f13.net

I want to get involved in one or both of these areas, but don't know the first thing about them (other than Jury Rigging is a prereq for most of the rigging skills, so I trained that to III yesterday). Anyone have any insight or links to detailed explanations for these?

I assumed installing rigs was as easy as installing modules.  If I ever find a rig I want, I'll check it out.  What we need is someone to build some rigs.

Rigging is pretty much just a branch of manufacturing. You need the standard manufacturing skills (especially Prod Eff V), as well as one specialized rig skill (e.g. Armor Rigging) in order to manufacture the rigs. Other than that, it's the usual ingredients + bpo + time in a manufacturing slot = product formula.

Tech1 rig BPOs are cheap (a few hundred thou, IIRC) and available widely at NPC stations. They're quick to research and quick to manufacture, like most other basic Tech1 components. Tech2 rig BPOs, afaik, have not been seeded and are currently only available via Invention.

Rigs are made out of salvage parts, which come in decent amounts but still cost an arm and a leg. I believe there's also a small amount of standard minerals needed; I don't recall off the top of my head. Tech1 rigs use "damaged" (i.e. normal) salvage components, such as 'Scorched Telemetry Processor' or 'Charred Micro Circuit'. Lots of them. The rig BPOs that I have demand over 100 of 3 different types of salvage components; most salvage components go for 20-40k each as of yesterday, while circuit-type components (there's 4 or 5 of these, all ending in 'circuit') were going for between 100k-200k apiece. Rigs aren't cheap yet, even tech1 ones.

Tech2 rigs, from what I've read, use rare-drop salvage components that are "undamaged" (you can tell because they don't have a damage word prefixing them and have a smooth blue background instead of an orange-red explosion background). I've not really even seen these on the market, so I assume they're ridiculously expensive. I have no idea what the mineral requirements are for tech2 rigs, but I assume they're similarly insane.

Salvage components are retrieved from wrecks with salvagers (duh). The better salvaging skill you have, and the more bonuses you get for salvaging, the less you'll fail when salvaging a wreck and it appears that you have both a higher "single-shot ceiling" and a higher average take. That is, when you successfully salvage something, you get between 1-n different types of components, with n increasing as both wrecked-ship size and your skill/modifiers increase. In addition, you get a quantity from 1-m parts of each type, again with m increasing as wrecked-ship size and your skill/modifiers increase.

For example, the other day I salvaged a Guristas Medium Wreck. I had no modifiers aside from Salvaging I, and I got 5 Tripped Power Circuit and 2 Ward Console. I expect I could've gotten much more with higher skills; reports are that medium-size (Cruiser/BC) wrecks can give up to 4 different types of components at once.

Even with all this mass salvagery, it's still a pain in the ass given the relatively short range of salvagers (5km) and relatively high failure rate. My usual salvaging technique is to loot by towing all wrecks into a 1500m bubble around me, warp out, fit 6 salvagers on my BC, warp back and powersalvage everything really fast. It still takes forever. I expect salvage part prices to remain relatively high for quite a while, unless CCP continues to increase the rate of salvaging drops or releases a Salvager II BPO that has a significantly higher yield.

As for installing a rig, I believe it's the same as installing a module, but you have to have the rigging skill to do it. I believe you can rig someone else's ship for them if they trade it to you. I also believe that repackaging destroys the rigs on a ship, but don't quote me on that. I could certainly test this out on the test server while we're waiting for the test POS to online itself later this week. I'll try to remember to do so.

Invention, I have no clue. I hear it involves the cutting off of genitalia with rust-ridden shaving implements, though. And the expenditure of precious, precious RPs.

Yeah, that is what I meant. I am assuming it is its own skill tree unrelated to invention, so I was trying to get a roadmap of what skills I will need (and how the process works for building rigs and inventing).

Edit- was responding to Yeg.

I will have to check the market for the rig BPOs. I have been stockpiling my salvage (Salvage III on both characters), so I hope to have enough for some simple rigs soon. Level 1 missions are a gold mine for this sort of thing with all the 1 shot kill frigs  :-D

Stockpiling salvage right now is, strictly speaking, a losing proposition. The market for salvage components is rapidly collapsing, so if you sell stuff off and then rebuy at market prices in a few weeks, you'll vastly increase your holdings. A burned logic circuit now is worth 1/20th of what it was a week ago.

I've also noticed people are starting to leave wrecks lying around in some outlying 0.5 systems. It may be profitable to get a fast frig or destroyer fitted out for speed to go salvage that stuff.

I've got a couple BPOs (Cargohold Optimization I, some missile ones) that I figured would be useful, but I haven't been able to get a lab slot since empire is horrifically overpopulated.

Yet another reason to get a POS up. Or at least train Sci Net to V so you can find the best spot to research in Empire.

For Invention you just need the Invention skill and some BPCs to do the invention on. You basically just bake the BPC in an Invention slot (it's a Research Slot of invention instead of material eff or time eff or copying), and if it is successful you now have a BPC with some bonus to it's attributes. (I think, I could be missing something).

But I hear the failure rate is high, and you lose your BPC when that happens. I wouldn't mind trying it with some ammo BPCs since those are really easy to make. Invention slots are also hard to find, so a POS wouldn't be bad for that either. :)

Doesn't matter in a region where even the pirated lowsec systems have 30d waiting periods on their slots.

