I have awaken!

“My clone has lain dormant for a very long time. I’m sure everyone has forgotten about me. But alas I awake.
…
The time has come for New Eden to see that I have teeth.”

I wake in the dark musty clone labs of a Home Guard station in [[sys:Kino]]. Something is wrong. It’s dark and quite. I can’t hear the low study thrum of the clone vats. What has happened? Using what little strength I have I brace my palms against the vat’s lid and push. With the last ounce of strength in my atrophied frame I hear a creek, then a groan and the lid comes free. Sitting up I stare into the darkness and inhale deeply. The air is damp and musty sending me into a coughing fit. Once that has settled down I swing my legs over the edge of the bed and unsteadily make my way to my feet.  On trembling legs I make way to the only light I see, a distant door control. The only glimmer of home I have is that its gentle amber glow means there is still power left to open the door.

I have returned! It turns out some beurecrat though they’d save few ISK and shutdown a few “unused” clone vat bays. Well the engineer in charge of actually throwing the switch was drunk to high heaven off of some Jovian wine and powered down the wrong bay. Apparently I’m one of the few survivors of the incedent. I guess I should count myself lucky. Now that I’m awake its time to pick off where I left off. The screen dims as the conversation is terminated. I’ve just finished telling my … associate … to begin to sell off the stocks of supplies left from before. He too survived the same ordeal as me….what are the odds. Regardless, we are both back and both ready to begin anew. He informed me that most of his buy orders were fullfilled in our absence so we have quite a stock of random things sitting in [[sys:Jita]] just waiting to be sold. This is good as our coffers will need some padding. Now to finish planning my return.

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.

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.

[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]]

[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.

Low Sec Hauling Can Be Profitable, But Also Costly

2012-03-14 -- Reviewing my log entries made prior to my absence I have discovered several left in a draft state and have published them. Unfortunately this one did not recover completely.

It started out as a normal day for me. I had recently discovered a program to install in my POD to help in my hauling endeavors. With a little work it would plot the best routes and pick the best commodities to make a profit off of moving goods around in my trusty [[ship:Bestower]].
...
I was under attack immediately after jumping into the system
...
Should have known low-sec was a bad idea
...
The [[km:8349299][loss]] set me back probably more than the profit of the past few runs
...
One of the guys in [[corp-kb:IDT]] was nice enough to send me a few ISK to replace my ship. Always nice to have friends.

Betrayle Hurts, and Lost Me an Osprey

2012-03-14 -- Reviewing my log entries made prior to my absence I have discovered several left in a draft state and have published them.

Today would be the day I learned that New Eden is a dark and lonely place, full of evil and vile beings.

I have been in [[corp-kb:New Interstellar Order]] for a little while now and was excited to join them on a corp mining op, even if it was rather early for me. I had accustomed myself to a clock where my piloting begins around 0:00 EVE-time during the week and maybe 15:00 EVE-time on the weekends. However, our mining op was at 13:00 EVE time, a couple hours ealier than I really wanted to be up, but I wanted to be part of the corp so I got up early and headed to my POD to start some mining.

Things went smoothly for awhile until a [[Myrmidom]] warped in. We didn't think to much about it as it was highsec, so he wasn't likely to jump us out right, but instead he can flipped us. And that is what started a series of unfortunate events that almost lead to me foresaking the life of capsuleer to go back to a life on solid ground.

You see the world is full of people who live off other's tears. That have no other goal in life but to anger and frustrate other people and just generally be jerks. I understand there is some allure to espionage, but being a traitor just to be a jerk is low and dirty. There are no rules of engagement for morality, CONCORD doesn't show up insta-gib capsuleers for being scum. They should, but they don't.

Now I have no problems with pirates, if I wander into low-sec its at my own pearl. I'm even okay with can flipping, after all CONCORD gives me permission to attempt to exact vengeance on the theif, but I don't have to and they can only steal what is in a jetcan, which after all, we knew was a possible outcome. So where is this all coming from? Well, back to the story.

As I was saying we were mining along and [[Myrmidom]] piloted by [[player-kb:Neekoon Trabird]] warps in. He glides on over to one of our cans and flips it. "Well, thats just great," I though to myself. One of the corp pilots had his own myrm in system so [[player-kb:Crimson Slash]] went and fetched it from a near by station. After warping back he engaged the enemy, well, lets just say that it didn't go so [[player-kb:8265236][great]].