Random Blatherings, Part..whateva...

So a little bit of an update upon my returning to the pod…

As any active follower of Eve knows, PI, or Planetary Interaction, is now in full swing. Although I took the time to train my industrial associate up to lvl 4 for pretty much all related skills, and am considering training my own skills up to help out creating higher end products, I have yet to jump on the bandwagon and actually set up my own PI installations.

Two reasons.

First, the land rush. With the introduction of PI and the possibility of having a semi-passive income stream, I envision a vast number of pilots in a mad rush to set up their multitudes of command centers, extractors and everything else. One thing I learned in watching the forums as well as playing with it a good deal on SiSi is that the location of the richest deposits on any given planet will shift once those deposits are mined out. I mean, I might be wrong about this but as of right now, that’s how I understand it. Keeping this in mind, I’ve chosen to wait it out a bit for the mad rush to be over and set up once things have quieted down and the deposits won’t be so shifty.

To me, PI is just like wormhole space and exploration in general. When Apocrypha came around, people went nuts training probing skills and making a mad rush for those unknown systems. The exploration career took a serious nose dive as well. (Which sucked cause I was already training at the time to get into it…) And now, as can be seen, the initial excitement of it has leveled off and things are flowing as normal as can be. I expect this will eventually happen with PI. Also, keeping that in mind, I’m not some sort of guru on market tracking. In fact, I suck at it quite frankly. But I’d imagine you can expect to see an enormous stream of products flooding the market soon. Because of that, sell and buy orders for said products will probably be excessively low until the initial flood calms. Personally, I think for the time being, the real money makers will be the people gobbling that stuff up to create the end products from the overabundance of low end materials.

Second, I am currently deep in Empire, a decent distance from any 0.0 system. I have no fear of operating, even solo, in a 0.0 NPC region and that is most likely where I will set up shop. Again, any person who has spent some time researching this knows what the reality is. Those planets in empire are immensely lacking in those new shineys. Just like moon mining, the richer deposits, the real money making deposits, are located in nullsec. So this is where I plan to go when I get around to setting up my own operation which I don’t want to move closer to until I have some other goals accomplished.

One objective is that I’ve currently have my industrial associate training a couple of long skills, Astrogeology V (to fly the exhumers) and Production Efficiency V. Together, that’s roughly 20 days till completion. So while those are training, I will be working on gaining enough standings to run level 4 missions for Duvolle Laboratories and will then have my associate piggyback to gain his own standings. That way, he’ll be able to access the high level R&D agents they offer. And once that task is complete, THEN I will probably move towards setting up my own PI operations.

As a further update on skill progression… My associate, after only like 8 months, is progressing quite well as a general industrialist. Only 10 days to fly a well fit exhumer, another 10 days to efficiently produce all manner of T1 products, and currently has a rather well balanced level of trading skills. Obviously, in training for all 3 areas of industry, he isn’t any sort of specialists and isn’t HIGHLY skilled in any particular area, but generalization is what I was aiming for (thank god though for neural remaps). In a few years I’m sure he’ll be one hell of a great industrialist. In fact, I know he’ll be an awesome industrialist in just about a year and a half. For now though, he’s almost to the point of where I want him to be to put him into full operational capacity. Ships he can fly include the Amarr freighter, Providence, the industrial command ship, Orca, and is really only a few days away from being able to pilot exhumers as well as the Amarr jump freighter, the Ark. (Although with a price tag of over 4 billion, I don’t expect to actually be flying one any time soon. It’s just nice to have that option for whatever corp I eventually join.)

For myself, I’m currently deviated to finish up a bit of racial cross training, but for the most part I am focused on training to fly and properly fit a Moros, the Gallante dreadnought and soon after that will the Thanatos, the Gallante carrier. At the time of writing this, I don’t have my skill plan in front of me but I believe all I have left for the long skills to train is Advanced Spaceship Command V with the other two long ones, Battleship V and Advanced Weapon Upgrades V now completed.

So that’s life in a nutshell. Now….back to the grind. (and insert mild grumbling here….)