I'll probably haul my wad o' BPOs out to Space Podunkville once I get SciNet up to III or IV.

Invention is complexer than just putting a BPC in a slot and hoping it survives.

First of all, you need a data interface for the specific range of research. Creating that interface requires skills that cost in the 250m on the market because they're mission rewards, continued with expensive ass BPOs, and catassing around a guesstimated 150 manhours minimum in COSMOS for the components required.

Then after that, you need data cores, which are volatile and poof during research, which are yet again either catassed or exchanged with RPs at your research agent (for probably more RPs per core than it is worth it at the end).

Optionally, you can supply a built item of the BPC you're gonna research, to increase chances.

At the end, everything except the interface is subject to lottery and is going to poof. Chances are influenced by skills, that being Research, two research skills required for the BPC and something else.

Or in short, it's a fucking retarded system that does nothing to help tackling the T2 market because it requires way too much advance investment in both terms of money and manhours for a chance on a decent return, since you gain only T2 BPCs, not BPOs, out of it.

Fuck CCP.

Er yah, guess we won't be doing that anytime soon.

The ship interfaces cost 10x more than all other interfaces. As long as you're not looking to break into T2 ship production, the interfaces should start becoming available on the market at reasonable prices in the coming months. Devs said they're going to tweak the drop rate on the cosmos missions.

Data core prices I've seen are in the 2M-5M range, which is a bit much. I don't know anything about the RP exchange rate so I don't know if we could expect that to come down or not.

1500 RPs for one datacore. I expect that price to rise if people actually start doing invention.

You can also get datacores from exploration; I helped some random guy out by opening up some hacking-required containers in his exploration pocket. Found a single Mechanical Engineering datacore and one "Tuning Instructions", which is apparently used to increase the ME on invented BPCs. This was in 0.5 space.

1500 RPs for a datacore is ridiculous. This requires you to train up Scientific Networking (or what it was called), bump your science skills like hell and then find a lot of high level RD agents, and maybe then you gain 2-3 datacores per week from RP points.

Research project management lets you run multiple R&D agents. Scientific Networking is doing blueprint stuff remotely.

And yes, it's ridiculously poorly balanced in terms of cost vs. reward. In almost all cases, you're better off buying a better-than-tech2 named component or tech2 component; inventing a BPC and manufacturing it is significantly more expensive compared to simply selling the datacores and materials for liquid isk.

For the vast majority of T2 items, there isn't any profit in Invention.  For the handful of items that either insatiable demand or cartel/monopoly action has driven the prices to insane levels (Covert Ops Cloaks, 1400mm II's, some drones, most HAC's), it's not only profitable, but some people are *really* making bank right now.

--Dave

Oh, and rigs: Don't expect the prices to drop that much from where they are now.  As people find the agents and missions that give the more expesnive components as rewards, those will come down a bit, but the price for rigs will always run in the 10's of millions (prices are already stabilizing).  Rigs probably won't have much of a market for finished models, they'll be built on a BYOM basis by people who have highly researched BPO's.  If you're just looking at the prices for rigs themselves on the market, you're looking in the wrong place, all the action is in salvage bits.  I've more than doubled my net worth in the last few weeks, all off of salvage speculation.

--Dave (Doesn't the Nyx look shiny?)

Yeah, I've made quite a bit off of either salvage part trading or simple outright hauling.

See, different rats drop different salvage parts, and some rigs require parts from a few different types of rat. It's easy enough to go to one empire's trade hub, load up on their native parts, then head out to another hub and resell it at 50%+ markup.

Several tech1 components suddenly developed very brief but very lucrative markets. Take a look at the price of micro capacitor batteries some time... They were going for nearly 80k at one point. 8)

http://eve.battleclinic.com/eve_online/item_database.php

Battleclinic has the Revelations info up if you want to browse the rigs OOG. CCP still doesn't.

Looked into this a bit - looks like the ONLY way to get the data interfaces (not data cores from RP points, that's different) necessary for invention is from exploration sites, in bpc form.  And these bpc's are going for billions. 

So much for joining the invention field. 

On a separate note, CovOps cloaks aren't inventable, are they? I don't think the proper BPC exists.

CovOps was changed to be built from the tech 1 cloaking thing.

The real cockblock doesn't begin untill after you get the BPC. The interfaces are extremely expensive to build, we've had one for 2-3 weeks, and we've been gathering components even before this and we're still short on building it.

Yeah, I looked at invention and thought "Fuck that.". So I went into rigging and salvage. Then I took a long look at that and sighed heavily. Luckily, I appear to be in the right area for some of the Drone rigs (which I want for myself) so I'm just stockpiling. Hopefully I'll have enough to make a few for myself, and then sell a few. Beats straight up selling salvage. Probably.

I'm researching mineral efficiency on the rig BPOs now, to see if it reduces the components I need to use. I do need to do something about my manufacturing efficiency.

Bring the BPOs to Akora and one of the directors can run them through our POS for ya at a VERY reasonable price. Don't have to wait 30 days either.

They just finished up a long run -- I queued them up when I bought them, well before I had any materials (or skills in rigging, salvage, etc). The wait isn't bad when you plan for it.