Ecliptic Rift

A video feed fades in. Casiella appears to sit perched on the edge of a cloud. She tries to smile but with little success.

Hi. I know we haven’t talked in a while. I, um… well, that’s my fault. I should have come say hello, at least, or let you know how or even where I was. Things just got, erm, complicated.

So, uh, where to begin. Right, well, I’m back in Republic space for now. I’ve been moving around a lot lately. Heimatar, Derelik, Curse… you probably won’t like hearing that, but I don’t really think we have much else to lose, right?

She takes in a deep breath as she closes her eyes. After holding it for a moment, she exhales and looks directly into the camera again.

You were right. Those bastards didn’t intend anything like I did. They weren’t my friends and they hadn’t really changed. After I got the hell out of there, maybe I got a little crazy. I did some things.

It doesn’t matter now. I can’t change all that and I’m not sure I should… because I don’t think I knew everything then that I know now. Damn sure I don’t know as much now as what I need to.

And that means, yes, I’m still working with people you won’t like. You can already guess who they are, but I don’t want to make you more upset. You just deserve to know, that’s all.

I swear to you, though, it’s all for good reasons. When I’m done, the world will be different. Better. Stronger.

Casiella pauses for a long time, sitting very still with slightly wet eyes.

Daddy would be proud if he knew what we were working on. I hope you’ll believe that.

I love you, Mom.

I wish I could say I did something interesting tonight, but I can’t because I really didn’t. Just bought and fit a Wolf assault ship, ran a couple of low-end plexes in Heimatar, then did some more starbase work. Even station spinning is more fun than that last bit. But at least I had a glass of whiskey and the EVE-Bloggers channel to keep me company…

So instead, I’ll just remind you to check out my EVE tumblelog where I post little stuff that doesn’t always make it here. As with everything else, I’d appreciate any comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism.

NB: This guide presents a very basic introduction to making ISK through trading. More detailed strategies are left as an exercise for the reader.

One of the least expected bits of the economy in New Eden is that you can often make a lot more ISK via trading than manufacturing. In part, this stems from the fact that we pod pilots can’t make everything – the so-called “named modules, for example – and so we have to feed the market demand. Other factors like convenience and lack of information can also come into play.

The age-old maxim to make money trading is “buy low and sell high“. This means that a lot of pilots spend hours scouring the market for goods whose lowest “sell” order is lower than the highest “buy” order. At first glance, this makes sense, but in reality very few goods have this sort of imbalance. Generic trade goods will have this property at times; the margins, however, often mean you could make a lot more ISK elsewhere. At any rate, those sorts of routes disappear as quickly as they appear.

So, instead, the trick is to reverse that with your own orders. Set up buy orders high enough to bring in goods but low enough that you can resell the items at a decent margin. Your buy orders should cover mission hubs so that you get a constant supply of goods. Generally speaking, you’ll want to set your sell orders in trade hubs, at least when you get started.

Here’s an instructive example. In the Minmatar Republic, the best agent for the Republic Fleet is Vir Honn (level 4 quality 18) in Emolgranlan, which turns out to have a lot of mission-runners due in part to his presence. Minmatar battleships often rely on projectile weapons, particularly artillery, so we look at the market data for large artillery and see the data shown at right:

1200mm Scout Artillery market

Ignoring the one outlier (which will fill quickly), the highest buy order that will cover Emolgranlan is about 3.4m ISK. Yet the sale price in Rens is 3.7m, and in Lustrevik they go for 4.5m (though at lower volume as Rens gets far more traffic). That spread is where a trader makes his money. On the price history, notice that the volume tends to stay between 50 and 100 a day, so there’s enough to make a decent profit.

So set up a buy order a touch higher than the highest one there. Some traders work in increments of 0.01 ISK, while others prefer to compete with larger jumps. Remember, though, that you hurt your own margins first, and that the market will always fill the cheapest available sell order, so don’t set the increments too large.

Once you’ve bought a few, truck them over to your nearest trade hub. In the case of Emolgranlan, that might mean Lustrevik as mentioned, but your volume will improve tremendously (at a hit to your margins, of course) by running them a few more jumps over to Rens.

Trading has many more tricks, particularly when you trade skills like Margin Trading or learn more about the regions in which you’re trading. But the basic path comes down to this:

1. Find a commodity with sufficient spread and volume to generate profits proportional to the capital you will use.
2. Issue buy orders just above the highest that cover the area from which you want to buy.
3. Once your orders fill, pick up the items and transport them to trade hubs.
4. Issue sell orders just below the lowest in that hub.
5. ???
6. PROFIT!

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.

As I finally got some good time in-pod, I’ve put together a plan of action for the next few weeks. Mostly, it revolves around specific goals I want to achieve, some of which nest within each other. I have written this post as much to elucidate all this for myself as much as to generate conversation with pilots who have similar interests.

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While looking for data storage facilities in Heimatar last night, I ended up tracking down an Angel Provisional Outpost, sort of a way station for their smaller craft. Frigates and cruisers buzzed all around but couldn’t provide a real threat to the Dark Perigee II, a well-equipped passive-tank Drake and my flights of drones. After I entered their complex, the Angels sent several flights of reinforcements who never returned. I picked up what I could from their wreckage and kept going.

However, they’d built this outpost in a pocket of deadspace in low-sec, meaning I needed to keep a close eye on my surroundings to stay safe. In this sort of situation, my directional scanner is maybe the best tool I have. The non-podder ships don’t provide much of a threat, so I set the range to 1 AU and 360 degrees to see what lands close by. If a probe or (worse!) a recon ship show up, I’ll align to some warpable object and leave as soon as somebody comes into the area. This assumes I’ve reached a safe distance from the warp-in point. I’ll also align the camera drone back in the direction of the original gate and bring down the range to 15k km, scanning from time to time.

