says these ships cost 9-10B to make....how are they selling for 6B?!

My liquid cash is less than 300M, but I have an enormous amount of goods that I could sell: Eve estimates the JFs are worth 51B, my trade hangar stands at 19B...that's the bulk of it.

I got into this predicament by having a high resistance to selling something for a low price...I'd rather hold it and wait for the price to go back up. This was ok when I had more ISK to invest than I could easily spend, but that time is past.  I spent my last chunk of ISK on some cheap PI material and now I'm in danger of missing other bargains if I keep my stock. I now need to be aggressive in selling off what I have, starting with the items that will sell fastest and still make a profit.

I'm hoping that Fozziesov will spark something in the market that pushes the JF prices back up, and quickly. Changes in the Caldari-Gallente faction warfare system might help push datacores back up to 125-150k, where I'd see a tidy profit.

Update on 7/20/2015 - Good news! I sold my Anshar for 6.37B, amid fierce competition. In addition the price of several datacores spiked to 150K and higher and I was able to sell several thousand of them. The wallet is now fat and happy at almost 10B, the trade hanger is around 16B and I plexed my account.  I also asked a question about the cost of building jump freighters. The answer was about 7.3 - 7.4B ISK, which leads to the question "why are they almost always sold for far less than that?"

Exploration

I've dipped a toe into wormhole exploration, looking for relic sites - no luck yet, but I have completed Archaeology V and thus I'm able to use a tech II relic analyzer. This should make relic site running a lot easier. My plan is to get a clone out to deep nullsec, via wormholes, and see what I can find out there.  I've run a few low-sec combat sites with corp mates and the rewards can be great, plus you get to socialize which is always a reward in itself.