Moving Out, Moving on
The advantages of us living deep in W-space turned out to be disadvantages as time progressed, leaving our team in a difficult situation. We were, at any given day, an average of five jumps away from a way to K-space. As this changed from day to day, a significant amount of time was spent trying to find routes to K-space every day. This also meant we tended to not get a lot of traffic, which was great when we wanted peace and quiet to mine gas or run a Sleeper complex, but PvP was in short supply aside from the occasional lone person in an adjoining system. This led to several of us going relatively stir crazy, as there was nothing to do when the team wasn't logged on. Additionally, being in a space-holding 0.0 alliance got us angry faces and other forms of dissent at our activities when we weren't in fleets PvPing. Thus, one night we had the good fortune of two wormholes opening up in our system that both led to regions our alliance held. Convinced this was a sign telling us to leave and never come back, we tore down our home that we'd lived in for nearly eleven months and shuffled it out through the two wormholes. This was not a relatively easy task as we'd been packrats those entire eleven months and accumulated an exceedingly large amount of garbage and miscellaneous items. Some rough numbers on what we moved are:
1,700,000 m3 of modules, ammunition, drones and tower fuel/modules 50+ Ships: 10-15 Battleships, 20+ cruisers, 15-20 frigates, and assorted mining vessels 1 Rorqual Capital Industrial Ship we had built inside the system
We managed to get it all safely moved out over a period of roughly four or five hours to a safe station system, but it was a significant effort on all parts of our team, plus assorted individuals from our corporation who were kind enough to help out. Moving out is always harder than moving in, no matter where you're going in life.
Lessons Learned for the Next Time
Our project turned out to be a success, for all intents and purposes. Every member made a significant portion of money over those eleven months once the project paid itself off which they promptly went and squandered on silly things like PvP ships and expensive implants, or in my case, blew it all on spirits, exotic dancers, and capital ship skill books. I wanted to conclude with a couple of thoughts on what I'd do differently next time.
- Start smaller, build up to something bigger. The lower end wormholes such as classes 1-3 tend to be much closer to K-space than their class 4-6 counterparts. This means an easier time bringing things in and out of the system as well as letting people get out for a breath of fresh air and change of pace. There's less of a feeling of being marooned in that case with nothing to do
- If we have this unyielding desire to go deeper into a class five or six, find a corporation dedicated to living in W-space. Living that far removed from the rest of EVE isn't really conducive to being in a space-holding 0.0 alliance. It's too difficult to get back and forth between your alliance's space and the W-space system at times.
- Keep control over your stashes of "stuff." As I noted above, we accumulated an exceedingly large amount of miscellaneous items over the course of the time we were in W-space. All those blueprints I mentioned we'd bought earlier to produce our own replacement ammunition and drones? Yeah, we might have used them once. We really should have refined a lot of the less valuable things into minerals or sold it on the market. While it wasn't hurting anyone being there and we might have used it one day, it was too much of a hassle to move out and deal with all at once.
- Similar to #3, don't bring in every ship you think you might need. We had roughly 6-10 ships per person in the system which we barely ever flew. Like the item problem, they weren't a problem until we had to move everything out.
- Don't build a Capital Ship in a wormhole unless you're certain you'll be there for a very, very long time. It was a pain getting everything inside, and then could have been just as much of a pain to move it out had we not had fortuitous luck with wormhole spawns.
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We had a great time building our production line (which still exists in a different form, turning out Strategic Cruisers) from the ground up and learned quite a few important lessons about EVE in the process. I'd be curious in seeing how many other operations out there had similar experiences to ours and wish those of you still making your EVE careers out of this continued success. It's not easy, but the hard work definitely pays off in the long run.
