For today's post I thought we should hear from the gentleman who built and donated 20,000 Fully Fitted Frigates to our event this Saturday. In his own words, so I'll step aside now and let him tell you his story.
___________________________
Why I Built 20,000 Frigates
I like doing what I want to do when I want to and more specifically how I want to. If I badly fit a ship or do something stupid, fine, hopefully I’ll learn from it and move on. If not I’m fine with that too.
I am a proud Caldari Space Hi-Sec resident and have no plans of moving anywhere else. For the non-combat focused player, Hi-Sec is a very dangerous place, you normally fly high value industrial ships which attract attention, with the only real defense - being smart with your fits and how much you carry, whether that be in value or in size. If you get jumped then you get jumped, its all part of the game and I wouldn’t have it any other way. You have to adapt to these challenges or you’re not going to enjoy your time in space.
FF4A
I first encountered the Frigate Free For All back in 2020. I saw a post on the forums and thought, yeah that sounds like fun, now what? So I took a cloaky ship up to Ouelletta to check it out. Just because I mine, doesn’t mean I can’t fly different ships. As I’m sitting at the gate to Jufvitte in my Nemesis, I check out local and not much is going on at all, not that I really knew what to expect as I very rarely visit Lo-Sec. Ouelletta is quite a compact system, so its easy to D-Scan. I made a few exit bookmarks from the NPC stations and a couple of safes then headed back home to get some frigates.
Now I’ve never been a boy scout, but I do like to prepare. Before I downloaded the Eve Client in January 2014, I had taken six weeks of prep – reading blogs/forums and anything else I could before I decided to commit.
So I transported some Kestrels and Tristans up to the NPC station 5-5 which had become my temporary base. I knew the post had said free ships were being given away and this was for new players or players new to PVP to get that taste of combat, but I thought its ok I’ll bring some of my own along anyway.
Then Saturday rolled around, I’m sitting in a Tristan “chomping at the bit” waiting for 16:00 to roll around. I’m watching Local with interest, keen to get going. Ok, now what? I don’t know if I was waiting for a starting pistol or a bell to be rung, but all I needed to do was hit undock and look for some opportunities. I headed for the star and soon got involved in some action, getting on my first KM of the event @16:04. Cool beans! Lets lock onto somebody else...
Three hours flew by and then I had to leave. Wow, that really was a blast !! 72 KMs + 3 Solo and 7 deaths - oh, I’m definitely coming back if they hold another one!!
FF4A 2021
When I returned home and got back to my normal activities, I started looking back at the event with great fondness and began to think on how I could help. I could make some ships, ok, how many? No idea. As this event was held in May 2020, I naturally assumed it would be the same for ’21. Ok this gives me plenty of time to make this happen. I decided on a total of 3,000 frigates across the most popular fits. That should be enough, right?
Looking at zKill for the event and seeing some pilots brought out some big ships to join the party. Hmmm, maybe I could build something else... The biggest ships I had built so far were Orca’s, Freighters and Bowheads. What with the Hi-Sec restrictions on Capitals and Supers, I never thought I’d ever construct one. However, you can in Lo-Sec and as it happens at the NPC station I used as a base. Let’s start planning this out.
Time went on and Christmas 2020 was approaching and Rixx let it be known that the 2021 FF4A would be March 6th. What now..? Ok, is this still doable? Yes, but it's going to be tight. Production went into overdrive as did shipping out the frigs/fits and capital components. Hey, its Rixx’s event he can do with it what he wants – he doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground or know what I’m doing, so I’ll just have to adapt and get it done.
Flying freighters into Lo-sec is probably not on anyones favorite things to do in Eve list, even if it is only one jump. With a lot of patience and planning I managed to get everything to 5-5 unscathed.
Everything went to plan and I ended up with everything I wanted (3k Fully Fit Frigates, 3x Battle Orcas, and 2 Carriers – a Chimera for me and a Thanny for Rixx)
The event was brilliant!!!! I can’t explain how good it was watching my Orcas fend off huge numbers of frigates, before succumbing to their glorious demise. I Loved it!!
