A little bit of mining

 Recently I decided to try to add an activity to my arsenal for when I'm waiting  for my runs to complete, mining.

For some people this will have been one of the most boredom inducing sentences it's possible to read about EVE Online, but I have my reasons. For one thing, it is undoubtedly industry related, so fits within the confines of my challenge well. It's something I can do ad hoc as the Industry Park I operate out of in null is upgraded with mining anomalies so there's always something to go after. And it also gets me out in space which aside from hauling isn't something I do much. 

At the moment I've started very small, a single Retriever with a semi-tank fit that is protected by my main with actual piloting skills who sits in a Gila and kills any rats that warp in and threaten my barge. 

My other null-sec character is currently training into flying barges as well so I should be able to up this fleet to 3 soon. I've registered with Horde's "mining tax" website which works out how much you mine in a month and sends you an invoice of ~10% per character over 1 Bn. I find this whole system a bit silly, but given that I am very unlikely to go over this limit any time soon I'll just tick that box and carry on as I please.

I am considering putting my main in a porpoise to provide boosts, but I'm not sure if that counts as "cheating". I do have a rorqual on that character but it seem egregiously silly to risk that to boost a single mining barge. Maybe one day as things scale up.

I will never make mining my main activity but it's something to do in a bit of downtime once all my slots are taken care of.

I also passed the 10Bn in worth this week, which is a cool milestone. In the last few days things have slowed as Mobile Depots have started dropping in price and the mats have gone up, though I have been able to source some from buy orders. I will probably slow down on producing them for now and move those slots to something else until margins improve again.

Speaking of slots, I'm still struggling with keeping my 2 null characters fully utilised. As one of them does all the buying/selling/hauling, I find workign out what my alt is going to do, then hauling the materials and trading them + blueprints back and forth a bit tedious, especially when I'm trying to also keep on top of reactions that are done in another system. I can see how people like Sir SmashALot ended up in a Lowsec freeport with a corp office for themselves. I think it's something I'd consider looking at in future though i don't know how the logistics for that would look and I'm a long way off flying my own Jump Freighters. TBD on this. The other option is a alt corp blue to pandemic horde, but I don't know the details of that so it might not be for me either.