Unconventional Hauling

     Moving assets around in New Eden can be a bit of a chore, especially if you confine yourself to the conventional paradigm of buying a fit and hull then moving them to their destination with a traditional hauler. Today's post will examine alternative strategies and techniques with a focus on deploying assets into potentially dangerous space such as low sec.

     Our example will be the Rifter, a modest tech one frigate and an iconic EVE Online ship. For our example let's say we want to deploy ten fully fit rifters into low sec. With the hulls themselves taking up 2,500m3 even max cargo fit tech one haulers can barely fit the hulls alone. Even then the ships themselves nothing more than helpless targets when fit in such a way, and in the depths of low sec deep space transports don't fair much better. So the traditional choice for this task is the blockade runner and accepting the tedium of making 3 or more trips.

    So what options do nomads such as myself have to offer you? Well one of the simplest options is to pick a station with reprocessing and industry to deploy out of and to build your own ships on site. Simply getting a blueprint and the minerals can cut that 2,500 down to a mere 317.5

     That's a big improvement but why stop there and what about the reprocessing facilities I mentioned? Let's trim that down a bit more by bringing in bulk of our minerals as compressed ore. Tritanium and Pyerite take up most of this space and with a little compressed Veldspar and Scordite we can slim this package down to just 50.2 m3

     Now what about those fittings? Building the modules can be a pain and we've saved so much space already, it's alright to settle for 127.8m3 for whole package. With some planning and packing we will be able to put everything needed to deploy 10 fully fit rifters into less space than a single hull would have taken up with the traditional methods.

     Sorry to disappoint those of you expecting to see the whole fit here, but this isn't the rifter fitting guide. All we care about right now is how much space it takes up, well that and we still need to ship it to our low sec system. With the rifters compressed down to this size we can now fit them all inside a blockade runner, but even they can still be caught with a good de-cloak or the simple bad luck of jumping into a situation where you cannot cloak.

     We're still easy to spot too whenever our blockade runner docks or jumps a gate so anyone who is about and paying attention will still know we're moving something around and might take the time to try and catch us. What would be even better would be if we could have both a less conspicuous transport that's also less vulnerable to risks of low sec.

     For this task I've selected the Sunesis destroyer, a SoCT ship with the agility and cargo capacity to suit our purposes. The following fit will get a skilled pilot just under a 2 second align time making you extremely difficult to catch. On top of this it can carry all of our rifters with room to spare while having nearly 10,000 effective hit points. The inclusion of weapons are a personal choice, I'm not a fan of going down without a fight even if I am flying a hauling vessel. The afterburner is exceptionally useful for closing that last bit of distance should you be unfortunate enough to land just out of docking or jump range.

     If we include the cost of the Sunesis and it's fitting as well we're still under 80 million isk. Meaning we get our cargo and hauler for less than half the cost of a blockade runner alone and without the burden of long training times.

     Next time you're planning an adventure and need to get some assets in place, take a few minutes and think outside the box. There might be options that can save you from hours of tedious hauling, pointless expenses or even painful losses that are nothing more than a result of your choice to take needless risks.