I’ve been on a spending spree lately. 😦 It’s only been about a week since I bought an Obelisk for 659 million ISK, and I’ve already spent another billion…

But I couldn’t help it. I’ve found a ship that seems to be all I’ve been looking for.

A lean, mean, fighting machine. The Rattlesnake seems to be what you get after you throw a Raven and a Dominix into a blender. 400 m3 drone bay, which is bigger than the Dominix’s. Same 10% drone hp and damage bonus per level of Gallente Battleship, without the useless (to me) bonus to Large Hybrid Turrets. Throw in 5% shield resists per level of Caldari Battleship and 50% bonus to Cruise Missile and Torpedo velocity and 4 missile high slots, and a staggering number of mid and low slots. Yummy.

I’m still quite a noob when it comes to the various ships in EVE, and am mostly familiar with Gallente and Caldari ships since I’m semi-trained in drones and missiles. Furthermore, I mostly only look at ships and modules that are available on the market, firstly because EVE’s contract interface is pretty horrendous and secondly because more than half of the contracts in EVE are scams. Incidentally, I occasionally get hits from people searching for “how to tell if a contract in EVE is a scam”. The answer is simple: Read Carefully and Learn to Tell Between Thousand and Million.

So I’m still extremely clueless when it comes to any faction ships, since I never see them. The only time I had ever heard of a Rattlesnake was when some ninja salvaging griefer was very happy at managing to blow one up. From this I assumed that it was some really expensive and rare ship (and also for some strange reason it latched into my brain that it was a Command Ship). I was pretty surprised when Audra Li mentioned it as being the only ship that seemed to be an upgrade over her Dominix. As a Dominix user myself I was naturally piqued by this and went and did some research as well as some EFT tinkering.

Holy moly… my respect for the technical expertise of Gurista pirates just went up a thousand-fold. How is it that a bunch of dirty scruffy pirates living on asteroids can come up with a ship that is so easy to fit and has such an incredible omgwhatisthisicantevenunderstand passive tank. It seems to have such an incredible shield recharge rate that just by training up to Caldari Battleship III, with my other crappy skills, I can get 84k EHP and 532 tanked dps.

Yeah, ok, that’s with a Dread Guristas Invulnerability Field but I can drop it down to a T2 version and still tank 478 dps, which is still pretty overtanked for level 4s.

I’ve been meaning to switch to a Raven Navy Issue for a while, to try out missiles as well as to try and improve my dps. Training T2 railguns on the Dominix will take a crapload more time than I’m willing to put in, and I wasn’t very impressed by the performance of my 4x meta 4 railguns. The only thing that I was hesitant about was that I couldn’t seem to come up with a satisfactory tank on the CNR. Especially since I’ve become so used to cap stable fits. My internet connection tends to die every so often especially when it’s raining, and here in Singapore it’s the rainy season all year round. Add in periodic baby summons and an active tank that only lasts 5 minutes is a really bad idea. I could come up with cap stable fits that can tank about 270 dps, but that depended on a heavy nos which… I don’t know, didn’t seem very dependable. I could get a slightly weaker but cap stable tank without the nos by going batshit crazy on faction/complex modules (CN/DG Invulnerability field, 2x Pithi B-type small shield boosters) but that seemed a bit extreme.

So the Rattlesnake seemed to be the best of both worlds. A crazy passive shield tank (I’m so lazy). Missile slots instead of weaksauce guns. And enough mid slots left to fit drone tracking and navigation modules, which pump up drone dps by allowing sentries and heavies to hit smaller targets easily. Of course, people will cry when they see my faction Rattlesnake using noobie Ogre I’s and Warden I’s… Some training in Heavy Drone Operation may be in the works. Most recommended fits also use torpedoes instead of cruise missiles (a 175.5 km optimal is just total overkill), but with torps I can’t seem to get an optimal higher than 45.6 km even with max skills and T2 javelin torps, which doesn’t really seem long enough? Will have to play around between torps and cruise missiles to be sure.

Surprisingly the price was pretty acceptable, 515 million ISK for a faction battleship. Apparently they used to go for more than a billion, and the other pirate faction ships are selling for around 900 million. Many people prefer the CNR or Golem since they do higher dps, and I’m sure they have a sufficient tank anyway. It’s just that I like the flexibility offered by the passive tank. The afterburner can only run for 7 minutes, but I only intend to use it in short spurts to reach acceleration gates and may even drop it if it proves unnecessary.