As for the carrier, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, it hung around valiantly, but due to my incompetence probably didn’t last as long as it should have.
FF4A 2022
So when I returned back home and got back to my normal activities, I started looking back at the event with great fondness and began to think on how – hold on a minute didn’t you say that earlier....?
Like my previous FF4A, it was such great fun, but with the big ships that brought it to a whole new level for me. I never thought I would fly a carrier!! I mean they are just for the big groups to play with, not some poxy miner from Hi-Sec...
Of course I would be building ships for the next event, should Rixx run one. He duly announced that he would run biannually and it would last for 6 hours. Phew, thats going to be a lot. I don’t think I could handle that, not with what I was planning, for two events in a year.
Fortunately for me, the late 2021 event did not take place, which meant my primary focus was on March ’22. But what to build ? Well 3,000 frigates do not last too long, 5K or 10k then? During the ’21 event I kept seeing in local demand for frigates which weren’t available, Tormentors for example. Right, that settles it, let’s build all available frigates, excluding ones whose purpose would not be suitable for the event.
That’s 14 different frigates across the four races, with at least 1k for each. I added another 6k of the more popular ones to bring the total to a nice round 20k. Well that’s a target... don’t forget the fits now.
That sounds fine, but for this amount time planning is essential, so I started back in August cranking out those BPCs and accumulating various resources. What about specials? Will you making those?
Yes was the answer, however, with various changes to ship designs, raw materials and the added new components were going to be a pain. There are “cheap” ones available on the market which do not reflect the current build costs. However, I was not able to move them (jumping- although trained, no experience yet – that’ll come later). So building was the only way to go, more stuff to build and transport.
Back to the frigates, the material changes also meant that the resources are identical which made it easier. However, there wasn’t any cheap ones on the market anymore and especially in any quantity. I knew I could make them cheaper than buy, but the new headache was moving them.
Each frigate packaged is 2,500m3, small enough but when you have 20k of them it works out to a whopping 50 million m3. 50 full freighter loads at 36 jumps/million. That’s 1800 jumps in total, just to move from The Forge to Jufvitte (next door to Ouelletta). Which means I still have to hump all of those into Lo-Sec, madness.
Why didn’t I make them up there? Well I still have to transport the raw materials so that would still be a massive shipment. Anyway, if you think I was going to hump all that, you are sadly mistaken. Many couriers took my frigates over many weeks. I paid a fair price of 1m isk/jump in bundles of 350k m3 (which equates to 140 frigs). Of the dozens of contracts I only lost one to a gank in Uedama. I had to massively increase the collateral to cover the cost of replacing the lost ships through the market. There was never the quantity I needed though, so I had to rebuild.
I could bang on about the fits and what a pain in the backside making rigs are, I’m looking at you Transverse Bulkhead I – all 18k of you... but that’s for another time.
So I contacted Rixx about what I was up to and I think it caught him a little off guard. He had to know what he was going to do with all these ships and I needed access to his stations for delivery and assembly.
That got sorted and with the assistance of the haulers in Lucifer’s Hammer, we managed to get all the ships to their new homes.
All that was left was final assembly and contracting them over to Rixx. Multifit FTW!
As for the specials, they are all built and ready to go kerboom!!
Will I do this again?
The honest answer is I really don’t know. I really enjoyed the process, the planning and the execution. However, its very all-consuming, not leaving time for other things in game. I will look back and see what lessons I can learn from this and what could be done to make it better. After all I hit all the targets I aimed for and finished with a good week to spare.
What’s it all for?
Well that is for everybody to come have some fun and blow stuff up!! There is no better reason.
Johnny Oxford Virpio
Saturday 19th March 1600 – 2200
Ouelletta
PS: Rixx here again. I just wanted to once again publicly thank Johnny for this incredible and humbling donation. It is amazing what the Eve community can do when we put our minds to it and this is a classic example of that in action. This event has exploded(!) in many ways over the years and I only have people like this to thank for that success. When you get handed a ship on Saturday just remember all the hard work, dedication, and effort that went into making it happen. And give Johnny here a big part of the credit. He deserves it.