After I’d reached the last section of the complex, however, and happily let my drones and missiles clear away a large chunk of the frigates there, the scanner showed a Brutix and a Lachesis and another battlecruiser in that 15k range. At this point, I didn’t want to stick around just for the chance of an escalation, I aligned and warped out with no trouble. I guess I left a few wrecks behind for their troubles.

But when I cleared the gate into the next system, Gusandall, I saw an Ishkar and a Megathron belonging to the Mean Coalition and KenZoku sitting about 12k km away. This didn’t look good, as the Dark Perigee II‘s align time won’t break any records. They scrammed and webbed me pretty quickly after I started to align to the next gate, so I targeted the Ishkar who had already come under sentry gun fire and let my drones and missiles fly.

As you might expect, these didn’t do much more than scratch his armor, not even coming close to breaking his tank, and I lost the ship. I saved the pod, obviously (how do pilots lose these at low-sec gate camps?), issuing the warp command as the hull started to disintegrate around me. I made my way back to my forward operating base in Emolgranlan and informed Vikarion of the loss.

I just hope they picked up any surviving crew after I exchanged a few friendly words in the local podder comm channel with them. Sometimes you need to swallow your pride a little, even when it stings going down.

For the first time in a while, I saw a pirate, and fortunately this time it ended in a draw unlike last time.

I’d tracked down an Angel data site in Ingunn (Heimatar) and had completed my aggressive negotiations with the local staff when a solo Ishtar (I believe) piloted by Buschi showed up on my overview, complete with 5 Tech II drones. He approached me from about 60 km away. At the time, I had my exploration Drake and had not fit for PvP combat.

My position looked a little precarious as I had just started to enter a globular cluster of coral-shaped asteroids, but fortunately my vector nearly had me aligned to a nearby CreoDron station and I successfully warped out.

Note that, other than the minor frustration of having to leave research data behind, this actually ended up giving me a lot to think about. I did give the other pilot a “Nice try” on the local podder frequency, and when he invited me to return for the one can that remained, declined politely. More importantly, it got me thinking about possible alternative ways to help bring about the Revolution and the Dream.

Maybe Vikarion‘s belief in the necessity of violent revolution has some merit. While the White Rose Society doesn’t even begin to approach the militarism of our colleagues in Naqam, taking on podders who work for the corrupt power centers (including the various empire fleets) may actually help.

I’ll have to consult with some of my peers about this.

Casi drifted through a forgotten corner of low-sec, her Buzzard-class covert operations frigate cloaked and scanning. She’d gotten a weak sensor hit indicating some sort of data repository in the system, probably belonging to the Angel Cartel given her location in Heimatar.

She’d just finished deploying out her quest probes when some of the feeds started displaying some oddities.  First it started with market and transaction data updating only partially. This concerned her greatly due to the plays she had going.

Even more than that, though, her navigational data started losing all coherence. Nothing reconciled, and so her thrusters started sputtering as the automatic systems tried to find reference points and failed miserably. The loud banging that started emanating from the correlation processor registered only slightly lower on the scale.

She started to ask her corp-mates for assistance, but even that started to build up with static and she just managed a hasty “going offline” (and not even the full words) before everything shut down entirely.

The Buzzard went dark, somewhere in the depths of Heimatar low-sec. Casi could hear nothing in the ship, not even the silent thrum of the pod fluid pumps. And given how she was wired up at the moment, that meant she had something approaching zero sensory input of any sort. Long moments stretched into what felt like infinity as she contemplated a podder death, one that could override all the safeties that promised her near-immortality. No sudden pod destruction and no way to trigger one, just a slow suffocation somewhere between the stars.

A blinding flash announced the return of all systems. The amount of returning data flooding back through her implant threatened to completely overwhelm her. Safeties kicked in and queued up the data, triaging what she needed most so she could regain control.

Less than ten minutes had transpired in what she now thought of as her “near-death experience”.

Casiella sat peacefully in a small nondescript cafe in a quiet little station in a back corner of Heimatar. A steaming hot cup of coffee rested on the table in front of her, the only sound coming from a happy couple chatting nearby and the occasional beep from her security drone floating nearby.

She closed her eyes and reviewed recent data from various research projects. Industrial R&D on a number of ship designs to marginally improve efficiency, development on more effective small ship designs, and Project Sidereal Fusion. This last one concerned her slightly as progress hadn’t come as rapidly as she’d hoped, but it had accelerated during the last week or so and gave her hope. Casi made a mental note to personally check in on the security arrangements soon.

Taking a sip of her coffee, she noticed one of the baristas in the corner giving her the eye. Turning up one corner of her mouth in a wry grin, she closed her eyes and leaned back once more. Coffee had little effect on her metabolism, given what her implant could monitor and control, but she enjoyed savoring the taste of it and the heady memories of university it often brought back to her. Discussing the next revolution until all hours, theorizing what the cluster could look like if they could only succeed, and skewering the latest commentary from the holopundits, she and her comrades from those days had mostly drifted apart once her “pod potential,” as they’d called it, had come to light.

And so now here she was, running her research organization and plotting with the White Rose Society for the next stages of the Sansha Dream. She mused to herself that perhaps not much had changed: lots of people talked about “the revolution,” but few of them, including most of the people she knew now, actually worked to make it happen.

The time had arrived for change. And she intended to bring it.