Monday, December 7, 2009

Capsuleer Firmware Patch Dominion 1.0.2

CONCORD has alerted capsuleers everywhere that a new firmware patch is coming up tomorrow. It covers only a few changes, but some very important. Here are the ones that I have noticed affecting my POD.

There is a fix for multiple modules not activating when multiple simultaneous commands where sent. As a capsuleer its vital my ship obeys my commands and having to re-order my modules to activate was an annoyance, but luckily it was nothing more, it had the potential of being bad.

There is also supposed to be a fix for those POD pilots using Mac hardware in their capsule. I have a Mac based capsule but haven't flown in it for about a week but instead have been in my capsule based on PC hardware. I may have to swap to my Mac hardware to check out how things are going on that front.

Some of my corp mates have been complaining that evemails sent to corp were showing up in the inbox. This has been changed, corp mails no longer get the "inbox" tag automatically. I have mixed feelings about this as I kind of like everything showing up in one place, since I could click the corp label to differentiate.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

9 Hour Mining-Op

Today was a really long day.  I hopped into my POD ready to start the corp mining up. For mining I can only fly my [[Osprey]] and my [[Bestower]] for hauling and this generally works out quite well. It allows the more mining specialized capsuleers to focus on crunching roids and I haul stuff around as needed. Starting around 19:00 EVE-Time, our regular Sunday corp mining op started. We had a special group of asteroids to mine today. Saturday or Friday night 3 of us ([[player-kb:Cayla]], [[player-kb:Dogmata ESQ]], and myself) were out doing the Enemies Abound (1 of 4) mission, well it happens to have some really nice roids:

        1,260,000 [[Omber]] (14x 90k-roids)
        800,000 [[Scordite]] (16x 50k-roids)
        350,000 [[Kernite]] (14x 25k-roids)

Normally our mining ops have 8 to 12 ships. Two or three hulks, a retriever or two, and a smattering of cruisers, and occasionally orca support. Today however there were four of us with a total of six ships, and nothing bigger than a mining cruiser (and of course an indy for hauling). So, any idea how long it takes to go through that much ore? A blinkin' long time.

Now this was a particularly annoying op. The mission, of course, had an acceleration gate which meant we couldn't just warp to the roids, instead we activated the gate and landed 60 klicks from the roids! And my Osprey is slow, only 167 m/s. And our haulers are all slow too, though Dog had an AB on his and was able to reach about 300 m/s. Still, all that ore was 1,296,000 m3 which is a lot of trips in indies. I wasn't hauling much, but in my Bestower which moves about 19,000 m3 it would be 68 trips!

So to help our haulers out I jumped in a [[Condor]] named "Speed Tractor", specially fit (out of random parts) for the sole purpose of moving full jetcans from the miners down to the warp in point. It had an [[1MN Afterburner I]], 2x[[Small Tractor Beam I]], 1x[[Salvager I]]. With a top speed using the AB of just under 1000 m/s it worked great for zipping out to a couple of full cans, throwing the tractors on them, and dragging them back to the warp in point. It was also nice in that without the AB it moved 486m/s, just slower than the tractors, meaning I didn't lose the cans I was pulling. This made it much easier for the haulers as they didn't have to travel 60km everytime to pick up a load of ore.

The op went quite well other than having very few pilots, in the end it meant about 8-9 hours of mining. It started with four of us mining, 3x[[Osprey]] and a 1x[[Sythe]]. Eventually the Sythe pilot left and we were joined by a [[Cormorant]] with a relatively low SP pilot, only 5x[[XeCl Drilling Beam I]]. After 5 or 6 hours we finally got joined by a [[Hulk]] and a [[Mackinaw]] which helped speed up the remaining rock crushing. Luckily my POD was equipped with various entertainment devices to pass the time. All in all a good day and lots of points earned for our monthly payout.

Saturday, December 5, 2009

[OOC] EVE Words Update

So I've put some more work into my EVE Words code. I changed it to use the Evelopedia instead of eve.wikia because wikia was missing some things, as well as the Evelopedia has systems, constellations, and regions. Killboards point to battleclinic. Here is an example of what EVE Words does, and you can download the current version here.


While Composing Blog
Displayed
-- Items --
[\[Giant Secure Container]]
[\[Antimatter Charge S]]
[[Giant Secure Container]]
[[Antimatter Charge S]]
-- Kill Boards --
Player:
Corp:
Alliance:
Killmail:
[\[player-kb:Lord Troutinator]]
[\[corp-kb:Goonfleet]]
[\[alliance-kb:Goonswarm]]
[\[km:8236534]]
[[player-kb:Lord Troutinator]]
[[corp-kb:Goonfleet]]
[[alliance-kb:Goonswarm]]
[[km:8236534]]
-- Locations --
System:
Constellation:
Region:
[\[sys:Itamo]]
[\[const:Ruomo]]
[\[region:The Forge]]
[[sys:Itamo]]
[[const:Ruomo]]
[[region:The Forge]]

Friday, December 4, 2009

[OOC] EVE Words "Plugin"

Today I wrote a little javascript that allows the use of what I'm calling "eve words", think kind of like wiki words, and replaces them with links to the appropriate site. For instance, if in my blog post I wrote "[\[Kestrel]]" it would get turned into this link "[[Kestrel]]" which directs you to the proper page on eve.wikia.com! I chose double square brackets for a few reasons, one, they are easy to type, no shift needed, two, you aren't likely to ever have double brackets normally in your text so things won't be accidentally replaced by the script, three, if a user has javascript disabled they don't look bad as just text.

I plan on adding a few more things to it, such as being able to specify a character link to battleclinic, such as "[\[Lord Troutinator]]", but that's a bit down the road. If I get enough interest (read comments on this post) I'll be sure to share the code with the eve-blogger community.