Cyno Things

I'm a regular user of cynosural fields to move ships and goods from high sec to low sec and vice versa. Cyno's are a pain sometimes and, since Rhea, the extended nature of the chain I need to use makes things very frustrating when I only have so many accounts.

Ready to Jump

One of my biggest annoyances is that if you join a fleet, that has an active cyno, you cannot use it..The Jump To menu remains empty of the cyno that you want to use.

I had this last night, if I'd been able to join a fleet that had an active cyno and use it I would have saved so much time instead I had to wait for my cyno's to finish each time and then I could light a new one for the newly joined fleet character.

What should have taken 20 minutes, maximum, ended up taking me just over an hour to move several capital ships and cargo 14 light years.

It Must Be Stacked

If you have a cyno-alt you should have encountered, at least once, the issue where your Liquid Ozone must be stacked as one. You cannot have the fuel in two or more stacks in the cargo bay. If you do then you are told that there is not enough fuel to light the cyno even though the required amount is present.

This catches me out quite often and I'm starting to load fuel into my cyno ships and using Stack All before I undock.

It's a small thing but its bloody frustrating.

And Another Thing

And fuck you to those low sec pilots who love to shoot unarmed and harmless cyno characters. Keep padding your killboards guys because your killboard statistics are vitally important to feel good due to your small penises.

Planning for Rhea

We're just a couple of days away from the release of Rhea and with it the new Bowhead ship transporter. This is a ORE produced capital class vessel and, as with previous ORE vessels, the BPO has only been seeded in ORE space and cannot be bought from NPC suppliers in Empire space.

I was not in a position to take advantage of this when the Noctis was released but I am now so why not guy a couple of BPO's and get them shipped to Jita, within hours of the release of Rhea, and make a decent profit from selling to those that do not (or cannot) source them from ORE stations in Outer Ring.

All Your Assembled Ships Are Belong To Me

So I had a word with Bex and suggested the idea to him and he's spent the past couple of weeks looking for a way to get in and out with the BPOs whilst avoiding the station campers and/or gate camps on the way to high sec.

Plan

On Saturday Bex told me he'd come up with an idea but needed some help getting the ship he wanted to use to the system in Outer Ring. I asked for some more information, OpSec prevents me sharing the full details now, and it was quite ingenious and far better than the plan i thought he'd come up with.

My task was simple, I needed to move a character who could use a cyno to a station in 4C-B7X so he could jump in the needed ships and modules. Quite simple but this was space I was unfamiliar with and would need me to travel through systems that, according to DotLan and zKillboard, were regaularly gate camped.

Into The Breach

A little bit of investigation led me to the high sec system of Orvolle in Placid which I determined as the best starting point for my journey. It had a direct connection to null sec Syndicate  that would lead directly to 4C-B7X.

Checking the ingame map for pilots active in the last 30 minutes showed that there were three systems along the way where i should expect probable gate camps which I confirmed using zKillboard and saw the kills for the past couple of days.

One thing I did before I confirmed my route was to check all NPC stations along the route I was going to take for Medical services. If they had them I would dock up and move my medical clone to this location so I would not have to do the entire route again.

So I jumped in my pod (no need to take a ship as I could buy the fuel and cyno module where I was heading) and immediately wished I had trained interceptors on my cyno alts.

The Journey

I needed to travel through six systems in Syndicate and eight systems Outer Ring to get to my destination. 14 jumps through very hostile space.

Route Taken

I warped to the PF-346 gate and my journey was started. Orvolle gate was clear and I made sure to bounce to a celestial and then to the next gate which, I saw, had a drag bubble on it that would have pulled me off the gate had I warped directly.

One jump, so far so good.

After bouncing in FD-MLJ I landed on gate to see two ships. "My first gate camp" I thought as I jumped through. It took a couple of seconds but the grid in X-M2LR loaded and I saw a Sabre on the gate and before I could do anything an interdiction probe appeared and the dreaded bubble appeared.

