15 January 2012

Bookmarks - Boring But Necessary

Starwalker had been flying around in New Eden for nearly year but had very few bookmarks. This is despite knowing that many Rebels and other residents of New Eden had extolled their virtues.


The need for bookmarks had always been there but in short Starwalker was too lazy to do the necessary work to create a full set of bookmarks for any system:

  • Station undock to avoid any station campers
o   Station dock to avoid any complications when docking and being outside of the docking ring when warping in and having to approach the final distance manually
  • Tactical, which is near a star gate or any other celestial like an asteroid belt:
o   On grid, or typically up to 350km from the star gate to avoid camps and in null-sec to avoid camps with bubbles or from celestials to observe it
o   Off grid, 1000km or more from any one celestial to be able to scan that celestial and ideally a number of celestials within the 14.3 AU directional scanner range
  • Safe spot, which ideally is more than 14.3 AU from any celestial to reduce the chance that the safe spot will be scanned down
o   Safe spot should not be created between two obvious celestial points such as from one star gate to another or from the sun to a star gate, to avoid being spotted by traffic simply passing by

Starwalker had some bookmarks but now had the usual problem when things are started in a haphazard manner – disorganization. No naming convention had been really used and even basic information about the type of bookmark and where it was positioned in system was missing.

Starwalker had no illusions about suddenly creating lots and lots of bookmarks but knew that he would start creating some in key systems and would now move to a naming convention such as
  • Type | Celestial [short name or initials] @ Distance

2 comments:

  1. FWIW, here’s the conventions that I use:

    |-- 01 @xxx --| for safe spots (where xxx is the distance in AU or KM from nearest object)

    |> Auner @xxx <| for a spot near a gate to look at it before committing to jump (“Auner” is the name of the system that the gate jumps to)

    [Auner Station @xxx] for an on-grid spot near a station to see what’s happening

    UNDOCK @ xxx for an undock spot – there’s a space before the word “UNDOCK” so that these are at the top of the People and Places list because I often need to have no confusion about them! I always have multiple undock spots from stations I use often because if someone is observant from the station and sees that you are 325k away after warping out of the station they can lurk there the next time. I also have several that are more than 1000k from the station so that I go off-grid and they don’t have a clue where I went.

    With this system you can tell at a glance what sort of bookmark each is. I think it’s time well spent.

    Good luck!

    ReplyDelete
  2. You can make alot of safes easily during roams. between any two points, make a safe. making gate pounces won't take too long either if you decide to hang around a system for a few minutes.

    ReplyDelete