Besides the Rattlesnake, I’ve placed a bid for the aforementioned DG Invulnerability Field at 385 million, spent 55 million for a Federation Navy Omnidirectional Tracking Link and bought another PLEX for 291 million (since the price had dipped). I promised myself that I wouldn’t buy any more new shinies for a while, especially since I still have to pay the 45+75 million ISK for Advanced Spaceship Command and Gallente Freighter skillbooks…

I’ve barely begun my first steps on my road to new shinies and already I’ve been distracted by another skill plan.

While I’ve been having a great time missioning in my Dominix, I always find myself wanting to try out some other types of ships. However, one of the barriers in my way has always been that I can salvage as I go with the Dominix since drones provide all the dps, freeing up my high slots for salvagers and tractor beams. If I change to any non-drone based ships, my high slots will have to be used for launchers or turrets, necessitating the use of a separate ship for salvaging. This is recommended by most people anyway, so it shouldn’t be a big deal right? Well it can get annoying if you move your mission hub fairly frequently, since I would have to first move the Dominix then come back, move the Catalyst etc etc. So despite my drone-only Dominix having abysmal dps, it’s still my preferred ship for now due to the convenience it provides. Of course, I could always…. not salvage. But… it’s money… right there… take it… you know you want to…

Besides, it was also getting annoying when I get some storyline mission that doesn’t let me bring my battleship. Grrr. Then I have to jump all the way back to where I last left the Myrmidon and come back again, which is a royal pain.

So I start wondering if there’s a way I can move multiple ships at the same time, maybe by tying a rope between them and using the Dominix to tug them along or something. Carriers are obviously not anywhere in my reach for the time being. I knew an Orca had ship maintenance arrays, but one look at the prerequisites killed that idea pretty quick (Industry V, Mining IV, Mining Barge IV, Mining Foreman V geez) especially since I would never ever use it for mining. But hey, what’s this? Freighters only require Spaceship Command V and a racial Industrial V skill….

Looking through the various race’s freighters, it seems like there is not much difference between them. They are all slow as hell (60-80 m/s), have a lot of hps (more than 100,000 each, so pretty much ungankable in high sec), and look like flying cargo warehouses. The major difference to me is the cargo capacity. The Caldari Charon seems to be the best with a capacity of 785,000 m3, followed by the Gallente Obelisk at 750,000 m3, the Amarr Prophecy with 735,000 m3, and lastly the Minmatar Fenrir at 720,000 m3. At first glance, I assumed I should go for the Charon. But that would require me to train Caldari Industrial V. Which is a completely useless skill because the Caldari Industrials are total crap. The following table (from Evelopedia) shows the cargo capacities of the various industrials at varying skill levels, fully rigged and equipped with Cargohold Expander IIs.

Trained Skill Level:	I	II	III	IV	V
Amarr’s Sigil	16142	16911	17679	18448	19217
Amarr’s Bestower	20257	21221	22186	23150	24115
Caldari’s Badger	10708	11218	11728	12238	12748
Caldari’s Badger Mark II			19032	19859	20687
Gallente’s Iteron	7788	8159	8530	8901	9271
Gallente’s Iteron Mark II		10199	10662	11126	11589
Gallente’s Iteron Mark III			17672	18441	19209
Gallente’s Iteron Mark IV				19859	20687
Gallente’s Iteron Mark V					38433
Minmatar’s Wreathe	8567	8975	9383	9791	10199
Minmatar’s Hoarder		1768	18488	19292	20096
Minmatar’s Mammoth				27129	28260

The Caldari Badger Mk II, at Caldari Industrial V, is barely better than the old Amarr Bestower that I’m currently using at Amarr Industrial I. Yuck. On the other hand, the Iteron Mark V is far and away the best industrial with 38,433 m3 of space. So it looks like my choice is between 35,000 m3 extra capacity on the Charon (and training a completely useless skill for 20 days) or getting a Obelisk with a smaller hold but more flexibility in being able to use the Iteron Mark V when I want to haul smaller stuff.