My first thought was I was screwed and I'd wake up in my clone in Orvolle and have to start the journey again. But regardless I selected a moon and spammed the warp button and was overjoyed to see the bubble stop short of my pod, quite literally by only a few hundred metres I'd estimate, and I entered warp! Luck was on my side and I had appeared just outside of the diameter of the interdiction probe.

I expected to be chased but after I jumped through my next waypoint I saw I was not and proceeded to the next system that had a station so I could update my medical clone location!

The rest of the trip was uneventful, I stopped three more times to update my clone location. Saw a few people in local in most systems but the gates were clear of drag bubbles and ships. I still made sure to bounce to moons before landing on gates and it added a few seconds to the stay in each system but it would, if there was trouble, save my pod.

Eventually I entered 4C-B7X and warped to the first ORE station I clicked on. My medical clone location was updated and, with the free rookie ship I got on docking, I bought the cyno module and fuel for one use. I waited until the system quieted down and lit the cyno, bought in the needed ships/modules for Bex and then jump cloned my cyno alt back to her home system.

Lessons Learnt

I have taken two lessons away from this trip:

• Having cyno alts with Cynosural Theory V really saved me, I doubt I would have made it all the way to 4C from high sec in a rookie ship with cargo expanders. 
• I cannot stress how important learning how to "bounce" between celestials and gates is. I really should have been doing that when I lost this pod earlier this year.

I'm hoping we can get BPO's out of the system pretty fast after Rhea is released but its all dependant on downtime.

It's been a long day, perhaps time to retire

My monitoring program has told me that I need to empty a number of silos in my towers because they will be full in less than 22 hours. The 22 hours finishing when I'll be at work and unable to do anything.

I've put it off since I got the notification around 2pm today because I've been having much fun "learning to scan properly" with a character in a WH (lots of signatures mean lots of practice). I also had to move a cyno toon to a station in Outer Ring in prepartion for moving a couple of characters there to try to (oh lol) harvest High Grade Harvest implants via LP missions. The 14 jumps from high sec to the station were eventual, and I finally used what my CEO has been teaching me when moving around unknown systems, and I'll probably do a post on that tomorrow.

Anyway, I've been emptying silos and I think its time to go to bed. I've emptied the same silo FOUR times now, warping to the tower, offlining the silo and then well I was sure I moved the contents to my cargohold but it appears I didn't.

I'm off to bed afer a shit of a day in RL but a positively fun one in-game.

Screwing my Logistics Chain for a night

Fool Me Once

 

I ran into an embarrassing situation last night, I had to move a JF full of product from null sec to high sec using my secondary JF character. Only I couldn't because the mid-point cyno toon is on the same account as the JF character, so I spend nearly an hour moving another character twenty or so jumps so he can jump out. Yet I run into the same problem again because where as I used to use the Jump Beacons in Providence for the final jump now I cannot because I don't live there anymore.

 

Dammit.

 

 

Fool Me Twice

 

I wasted a couple of hours messing around getting a cyno toon, modules and fuel to the right station and then, to compound my stupidity, I didn't have enough fuel in the JF to make the final jump and had to borrow 30m ISK to buy enough fuel to finish the jump.

And of course as I undocked some NA. guy decided to try to bump me off station with a Cynabal... but I eventually made it to high sec and safe'd up in a station whilst I went off and did something else to calm down.

 

Fixing the Fool

 

After I logged off last night I spent some time considering my options as my plan is to use a second JF on this run as I have the need for it. Unfortunately 'as-is' I do not have the cyno alts on the right characters to be able to do this.

 

In order to be able to do it I'll need to repurpose a PI character into a combined PI/cyno toon and make sure they have two jump clones (at least). This will give me the flexibility to have two JF characters active at the same time and allow me to be able to move nearly 700,000m3 at a time from null sec to high sec.

 

I was going to utilise the PLEX for Training scheme but thinking further the character that the PI toon is currently on doesn't need to be training concurrently as he's just finishing up "nice to have skills" and a 30/60 delay on these won't be an impact for him.