Hard Left

I might be re-tooling my shipbuilding plans a bit.

No, I’m not talking about building different hulls for the market. That’s not going to change any time soon, although I actually anticipate some expansion past the current stable of Gallente hulls that I build for North Provi. I’m talking about the plans that I’ve got for my own personal ships. Right now, the largest ship that I’ve got for moving completed ships, modules, rigs and ammo from my manufacturing center to the trade hub is an Iteron V.

Feel free to laugh, I frequently chuckle at the huge discrepancy between Kym’s respectable ability to build stuff, and the anemic logistical capabilities that I’ve given her. There has been a plan in the works for a couple of months to build an Obelisk to haul stuff around with, but to be perfectly honest, I’ve never been completely ok with my plan, mostly because flying a 1B+ freighter around in nullsec is asking for trouble. Even though the plan was to only move stuff with it once or twice a week, and only through a jump bridge at that, it still didn’t quite sit well with me. Plus, I still didn’t get any highsec logistical gains with the freighter- moving it around through nullsec and out to highsec a lot pretty much guarantees a gank, so I planned to simply keep it in null 100% of the time. This plan left me with a very expensive hunk of metal that, in all honesty, wasn’t going to be used to its natural capacity.

Why the freighter in the first place? In a word: hulls. Even packaged, a cruiser is 10,000 m³. A battleship, which I occasionally build for special orders, is 50,000m³- more than an Iteron V can fit, not that I’d want to haul a battleship in an Iteron to begin with. Kym also can’t fly every ship in the game, and I don’t really feel like wasting the time and ISK to train all the subcaps at this point. Not to mention, I’m not building or moving ships one at a time anymore. So the idea for the Obelisk became a reality, and for the last couple of months I’ve been assembling capital parts.

Now that I’m approaching the point where it’s time to assemble the whole hull (capital ships are made from dozens of smaller, previously assembled components, which then get combined into the final ship), I find myself balking a little bit at the plan, and today decided to give it a bit of a revamp after checking out Eve University’s wiki. If you’ve never been, it is probably the best source of information out there for Eve. I find myself frequently going back to read stuff, and it’s taught me a lot about the game. Anyways, back to the post.

I still plan to build the Obelisk, but instead of using it to ferry hulls and whatnot in null, it’ll be flown out to highsec where it belongs and used for stuff out there. In its place, I’m going with an Orca for the nullsec logistics. Why I didn’t choose this plan initially is beyond me, but oh well. What’s done is done, and there isn’t any wasted time or ISK, just a jumbled order of completing things. The Orca’s got a few advantages over the Obelisk, anyways. Cost is the obvious one. I think the hull can be assembled for less than half of the cost of the freighter- and most of the parts for the Orca are already laying around, as they had been built for the Obelisk (there’s a lot of crossover between the hulls). So, it’d be easy to switch gears from that perspective. Training time is a lot less, too- maybe a week from this posting, Kym could be flying the ship. The Obelisk is still about a month away. The Orca can be fitted to have a cargo hold in excess of 100,000 m³ (the primary hold- not the specialized ones)- enough to haul 2 battleships at once, or a multitude of other hulls. 100,000 m3 would be enough cargo capacity for my logistical needs. The ore hold might be a plus once the summer expansion rolls around, too.

Lastly, the Orca is around 25% of the mass of the Obelisk- using the jump bridge shouldn’t  anger the owners nearly as much, since  a battleship’s mass is about half of the Orca’s, and those jump though all the time. Maybe I’ll even set up boosts with the Orca at some point- just not right now.

So I guess I went from building one capital ship to building a pair, it would seem. I'm not quite sure how long it’ll take to get both of them completed, but I think it’ll be exciting to be flying something bigger than that Iteron V  I’ve had for the last 6 months.