Christmas Retriever

After skilling up for days, I'm now able to fly a Retriever. To celebrate, I treated myself to one in Jita and set out to fly it back to Ellmay for its maiden mining-run.

17 jumps in a Retriever takes a long time. Its 92m/s top-speed has a lot to do with that. My limited capacitor skills added to that by requiring me to perform a lot of intermediate jumps between stargates. Also, I could not fit a Mining Laser Upgrade in addition to the dual T1 strips. Not even with a CPU Upgrade. Must up those skills!

That said, when I finally got to Ellmay and took out the Retriever for a trial-run all was well. The sound of dual T1 strip miners sucking the ore out of the asteroids at breakneck speed (compared to my Navitas) was very gratifying!

Truth be told, having a lot of ISK makes me less likely to do a lot of mining, but I like it, so having the skills and the equipment to do it is a goal in and of itself. Besides, a lot of ISK is a relative thing. I've spotted a very nice Nighthawk that makes my heart race and will require me to invest heavily in hardware and skillbooks.

The Gift That Keeps On Giving

Today's my birthday, and to my great surprise a reader of this blog gifted me 50mln ISK to spend as I please. It's an experiment to see what happens if a n00b like me suddenly has what would seem to be unlimited resources.

The first thing that happened was a sense of utter wonder why someone I don't know would gift me something. The second thing, naturally, was me looking good and hard as to how to spend all that ISK in a way that will help me in the long run. Then, a third thing happened: I realized that someone is actually reading this blog! Yay!

I've decided to put the ISK in my head and get me a full set of +3 implants. With my current abilities I can fly a nicely fitted frigate, but the drones in the epic arc "Burning Down the Hive" eat through my tank without me being able to scratch them. So I need to skill up ASAP, and getting the implants lets me do that by increasing my learning speed. Or so I hope.

If not, adding the implants will at least help me get better faster. That is, until someone podkills me of course. But I hope that will not happen anytime soon.

Of course, I will need a new Tristan as well to try my hand at killing those pesky drones again. So I bought one. This time, I've fitted it with blasters in stead of railguns to see if that helps. If not, I'll be broke once more and it's off to the Navitas to mine me some ISK.

Zen And The Art Of Mining In A Navitas

Mining for me is one of the most relaxing ways to earn some much needed ISK. So relaxing in fact, that it borders on a full-blown Zen experience. It's hard not to blank out your mind so far as to fall asleep at the helm of a Navitas if your churning through endless roids of Veldspar.

I can hardly wait until all those mining runs pay off and I can fly my Covetor. Still 36 days to go before I finish my skill training for flying that ship, so I'll probably go for an intermediate Retriever as that will only take me 11 days of training.