Red Frog Freight Service

I had heard of Red Frog Freight Service nearly a year ago from another pilot that was using the service for POS refueling and consolidation of their corp hangars. So, since I had recently pulled out of Wspace and my entire POS portfolio was (albeit in a single location) far away from my desired base of operations, I decided to look up Red Frog and get a better idea of how it worked and what the freight services would cost.

Much to my surprise, it was dirt-cheap and nearly instantaneous. I had more than 3 Billion ISK worth of POS fittings, ships, fuel, supplies, and loot that I wanted to relocate 26 jumps to my "permanent" base in Lonetrek.

With a max m3 of 860,000 m3 per contract and a max collateral of 1B ISK, this actually worked out perfectly divided into 3 separate contracts. The process was pretty simple - divide up the ships and cargo to no more than 860,000 m3 per batch and then create a courier contract for each batch.

I had a couple of "comfort" questions I posted to their channel in terms of how the process worked, but within 36 hours, all 3 contracts were completed and the total cost to move this immense amount of equipment was....wait for it...less than 29M ISK. Yes, for under 30M ISK, I saved myself roughly 47 52-jump round-trip efforts in max-rigged Iteron V. That spells more than 2,400 total jumps that I did not have to grind, nor sweat out the prospect of HighSec ganking considering the cargo value.

To say that I found this service invaluable would be a gross understatement. I actually ended up tipping the three pilots that completed the contracts an additional 10M ISK per pilot just because I though the value was so high and the cost was so low.

As I mentioned above, they also offer HighSec POS Refueling contracts - something I will be considering heavily in the coming weeks.

Hats-off to Red Frog Freight Service, their great service, and impeccable results (success rate at 99.9%).

Fly Safe!♦

More love bestowed on my Viator

OK, so the last station to clear out was in Dal, which is a LowSec system next door to the border system of Anamake - a notoriously rough place to be in an industrial...

With some heavy tonnage worth of goods (all sorts of POS fittings, most each in excess of 4,000m3), this was not a job for the Helios. However, my base was nearly 16 jumps away, and I did not want to run 11 full round-trips. So, I devised a plan whereby I parked my two Itty 5's in HighSec just outside of the border to LowSec, then sent my Viator in for the relatively short 4 trips each way to essentially ferry out the expensive goods.

So, although there were camps in both Anamake and Dal, I made 11 round trips, through both camps coming and going each trip, and got all of the goods out to HighSec. Once there, I simply loaded it all up in the Itty's and the main and alt transported it all back to my staging system.

FYI - I had scouted the 2 gate camps and was relatively confident that they were not fitting smart bombs, which essentially allowed me to go ahead and proceed with the Viator plan.

Like I said in an earlier post - I am beginning to enjoy my Viator - all the benefits of a Covops, but with an actual cargohold.

Fly Safe!

Google Analytics Stats

Wensley at Rifter Drifter recently posted his Google Stats, which drove me to check my stats for the first time in over a year! Very interesting to see your traffic distribution, sources of traffic, etc. As such, here is a quick recap and at the bottom, my thoughts...

January GA Stats:

General:

• 49,486 Views on 21,247 Unique Visitors
• 40.82% new visitors in January
• Avg Time on site is 2:51

Geo:

• 40% US
• 11% UK
• 9% Canada
• 6% Germany
• 5% Aussies
• 2.7% Netherlands
• 2% each for Sweden, Denmark, France, Poland
• ...then 77 other countries under 1%
• Iceland (CCP!) at 0.33%
  

Traffic Sources:

• 65% Search Engines - Nearly all Google, where are Yahoo! (.03%) and Bing! (0%)?
• Top keywords were all about "eve wormhole" and close variants combined at 17% of searches, the rest being names of sleeper sites
• 19% Direct Traffic
• 16% Referring Sites - Facebook (6%), scrapheap-challenge.com (2.65%), crazykinux (1.96%), Mynxee/lifeinlowsec.blogspot.com (1%), long list of others at under 1%.
  

Most popular pages in January:

• Root/Home Page (25.59%)
• The demands of W-Space Colonization (4%)
• EVE Grids and WH Exit management (2.38%)
• Hybrid Polymer Reactions (1.66%)

Most popular pages in December:

• Root/Home Page (27.91%)
• Wormhole System Daily Ritual (2.24%)
• Living in WH Space (My very first post still sees the most traffic!) (2.18%)

Thoughts:

• Interesting to see that the traffic is so dispersed across all posts - a lot of visitors appear to read through all the posts - nearly as many views of prior months posts as current-month posts.
• Hardly any referring traffic. I have not jumped on the EVE Tweet bandwagon, nor have I campaigned for any kind of premium links from others - just interesting to note that other than Kinux, not a ton of referring traffic.
• Shocks me that my first-ever post on this blog, from June 25th 2009, still gets some of the highest pageviews of all of my (currently 121) posts.
• The most-read post ever? The first-ever post, but excluding that, it is the post on EVE Grids and WH Exit management. I suppose that is not too surprising, considering it generated a whopping 22 comments, all of which were good posts instead of one-liners...
• Most commented post? A recent one: Blockade Runner Transports == WIN with 23 comments.
  

