Zero Gravity Geology

Friday, 4 July 2014

Ganking with a Supercarrier post Kronos

I logged in last night and saw a friend that I haven't seen for a while and before we could share any pleasantries he put this kill mail under my nose:

https://zkillboard.com/kill/39849856/

A couple of months ago he stopped playing because he moved back to his home country and alas he was missed but it's good to see him back and up to his old tricks.

A beautiful, but deadly, example of Gallente Engineering

The kill isn't great but what I was more most interested in was the comment he made that the damage he did on the Rhea from his Nyx was ONE salvo from his deployed fighters.

Kronos Changes

As part of the recent Kronos release, there were major changes to drones and these, in part, affected Fighters and Fighter Bombers:

Drone skills now affect F/FB attributes
Drone modules now affect F/FB attributes
Drone Interfacing now gives a 10% not 20% damage increase per level
Base F/FB damage reduced
Reduce deployed F/FBs per racial carrier level from 3 to 1
F/FB volume doubled (5000m3 to 10,000m3)
F/FB hit points doubled (they're more hardy now)
Super carriers receive a 100% bonus to F/FB damage

This means that carriers/super carriers will not be able to store and deploy as many F/FB's compared to before Kronos, but the base damage and hardiness increases and you'll be able to increase the damage and other attributes via Drone Modules and/or Skills.

Adding drone specific modules to a fit should certainly benefit the ship, the increase in attributes such as mwd speed, optimal range etc.. but more importantly, the amount of damage done. Drone skills should also provide a smaller benefit, certainly racial specialisation skills will add between 2% and 10% more damage per F/FB but better still the Navigation and Durability skills will make F/FB faster and harder to kill.

The Kill

The Rhea pilot had previously cyno'd into the system twice before, being caught once but escaping the other time, he was getting caught because he lit a badly located cyno on one of the system stations.

Pack up your troubles in one ship just don't lose it when you jump

This mistake (a very common one with cyno's) allowed the Deimos to bump him away from station and prevent him docking, once off station the Nyx was called in and the story bought to a swift end.

As I said previously, the comment from my friend that the majority of the damage from the Nyx came in just one "cycle" of the deployed fighter bombers , thus minimising the time he was "in the open". Ten highly buffed FB's must have put out a tremendous amount of damage, I've seen ganks before and that required several cycles from the FB's to kill even a jump freighter.

What was different now for this, was it the fit or the increase in skills?

The Fit

My friend linked his fit so I was able to see how he was fit to increase the damage he was doing, and it was quite a fit to do over the damage he said in one volley.

Three Drone Control Units modules in his high slows, each of these allows 1 extra fighter/fighter bomber to be used.
In the mid slots he had two drone navigation computer II's and two Federation Navy Omni-Directional Tracking modules without scripts to increase f/fb base statistics
The low slots he had the a mix of tank modules with four Federation Navy Drone Damage Amplifiers.

The type of F/FBs used do make little difference to the damage that is done but regardless 13 of them is some serious firepower.

Fitting Theory

I'm not an expert with the numbers or how the game actually works. What I present are details as I've found them (and/or researched) and reactions by myself and anyone else involved. If you find an error, please write a comment and correct me.

I've previously played with Nyx fittings and one I had with no drone modules was reported by Pyfa (with a maximum skilled pilot) would be able to put out 9000 dps with a full set of 20 FB's.

Keying in the details above, into a Kronos released Pyfa, and modifying the skills the pilot had to match those I know the Nyx pilot had I saw that this increased by 62% to a little over 14,000 using 13 FB's. Changing the type of FB used and even using a mix of F/FB's did alter the dps but it ranged from 11,000 to 14,500 depending on the F/FB's used.

Conclusion

Wow.

The changes in Kronos seem to indicate, with this type of fit, that a 62% increase in damage from F/FB's may be seen. That is quite astounding. Of course different skill levels, FB's used and the defenses of the ship you're attacking will change this but still, that is a huge amount of firepower for a single ship.

To me this shows that the Super carrier changes in Kronos haven't hurt the ship to the effect many were speculating and they still are a very potent and dangerous entity in New Eden.

