A Little About Jack Dancer And A Lot About Other Things

Yes, Jack Dancer is still alive and well!  After leaving Seattle for an Eve-Deprivation week in North Carolina for a niece’s wedding (the highs were around 105F (41C) and the low temperature there was never as cool as the high back here in Seattle!) I’ve been cruising around low sec without causing any undue distress to my many enemies.  I popped into a Faction Warfare site yesterday where I had located a rifter.  Unfortunately, he fled.  But then we had a nice conversation – he is just a month-old player and asked about the Black Rebels.  I told him good things.

One thing that I’ve recently learned (that will probably get 99% of my audience rolling their eyes in amazement that I can be such a noob) is that the system map can be used with D-Scan to quickly look for targets.  My previous method had been to find a “safe” spot and then look around space by lining up my rifter with the various celestial objects and hit d-scan at a 15% angle.  It works, but my new technique is better.

With it I go to a "safe" spot and open the system map with the display of all the planets orbiting the sun, then line up the little “You Are Here” marker with the various FW locations, asteroid belts, planets, sun, gates, etc. and then hit D-Scan.  I can use a 5% angle this way and it’s faster and more accurate.  Plus I don't have to wave the screen view up and down to try to find that planet or gate that's not on the solar plane with the others (I especially hate that...).

OK, you can unroll your eyes now…  I’m a hopeless noob…

In other news, my alts have been taking up my time with various fun activities. 

My explorer alt stumbled through a wormhole to a different part of high sec space to find a very shiny 520 million isk item drop in a Gurista 4/10 DED site.  A personal best.  It's not always like this - sometimes I hit a dozen 3/10 and 4/10 sites that result in 15 million isk total.  Exploration has some serious ups and downs and is much more like gambling than salary work. 

My station trader alt is back in business in Jita and he’s pulling in the isk again after finding some profitable items to specialize in.  It’s a 20 minutes in the morning (when I have time) and 20 minutes in the evening activity (on most days, but not all) and it’s fun to watch the daily spreadsheet totals as they get bigger and bigger.

I picked up one of those “Power of Two” deals for 2 PLEX about 4 months ago that gives 6 months worth of playing time.  I am training that character to fly stealth bombers and right now he’s sitting in a Purifier in a C2 wormhole space.  The C2 has a high sec exit and a C1 exit – so it’s convenient and I should see some PVP activity there.  It’s fun to be cloaked up and have the local residents not know about me lurking outside their POS bubbles…

And my newest activity is Planetary Interaction.  I trained my hauler alt on the basics and yesterday set up a production facility on a Plasma planet in low sec space far from any of my other characters.  I used a couple of the video guides on YouTube to help with sorting out all the options (and there are a LOT of options!) and lost a Viator when leaving a low sec station due to panic and stupidity before actually getting the production facility set up…  Now I avoid stations and camp out at safe spots in low sec with my hauler.  We’ll see if he manages to produce anything useful…

So, while I don’t have much Jack Dancer News – I still have been having fun.