Oodles and Oodles

I received a note from Urkhan Law (who writes the blog, Lawless) that a particular rig was missing from my market in Bosena. Whoops. As it seems is often the case, I forgot that particular rig because someone else had deeply undercut me and the frigate market went stagnate after Odyssey as everyone ran to play with the new changes.

However, the note was an interesting tie into my conversation with Locke about having fits ready for people to buy. 

This actually isn't a market blog today, hence no TCS tag.

It is a question about preparation. Locke has been filling his corporation contracts with doctrine ships. That is something Van has taken upon himself for 7-2. I rarely buy from corporate contracts. I think they are a fantastic idea and I know that a lot of our membership do. I do not because I have all of the doctrine ships in my hangar. Then I have extras.

At the same time I am preparing for a Jaguar Fleet for next weekend. For these fleets I supply the Jaguar's and the ones that live are handed back to me at the end of the fleet. I buy and fit them and hand them out because Jaguars (to my confusion) are not the first ship that most people grab. I must be reasonable and understand (somehow) that most people will not have one ready (and that some may fit them to armor but we will ignore that particular evil, today).

Then, as I ran my Jump Freighter to Jita to do a suddenly stock due to an OP where the FC wanted things people might not have in the deployment station, I started to ponder preparation. 

One of the things about not living in high sec is that preparation is a very important thing. Early on, in THC2, we often spent Sundays stocking our hangars from the weeks losses. Ender did the jump freighter runs and he wasn't going to do them every day. Most of our security statuses were rather low although in those days we all hovered above -5 (except LR).

My early training program with Diz was crafted to train me through both armor and shield tanking. It never occurred to me that everyone did not do that. Part of my early candy themed naming convention was built around identifying my shield and armor ships. It seems that I am not bright enough to name them things like "shield" or "armor". I always assumed ships needed names and those names were supposed to be fun and interesting... I did learn later.

My deployment hangar has 40 fit ships and 34 empty hulls. I consider this perfectly normal. I can fly every doctrine that we have, every sub doctrine, or an appropriate support ship. I have backups of everything and multiples of anything light weight or that I enjoy flying (I only have 11 fit Jaguars with me, so there). I do have a personal tendency to overbuy. I assume that I will die every time I undock so I often buy 5 of whatever I am going to be flying if the price tag is under or around a hundred million ISK.

I don't expect everyone to have forty ships ready to fly. In many ways my hangar represents the PvPer I'd like to be vs the PvPer that I am. I do think that a backup of anything regularly or commonly flown that is not super expensive makes sense. I should add that this is for fleet situations. Solo PvP runs after the rules of the pilot and no one else. Being able to reship is important and from a small gang perspective it is vital.

7-2, like THC2, reships on the fly. The fleet may start out with T1 frigates and switch to a Blops fleet before settling into whatever the FC calls for the night. Each FC also has their own flavors of fits and I've simply accumulated what I need. It makes it easy for me to forget that not everyone is me/us and flies this way. Listening to others adventures in stocking, fitting, and supplying themselves and corporations is fascinating.

I may be a spaceship hoarder.