People who have them now have a very potent and dangerous vessel, so they should they cost enough. But with the changes to industry coming on the 22nd July 2014 with the next release it could very well see the price of these ships rise by 10% of more.

Wednesday, 2 July 2014

Would you like PI with that?

I've continued to procrastinate on PI since my post last week but I have made small headway towards getting past this by doing some research and reading up on the finer points of setting up production planets.

I've still got more to read, I wish more people shared their setups and production schedules as seeing real examples really helps me learn, but I've know the following:

what planets I have available to me
what characters and skills they have
no idea of what I can produce

I also really need to pay attention to my Factories and make sure I'm keeping them running at full capacity. This means making sure I know how much input I need and produce at least that amount elsewhere in plenty of time for my production planets running at full speed.

Planets

I try to keep all my PI actions within one system, this simplifies my logistics but also the increased security I get because I'm not flying between systems with cargo. An additional benefit is the system I'll be in has several friendly POS setup which I can make use of both to share cargo (the characters I have are in not all in the same corporation)

I have the following planet types available to me:

Barren
Ice
Lava
Gas

The lack of Plasma and Storm planets really limits my P4 production possibilities, I could use Gas/Barren or lava to make up the difference but with the characters I have I'd rather maximize what I can produce.

I'm going to setup production planets, that is planets dedicated to producing the final goods from intermediate materials that are produced on other characters and planets.

Characters

I have six characters available for PI in my chosen system. All have reasonably high skills in Planetary Interaction and can all fly the the same racial industry ships. Each character has, at minimum, Interplanetary Consolidation to Level 4 and CCU Level 4.

Available characters PI skill levels

I really should spend a little time training them all to have Advanced Planetary to Level 3 at least and at some point I really should get them all to CCU 5 and IC 5 but this is what I have and it does give me the ability to have production spread over a total of 30 planets.

Production

Deciding what to produce using my planets has proven much harder than I thought. Originally I thought I'd make POS fuels because that's always been a good seller and I've done well with them over the years.

However everyone who does PI seems to make POS fuel components and the margins aren't great, especially as in order to do well I'd need to figure jump fuel into my costs. I did some more research but was getting nowhere so I decided what I needed to do was look at the price per item in Jita and then see what the 30 day average volume was in order to better see what would be profitable and what would not.

So I came up with this:

PI options with pricing and 30 day volume information

It shows the PI materials I can produce from Base to P4 along with the item price and 30 day volume. I've highlighted in purple the POS fuel PI for reference and looking at the 30d volume you can certainly see its a good item to make should you wish too, but I don't (if I can avoid it).

I'm ignoring Base, P1 and P4 PI items (P1 because profits are small and P4 because it's a low profit/volume item) so I need to find one or two item in P2/P3 that I can make.

There are a few of items in P2 that stand out as interesting and two P3's that will warrant further investigation for me.

Further Investigation

I'm not going to say for now what they are until I've run further investigation and worked out what my margin's will be.

My further investigation uses the Planetary Interaction Diagram to see what I need and how complex any manufacturing chain will be. The more chains I need the more maintenance my manufacturing will need and I don't want to be doing PI daily, I want two to three day cycling for optimum return.

Monday, 30 June 2014

Know Your Scams: Contracts for Fitted Ships

Setup

The scammer sets up a contract that appears to contain the modules and support items (e.g. Mining Crystals, Drones etc..) for an Orca in a mining support role. The contract is priced very competitively when you take into account the price of the ship, modules and any extra items.

Example contract setup

The scammer will then actively advertise the deal in Local with the contract linked with some favourable information on the contract.

Local advertisement by known scamming character

What Happens Now

The mark clicks the link in Local, sees what appears to be a really good deal and clicks Accept.

Look closely at a scam contract and you'll see one thing is missing, the modules are present are as all additional support items but the critical item, the Orca, is no listed.

The scammer is relying on the mark not checking the details in the contract under You Will Get, by putting often used modules and items they are hoping that they won't notice the lack of Orca.

