Comfortable research

I’ve rejoined New Eden Research after building up Mundilfari Station in Vorsk, so if anyone needs highly-available research facilities of any sort, we can help. Corporations can join NER (including subsidiary corporations) and use the material research labs for 15k ISK/hour, or production efficiency labs for free. Copying and invention will require other arrangements. Send me a message and we can work them out.

Putting up a large tower, lots of labs, and requisite defense in case of war took a good bit of time and ISK. Fortunately, my trading efforts keep paying off well, and I have a good system in Heimatar so that I don’t have to spend too much time on it. Once NER gets going, I expect that the tower will at least pay for its own fuel costs. As an added benefit, I have copy slots available for my own use at all times, and all the research (including invention) goes a lot faster. Dedicated facilities really make a difference.

I also did a bit more exploration, primarily clearing out a few facilities hidden in cosmic anomalies near Vorsk as well as poking at some Angel Cartel datacenters and such. That actually reminds me, I need to jump back down to Curse so that I can visit with my research staff in the Cartel labs and keep our arrangements down there going. I know I have something of an inconsistent arrangement, so I’ll need to address that soon. Maybe.

Fiction contests

Silver Night has graciously decided to sponsor an EVE fiction contest:

Just write a short piece of Eve fiction. The contest will run 3 weeks from the time of this post. Submit your story in this thread (Either the story itself or a link to it). Winners will be picked by me at the end of the submission period.

He has several other requirements, including that the story not center on a capsuleer. First prize? A faction battleship with a 300m ISK fitting stipend… and the runner-up prizes look nearly as good. But beware that he has high standards. Check out his Syndicate Files story (written with Ciarente Roth) for what I mean.

As a side note, you still have time (but not much!) to get into Evemonkey’s February contest, with a Dramiel prize up for grabs.

New Eden Research returns

I got confirmation of great news this weekend: New Eden Research has returned. Essentially, corporations can join the alliance to use research labs with much better availability. However, due to CONCORD regulations, alliance members can only use material and productivity research labs (not copying or invention).

I do like to think that this new, resurgent NER will fare better than the previous incarnation. We’ll see.

Cohost for Missions Collide Episode 9

I recently (okay, three weeks ago) appeared on Missions Collide Episode 9, which you can now download. We talk about some UI stuff, EVE news and tips relating to carebears, leadership skills, and lots of other interesting bits. Somehow we went to a full 84 minutes, which in retrospect probably came out a bit longer than healthy for hosts or listeners. But please go listen, and keep pestering Boris Hotch to come back. If you have any other feedback, we’d love to hear it.

Back in Ecliptic Rift

It’s done. I’ve closed the Back Alley Trading Company and set up in Ecliptic Rift again. I’ve opened another office and this week should see me starting to get my operations moving.

Watch this space…

Closing up Back Alley Trading Company

Due to various business and personnel reasons, the Back Alley Trading Company [BKAT] will close up shop and liquidate. This process has already begun and communication has been sent to all current employees.

At this point, most of the pilots have moved out to W-space as part of the Syndicate Special Operations Division [SSOD], a corporation within the same alliance (United Trade Syndicate, [TRAMP]) as the Company.

Why will the company close?

I won’t discuss every factor here, primarily because several of them have to do with the private and personal matters of other pilots. Out of respect for their privacy, then, I’ll set those aside, except to say that plans didn’t work out for them as well as they’d hoped, either.

But in general, when BKAT joined TRAMP, we split the combat wing and most exploration off to a new corp, SSOD, under the leadership of Chainer Cygnus and a team he assembled. As it turned out, most BKAT pilots went there, leaving only a few in this corp. Most of the remaining pilots have not had the opportunity to fly as much as they’d like, dealing with planetside issues. Rather than try to rebuild the corp in this particular state, then, I decided to close it. Only one other pilot owns shares, and he will receive an appropriate payout for their value.

I may write in the future about additional lessons learned, but not right now.

What does this mean for you?

I don’t have any intention to retire, certainly. I have short-term plans I will announce once BKAT fully closes, but I intend to remain in Republic space for now and will continue many of the same activities in which I have participated for some time. These plans do include continuing to fly with the United Trade Syndicate.

However, I do not intend to rebuild a new industrial corp right now and will fly solo (in the context of a corp). In the long run, who knows?

