Andre Vauban
Gallente
Quantum Cats Syndicate
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Posted - 2010.03.25 21:16:00 -
[1]
 Originally by: MouthP1ece
my little corp is looking around for an alliance to join and we keep seeing that some alliances talk about having an industrial backbone and I'm kind of curious what this means to different people.
Does this mean that they just rely heavily on industry as a way of making money, or are they offering cheap ships/fittings/ammo to members?
Any insight would be welcome :)
There have been lots of good examples in this thread. Since this is a topic near and dear to my heart, I'll provide another example.
An "Industrial Backbone" is simply an organized effort to keep the supply lines going. A lot of this involves armies of alts.
I'm just in a FW corp and we only need to move supplies into lowsec. Pretty easy task, right? Well not really... We have numerous alt corps/NPC characters (unknown to everybody) that do various things.
Some folks have large BPO collections and research towers and they just churn out BPCs. Other folks have mining alts that they love to mine on while shooting the **** on vent until some pew-pew happens at which point they log the mining alts. Other folks have NPC freighter/orca alts to move stuff around highsec, others have NPC JF alts to jump materials around. And still others have carriers/JF's in the corp itself to move materials around.
Then its important on how you organize all these different pieces to create your well oiled logistical machine. We have our miner alts mine minerals where ever they choose. They then get with the mains of freighter alts, who move the minerals to the corps main highsec staging point. The freighter alts also make weekly (random time though, never make runs on a fixed schedule) Jita (or our market hub) runs and haul materials (minerals, modules, pos fuel, etc) back to the main staging point. The folks with BPO's/research towers crank out BPCs and deliver those BPCs to the staging office as well.
The most difficult part is tracking your run rates on different ships and modules. How many ships of a particular type do you need per week/day. What is your inventory at you main lowsec/0.0 base of operations? How long will that inventory last? How long does it take to build and move replacements? When to I need to build more to get it there in time? When is my BPC almost depleted? How long to "order" another one? What is my mineral run rate? How do I communicate to my miners/freighter/copy/research/invention/etc alts what materials I need?
Once that is done, its just a matter of installing the manufacturing jobs and setting up courier contracts to the mains of the freighter/JF/transport ship pilots who will move the materials into your 0.0/lowsec base of operations.
Then you have to do the entire chain in reverse for moving any loot/moon goo/minerals/etc from your lowsec/0.0 base of operations back to your highsec base of operations.
Its a tireless job, but not thankless. Corp mates really do appreciate the fact that anytime they need a new ship or module, its available in your main pvp base of operations.
Its really not that much work if you can find a dozen or so people to help get the job done in various ways. You just have to respect and recruit the folks that like to pew-pew and xyz industrial activity.
Personally, I like the manufacturing and research as a side function to perform, but hate the hauling and minerals. Luckily for our corp, we have some other folks that like hauling and mining on the side when there isn't any action happening.
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