Day 83 : Fracking Frigate Five

I was mining over breakfast while I scanned the market. This is always a bad sign that the EVE addiction is peaking again. I use the morning mine as an excuse to look for blueprints to buy. I need to run a swathe of experiments or I’ll just end up on my current products for ever, making tiny profits. Whenever I consider buying blueprints the lack of ME research slots begins to drive me mad. Now I see why people anchor POS in hi sec and keep them closed down when out of use. I’m thinking of looking into doing the same.

While at work I run EVEMON. I get a kick out of my small sales business out there doing stuff and watching the cash dribble in. If I’m in a bad mood I use it to glare at the skill queue. It’s the skill queue that gets me now. This appears in the Windows taskbar.

                              

I need to get home now, but I’m stuck here for 3 more hours! What can I do with Gallente Frigate V? I can spend, spend, spend. Buying and learning Assault ships, buying an Ishkur even though T2 drones are four days away, start planning for CovOps ships, so many things to do, plan and waste ISK on. Except when I finally get home I realise that I don’t have Mechanics V. Bastard. On top of drone training that puts a fully operational Ish’ over another full week away. DAMN, DAMN, DAMN. The problem with having an interest in everything is lack of focus, and some lack of attention to detail obviously. I’d missed the Prerequisites because I’d skipped to the new “Required For” tab and started dreaming about all the stuff I could be doing once I’ve learned it. Right now I am back in skill queue hell. The Queue goes ever on and on, down from Couster where it began.....

At least this weekend I have friends visiting London so I can escape and take my mind off it all. Two of my best friends, RL ones before Warcraft and one of them a casual EVE player, are in town. It might make for some short entries on the blog but knowing me I’ll squeeze in the time somehow.

Still annoyed I decide to measure the run to Jita in a autopiloted pod. It takes about 25 minutes. I still don’t like travelling by pod. I’m going back to shuttles. I feel naked out there without some form of hull wrapped around the pod. It gives me a chance to survive a speculative one shot from some bored suicide ganker on the Uedama gate.

Once at Jita, still trying to avoid looking at the skill queue, I decide to spend all the cash I’ve made making and shipping Navitas hulls up here. From the deliveries I think that at one point I must have actually been racing a freighter carrying my courier contract up there. The freighter pilots are pretty mysterious to me but they are the only people who could have been ferrying multiple 30,000m3 contracts all in one go. How do they work? Do they just drift round a section of empire space filling the hold with goods and contracts for Jita and then go once the hold is full? How much danger are they in? This is EVE after all, has anyone ever decided to cut one of the routes into Jita (other than Burn Jita)?

Since Procurer hulls have come back down in price, after the huge spike following the patch, I decide that it is time to grab one. This might get me out mining in lowsec. Mining in hisec is becoming more boring than restful. I grab the Procurer and fit it out with a full on tank. So much for saving money on the hull, the rigs cost me twice that. Something odd happens then that I didn’t expect. I’ve seen a Procurer before, done show info, rotated the preview around to have a look at the ship but it is different once you have one and you are flying it. I actually like this ship for the ships sake. When I bought the Retriever it was all about what it would bring in. Not so with the Procurer. It looks great. It is powerful, squat and yet retains an element of almost brutal elegance, it looks “space worthy” whatever that means. For some reason it has a big fat radiator grill in the front of it. Basically it’s a space HumVee. I can’t shake the feeling that instead of mining it wants me to put the largest piece of artillery I can fit on it and go and have a fight. It could probably handle it too. Fully kitted out with the modules running it is cap stable at 46K EHP. It is my toughest ship by a long stretch since I haven’t found the time to research a proper fit for the Myrmidon. Spending so much on the Procurer, and liking it as much as I do, means it’ll be harder to risk it in lowsec. I’ll get over it.

So, once again, it is all about the flying of shiny new ships. I wonder if this feeling fades once you’ve tried flying everything. Flying everything I can is high on my lists of “must do” in EVE. I’m just a big fan of spaceships when it comes down to it, and there are plenty of them. I’ve yet to fly even the other three races frigates, except the Rifter which I couldn't resist. Mind you, I’ll end up having to learn the other racial frigate skills to level V too. At least I’ll have Mechanics V when I finally do. Stupid f***** skill queue.