Message from a friend...

This just in from friends in a sister corp in the Alliance:

"We've decided to pull out POS and go back to running our industrial work out of a back-water station.  All work in our POS will be completed this week and we'll take it down and mothball it.  Discussion is taking place about whether to hold onto the components or sell them off."

We wish them well in their migration back into dealing with station queues.

For our own part - we've so far invested about 4b ISK into our w-space adventure and have realized an income of approximately 50m ISK.  Quite a loss for the first month.  But that heavily defended POS was not a small expense!  We'll see what the next month brings for profits… Though… someone was talking about sending one member back to HiSec to run LVL4's in a Marauder for some sort of steady income!

And, now for something completely stupid

Yeah, the new dev blog is out about hi-sec poco's in Rubicon...  I was ok with this idea until I read this paragraph in the poco dev blog:

The NPC tax will continue for hi sec POCOs (as we want low sec POCOs to still be competitive). The tax rate stays the same, at 10% for export and 5% for import. This is then in addition to whatever tax the player owner sets. 

Yup... let's just give everything to the playground bully.  No need to worry, they won't do anything wrong.

Guess our decision to dive into w-space and forget about the junk in k-space was well timed.

I hope it works for them.  I suspect it will turn out to be a short quick grab by large alliances that are not so hated that they actually can get into hi-sec to get a lot of poco's up and help squeeze the profits out of hi-sec to force people to go somewhere else.  Sad.  Oh.  Did you hear that?  I think it was the death gurgle of PI in hi-sec... R.I.P.

-Yinmatook

Tick tock, tick tock...

"Oh bother!", Guerre exclaimed.  Then quickly shuffled his feet and apologized to the Amarr mission agent.  Still, he was upset with himself about forgetting this agent was one that frequently sent folks out to do direct combat with the other factions.  Since this was the second in a row and declining right then would have led to a confrontation with "the boss".  The displeasure (and standings hit) from the agent would have been fine, but when "the boss" got wind of it, and somehow she always did, then there would be hell to pay - and hell hath no fury like a woman bunched up panties... hmmm, did she even wear... oh my God!  Guerre decided he didn't want to pursue that line of thought any further!

So, he delayed his decision (knowing that he'd decline it after the four hour window had passed) and went off to run courier missions.  At least those never led to direct declines in apposing faction standings!

Someone had told Guerre that you could run fifteen distribution missions and then switch to a security agent to run that all important sixteenth mission and guarantee yourself a security storyline for the maximum faction gain.  Sadly, he had found that while you can (and in fact you will get a storyline mission as long as the agents work for the same faction - they don't have to be in the same Corporation) do that, all the storyline missions are a random crapshoot and you are not guaranteed any particular storyline based on the normal mission agents you work with.  Bummer!  Oh well... the standing would come, eventually - as long as he didn't go bonkers (or get castrated by "the boss") in the mean time.

The bottom line is waiting around for the skill queue to finish that all important skill is a slow and tedious process and one just needs to find the right challenge...

Marching to the next big thing

The order has been given.

Skill plans have been re-factored, re-ordered, re-planned, and re-loaded.

We are going to w-space.

Assembly Array experience is being acquired.

WooHoo!

Time to brush up on those scanning skills, they are suddenly going to be very important to survival.

Be careful out there!
  - Yinmatook

Odyssey has landed! Oh my, the world has changed...

Test has fallen apart.  Not that my corp was ever involved in that little mess.  But, we shared an area of hi-sec with a corp that was a member of their alliance and that corp has now left this area of k-space and a couple of mercenary corps have moved in.

Don't get me wrong, it's nice to have folks around.  However, it would be even better if they'd just run the anomalies, scan down the sites, and run missions; instead of filling up the manufacturing queues in the constellation.  I mean, seriously, it is nasty when I have to wait five days just have a queue available to run a ten hour manufacturing job.

So...

The corp and the alliance are all aflutter with discussion about should we move, should we rent from the Goons, should we find/purchase a wormhole and just leave k-space for a while???!

We'll see... time will tell...

Be careful out there!

  -- Yinmatook

Ship Bumping...

Mabrick has posted an interesting idea that would increase the danger to the ship doing the bumping.   If you haven't read it, please do.  I'll still be here when you get done.

What's the biggest problem with this thought?  Well, the accidents that will happen.  Can you imagine the carebear tears that will occur when the Orca warps to 0 and practically obliterates the Hulk it lands on top of?  Before CCP can implement this mechanic change, they'll have to improve the "warp to 0" handling so we don't accidentally destroy ourselves and our friends when we are trying to help them.

Ok, that is all...  Back to what you were doing (and I'll get back to my inventing, manufacturing and once in a while actual mining).

The standings grind...

Guerre silently raged at the audacity of the agent to ask him to go kill a Minmatar ambassador.  Was the agent completely blind.  Had he not declined every mission involving killing members of any of the four major factions this Amarrian scumbag had ever asked him if he wanted?  Still, periodically, this scumbag agent would offer him a string of combat missions against the Gallente and Minmatar factions.  Guerre had his practiced answer at the ready.  "I thank you for thinking of me.  Sadly, at this moment in time, I really have to decline your kind offer.  My CEO has demanded that I spend this solar day patrolling the asteroid belts for those blasted bot miners, again."  To which, the scumbag gave his usual smirk and "You know, the empire can be a formidable enemy too" warning.  Guerre, just smiled back and turned to go.

He'd go hang out in the asteroid belts for the next half a day and then come back to see if the agent had anything that was really worth doing.  He also made a mental note, that he really needed to find a better agent to work with in the future.  He really liked the combat and the ISK that it brought in, but couldn't Calara have assigned him to work with an agent that wasn't so blasted conceited to think that the only faction worth having a positive standing with was the Amarrians?

Still, he'd heard of a suspected bot miner out in the asteroid belts and he wanted to see just how far he could push the limits without having his ship blown up by Concord...