EVE Progress
EVE is going very well for me at the moment. My corp runs an invoice-and-repay system for ships and skills, so all I need to pay for myself are fittings and ammunition - and repairs. The threshold between the beginning skills and ships, and the second tier (moving from frigates to basic industrial ships and destroyers) is fairly large, though, from about 100,000 ISK for any other skill I bought to nearly half a million for the Gallente Industrial skill. So I had to get together some cash to buy the kit in the first place.
There were two ways I could go about this - mine, or run combat missions. Annoyingly, the snazzy frigate I'm currently flying - a Tristan - has a smaller cargo hold than the otherwise lower-specced Navitas I used to have, so my effective gain from mining in any given space of time had been cut in half. So combat missions it was. I loaded up on armour boosting, as much as my skills can handle, the highest damage ammunition my railguns could hold, and went out on missions.
Most of them were grand - no major damage taken, because the NPC drones and pirates were polite enough to bunch up into groups of two to five, rather than attacking me in groups of up to twenty (the adrenalin rush when you drop out of warp and see little red crosses blooming all over your screen is impressive). One, however, involved taking down a point defense battery. This is essentially a great big gun sitting in space. It only fires about every eight seconds, but the hit is enormous, and it didn't ever seem to miss. So I had to get in to my optimal range, and start pounding away at it, hoping to blazes my shield booster could cope in short bursts, and wouldn't drain my capacitor completely in the process. It did, though, and at the time I landed the final shot, I was one missile from being dead in space, with no power left for shields.
Soon after that, the agent I'd been running missions for offered me some dogs. Quite literally; she breeds a particular kind of big unpleasant dog (Slaver Hounds) and said I could have twenty of them, and that they'd probably sell for a decent price in other regions. Some market research later, I'd ascertained that they'd sell for 2000 ISK a pop in Rens, a system nine jumps from the station the agent is based in. So I accepted the dogs, and did the nine-jump run. And on arrival, discovered that the dogs were still lounging around in my hangar in the agent's station, since I'd forgotten to put them in the hold of my ship. So nine jumps back, pick up the mutts, nine jumps up, sell the dogs, and another seven jumps back down to Yuzier. Probably not a good time-for-profit ratio...
So between that performance, the missions, and selling off some stuff lying around in my hangar, I had enough to buy the Gallente Industrial skill, for just short of half a million ISK. Started learning that, sent in the invoice to the corp... and then when the money came back for that, I was able to buy an Iteron Mark II, for about 350,000 ISK. Three jumps to the station where it is, and I started learning the second level of the skill, so that when I get home this evening, I'll be able to fly the thing. The Iteron will probably be my workhorse ship for the next while, although I'll be acquiring a destroyer of some kind for combat missions as well, when I can fund it through mining. In the meantime, the aim is to work on increasing the fittings skills, so that the Iteron can be as well fitted as I can manage. I need to name it, too, since I'm going to have it for a while.
Posted by Drew Shiel at November 20, 2006 8:36 AM