Well, first I needed to find out if the 35,000 m3 extra is actually significant compared to a 750,000 m3 bay. If I can fit everything I want in the Obelisk anyway, then the extra space isn’t really important. Let’s take a look at the sizes of the ships I may want to bring along:

Hull	Assembled	Repackaged
Raven	486000	50000
Dominix	454500	50000
Drake	252000	15000
Myrmidon	270000	15000
Catalyst	55000	5000
Bestower	260000	20000
Iteron V	275000	20000

I need to look at assembled sizes as well because you can’t repackage rigged ships without losing the rigs. I need a rigged battleship for level 4s, so that’s a big chunk of the space already. I managed to come up with some unrigged battlecruiser fits, but they’re definitely not as effective as the rigged versions. The salvaging Catalyst would also ideally have 3 small capacitor control circuits fitted, otherwise I would only be able to run the tractor beams and salvagers for 1.5 minutes which is a bit ridiculous.

So, at first glance:
Charon 785,000
Raven 486,000
Drake 252,000
Catalyst 5,000
Bestower 20,000
Total 763,000
Remaining 22,000

Not good. Can’t fit rigged Catalyst even on a Charon, and definitely can’t fit these hulls into the Obelisk since there is only 22,000 m3 left. Sigh. Looks like I’m stuck with training Caldari Industrial V unless I bring an unrigged Drake.

Wait a minute, I forgot all about the Freighter skill bonus on the ships! “5% bonus to cargo capacity and 5% bonus to maximum velocity per level”. Its a rank 10 skill, but I should be able to train to something like level 3 fairly fast…

Obelisk 750,000 x1.15 = 862,500
Raven 486,000
Drake 252,000
Catalyst 55,000
Iteron V 20,000
Total 813,000
Remaining 49,500

Fantastic! Can carry a rigged Raven, Drake and Catalyst, a packaged Iteron V (still good for 25,270 m3 carrying capacity) and maybe a shuttle and still have 49,000 m3 of space left for loot and modules. It’ll be like touring the universe with a mobile tractor trailer containing a kitchen, bedroom, bathroom, and jacuzzi!

So having made my decision, now comes the painful part… spending ISK (QQ). 659 million ISK for the Obelisk, which is actually a fairly low price based on the historical data. Back in February 2009 Wilhelm bought a Charon for 920 million ISK. 45 million ISK for Advanced Spaceship Command, and Gallente Freighter is going for about 75 million ISK in Jita. Eep. 779 million ISK price tag in total, but it sounds fun to be able to haul all my missioning ships around at one go… Once I finish training, that is.

Note: Assembled ships cannot be placed directly in a freighter’s hold, even if it fits. This gave me a heart attack when I read it in Wilhelm’s post, but some later research revealed that rigged non-capital ships can be placed in a courier contract, which can then be moved via freighter. A bit more hassle, but no problem since I have a second account that can act as the courier partner as you can’t create a contract to yourself.

Not a good weekend for my trading activities.

After finding out that the skillbooks which I had been attempting to stockpile to control the market were from Loyalty Point stores, I had resolved not to try this trick again since it was evident that a few characters like to dump their LP on hundreds of these books and dump them in Jita. These characters are doubly annoying in that not only do they totally saturate the supply side, they do so in a way that completely kills the margin between the buy and sell orders.

What they do is instead of posting their 100+ skillbooks all at one price, they painstakingly split them up into batches of 3,6 or 9, and then post all these batches up with descending prices with intervals of about 30,000 ISK.

Yes, those are all by the same guy. I’m guessing that he does this because he thinks it averages out his revenue; posting them all at a low price would mean leaving a lot of money on the table, but posting them with a 0.01 ISK undercut would also likely mean that he gets undercut very quickly. I have to say that this strategy does sort of work, because one look at these prices would discourage any margin trader from coming in. Of course, what can also happen (and does happen) is that more clear-headed traders with existing stock simply put up a sell order in the middle of all these orders at a price they are comfortable with, blocking out all of the higher-priced, more valuable sell orders anyway.

Unfortunately, last week I made the decision to buy out all of this guy’s orders and reset the price point to original levels. That meant buying 300+ of these books. While I wouldn’t make much profit for those books that I bought at the upper end, this would be much more than offset by the margin between my price and his lower orders. Part of me hated basically rewarding this guy for his dumb market destroying activity, but the more rational part said “you’re going to make money from him anyway, who cares”.

Overall my scheme worked, helped by another shuttle run to Amarr to pass a big portion of the 300 books to my Amarr trader, and I did make some money (I think, it’s hard to keep track with such varying purchase prices). But before I could sell all of them, this guy has come back again. Only this time it seems he brought his alt as well, because there are EVEN MORE books up for sale using this annoying pricing method. You have to admire his tenacity in painstakingly splitting everything up into batches and posting them up one by one, not to mention the time he must have put in to train such a staggering amount of orders just to sell a few types of items. However, I should have listended to myself and not encouraged him by buying out his stuff, which is basically the best case scenario for him. Now the market is destroyed once more and I’ll have to wait a long while before it’s worth trading in it again. On the bright side, I’m also seeing other traders dump big batches of books to block this guy’s orders. Hopefully, his current orders will take so long to sell that it ties him up for a long time and teaches him a lesson.

