On To The Moons

The Crimson Harvest event concluded this week. While the Blood Raider Super Kerr-Induced Nanocoatings (SKINs) look sharp, I'm a Minmatar pilot and won't sport the colors of those lunatics on any of my ships.

Avatar sporting a Blood Raider event SKIN

The most important goal during the event was obtaining enough cerebral accelerators to last until the expiration date of 28 November for my three characters currently training. I'm training my mining/PI alt into not only flying stealth bombers, but my PvE Arbitrator fit that runs these limited time event sites so well. My main character is on a long slog of level 5 skill training plan that will last over a year. I'll finish the last tech 2 medium gunnery skill in the next two weeks, followed by the last electronic warfare skills. With those complete, I'll have Mastery 5 in almost all cruisers and below. Finally, my leadership/industrial character is working on training all of the moon mining skills to level 4 in order to use tech 2 crystals. Currently she can only use the tech 1 variants.

Launching a moon probe

Which leads to my next grand adventure: probing moons. I want to create a resource map for the Minmatar Republic. I haven't decided whether to just keep the information in a Google sheet or try out one of the free geographic information systems available. The Google sheet is working pretty well so far. All I have to do is copy/paste the results into my sheet and I get the classifications of each moon mineral (or gas) along with a classification of each moon (R64, R32, etc) and a count of each type of moon. The only manual work I have to do is add a new system into my system tab because I'm too lazy to figure out how to do that automatically.

A distant look at a moon fracking operation

So far I've probed down the moons in 11 of the 104 low sec systems in the Minmatar Republic. Without going into great detail, I think low sec received a decent distribution of moons. In my admittedly small sample, I scanned 4 R64-class and 13 R32-class moons. As a percentage of total moons scanned, that breaks down to a frequency of 0.7% for R64s and 2.3% for R32s. But as I indicated, that's a very small sample from one region of low security space. The overall distribution could vary greatly.

Moon mining fracking just beginning

I've openly wondered how much moon mining will occur in low sec. Actually, I've openly wondered why would anyone mine in low sec when they can go to null sec and get a better pay with less risk. I stated that on an episode of Talking in Stations a couple of weeks ago, and then talked to the CEO of a new player corporation in Discord after the show who was looking forward to the opportunity. I think I received my answer. The question I have is: are there enough people like that CEO out there to make moon mining in low sec more than just a niche activity that only strange people do?

Only 400 kilometers from the refinery

During my moon probing activity, I only saw three refineries. That does not mean only three refineries are active in the 11 systems I probed. Due to citadel mechanics, refineries do not appear on the overview system-wide unless the owner makes the structure public. Making a refinery in low sec public is just asking for trouble. The refineries I spotted were already in operation fracking a moon when I launched my moon probe. So a moon that was quiet 7-10 days ago could now have a refinery blasting chunks off of it. Perhaps this weekend I will do a survey of refineries as well as probe down more moons.

Flying behind a moon fragment

I hope I can find a group actually mining moon minerals this weekend and get some additional screenshots. I also want to find out a little bit more about the mechanics surrounding moon mining, such as reactions. I probably will never get into moon mining, but knowing what the neighbors are up to always helps surviving in low sec. Besides, I'm just nosy.