Missions, Hauling and PI

As you may be able to tell from the large gaps between my blog posts my time for casual writing has been minimal as of late due to the final run in to the end of term at University, thankfully things are getting finished and my free time is increasing again, yipee!

In the meantime I've been trying to get myself some passive ISK by doing low intensity activities that can be running in the background and only require minimal input. To this end I've been moving stuff around for Mia using my alts Orca, mining with my alts Mackinaw and setting up a few planets for PI with, you guessed it, my alt. Suffice to say my alt did get the training queue back for bit to round out some useful skills but on the whole has been steadily making ISK which I will no doubt waste in a ball of fire and ship wreckage but I guess that's what you get for playing at internet spaceships :)

I'm not going to give people guides on how to set up PI as I'm not an expert in any shape or form but if you are interested I suggest checking out Seamus Donohue's excellent video which can be found here and the more recent articles by The Mittani here, there are various ways to do PI and I myself am trying out a couple of things so I may put my pennies worth in later.

As far as mining goes I'm not sure you can be an expert at mining but I guess there is a balance between effort and profit. If you're just selling minerals for profit then Veldspar and sometimes Scordite are usually king when it comes to the HighSec ores, if you're manufacturing however you need to look at the minerals you require and decide if its cheaper, and simpler, to mine common ore and sell some of it to just buy things you need or whether its best to mine the relevant asteroids to get the minerals you need.

Recently my plan has been to fill a Mackinaw every 30 minutes or so and dock up unload then repeat, if I go for Veldspar though the ore size is so small that I would need to lock new asteroids and start strip miner cycles every 6 or 7 minutes or so, not so bad when you're actively paying attention however as I was trying to write a report I went for large Rich or Azure Plagioclase asteroids which would mean I only had to start my strip miners one more time, a perfect way to make ISK or gather materials for production.

Thankfully in the last few days I've been able to get back into the swing of things with E-Uni operations and move a large percentage of my assets to the Low Sec Campus, a great place to meet experienced pilots and get used to not having Concord as your safety net, suffice to say I've not regretted the actual move from HighSec. I would strongly encourage any new Unista reading this to put a jump clone at the LSC and get a few frigates down there as well, perhaps a few destroyers or cruisers depending on your cash flow, try it out, don't be scared to lose a ship or two and be active, you'll learn so much more by doing and it helps cement the information from classes, so what you waiting for, go now :)

Until next time, fly dangerous o7

Space, the final frontier...

Due to real life Uni deadlines my time for roaming and organised fleets has been somewhat curtailed so I decided that it was time to maybe get back to my roots and grind out some ISK for the future.As I've mentioned before my original character for EVE was a miner, and to be honest he's about average at best, so I jumped into my Mackinaw and started chewing through the belts, a great way to make ISK when you've got to write reports.

This got me thinking about other ways I could go about making ISK and with the belts in the nearby systems being hit by some serious mining fleets I thought about practicing my scanning skills to find a Gravimetric site and with the help of a friend from my alts corp we found one in the very next system. As we landed at the site we found a single Retriever ripping into the low sec asteroids that I'd normally not risk going to get. So the race was on, word was sent to fellow corp members and soon we were attacking the site with 4 Exhumers with Orca support, in less than half an hour we emptied the site and went back to our own ISK making things.

Me however, well I got thinking, why do I always rely on others for the scanning, Exploration  is a  fantastic way to not only practice your scanning skills for use in combat (more on that in the future) but it can also yield some fairly lucrative sites, many of which cannot be tackled by the lone new player. Depending on your corps activity you may be able to get a group together and run such sites, although I would suggest avoiding high level DED sites until you know what you're doing.

As I found out the interface used for scanning is one that while tricky to get the hang of is in fact fairly simple once you get used to it, that said though the right skills like in any other area in EVE will make a massive difference. In game skills such as Astrometrics, Astrometric Accqusition, Astrometric Pinpointing and Astrometric Rangefinding are all vitally important and unlike many areas of the game this small suite of skills can be trained to reasonable levels relatively quickly. To that end, and to have a change from PvP, I decided that this is an area I will be working in the coming weeks and months to master as I really like the potential for finding the hidden riches of EVE but also for use in PvP when using Combat Scanner Probes, a skill that always seems to be in short supply at least within E-Uni from my fleet experiences of the last few months.

Until next time, fly dangerous, make it so ;-)