I also should have listened to myself about not stockpiling too much. I was burned slightly in the past when I collected too much inventory and was caught when station module prices collapsed in the wake of Tyrannis NPC sell orders being removed. Over time, however, the lessons learnt by that episode seem to have faded and I found myself buying out 96 starbase modules again in an attempt to control the market, thinking that I could make about a 400,000 ISK profit on each one.

However, I severely underestimated the ease by which people can make these modules. Not being active in PI, I don’t have a good idea about what goes into the making of each of these modules, but it seems that certain traders are dumping huge numbers of these onto Jita every weekend. Maybe they crawled out of some wormhole somewhere where they have been busy manufacturing 24 hours a day. Not only do they dump massive numbers, they also undercut quite deeply and check their orders very often. So now I’m holding on to 70+ modules with the sell price now stuck beneath my buy price due to massive orders (which are still being undercut left, right and center despite their deep undercut… as expected).

I think it also doesn’t help that being made out of PI materials, which essentially are “free” in the minds of most people, these modules have basically no floor price as manufacturers are willing to sell them at any cost since they don’t actually lose any money. Sigh. Hopefully the market recovers during the week when these baboons go back to whichever wormhole they crawled out of.

When I first decided to get another account about a month back, me and my wife encountered the mysterious disappearance of a PLEX buy order. The buy order was not cancelled and was not filled, but we were out the ISK from the market escrow until the next downtime and never got our broker fee back either. Since we eventually got our ISK back, we wrote it off as an acceptable outcome even though we didn’t find out how it had occurred.

A couple of days ago, my wife suddenly noticed that she seemed to be missing a bunch of ISK again. She was pretty sure that she had easily more than 600 million in the afternoon, and now we couldn’t seem to reach 600 million even counting all the assets she was holding in inventory. Some digging through of her orders revealed that more orders had gone missing! Ordinarily this would be very hard to detect, but one of those that poofed was for an item that she specifically remembered not wanting to cancel due to the fairly high broker fees, and she wanted to leave it there to annoy some stupid random overbidder who thought that a 200k raise in prizes made him a big boy.

Sure enough, after downtime she was refunded the market escrow from 3 separate orders. Perusing through her journal also revealed that this had been happening for the past week, with some ISK being refunded after downtime every other day. And no broker fee refund either, those sodding bastards.

Armed with this knowledge she filed a petition to the GMs asking if they knew of this bug. I mean, it would be really disconcertingly bad coding for market orders to just go poof for no reason.

Let us now take a moment to consider some interesting facts about EVE’s market system, in particular the expiry date of orders.

Did you know that the expiry date of orders gets reset whenever you modify an order? This makes it not so much an expiry date, but rather more like an inactivity timer. Did you also know that when an order expires, the player does not get the escrow released until the next downtime? Coupled with the fact that the broker fee remains the same regardless of the duration set for the expiry date, there is really no reason to ever have an expiry date that is not set to the maximum of 3 months. You don’t get the broker fee refunded when an order expires, it costs the same to set up, and you get your money back faster (usually) when you cancel an order. You can even cancel an order at any time anywhere in the universe without training any additional skills! So only a doofus would ever let their orders expire.

It turned out, after perusing the helpful GM’s reply to “maybe set the expiry date longer”, that buy orders and sell orders have different default settings. She had set her sell orders to 3 months by default, but the buy orders still had expiry dates of 24 hours. This was also hidden due to her interface displaying buy orders on a longer line with the expiry date column hidden compared to the sell orders. Because she did not change all the orders at the same time every day, over time their expiry dates were extended to vary all over the place. Thus only a few orders would poof every other day, and usually those with little activity so she would not notice them disappearing.

So I guess we can now rest easy that EVE’s market code is not in fact horribly buggy, although the question still remains as to why there are even varying expiry dates in the first place since everyone should always set it to 3 months. She’s still out a couple of million from all the broker fees though, and she’ll have to replace her existing orders as they expire/get filled with 3 month orders. But we can finally close the case of the missing order once and for all.