Variations

There is another variation of this where instead of the missing Orca you will see one of the following:

A large General Freight Container renamed to Orca
An Orca blueprint copy

Regardless the scam is still the same, there is no Orca ship so you're overpaying for what is there under the belief that the contract is for an Orca with mining support accessories.

How Can You Protect Yourself

Spend a little time reading the details of the contract closely will help you. Verify that the green text shows you receiving what you're expecting. This type of contract implies a ship with rigs and fit, so verify not just that you can see the fit and rigs but also the ship is there.

If you see a contract make sure you block both the issuer AND the person who advertises the contract (they could be different).

Friday, 27 June 2014

Know Your Scams: Index

Overview

This is the Index page for the Know Your Scams series, as I add new scam posts I'll link them here to this index page so you only have to bookmark the one location.

You may know but there is almost certainly a player, new or old, who doesn't. This page is for those that don't know but want to know.

Posts

Posts without links are scheduled for release in the near future.

Rules To Remember

The trap cannot be far away...

Rule #1: In Jita, anything that appears in Local is a scam

Rule #2: See Rule #1

Your experiences at other trade-hubs may vary but I find that these two Rules work extremely well in any system that has a Local channel.

Feedback

If you have any feedback about a post (or posts) please leave it as a comment on the post, if I'm wrong or am out of date I will take the time to update my post. Your feedback is appreciated and valued.

If you have suggestions for new posts on scams in EVE Online please leave a comment on this post.

Loving and Loathing PI

I both love and loath Planetary Interaction.

I love it for the passive income it generates and the setup of the planets/systems really appeals to my OCD loving brain.

That said I do not like the process to setup planets, the lack of tools to test and theorise PI setup (think EVEMon or something more graphically orientated) but most importantly the time it takes to setup more than 1 character to produce anything.

I really shouldn't complain, I know a lot of people have more characters to deal with and have it much worse. One of my friends had 16 or so characters to setup when he moved to a new alliance in null sec. He managed to do it without, much complaint, so why am I procrastinating about this.

Anyone able to suggest good webistes and/or guides for setting up and running PI?

Monday, 23 June 2014

Distracted

Had to attend a birthday party on Saturday and whilst I thought I'd be home by early evening I wasn't actually home til after 11pm. Great party as I got to see people I haven't spoken to since New Years Eve but it did mean most of the weekend was away from EVE Online.

Caught Out

The travelling on Saturday meant I had reduced EVE time and it didn't help that the Steam Summer Sale is on as well. I was gifted a new game and have been enjoying that instead of logging into EVE... it feels like I've cheated on EVE Online :\

But that said, I did update a few things over the weekend and made sure my "minuscule empire" was ticking along, even managed to get around 30,000 LP from missions so it wasn't a wasted time.

Remember the basics

I did forget to empty my towers though, inputs were fine but I needed to empty the output material silos last night (Sunday) but I forgot and only did it this morning about 9 hours over due from the extra moon goo I now have.

Aside from those things it is still very much quiet, the war that my fellow alliance mates are waging against "the insidious pirate gang" who live in the next system over is continuing and I'm making new friends in the "pirate corporation" which is both amusing and confusing at the same time.

Know Your Scams

I'm going to be finishing up the remaining Know Your Scams posts. I've been waiting on a lot of screenshots and scanning through Jita local for new or variations scams but I think I've got the major ones sorted. The KYS will be updated as new or interesting ones come along and I'll be putting an index page once I'm finished (for now).

Industry Posts

I'm updating a lot of my external spreadsheets at the moment, simplifying forumlas and also verifiying (where I can) that the data is still accurate. Once I'm happy with what I have I'll be doing a series of posts on my spreadsheets and releasing access to all of them so you too can utilize the knowledge I've gained and how I management my "minuscule empire".

Feedback

I get some feedback via comments and a lot more via in-game mails but I would really like more, are there posts you like to see more of or want to just tell me I'm wrong about something please leave a comment. It also helps me know that people do read what I'm posting and it's not just me that reads it too....

Thursday, 19 June 2014