I went ahead and upgraded the new accounts. Too many skills I can't train on trials and I was already up against them. I'll give CCP this, they made trials flexiable enough to give new players a taste, but limited enough to keep existing players from getting too much out of them while they are free. The big one was that trials can't give money to anyone, so I was a little annoyed after I divied up my main's ISK between them. Oh well, just some free time for the main worst case.

So after taking stock of what I had on my main and how much time and ISK it would take to get the new accounts to where I wanted them skill wise, I've settled into a nice little mining op.

The two Caldari are acting as defense in Kestrels with with a mix of Bloodclaw and Serpent missles. The missles are kinetic so they are pretty effective against Serpentis. These are the rats I deal with since I'm in the Essence region of Gallente space ( main is Gallente and had too much crap to move somewhere else yet ). These two are traiing up to Cruisers right now, should be able to pick up Carcals tomorrow evening. Once I get then in Cruisers, I'm likely to start to take them in different directions. Two cruisers are overkill for 0.5 space where I'm mining, but times when I've had one of the Kestrel's off picking up orders I've found that one frigate just isn't enough defense.

I have a new Gallente working her way down the Gallente Industrial command skills. With my main being Gallente it made more sense than going Minmatar as I already had a Iteron 2 and Iteron 4. She hit level 3 last night and I picked up an Iteron 3 to get the second high slot. She has enough skill to run remote armor repair, so she lets me stay out longer with having to go back for repairs.

The main is flying a Procurer with a modulated strip miner fitted with a crystal for Veldspar. At first I was mining everything but Veldspar, but given the price on Tritanium I'm getting, 3.97 to 4.15 ( I lucked out and managed a decent sized sale at 5.0 over the weekend ), I see the most profit in veldspar followed by Scordite. Unless I'm willing to track down some Kernite, I won't be able to beat the yeild on Veld. I'm aout three days out on getting my Astrogeology up to level 4 so I can upgrade to a Retriever.

By no means am I rolling in the ISK, but I can bring in about 8Mil per asteroid belt just strip mining the Veldspar. I picked up Ice Harvesting last night just to try it out. Perhaps I'm not hitting the good ice, but the value of the product seems rather low. Is this a case of there being little demand in Empire space, or is it more that you need to convert the isotopes into something more valuable.

One of the best and worst things about Eve is that you can pretty much set your own goals. Right now I'm considering a POS for moon mining in the highest sec space I can place one, I'm thinking that its > 0.4, but the docs and wikis are a bit vague. I'm going for low sec over 0.0 because I really want to try a setup that pretty self suficient and see how much I can generate for something I only have to deal with once a week.

Okay, one final thing in this mega post, I was seeing PLEX at 350mil, is that about the average for them? Trying to figure out what my income needs to be to pay for my accounts.

- Souca -