Player Features and Ideas Discussion

Oh man, I have 1+ full towers in order to run a reaction chain. My drug lab takes a tiny tiny amount of my grid/cpu and rapidly builds boosters, but I think I'll buy a massive ship so I can make drugs while still most likely sitting in my POS.

For the love of Cthulu, why? It would be even less useful than the soon to be pointless Rorqual come Crius.

Well put and 100% accurate.

Also love the Cthulu refferance. Made me chuckle.

Least last I checked, the turnover on pure form of boosters (pre-manufacturing step) in trade hubs was basically nonexistant. Nearly every if not every drug manufacturer buys gas clouds, then reacts them himself and builds the boosters for sale. There is simply not enough pure form booster material for even a dabbler to skip that step, and what there is may be priced far above the level required to break even post sale.


Plus the subject was on a ship for manufacturing them, not some drug peddling wagon. You could do that with a blockade runner easily enough if you are crazy enough to try and sell boosters out of a ship in space that your buyers can try and kill.

Sure, give it a one-minute cycle time on the module and do not let it work within 40km of a tower or station.

This is exactly the kind of perspective someone who owns a restaurant would take towards running a food truck, but they still make money. Good money, in fact.

If the ship is tailored to making deals in dangerous situations, then I don't think people will have a problem flying it. We've got plenty of other ships with GTFO features like warp core strength, interdiction nullification, etc.. And don't underestimate the player base. Red-Frog Alliance hasn't been doing so well these last 5 years solely because they use competent pilots, but also because people appreciate the value of their service and don't want to be blacklisted.

When you're Johnny-on-the-spot offering a useful and convenient service people will pay a premium. Doubly so for small commodities like boosters. If they feel it's needed now, it's needed now. Not after a trip to Jita.

On top of it all, Serpentis controls ORE now.... This is just so right....

You are deliberately ignoring things or leaving them out for your convenience.

The concept of the ship is that it can manufacture the drugs, something you otherwise need a POS to do.

The vast majority of boosters are sold in Jita, with a handful offered in places like Amamake and Gonditsa, where they are only really available to the locals. Nobody does sell orders in stations in FW or anywhere else in low or null.

Black Frog accepts contracts, that's all they have to do to put themselves at risk if someone really wanted them. Nobody said this activity was going to be inherently risky. You sit outside the station or at a safe to manufacture the drugs, slowly, get some attention and see what people want in local chat, cook it and drop it off in a station for them. Some busy low sec systems have 10 or 12 stations spewing in your overview, it's no big deal to d-scan until you find one that isn't being watched, because most of them aren't. Ever. Station camps don't work when your targets have 11 alternatives to dock at.

It's not like players haven't been using ECCM's and cloaks to remain almost completely safe for years either The ship doesn't even need a covert ops to be ideal for the role.

I'll take dev time being devoted to a niche industry ship before I find it reasonable to be used for tourney awarded WTFMobiles any day.

You're making a lot of assumptions to justify your position.

You assume that the pilot needs the pure form of the gases.

You assume that prices of the pure form won't rise with demand, causing larger sale volumes. People who do know how and where to make isk with it will drive up buy order prices.

You assume that steps 1 and 2 can't be combined. All of the code for the ship will have to be done from scratch anyways.

You assume that in order for it to be worth someone's time, it has to be at least as profitable per hour as running a lab in a POS. It doesn't.

Astute as always.

The reactors, silos, and POS all have numerous other uses. The only thing on a POS that is dedicated to producing boosters is the drug lab, which as you said is an insignificant tick leeching off of the rest of it. You're not replacing the POS, because the POS has value beyond booster production; you are only replacing the drug lab.

All of those POS modules can be used to produce a metric ****-ton of other products. A ship used for producing boosters can be used for.... Producing Boosters.

Why so much fear over a one trick pony?

If the raw materials go straight from being materials to boosters, and there is no way collect pure forms, there is no imbalance. The ship does not infringe upon any territory other than the drug lab which hardly anyone uses because they'd rather manufacture something more profitable if they're going through the trouble of maintaining a POS.

Oh, and we have plenty of ships with huge specialized cargo holds. One more won't hurt.

The speed of the process can be adjusted as CCP sees fit, faster or slower. Honestly it's kind of silly as it is. Boosters are just kind of a tacked-on process feeding off of other production chains that are balanced for the production of other more important products. It's something that needs to be re-assessed as a whole.

Because I don't think that a cheap industrial should be able to replace a process which currently requires long term maintenance of an entire POS.

Currently a single super simple chain for standard boosters requires four silos, a reactor, and a drug lab, a POS, fuel for the POS, and probably a CHA/SMA. It takes days to process large amounts of gas into pure, and hours more to process the pure into drugs. Not minutes in a single industrial.

It takes time, effort, and helps prevent the sort of interference by dabblers who drive profit ratings down massively after they build something because it's new and easy, then start dumping cheap sell orders when they realize it's hard to sell. Just look at the awful profit margins on t1, then make them even lower with the constant influx of disappointed noobies dumping stock.

Would you object to a different ship with a similar level of ability to replace POS modules?

Say a new Rorqual that took raw ore or minerals, refined, built components, and assembled ships on the spot, and say 1/100th the time that it would take in a station, while doing it all at the same level of material efficiency? And yes, it could do capitals as well. Because that's the same thing as your proposed ship, just not with drugs.


Even Heisenberg had far more trouble with other people than he did with the physical act of making the drugs. I don't seem to recall him snapping his fingers and magically assembling product from raw materials without going through an intermediate cooking stage, do you?

Please stop comparing ships production to booster production. It's rather silly to read. The two are in no way relevant to each other. One is a luxury commodity, the other is a standard necessity.

Production in general requires a POS. Without that drug lab, the POS still functions and serves many and wondrous purposes.

Look at the drug lab from an objective point and tell me what it is, if you don't mind...

If your answer is a tacked on feature with no significant planning or development involved that relies entirely on other independent features of the game that were developed for their own purpose with no intention of interacting with it and subsequently cannot be changed to work appropriately with it without breaking their other functions, you are probably partially or wholly correct.

Booster manufacturing has needed to be fixed since day 1. Don't let that fact get in the way of implementing something that actually does work. Just let it serve as an example and standard for fixing what already exists at the same time.

Not even CCP holds to the idea that it takes an entire POS to manufacture boosters. Every NPC drug manufacturing installation is a tiny isolated building half the size of a cruiser in the middle of nowhere.

Your worries about the market are completely unwarranted also. The only reasonable use for the ship is using it to provide to markets well away from trade hubs. It wouldn't have any effect on Jita, and would only cause prices to rise if anything.

Nobody said the industrial was going to be cheap. T2 industrials run from 80-170 mil, and they're in fairly high demand. It's not unreasonable to suggest the ship would cost 250 mil even after markets stabilize.

Really there's nothing to object to even as a person who currently manufactures boosters. It takes days for a POS to produce a large batch. Great, let it produce. You don't have to be there while it does so. So grab your drug smuggler ship with a few items pre-made and a hold full of raw materials for making orders on the spot and go out to some hot spots to make isk while you are already making isk. One activity doesn't require you to be actively involed, the other does. Thus there is no reason that you can't profit from both.