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.

A Sneak Peek at a Planetary Scan

Last night, an unnamed official from the Directive Enforcement Division's Technology Review Board slipped me a picture that appears to show how the spherical harmonics I alluded to yesterday relate to planetary scans (h/t Anonymous). Here it is:

A planetary scan result, appearing to show the concentrations of argon gas on Tash-Murkon Prime I, a storm world in the Amarr Empire.

I'm sure this image is part of a work-in-progress and may thus be a far cry from the final release. (The scan window, for instance, would seem to be superfluous given that scan results show across the entire planet's surface.) Nevertheless this pic suggests to me a few possibilities:

• Scanning skills may directly influence a capsuleer's ability to resolve an accurate planetary scan.
• Location, location, location! Where you plop down your extractor PINs will likely determine your rate of resource extraction. And I expect there will be limits on the amount of PINs that can be placed by any capsuleer in a given area.
• Temperature, pressure, and surface gravity. These readouts might be important to know for a planetary developer. As we've seen from this Eve University video (h/t Crazy Kinux), launching resources into orbit will incur a cost in ISK. It stands to reason that that cost will be higher for the more massive planets. And temperature and pressure may affect operational costs for planetside facilities.

So that's it. Some tantalizing possibilities for planetary scans but few concrete facts thus far. If you're interested in a closer look at the interface for operating planetside PINs, I recommend you have a look at Crazy Kinux's post linked above, as well as Eve Online Wormholes, which has a rundown of the process in text and pictures.

Planetary Interaction

The entire Applied Physics crew and I have been following the latest developments in planetary industrial automation with great interest. You'll find the full rundown here, but if you'd rather look at the "tl;dr," bullet-point version, look no further.