A Plasma-scorched City on a Hill

People of Palas I, I bring you the new city of Asstastica, now producing the finest enriched uranium and consumer electronics products to be found in the cluster (and at a fraction of the going price)!

Gold Rush?

So I'm stationside in Amarr right now, practicing my remote sensing skills and seeing how the scan results line up with the production trees for resources produced planetside. I'm frankly a bit overwhelmed by the possibilities. Consider this interesting discussion about planetside industry and control-tower fuel; that's just a single dimension of the many-faceted market that will open up to the capsuleer population once the first command center modules come off the production lines.

The big question, to my mind, is what will all this do to the market? Will we see a big gold rush like we did when Sleeper space was discovered and T3 goods started to make their way on the market? Perhaps, but at the moment, I'm inclined to think it won't. Unlike the case with the Sleeper gold rush, there's no "must have" item at the end of the planetary resources production chain--no shiny new sexy toy for capsuleers to satisfy the urges of their mid-life crisis. And for the time being, capsuleers won't have a lock on the planetary resources market: the empire corporations plan to continue offering their POS-fuel wares for now, so they--with significantly larger stocks of goods which they can bring on to the capsuleer market at a moment's notice--will effectively set an upper limit to prices.

I also wonder if the portion of the capsuleer population that is naturally inclined to these sorts of supply chain management puzzles is large enough to sustain the demand for POS-fuel without help from the empire corporations. At the moment, I'm not sure it is, although it certainly could be in the future.

But I admit I'm really just casting about in the dark for predictions. I'm not much of an economic oracle. We'll all see how things shake out in the coming months.

--A. Macx

UPDATE: One of the problems with guessing what's going to happen in New Eden's economy is the lack of transparency in the decision-making processes of Concord and the empire corporations. You can set yourself up for what you think is going to be an efficient operation moving forward, and--yoink!--some corporate bigwigs can render your business model obsolete and ruin your day. Case in point: decisions like this could change everything, or nothing, and you have few ways to protect yourself. Mind you, I'm not really complaining; those are just the rules of the game.

Overheard in Jita

As if you hadn't figured it out by now, posting has been light (i.e. non-existent) for the past month, as I'm disembarking from the capusle for a few weeks to get married and go an all-too-brief honeymoon in Everyshore.

But so as not to leave you entirely without entertainment, herewith Episode One of "Overheard in Jita", with names redacted to protect the politically incorrect:

Jita Jockey #1: You ever hear what they eat in the Minmatar Republic?

Jita Jockey #2: No, what?

JJ #1: They eat dog.

JJ #2: Really? That's gross. They must be really poor to have to eat dog.

JJ #1: Yup. But not as poor as they are in Heimatar.

JJ #2: Oh yeah? What do they eat there?

JJ #1: In Heimatar, they're too poor to eat dog; they only eat bark. [Rimshot.]

[Crickets chirping.]