A re-birth of sorts

Been hibernating for a while but decided to re-engage and get back to being a capsuleer after an old friend from my days in Union Aerospace (UAERO) came back and asked if I could help with some hauling. I have been planet-bound for the last four years, having switched spaceships for mechanised robots (mechs) but once a pod pilot, always a pod pilot.

Since this was an old friend of mine, I said yes and with some excitement docked up at the nearest space station and shuttled to some old familiar haunts. I found that my hangars were still full, no-one had looted anything and that I was the sole holder of all the assets of the corporation.

I grabbed a ship, made sure it's engines and fuel were still viable and undocked.

That was it. I was now back in the black and what a thrill it was. There's been a massive improvement in the interface between the pod and the ship. As ever, there are new ships, new rules of engagement and new actors in all areas. However, just the simple joy of flying through space and drinking in the vistas of distant galaxies, gas clouds and jewel-like stars hanging in the night sky is intoxicating enough.

Should never have left though I did have the hindsight to keep my pilot's license active.

The corporation is slowly reviving as my mate, Walter Purple has brought in two more pals: Ian Beany and Varnock Black. I remember the original UAERO starting early with only two of us and we became one of the first corporations to build and field a carrier - as well as being one of the first ones to lose a carrier as well!

Right now, the plans for the re-awakening corporation is for short term plans: get our consumables sorted out, agents running and missions under our belts. Already, we're easily completing L4 missions as a group.

Good times for sure, I am now sure they are back.

R & D (continued)

OK - back to some more R & D as my agents have been demanding attention from me, I have been out in low-sec space for the past month and since I had some of the top people in Creodron working for me, it was not a good idea to leave them for too long.

Doppepuette Ciete has been driving his team hard but the results have been pouring out, all then packed into information-dense data-cores and available for my further use. Roomfennan is heading up my mechanical engineering team and the results have been a lot slower. Her project management skills are not as sharp as Doppepuette and the results show. However, mechanical engineering results are hard to come by and I am thankful for whatever she can give me. My third R & D agent is Clel Sycotonerier (pictured), rated as number two to Doppepuette in the Gallantean Starship Engineering field and she's driving her team hard to close the gap.

Now what does this mean for me? I mentioned that I needed to get into inventions and the potential is almost limitless. However, I need interfaces and decryptors.

The Interface is an item with unlimited use and since I am interested inventing Gallentean ships, then the interface I need is the 'Incognito Data Interface'. The other interface types are in this table:

Race: Gallente

Name	Used on
Incognito Data Interface	Ships
Incognito Data Interface	Ship Equipment
Inognito Tuner Data Interface	Rigs

The cost of the interface is around 93million in Jita.

A decent investment? Well, you need it to invent so I have to swallow my fear and part with the iskies.

Hmm however, I also realised that I should also look into decryptors. One time use items that modify the stats of invented blueprints in certain ways. They appear to vary greatly in cost but Jita is the place to go. They affect four stats: the chance of a successful invention, the final material efficiency (ME), the final production efficiency (PE) and the number of runs you can get from the end result. The base ME and PE of any invention job is a default -4 (negative four), the following show the modification to that number. So a job done with the War Strategon will come out with ME: -7 PE: -2.

The chance is the only thing that is different from any other bpc. It is exactly like it sounds, the higher the better. The best a decryptor can do is add 30%; the worst is make it 60% less likely. Once again, these are destroyed no matter the outcome of the job. The following is a chart the decryptors in game. Note they are located under the respective pirate faction on the market place: Amarr is Bloodraider, Caldari is Gurista, Gallente is Serpentis and Minmatar is Angel.

Stolen formulas is the best item but quite expensive. The other items, cheaper and probably more readul

Name	Chance	ME	PE	Runs
Stolen Formulas	1.8	-1	2	4
Test Reports	1.2	2	5	1
Collision Measurements	1.1	3	3	0
Engagement Plan	1.0	1	4	2
Symbiotic Figures	0.6	-2	1	9

Low-sec mining? bah.

A nice shot of my incursus to brighten my day. I use this mean looking ship for my everyday travel. Also, use it for the courier work I do for Creodron. The incursus is small, fast and hard-hitting and I love it. The Tech 2 brothers, the Ishkur and Enyo are even better but a bit more of a kick to the wallet.

The L4 mining missions are a challenge to be sure, the agents asked me to get them 3000 units of geodicite, a poor relation of Crokite. I was going to get paid 3million isk and a lot of loyalty points but jet can mining in low-sec with rats around you and pirates meant that I had to warp out and switch from the mining ship to a combat ship and back again. Yes, I considered using a Dominix with mining lasers and using drones for defence but didn't have the time to set one up. Anyway, jetting my ore out and wrapping it a thin, flimsy wrap was a bad idea. The agent had located a specific area for me to mine. On arrival, I only saw two rocks and I had to completely mine them out. Once I did, I grabbed the ore in several journeys but the can did not last and I lost the last 300units. Now problem is, the agent required the exact amount that was in both asteroids. Losing 300 units, I could not find another source ANYWHERE. I considered going out and scanning for the missing ore but decided that it was too problematic. I informed the agent that, reluctantly, I had to decline the mission.

He was pissed at me and tapped something in my record and obviously, made a note of my unreliability. Bastard.