I am Joe Blog’s Left Ventricle

The cloaked Recon swam towards the jump-gate, coming out of warp within just a few meters of the massive celestial structure. With a sinister hiss, the high-tech cruiser de-cloaked and activated the gate.

Nothing else was within sensor range, except the usual two sentry guns that the Caldari state maintained to show whose near-lawless low-security solar system it was. Moments later and light years away, as the fog of the huge jump cleared, Ami’s eyes scanned her sensors again - nothing on the other side either.

“Clear!”

Mortu punched the warp. He waited just a few million kilometers from the gate, his ship fully aligned and at full speed. Despite it’s incredible bulk (more than 40,000 cubic meters of cargo lay in its massive holds), his Impel immediately entered warp and sped towards the gate.

Not quite fast enough! In the last few seconds of his approach, two battleship-sized signatures appeared on his scanner - flashing red. PIRATES!

“PIRATES coming to the gate Ami!”

“GET THROUGH!”

Mortu hammered the gate activation sequence and jumped. He knew they would be hot on his heels - the last flash from his display showed the closest to be just 90km from the gate, and no doubt warping to jump range.

On the other side Mortu immediately began to align his massive Transport to warp for the next gate - a ’safe’ system with police protection. But his luck was spent - without any run-up, his ship ponderously lurched toward the gate, painstakingly building up speed to enter warp.

Ami flicked her Recon onto a course near to but not quite directly at the opposite gate as well, and re-cloaked.

The gate activated again.

Twice.

A moment passed.

The two pirate battleships de-cloaked, locked Mortu and began to fire. The closest activated a warp scambler. In horror, Mortu watched his ship’s warp cancel, his speed begin to drop again, and his shields begin to disappear as the powerful Battleship lasers smashed into him.

What chance did they have? An unarmed, warp-scrambled Transport and one high-tech cruiser? Worse, it wasn’t junk in Mortu’s holds - but priceless minerals, a weeks income from the starbases. With the two ships at risk, the possible loss from this encounter was well into the hundreds of millions.

Ami decloaked and began to target the Pirates. Then hit the wrong button and cloaked again.

“SHIT!”

She uncloaked again, desperately targeting the pirates, and…

The Falcon, her Force Recon, finally paid for itself. Sixty-million just for the hull, millions each for the seven multispectral jammers, more for the signal distortion amplifiers. Another twenty million for the cloak. An incredibly expensive machine, which had never before activated a module in anger.

Within moments, both enemy ships were jammed.

Mortu, seeing his shields scream down to zero, noticed he was no longer warp scrambled, and hit it again. His ship began once more to crawl towards a speed it could enter warp from, agonisingly drifting toward the opposite gate, billions of kilometres away.

One of the battleships fought off the jamming and began pounding the Transport once more. Either it wasn’t close enough to warp scramble, or it had no module fitted, for the big slow ship continued to painstakingly approach warp.

An eternity passed, as the Impel’s shields dropped to zero and its armour began to be gouged off by the great laser beams. Then suddenly the scene fell away and the damaged transport warped away to freedom.

The Pirates wasted no time turning their attention to Ami. Now both had fought off the jam and began smashing her shields down as well. She began to warp for the gate now too, and again it seemed like an eternity was passing as the beams crashed into her hull. She hit her cloak.

“You cannot activate your cloak as you are targeted.”

One of the pirates was jammed again as her modules cycled, still on their original targets, and then she was into warp, cloaking seconds later into safety as the Pirates disappeared from her scope behind.

Ami: “Damn good fight guys!”

Pirate2: “Fun!”

Pirate1: “Definitely! Well defended btw!”

Ami: “Lol, my heart is pounding, you almost had us BOTH!”

…

Eve is a game, people. Or at least, that’s what I keep telling myself.

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.