A brief thought on fleet/ship threats

This is more of a framework for a thought exercise than anything else.  This is mildly applicable to solo work, some of the concepts should be easily applicable but the bulk of this is aimed at small gangs where individual piloting decisions can make a significant difference.

There's two threat considerations:  threats to the fleet and threats to the individual.  This can be ascertained by the engagement profiles of the fleet.

Take the nano gang that excels at ranged engagements by virtue of superior speed, damage projection and control via bonuses webs.  A significant threat to the fleet would be opposing Huginns, Rapiers and fast tackle.  Milder threats would be tracking disruption (if turret based).  A personal threat might be the fast tackle frigate that's just waiting for someone to be burning at a Huginn.  Other ships with inferior damage projection can be ignored for the time being as they cannot harm the nano gangs ships.

The gang full of brawling ships should similarly be wary of chasing a longer ranged gang that has bonuses webs.

The use of EWAR plays into this role as well.  Damps can be used offensively on opposing logistics ships to either lower their lock range or increase their lock time.  Defensive uses would be against those web range bonused ships or tracking disruption ships.

Lowsec Industry, Part 1

Note:  I am going to break this topic up into a series of shorter posts in order to actually get stuff out in a reasonable time frame over trying to make one large post about it.

Sugar Kyle over at www.lowseclifestyle.com had an interesting post on lowsec industry.  This is not a new problem.  The wonderful folks over at Failheap Challenge recently had a discussion over the lack of nullsec industry based off an infographic showing that the majority of industry (unsurprisingly) occurs in highsec.

Lowsec does not exist in a vacuum, it competes with highsec and (to a lesser extent) nullsec.  Even then there are systems that are "better" than others for industry.  So in an effort to be thorough I shall by taking a mildly comprehensive look at science and industry as a whole.

The short answer is:  it's easier and far simpler to build things for sale in highsec.  There is little reason to build things in lowsec unless it's something that absolutely cannot be done in highsec ie, carriers and dreadnaughts. 

Part of that is the freedom to shoot things in lowsec without direct ship destruction via concord also means the freedom to shoot (or not) the ships that have the potential to build the ships and modules that do the shooting in the first place, ie, it's a social problem that has potential social fixes.  Social fixes that are unfortunately not implemented with significant regularity for a variety of reasons.  In other words the only thing stopping a player in a combat ship from shooting the mining barge happily chewing rocks at a lowsec belt is the combat ship pilot.

There's a significant volume of materials that go into building things.  Those materials are moved vastly simpler in highsec (lower barrier to entry).

Finished products (notably ships) also have volume that make moving goods difficult in lowsec.

The exception to the above is building things for sale in the same system.  While perfectly viable, sales in lowsec generally tend to be on the low side of build able items and rarely enough demand to justify it.  A wide variety of goods are required for a lowsec trade hub and not all of them can be built (as it's rare someone would want to buy a half fit ship).  Simply buying in Jita, transporting to a lowsec trade hub via jump freighter and selling at a mark up has been proven to be sufficient to meet lowsec market demands.

Markets themselves are an important part of the discussion along with various market costs (transportation costs most notably).

FW space also has an element of economic warfare for anything placed on the open market is vulnerable to being bought out by opposing militia and relisted at higher cost which is counterproductive if the goal is to supply friendly militia.  This leads to using corp contracts for fitted ships.

The market side of things is by far a deeper subject to hop into and at risk of having babbled long enough, I'll save the rest for a full post on the subject.

Tangent:  A comment on Sugars blog was a link to this experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffaker%27s_mite_experiment.  The point that I took away from it is that "prey" must have effective options to survive, otherwise the predators hunt the prey into extinction followed shortly by their own extinction for lack of fold.  This obviously isn't quite accurate for Eve Online as there are people who continue to travel through Ossogur into Amamake, or Rancer.  I'd like to think that's a decision someone would make only once, but there are repeat customers to the smartbomb/instalock party.  Having said that, lowsec survival in a noncombat or PvE fitted ship tends to be a very binary proposition:  either one is mostly safe with preventive options or one is tackled and likely to lose said ship.  I'm not sure there's much middle ground save doing DED sites in a PvP ship or group.