Saturday, August 30, 2008

EVE-Online: Big trip into low-sec

So if you've read my EVE posts, you know I'm really a carebear at heart. I like to build stuff and sell it. As such, I'm very inexperienced with PvP. Today, I started a long trip into low-sec to haul some stuff for a friend in our new alliance (AMC broke up under a severe wardec).


For those of you who don't know how to read the EVE star map, the colors show the security rating. Green/yellow are "safe," red/orange are not. Each straight line is a jump from one system to another. The green end of this path is where my corp's HQ is. The red end is the unsafe area where my friend's stuff needs to be delivered.

This is the biggest excursion into low-sec I've ever taken. The funny thing is, my hauler is a Viator, so I need to use containers inside its cargohold to fit more stuff in it. It's weird, but cargo containers in EVE use some odd technology to make them take up less space than they hold. The trade off is that you compartmentalize your cargohold. You can carry more stuff, but nothing can be larger than a certain size.

It turns out one thing I need to haul is a container. For obvious reasons, you can't put containers into containers. I can't fit it into the ship since I need the containers I usually use to fit everything else in. So I tried to open the container to see if I could just separate everything out. Turns out the container is empty. Good thing I had to check this, or I would have gone over 20 jumps in low-sec with part of my cargo missing!