The Power of Friendship

Having started the semester last Monday and going to classes all week, I arrived at the weekend tired.  Wanting to vege a little I decided to rent a bunch of movies and do a little missioning.  PvP can take quite a bit of concentration or you end up flying in a pod most of the time, and so I figured I would work on my industry alt a little. 

Some of the things he is good at involve exploration, but with the loot spew I just haven't gotten back into doing it after I wrote my guide.  He also has good manufacturing skills, and is a pretty decent miner.  The min/maxing which normally takes places with miners doesn't really happen with me.  I have my barge tanked, and I mine ore which I need for manufacturing.  While I do have my list of the top notch ores to mine, they are not always a high priority. 

For instance a couple weeks ago I noticed I needed some Megacyte for some of the blueprints I had.  Looking over my handy dandy spreadsheet I see Arkonor gives me the most Megacyte (by the way it can't be found in high-sec).  Scanning down a wormhole I venture into the unknown in my Venture to harvest the elusive rock.  Finding the ore site (wasn't hard I just opened up the "discovery scanner") and I warp to and snuggle up to a tasty Arkonor rock and begin nibbling away.

As ISK/hour goes it would have been more efficient for me to go mine Omber in my retriever and then buy the Megacyte.  It was more fun though scanning a wormhole and brings me more satisfaction to know I did it myself instead of just buying everything.

Anyways, to take full advantage of the materials you mine, one should be able to refine their ore.  This requires refining skills to reduce the waste factor which happens in the process and it requires you to be liked by the station you are refining in to reduce their taxes (the amount of ore they take after you refine).  Alas one needs standing to at least 6.67 to reduce the tax rate to 0%. 

This means missions, which on an industrial alt with little to no combat skills I was in for some distribution missions.  So I rented my movies for the weekend, and distributed everything from civilians to toxic waste around the region.  My mission was a success and now I am liked so much by the corporation which owns the station I have moved into, liked so much by the way that they feel that there is no reason to tax me for my activities.

It's good having friends in high places.