Day 45 : The Day of the Beast

Two things will happen by the end of play today. One, I’ll be able to fly the Mammoth class hauler. Two, I’ll reach two million skill points.

First the Mammoth. I’m going to call it The Beast. It is over a kilometre long and more importantly  It’s a jump of 5000 m3 in hauling capacity. I’d originally aimed at using it to cut travel time to and from asteroid belts during my expansion of mining. With the changes to mining barges coming on the 8th The Beast shouldn’t be needed for that. I will put it to good use before the 8th in that role before the ore and mineral markets take a temporary dive and ore hauling takes place in the barge you did it in. Afterwards The Beast will give me a decent bulk hauling capacity that may make trading decently profitable at lower margins in materials other than ore and should sustain me through any market crash that might result from mining changes to the foundations of the economy. I’m considering a system move at some point in the next few months and I’ll have a lot of stuff to haul around, The Beast will help with that.

Secondly the skill points. Two million skill points is something of a landmark, it is the first increment of skill points that you commonly see as a requirement in Corporate recruitment messages. It’s a way for corporations to verify that you have played for a set amount of time. I guess it is pretty near a month plus the initial 14 day trial so that it should indicate, boosting implants aside, that you are ready to head into further months worth of time. That you are dedicated, if not completely addicted, to EVE. I’m both of these but the results of my skill queue choices have scattered the 2 million points all over. Some of the choices would no doubt baffle any future employer. Fortunate then that for now I have my own corporation and don’t need to go applying to recruitment ads. As for the skill queue itself, I do have a plan to start refocusing my choices, whether it passes the test of time is yet to be seen. I’m moving back towards the fitting and combat skills I abandoned to shift into mining and refining. Higher fitting skills means stronger ships. Higher combat skills means a harder hitting ship. These improved ships open up rapid running of higher level missions which are my cash reserve should mining crash and my efforts at trading fail. My budding manufacturing efforts are too far away from being profitable to even plan for, and I need collateral to take advantage should the ore/mineral market hit ‘rock’ bottom. Hopefully with newbie miners in control, only ore should bottom out completely and I’ll be able to compete by buying and refining. Yeah, my understanding of economics is that bad.