Fly Safe!

Consolidation

Similar to the last time I stepped out of WSpace for a short stint, it provides an opportunity to go round-up salvage and other materials that were dropped off at K-space exit points over the course of the last several months.

Typically, these drops take place because I have always maintained the belief that you should never store billions of ISK worth of loot in your W-space POS. In cases where there was not a convenient path to market or simply did not have the time, I had about a dozen locations that needed to be consolidated.

So, I spent some time over the weekend while reading up on global news to fly my Viator and Itty 5 around EVE to get everything back to my new staging base. Mission accomplished - amazing to see what you end up stockpiling. I have over 300 Melted Nano's and datacores in the thousands. Plenty of goods for reverse engineering and T3 production.

I had also amassed an amazing amount of W-space gases that there was frankly no need to react into component materials - I have enough component materials to last to the next ice age and will likely be selling off my hybrid reactions setup. That leaves a LOT of C-70/72/60/84 gas that I will likely take directly to market.

I have been enjoying the reports from the D-GTMI front - I especially enjoyed Manasi's posts and pictures.

Fly Safe!

What I am NOT doing

Well, even with just my first 12 hours in 3 months outside of W-space, I can attest to what a difference POS maintenance in W-Space represents in term of EVE commitments.

As such, here is a list of things that I will not be doing daily:

• Logging in from work 3-4 times per day to check on T3 jobs, starting new reactions, component jobs and subsystem jobs, and making sure there are no recent POS attacks.
• Logging in nightly for 3+ hours to scan any new exits, clear any new spawns, and evaluate adjoining exits for safety/closure.
• Constantly monitoring fuel reserves for rare HighSec refueling opportunities
• Not stressing over whether or not I cleared all possible sleeper sites before another pilot does
  

All of this ties into my recent post on the demands of W-Space colonization - a "must-read" IMHO.

Fly Safe!

Exiting W-Space

A rare and convenient HighSec exit opened yesterday and I had logged on just in time to get about 75% of the transport effort completed before downtime for the Dominion patch.

I had a handful of subsystem assembly jobs remaining anyways, so today I logged in from work and spent the 90 seconds needed to kick those off. Once I get a chance to login tonight I will be taking down the remaining POS structures and evaluate the best LowSec exit to take everything out. Hopefully another nice HighSec exit opens, but it had been close to a month prior to this recent HighSec exit...

So, although I found some great neighbors in a really nice C2 with the right static exits, I need to take a short break from W-space. I will continue my T3 production in the near future, and will likely just spend some intermittent time on getting my Caldari toon's Gallente standings back up to avoid future mishaps. I will likely leave the scanning alt in-system just in case I have a hard time finding a good home in the future.

Not a true hiatus from Eve, just turning down the volume to catch my proverbial breath.

Fly Safe!

Blockade Runner Transports == WIN

So after my previous thrashing while attempting to transport some goods out of Jita, I took the friendly advice given by some readers here and picked up a blockade runner Viator, fitted for CovOps cloaking.

With these transports, you can choose a type that provide bonuses towards hitpoints (HP) and Warp Strength (ex: Occator) or to fitting a Covops (Viator). Since I am max skilled already for CovOps ability, I went for the Viator.

Although the Occator-style blockade runner transport is meant to increase armor and warp strength for staying power in HighSec (i.e. to outlast the ganker), after seeing the ships being used in the latest gankfests (Uedama, Perimeter, etc.), I am not really all that sure that the improved armor tank would last long enough.

With the Covert Ops Cloaking Device, which allows you to warp while cloaked, you are essentially getting Helios-like gatecamp busting in a Transport.

My trip to market today saw huge gank-camps in the usual keyhole system of Uedama and the main entrypoints to Jita (Urlen, Perimeter). But I was able to skirt past the gankers. I did have to shake a follower by pausing briefly in Haatomo 100km off a station, otherwise the trip was nicely uneventful.

Back to completing some T3 subsystem manufacturing and then likely pulling out of WSpace for a short stint.

Fly Safe!