In Capital Assets, we talked about how we assign the costs of research to the asset being researched. There’s one major problem: we assumed there is a direct cost for the research that can be trivially assigned but this is not always true. NPC-provided material research and copying slots are scarce so serious researchers turn to starbases. Unlike renting time from an NPC station, a starbase requires a certain amount of fuel just to keep the lights on, independent of its workload. This means an indirect cost we need to account for.
Status of EVE Accounting
I’ve been delinquent in completing my EVE accounting posts, primarily because I’ve been busy playing EVE instead of writing about EVE. While the state of EVE industrial software is less than perfect, combining multiple tools has allowed me to work out a system of profitable EVE industrial activities. I figure I can drop some suggestions while I work on producing new content and updating old.
Capital Assets
In the previous article, we looked at the day-to-day flow of resources through a manufacturing business. Most of the business transactions followed the disposition of inventory: buying raw materials, turning them into products, selling those products. However, these are not the only “things” the corporation owns. Freighters, starbases, and blueprints are required elements of our manufacturing business but aren’t consumed during normal operation. These assets are known as Capital Assets (sometimes, Longlife Assets) and need to be handled differently.
Research Towers
Lines at the NPC-owned stations are long, especially for ME research and copying. Determined players work around this by forming a corporation and anchoring some Mobile Laboratories around a POS to get their own private research queues. This post is simply a “notes” post, derived from personal verification on Singularity, for people looking to use a POS for blueprint research in EVE.
Reporting on EVE
In my previous article, I began the first step in designing an EVE accounting application. We postulated a stereotypical indy: the player buys his raw materials on the EVE market and sells the manufactured goods on the open market. He needs answers to questions like how much raw material to buy, what to build, and how to sell. Now that we know what questions need to be answered, how do we go about answering them?
EVE of Business
Recently, I discussed an EVE Online business accounting software package. Before we start designing the cuts, it’s important to examine the software from the perspective of prospective users. It’s the first step in a Functional Specification after all. The key purpose of accounting is to maintain a record of the company’s financial actions in order to assist in business decision making. So what type of decisions are our users making and what type of information do they need to make them?
Spatial Combat
A key element of space trading games is space combat. Piracy, wars, and defense operations are the order of the day. So, given our 100~200 year time frame, what sort of space-based combat technologies are we looking to see?
Our current projectile-based weapons (guns) are likely to still be a dominant offense technology, along with guided munitions (missiles). Railguns, which use magnetics instead of gunpowder to propel the slug, are likely to be militarily practical within a decade. The remaining technical hurdles are the ablation of the rails and the electrical power required to drive the system, neither are impossible to overcome. But what about something more exotic? Continue reading
