Ship’s log: 31-08-06
“..twenty three jumps for a measly 30k profit! Trading is looking to be more time-consuming and involved than I thought. My indy is too slow, even with MWDs.
Gone back to piloting my Tristan. Recently blew almost 2 mill ISK on new skills to help with targetting, missiles and mining. Have recently realised my favouring missiles doesn’t play to the Tristan’s strengths (5% bonus to Small Hybrid Turret damage and 7.5% bonus to Small Hybrid Turret tracking speed per skill level) but I like to keep those targets at a distance. Turrets are too close for my liking. I might experiment.
Recently spent just over a mill ISK buying a new ship. This time a mining barge, the Procurer. it’s the smallest ship of it’s class but a more sensible ship for mining than my indy. Both because the indy isn’t designed for mining and because people think you’re an ore thief.
I’ve still not trained up all the skills for the Procurer yet. I need Industry level 5, i’m currently at level 4 with ten days of training time left. Also Astrogeology level 3 and Mining Barge Level 1. I’ve bought both but can’t train Mining Barge until i’ve got Astrogeology to level 3 and Industry to level 5. So it’s a ten day wait and then I have to actually by the equipment for the thing – a Strip Miner, version 1 of which retails at just over a million ISK. What trading costs in time, mining costs in cold hard cash.
While training some skills – trained up targetting a couple of levels which allows me to target four ships at a time now – I’ve gone back to agent work as my main source of income. While a three hour trade run two nights ago netted me around 30k, one mission from my main agent Armibaine Chour got me 88k with a time bonus of 77k! On top of that it was a kill mission and I got bounties for killing around 18 Mordus drones. Mostly 3.5k each but a few of the harder ones were 4k and one very tough one had a bounty of 12k – all in all I made 258k in about an hour’s work! Not bad for one mission.
I don’t expect them all to be the same – the previous mission was a standard rookie shoot and got me about 30k overall – but hopefully if I can build up some loyalty i’ll get more profitable jobs.
The plan is to train up the Procurer and strip some ‘roids in high sec space. It should be quicker than using Miner II lasers and bring in a steady income hopefully. Once I get some funds together I’ll buy more kit and skills and by doing a combination of mining and missions aim for the Caracal cruiser – a pricey 4.5 mill (for a rookie anyway). I may settle for a Destroyer meantime – the middleground between a frigate and a cruiser. I recently made a new friend who was flying a Cormorant that seemed to be a worthwhile purchase. We’ll see.
Also thinking about joining a corp and have my eye on one in particular but I don’t know if I want to give up the whole freelancer thing just yet. Once I get a few more ships and the ISK to cover any losses then I might go for it.
Currently docked the Astral Mining outpost in Oursalaert II. I’ll be here awhile as my engineer Rambo is taking a couple weeks vacation. More updates to follow.
Edward Spiegel signing off…”
