EVE General Discussion

The new (and unimproved) Hulk now has only 350 m3 of space available for crystals. The idea, apparently, is that this limit will force Hulk pilots to rely upon fleet support to deliver new crystals when the miner wants to switch to a new type of ore or has burned out his existing crystals.

So, assuming that I want a hauler to deliver crystals to me while I'm out in a hidden asteroid cluster, how should I arrange the logistics? For example, let's say I'm about to switch to Arkonor, and I have none of these crystals onboard at the moment. My crystals are sitting back in a station (assuming that the alliance holds SOV and has deployed an outpost in your mining system to support this kind of thing).

I could go into my Assets window and -- if I have my crystals just sitting on to floor of the hangar, all unorganized -- select 3 or 4 of my T2 Arkonor mining crystals, and contract them over to the hauler pilot. The problem here is that these crystals are worth about 2.7 million ISK apiece, and I'd kind of like to maintain some security over them. More to the point, if I contract the crystals directly to the hauler, they are just going to get tossed into the cargo bay of his industrial with everyone else's crystals. There will be no way to tell my Arkonor Mining Crystal IIs apart from somebody other pilot's crystals. If mine are basically new, I really don't want to get them mixed up with some other person's crystals that are 90% damaged.

So instead of contracting the crystals themselves to the hauler, I suppose I'll want to use some kind of can, which I can contract over to the hauler whenever I need new crystals delivered to the mining op. That way, I can at least tell which crystals are mine. This can is going to contain some pretty valuable assets, however. It would need to be set up before the Hulk undocks, and would ideally carry all the crystals that I might need to have delivered. In 0.0 SOV space with access to hidden belts, this pretty much needs to cover all 16 of the game's ore types. Assuming that I put 4 crystals in there for each ore type, that's 64 crystals or 1,600 m3 for the full set. That means something along the lines of a Giant or Huge Secure Container. That's a bit big, but nothing that a typical industrial ship can't handle.

The ideal container would be an audit log container. These can be password protected, so that no thieving hands can get into my multi-million ISK set of crystals. But there are two problems here. First of all, there aren't any audit log containers in the Giant or Huge size range. Secondly, even if I tried to use a smaller Large Audit Log Secure Container, I can't contract it over to anyone else once a password has been set on it.

It looks like the only real option really is the Huge Secure Container. It's big enough to hold all the crystals, and small enough to fit easily into an industrial. But despite it's name, it's not really "secure". The password is meaningless unless the can is anchored in space. If I contract it over in the station, there is nothing to prevent the hauler from reaching in and taking everything out of it.

Personally, I know all the guys I tend to mine with, but some ops are a bit more free flowing than others. The hauler may not be in my own corp, but in one of the other corporations in the alliance. Can anyone think of a way that these deliveries could be set up in any kind of a secure fashion?

^

Cynosural field.

Oh as for that, you talking about courier contracts? They move in crates. Chances are the courier won't have crates of crystals "laying around" since point A to point B makes for safer runs, unless the contracts are mounting up for just one destination. The ones that mount up don't pay, sooo....

Virgin crystals are packaged and stackable, they have a quantity in the "quantity" column. Used crystals are unstackable and don't have a quantity in the "quantity" column.

Didn't read your post thoroughly but you are trusting the hauler with your ore worth far in excess of your crystals, are you not?

OK read your post properly and you get 8/10 for getting me to respond seriously.

You lose 2/10 for "multi-million ISK set of crystals". Gave the game away.

He occasionally tweets. But you'll need a doctoral degree in video codecs to understand him.

It's not, the OP is just inventing problems because he thought he could come up with a novel variation on the "CCP nerfed my Hulk" whine.

How can a hauler, deliver your giant wall of text to a reader safely. They would need officer cargo expanders to carry that much wall.

LOL... Rodyas won the thread.