20070325 :: Accounting

It's astounding what a fella can do when he puts his mind to it. I knew I had over-extended myself a while back and it took the lost of the Cheetah to put things right.

First a touch of background:

The Cheetah, named the Halve Maen* ate it as you may recall from a previous post. I had a bit of an "awwww" moment with this one as was not only my first Cov-Ops frigate, but also the first-ever rigged ship I had flown. And, to top it all off, I had built the rigs myself. She was the ship I purchased after deciding to go into Exploration. At least she went out doing what she did best.

Note: there's still no sign of the five crewmen nor the janitor who were in the hold. Anyone finding them, please feed them and drop me a line.

Anyways, I found myself in dire straits after realizing I'd let her insurance lapse. CCP really ought to come up with a better system for that. I understand the hassles of sending out emails to every client with lapsing insurance, but currently the only way you find out is if you happen to open the insurance window to insure a new ship. While it does place the bulk of the responsibility on the pilot's shoulders to keep their insurance up to date, I'm sure a system could be crafted that pops something in the neocom client-side to take a load off the server. Needless to say, all that aside, I couldn't scrape up the 12 mil for a comparable replacement.

The first thing I did was to go and fetch my Drake, Sir Walter and set about cleaning up the den of Angels I stumbled upon that cost me the Cov-Ops frigate. And then for good measure I wiped up the two other locations in-system she'd uncovered. I never could figure out what the two Asteroid Stations were about, but there were two of them, too.

All told it was three hideouts, each running about 1.3 mil a pop in bounties alone, not including the loot and salvage. Among the salvage were a few choice items that run in the 4-8 mil range. Figure with the loss of the ship (~12 mil) and three hideouts, plus just the two heavy ticket items I'm getting about what I lost in the ship. Fittings were another matter though I had been able to salvage the Cov-Ops cloak and about 45 quest probes.

After triumphantly returning to station and looking at my new-found loot a bit of buyer's remorse set in. I had been on a bit of a buying spree lately, picking up items that were nice to have, but wholly unnecessary. I sold off the Rifter, Rupture, two Mammoths, and the Tyhoon. Some items are still stuck in market limbo, but already I've raised the bank account to over 96 mil.

And that's after taking into account the purchase of a new Cov-Ops ship: the Helios. And she can lob probes with the best of them. She's not been rigged out yet, so her time's a bit off with analyzing probe data, but already she's found a few places in the neighborhood.

If anyone reads this and has any comment on the Cheetah/Buzzard/Helios/whatever the Hell the Amar fly, then please let me know!

* The Halve Maen (English: Half Moon) was the name of a Dutch East India Company yacht which sailed in what is now New York harbor in September, 1609. [Wikipedia]