I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

St Kilda suffers from an excess of personality.

So Vanguard went to shit. Un-yippee. Here’s what I’ve been playing instead.

http://www.eve-online.com/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eve_online

I wont talk about the game itself… that’d be boring. What I will do is give an example of an operation I’ve been developing within it.

Prospecting

Flying around in a cloaked ship in dangerous space, unloaking for just long enough to launch scan probes into moons. Some of the systems had 40+ moons so this took a while, even with a relatively agile Covert Ops frigate, which can warp from place to place while cloaked.

What was I looking for? Rare moon ores. Almost every moon (many per system, thousands of systems) in Eve has something you can harvest - atmospheric gases, silicate deposits, common metals… but most of these sell on the open market for very few InterStellar Kredits (isk). However, there are two very rare elements which are occasionally found on moons, one of which was selling at that point for about 2,700 isk per unit, and the other almost eight thousand.

What I found was three moons with technetium deposits - the second rarest, and easily the basis for a serious mining operation.

So how do you mine a moon? I’ll get to that. I was nowhere near up to it - I had a problem.

Diplomacy

Two of the moons had old, powered-down starbases anchored around them. In Eve, starbases have a gravity anchor that locks them into place in orbit around a moon, and prevents any other starbase from being anchored.

This meant I either had to destroy the starbases (which have millions of armour hitpoints, even without any fuel to run) or somehow convince the owner of the towers to peacefully remove them. They’re worth 350million each, so destroying them would be… somewhat nasty.

It would also take HOURS of play, even with three ships pounding away with all guns.

I noticed the corporation that owned the towers had three members in it and didn’t seem very active. On reflection I prepared a two-pronged strategy.

1) To contact the CEO of the corporation and request the towers be removed - promising to let him know when I got bored of mining the moons so he could have them back, while simultaneously

2) preparing everything I needed to destroy them.

It took over a week for him to reply at all, and I was literally poised to strike the same night his eve-mail returned. It was also noncomittal, just sorta “let’s discuss this”

On reflection, I decided to continue to negotiate. Two large towers add up to over 700million isk worth of assets… even for well-connected and experienced players that represents weeks of playing the game and saving up all your money.

It was another two weeks of real time before he finally mailed me to say he’d taken them down. In the end, I think this worked out for the best. I had to wait, but I’d achieved access to the moons with only one other person in the eve-universe knowing I had them, without making any enemies or doing any noisy shooting. Especially not hours of noisy shooting in pirate-infested space.

Setup and mining

Here’s where it gets really complicated. In order to mine resources from a moon you need a starbase anchored and fuelled, with a moon harvesting array online, connected to a silo for storing the ore, preferably by way of a coupling array so you can empty the silo without losing any ore being harvested.

And you need defenses. A small control tower costs ‘only’ a hundred million isk, but it also has a quarter of the shield strength (still millions). There are plenty of people in Eve who play the game just to destroy other people’s hard-earned assets, and these would jump at the chance to wreck my mining operations - cheerfully spending hours of their time and millions of their own isk on ammunition for little or no gain - except the satisfaction of making another human suffer and seeing something valuable destroyed.

Eve can be a dark, dark game.

The area of space I was setting up in was not only low security and full of pirates itself, it was on the wrong side of a notorious pirate bottleneck - a low-security (little to no police protection) system whose stargates (travel between solar systems in eve is mostly done with stargates) were often ‘camped’ by pirate gangs.

So it’s full of bad people. But also, as a result… mostly deserted. Aside from the pirates and the occasional unwary victim, the population is very low out here. And with few targets, the pirates aren’t very alert, and don’t camp any of the gates 24×7. Plenty of times you can slip through unseen, especially if you scout ahead. But I’ll get to that.

In order to transport the huge starbase control tower (thousands of cubic meters) I needed a serious industrial ship - a hauler in Eve slang. These things are slow, ungainly and weakly protected. Extremely vulnerable ship, carrying a hundred million worth of starbase parts through a pirate infested hell hole.

Why take such a risk? Well, the rewards are high. And here’s where you can see why I like Eve… you can mitigate the risk with your brain. I never jump through a stargate when I don’t know what’s on the other side. I use two accounts to transport things, one pilot flying a hauler and one flying a high-tech ‘Force Recon’ which is a cloak-capable ship that can jam the targeting systems of its enemies.

So far on this project I’ve encountered several very serious gate-camps of pirates. One had a massive carrier (a capital ship that often sells for a billion isk) supporting the pirates in their battleships. But never have I jumped into such a camp with my hauler. Always the Recon jumps through first, and the hauler doesn’t even warp to the gate on the other side until all is clear.

If it looks bad, the recon cloaks and warps away before anyone can target it.

If I ever run into a small camp or a lone pirate, I have the option of jamming him with the recon while the hauler runs, before cloaking and fleeing with the recon.  I doubt I’ll be tempted… caution is rewarded when you’re carrying millions and millions worth of starbase parts, and ore.

Which gets me to the end of this section… I eventually setup three ’small’ starbases with moon harvesting arrays, coupling arrays, silos, warp-scrambling arrays (to prevent enemies who attack them from escaping), gun platforms and missile pods.

But all of this takes fuel.

Feeding the beast

Every hour, each of my three moon harvesting modules harvest 100 units of Technetium, which takes up 0.8 cubic meters per unit.  Each week, they produce between them some 50,400 units of the stuff, which takes up 40,320 cubic meters in a ship’s hold. It’s only this week that I’ve had a ship with cargo holds big enough to even dream of fitting it all in. When I began, my Technetium sold on the open market (to other players) at the biggest trade hub in the game for 2,700 isk per unit immediately, or up to 3,200 if I was prepared to put up a sell order and wait. Tonight’s sell orders are over four thousand, meaning this business can net me about 200million gross revenue a week. Nasty.

But there’s a big catch to this caper. Each starbase consumes the following every week:

Enriched Uranium 168
Oxygen 1,176
Mechanical Parts 336

Coolant 336
Robotics 168

Nitrogen Isotopes 18,984

Liquid Ozone 6400
Heavy Water 5,040

Which costs between 10 and 12 million dollars to buy, and HOURS to collect and haul to the starbases, and load into the control towers.

Even still, the profits stand at around 175million a week right now, which should be enough to get me into two very expensive hobbies sometime in September.

Capital ships, and alliance warfare. Which I wont begin to describe now.