Day Six : Knackered Logistics

Thanks to yesterdays insomnia I am so tired it is painful. I can't be arsed doing much. I send out the Hot Dog to mine and have a nap and wait for the footie to come on TV

When I've woken up again I've thought two things

1) I'm never in the Couster system yet most of my ships are. I need to bring them all one jump down to Algogille. How?

2) The Hot Dog is the most rubbish mining ship ever. No drone space, one space for a mining laser and no bonuses.

For the moving of ships I figure I can buy a cheap shuttle, use it to get to Couster and either just leave it or reprocess it. I have a second Iteron class cargo hauler there so I could bring all the shuttles back at the end - the cargo hauler could take 9 of them with some boosted cargo space.

I don't like the thought of buying shuttles all the time. So I check the blueprint in the market, find out I've got enough minerals to make loads of them. I could make more by mining and refining for five minutes. I buy the blueprint and get the local station making me some shuttles. Once thats done I spend 20 minutes zipping back and forth till all my assets are in one station. I go back once for all the shuttles. Move done.

Once thats done I check out the original frigate type - the Navitas class. It looks like a cross between a futuristic motorbike and a fish. It does have space for one drone and two hardpoints where I can place weapons or mining lasers. I've learned the skill of running mining drones and my mining skill is higher than it was a couple of days ago. The Navitas class of ship also gives you a bonus to mining yields (20% for every cycle of the laser). It has less than 10% of the cargo hold space as the hauler though. Time to try "jet canning".

I equip the Navitas with two mining lasers and a mining drone. I fly out to an asteroid field. Its fairly quiet so there are valuable rocks that no one else is mining. PVP is all I have to worry about, no game generated pirates will appear in 0.9 security space. PVP probably won't happen since the cops would descend like a ton of bricks on anyone starting it. 

I lock onto a rock with the highest cash ore. I train the drone and the two lasers on it. Within minutes the cargo hold is full. I'm mining at least 5 times faster than in the Hot Dog.

Instead of going back and forth to the station I jettison the ore. This makes it appear in a cargo container that will vanish in a couple of hours if I don't do anything with it. I mine the rock again. As the cargo hold on the frigate fills up I just transfer it to the cargo container. The container can hold stupid amounts. Once it is holding what the Hot Dog can haul I bookmark the location of the container, warp back to the station, switch to the Hot Dog, launch it, and use the bookmark to warp directly back to the location of the container. Thankfully no one has robbed me. I transfer the contents to the Hot Dog, warp back to the station and flog the ore. 700,000 credits in half an hour or so. The penalty being that you need to manually transfer the ore to the container (as far as I can see - I need to investigate more) so you can't just let it run and sod off and do real life stuff as I did the other morning.

Flushed with profit I buy a new Destroyer that I'm going to try mining with somewhere more dodgy (and yet still fairly safe). Its a few jumps down the line to pick it up. The shuttle can't hold much but it can hold enough for two cargo bay extensions. I fly the shuttle to where the new Destroyer is, activate the Destroyer and fit it with the cargo pods. It can now just about hold a packaged shuttle. I store the shuttle in the Destroyer and fly it back. I name the new Destroyer "Rockbitch" in honour of its intended task.

Day 6 done. I'm too knackered to do much in the morning still so in a fit of evil I send invites to 21 day free trials to three friends. Just before the weekend. Evil. Maybe EVE is getting under my skin.