Now that I’ve finished up most of the support skills that are of immediate interest to me, I’ve been thinking of what goals to start training for next. Something that looked interesting was naturally the T3 Strategic Cruisers, being one of the newest and shiniest class of ships. Prices for these have come down a lot as well since more and more people have become very proficient at running wormholes for the Sleeper components needed.

So, what skills do I need to train up for a Strategic Cruiser? I have revised my previously low opinion of missile ships after seeing how effective my wife’s 3 week old character is in her Drake. The only downside is that she chews through piles of Scourge Heavy Missiles like Cookie Monster demolishing a plate of chocolate chip cookies, and she has left packs of orphaned drones throughout space due to forgetting to recall them.

In any case, back to the T3 skills. So my choices were either the Tengu or Proteus since my training has mainly focused on missiles/drones. The training times for the Proteus are shorter due to having already finished Drones V. Unfortunately Sleepers love snacking on drones, so the Proteus seems to be not such a great idea for wormhole ops, which is one job I had in mind for the T3. So, let’s look at Tengu skills…

Caldari Cruiser V – 24 days 12 hours, ouch 😦
Shield Operation V – 4 days 4 hours
Electronics V – done
Engineering V – done
Missile Launcher Operation V – 4 days 4 hours
Navigation V – 3 days 18 hours

Hey, not too shabby! Cloaking IV is needed to mount a Covert Ops cloak, which would come in handy, but I’ve already been training that and it’s due to complete in 2 days 11 hours. That means the rest comes up to… 36 days 14 hours. Hmm.

However, the vast majority of that is in getting Caldari Cruiser V. I then took a look at all the other ship types that I could possibly have an interest in and found that things didn’t look too bad.

After finishing Cloaking IV, I could train Caldari Frigate V, which would let me pilot assault ships! That’s 8 days 8 hours.

If I follow that with Electronic Upgrades V (8 days 8 hours again…), that gives me access to Covert Ops ships and Electronic Attack Frigates. Somehow the idea of flying a stealth bomber has always appealed to me despite the likelihood being that I’ll just end up bombing myself or splatted in 2 seconds by a Rifter.

Speaking of Rifters, training Evasive Maneuvering V would then let me fly Interceptors, the tech 2 super speedy versions of frigates. Caldari version, though.

So all in all, I’m actually closer to a lot of tech 2 hulls than I thought. Granted this is just the skills to be able to undock and fly around, not use each ship to their peak effectiveness. But still, it doesn’t seem that long until an operational Tengu leaves Jita.

One thing I’ve been struggling with though was whether to finish the tier 1 Learning skills to V. According to EVEMon it would take something like 200+ days for me to recoup the 4 days of training time for each attribute. But this plan would already be a sizable chunk of that 200 days…

Now I think it’s pretty clear that I am, with no beating about the bush, a money-grubbing miser. Both in game and in real life. I’m never going to buy a flashy car or a big house or some ridiculously overpriced piece of garbage. Well, actually I’m never going to buy a handbag, period, but you get the point.

In New Eden, my ships are pretty run of the mill. I don’t stint on Tech 2 if I can use it, but I don’t even buy meta 4s most of the time as most meta 4 modules are insanely priced for the upgrade they provide. Prices in EVE, just like skill training times, seem to universally follow a steep exponential curve despite the benefits actually being linear.

However, I’ve seen plenty of killmails like this 2 billion ISK Tengu, which was actually killed by friendly fire of all things. The very thought of equipping a ship with a 1.1 billion ISK module totally boggles my mind.

I mean, for that kind of price I’d expect my ship to be invincible or something. Most killboards measure effectiveness by ISK destroyed vs ISK lost, which I think is a very good way of thinking. Most faction and officer mods are nowhere near worth the ISK they cost. For example, I took a look at how much it would cost to buy Caldari Navy Heavy Missile Launchers for my Drake. They cost 55 million ISK each!!! That’s almost as much as my entire Drake fit in the first place. Equipping 7 of those would be like duct-taping 7 other fully-fitted Drakes on top of a Drake hull, only much less awesome.

Comparing the stats of the various heavy missile launchers, it’s clear that the Caldari Navy and Dread Guristas launchers are definitely the best. They use the least powergrid and the same CPU as the Tech 2 versions, while having the largest capacity and best rate of fire. However, the rate of fire improvement is only a 12.5% increase in DPS over the Tech 2 or meta 4 launchers. Is that worth a price tag of 55 million per launcher compared to 750k or 13.5 million respectively? Not to me. I’d rather fly 8 Drakes with meta 3 launchers than splurge on faction or officer mods and risk losing half a billion ISK to an unlucky DC or crying kid AFK.

