Podded!

Podded for the first time ever!

On Sunday morning a wormhole opened into a clean type 4 system when most of the corporation was online. So we promptly went about harvesting the goodies. Just before downtime I asked for someone to sit on the wormhole so Carraig could warp to them and then home. Mono volunteered but went to the outbound wormhole not the wormhole heading home. We both jumped through, realised the mistake, jumped back and downtime hit. Carraig was stranded.
When the server went back up Slay went to rescue her before Aileen and myself went into town for lunch. He jumped to the wormhole connecting to the home system, jumped through with the intention of giving Carraig a target and promptly got hit by an Azaru who shredded the Iteron III that Slay was flying.
Carraig in the Retriever warped to the dying Slay and straight through the wormhole without any trouble and then home. When I realised Slay was under attack, I must have given up on the Iteron and prepared myself to warp through in the capsule. Unfortunately I kept getting ‘Session Change in progress’ and in surprisingly short time, found myself back in Duripant thinking that only that morning I had commented on how safe the home system felt.
Drifnir was good enough to find me a connection to high-sec for Slayfoe to get back to the POS system in a PVP Thorax.
Lesson learnt? Well if you can’t get through the wormhole then warp elsewhere instead. He probably had a point on me (preventing me warping out) but I’ll never know.

Fueling a POS

To keep a POS up and runnign you need to provide it with various fuels that are supplied by NPCs in known space.

The fixed amount of the following items are required per day/ week/ month:

Enriched uranium
Helium isotopes
Robotics
Collant
Mechanical parts
Oxygen

The amount of these items required depends on the CPU and Power requirements of what you run at the POS:

Liquid ozone (power)
Heavy water (CPU)

Then a last item, Strontium Clathrade, is required to fuel the POS when it is put into reinforced mode, this happens when it is attacked.

The amount of the various items can be calculated at the following useful place:
http://eve-online.itemdrop.net/eve_db/calculator/pos_fuel/
It also shows you how much volume yuo will need to haul on a weekly basis - looks like an IttyV will do the job each week, also looks like the corp/I will need to find about 21m per week to keep it operational.

Setting up a POS

Last night the chief of our little corp decided to set up a second POS in the system to cater for the miners among us (2 at the last count). It is a medium amarr tower with corporate hangar array and medium intensity refining array with a slew of guns to deter the casual looter.

Notes to self: it takes AGES to set up a pos as the tower can only handle 1 thing at a time and each addition to the pos needs anchored (5 minutes) and onlined (another 5 mins). So apart from the tower, the 16 odd items should take 160 minutes to work, or about 3 hours. Each gun then needs ammo loaded, first time I have ever loaded a laser into a turret but it obviously makes sense to use guns that dont require ammo - hence lasers with crystals.

Now all I need to do is find some rocks to mine.

The whole operation requires various types of fuel to keep running, this needs to be fetched from empire space, so I can see some runs to high sec soon. This naturally will cost money so I need to establish how the money side of the operation is to happen and how to pay for the fuel. Mono says that there is a fuel dump in Amarr space ready for picking up as soon as we get a suitable WH.

So we'll have a POS tower with a refining array to refine the materials we already have mined, this might take a few days, it isn't like at stations where it happens immediately. The question will be what to do with the minerals. Sell or manufacture.

1. Selling: will require hauling the minerals to high sec when a suitable WH appears.
2. Manufacturing: either for use by the corp or alliance in WH space or for selling. Selling means dragging the products to high sec when appropriate WH appears.

Hmm, might be better to make stuff that can be sold to the corp or the alliance in WH space.

Wormhole Space

Well, gaming has slowed down since the little bundle of joy entered out life. Baby Alannah is 7 weeks old last Tuesday and has learnt to smile at people. Generally not at the 2 milk providing pillows that she will come to know as her parents but at new faces that come to visit.

On the work front I am back where I was before Christmas working away in RKD Cork on contract basis. Once you get used ot the idea of not having secure employment it is quite liberating. Getting good experience on hospital design which is good for the CV.

In the meantime gaming has reverted to Eve. I simply got bored with WOW again. I drop in to say hi to Dougal and the rest of the gang from time to time but most of the little gaming time I spend is trying to avoid getting blown up in Eve.

I had kept the two accounts going through out the WOTLK expansion working my way though core skills on both accounts. This has given both characters a nice base from which to specialise. Slaybull is a combat pilot and Carraig naTaribhe is a science character turned miner. After a few weeks of having my cans flipped in Empire space I moved both characters to join Monomorium at his POS in Wormhole space.

First things first. I flew my lovely Dominix full to the brim with drones and other tech II goodies though low-sec space and got jumped by a gang that blew me to bits (capsule managed to escape, so I haven't been podded yet).

So I arrived at the Monomorium's pos in a capsule with nothing to my name. The POS is in a L4 wormhole system that has been cleaned out so all action generally happens in adjoining systems through whatever WHs have opened that day. The combat missions have been done using a fleet of Dominix BSs fitted to spider tank. Very first mission I got mine blown up by forgetting to turn on the damage control module.

So far I have enjoyed the experience. Mono has been very generous and easy about mistakes made to far. I help out where I can and have yet to get bored. Because of the whole need to probe for asteroid belts things can be a bit slow, there is no such thing as going out to shoot at rocks for 20 mins. In the next blog entry I'll figure out some goals.