I count every single pilot who’s flown with BKAT as a friend and look forward to future operations with TRAMP pilots, including those in SSOD.

Freshening the blog design

I felt like I wanted to freshen things up a little bit, so I updated to the Station theme for Wordpress. Actually, this site and the front page for the Back Alley Trading Company swapped themes for various thematic reasons (and that one will continue to undergo heavy work for a few days). I’ve also added a favicon and a new header graphic, simplified a few widgets, and taken care of other minor administrative updates.

Let me know if you notice anything wrong or broken, and of course I’d appreciate any of your feedback and constructive criticism…

Image credit The Shane H

Launch of the Zephyr

In case you’ve missed it, CCP announced a new holiday gift shuttle, the “Zephyr“. (Nothing at that link yet but that should change soon). And props for including wallpaper-sized screenshots (go see them)!

But why should we care? Shuttles don’t do anything, right?

It has its own special probe launcher (for wormholes) and Sleeper NPC‘s won‘t shoot it in the same way that all NPCs won‘t shoot pods.

This means that we’ve got a custom-built ship perfect for scouting wormhole sites. Now, the covops frigates already did this, but they could get decloaked and destroyed. Anybody who’s spent any time in wormholes knows how that feels.

A few other thoughts: will it have an absurdly low signature radius? (Perhaps.) Any cargo hold? (I assume so, for the probes, though I hope they didn’t build it with a dedicated bay.) Will non-Sleeper NPCs actually ignore it, too? (If we’re lucky.) Can I fit a salvager on it? (Almost certainly not.)

The mind races with the potential.

Image credit seriykotik1970 (statue by Antonio Corradini)

BKAT chat room

Anybody interested in chatting out-of-game with Back Alley Trading Company members (or just amongst yourselves, I’ll give you a topic ) can come check out our webified room.

Construction through colonization

Colonies depend on towers

For a long time, I’ve dreamed of a world without centralized power structures. A world where people work together in an effort to build something new, with their efforts rewarded with freedom and liberty.

My dream just took another step on the road to reality with the establishment of a starbase for the Back Alley Trading Company in a wormhole system.

Granted, it took a bit to find our foothold. We’d spent several days scouting every wormhole we could find, looking for a place that met our criteria. One of my scouts found a promising connection in the Khanid region, but a couple of other pod pilots had gotten there already for a quick raid. I vectored in another scout and raced across 17 jumps to reach it myself in my Drake.

A Maller and Myrmidon evidently paid no attention while my scouts stalked them, so when I arrived, I had a scout give me a warp-in point. I landed on the grid and started spewing missiles from range. Of course, we didn’t have any warp disruption on them from that range and didn’t want to use covops frigates for that purpose, so they fled back to K-space. In reality, while I wouldn’t have minded a kill or two, this accomplished our primary tactical goal of clearing the system. I had little intention of actually destroying their ships (though I would have done so if they’d chosen to engage).

When I chased them back into Ashi, the wormhole closed behind me, with my scouts still inside. Perfect.

We hurriedly arranged logistics while they probed out a new entrance and set up our starbase. We’ve already cleared out quite a bit of Sleeper activity, plus some gas clouds. I left pod for a while and came back to find that my associates had lost a couple of barges due to not watching their directional scanners or staying aligned. As I told them, I don’t mind losses, but I do mind losses from which they learn no lessons. I think they got the point… actually, I know they got the point.

A few other lessons I learned: in tower management, you can choose which roles can perform various tasks on specific structures in the base. The settings for Ship Management Arrays and Corporate Management Arrays have selections for Starbase Fuel Technician, Config Starbase Equipment, Corporation, and Alliance. I set those to Corporation and then created a title, “W-space Pilot”, for the folks out there that gave them access to the proper hangars and such. This lets everyone do their jobs without having the ability to take the whole thing offline themselves. Security matters, and I’ve learned paranoia in my years as a podder. (Fortunately, I had a consultant come in and help us with the organization, so we have the needed bureaucracy already in place to grow quite a bit.)

Also, if you want your tower to shoot at neutrals, you need to set the defense AI to target anyone below 0.1, not the default 0.0. Obvious in hindsight but I just did too many things at once.

Later we’ll move to a system with a higher rating, but for now, this system gives us a great opportunity to work out the kinks in our operation and get some of the newer pilots accustomed to flying in space without CONCORD’s paternalistic protection.