I could sort of see the point if the reduced fitting requirements allow certain fits that wouldn’t otherwise be viable, because then it’s not just some marginal DPS increase. Or maybe the hull is already expensive, I mean I wouldn’t put cheapo meta 0 modules on a tech 3 strategic cruiser either. But in EVE there’s always the risk of losing your ship due to circumstances beyond your control, and using super expensive mods doesn’t exactly make your ship super powerful either. I’m sure that 2 billion ISK Tengu would still have died to a ragtag EVE Uni newbie frigate fleet that cost less than 100 million.

Maybe these are old players that have like trillions of ISK just lying around, but I don’t think I could ever bring myself to undock in a ship that’s worth half a year of PLEX…

You can always find amusing things in Jita. Amusing in a kind of “scratches head wondering what these monkeys are thinking” kind of way.

I’ve previously mentioned the guy in Jita who had put up an order for 30 implants… in Jita 4 Moon 5. His order has now been sitting there untouched for more than a month, despite him pitifully updating his price every couple of hours.

Sorry for the resolution, it’s hard to make the picture big enough to be legible with EVE’s tiny fonts. I’m still wondering how long it will take this guy to realise that his order really stands out from every single other order (I also hope he doesn’t have any other orders placed in Jita 4-5). Notice the 3 telltale signs he should have noticed circled in red (if he had put his range as systemwide it would be ok, hence the 3rd circle). This is aside from the ginormously obvious difference that on his screen every other order shows up as unhighlighted while his is green. Which brings me to the other guy which I just noticed, with his order circled in blue. Have fun collecting your implants from all over The Forge region… I hope you meant to do that for some reason.

The other thing I find exasperating is how some traders seem to be little better than robots mindlessly updating their prices. Of course there’s always the possibility that they ARE bots since there are apparently mining bots, but I’m not so sure how many trading bots there are or even if it’s possible. Very often I see something like this happening:

Note that the buy orders were previously in the 2,231,000 ISK range. Some guy comes along, and puts up an order 7 jumps away for a single unit of this item, with a 2 jump range. Of course he thinks “I’ll get it faster if I put a higher price hur-de-hur” and overbids by 400,000 ISK. Either that or he knows what’s going to happen and is actually trying to manipulate the market.

What happens next is that some absolutely brainless monkey will start overbidding the 2,630,000 ISK price, just so that their order appears on the top of the buy order window. Despite the fact that that single order 7 jumps away has absolutely no bearing on the Jita market whatsoever. No one in Jita is going to lose any sales to that order, since no one would jump a minimum of 5 jumps away just to get a 400,000 ISK savings. And it’s only a single unit, in a market that moves hundreds of these items every single day. And henceforth everyone continues to overbid that order, which ends up costing millions more for everyone. Le sigh.

Oh wait maybe they think they are engaging in “market PvP”…

On a less cynical note, I actually did a sort-of trading run today. The market for one of the skillbooks which I found out came from Loyalty Points had collapsed below my purchase price due to these mission runners dumping huge numbers of them in Jita. There’s no way I could buy out 300 plus skillbooks and expect to sell them before these guys appear again, and there’s no point keeping my sell order up at my original price and waiting a few weeks for those ginormous orders to clear.

However, they actually still sold pretty decently at Amarr…. hmm. And my other trading alt had just run out of stock of this item to sell. So I loaded up my little Gallente shuttle with my remaining stock and bought a few other things which I knew sold better in Amarr. Undocked into the void, almost getting run over by a blaring Charon freighter which was 5000 times my size, and set my autopilot for the 9 jump journey to Amarr.

I was a bit worried about getting suicide ganked along the way due to the value of the goods, which was more than 300 million, but figured a shuttle is pretty fast and normally not worth the effort of a gank. I had a bit of a heart attack when a Stabber actually started locking on to me while I was 12km from the Kaaputenen stargate, but my nimble little shuttle actually made the jump before he could resolve the lock. Gate camp failed! Kek.

The rest of the trip passed without any other incidents. For some reason Gallente shuttles are bright and cheery yellow instead of their usual dark gray-green color which they use on the rest of their ships. Makes it look like a little taxi rushing around. I would totally fit a Civilian Horn Amplifier on my shuttle and spam it while buzzing past those huge lumbering freighters and Orcas on the way to the stargate.