Working on Lai Dai standings

1st September 2009 – 5.18 pm

I may not have been successful yet in inventing a Crane but I sense my fortune lies in that direction, whether it be gained in Tech II BPCs or lost by throwing hundreds of datacores in to failed invention jobs. Being back in k-space for a while means I probably ought to work with Lai Dai, to increase my standings in order to gain access to the corporation's level four R&D agents.

The Lai Dai Corporation appears to be entirely decoupled from Caldari State, as I effectively have no standings with them at all. It is only by the grace of the connections skill that I have access to a low quality level two agent and don't have to jump back in to a frigate for level one missions. The level two agent sits amidst a high concentration of Lai Dai agents in Lonetrek, which should let me hang around a single constellation for most of my efforts to gain standings, instead of having to move a handful of ships every so often.

The positive aspect of agent concentration is balanced by the relatively tedious nature of Lai Dai's work, there being precious few agents offering mostly encounter missions. Instead, I find myself acting as a courier most of the time, with only an occasional opportunity to explode rat ships. Thanks to a corporation friend, outside access to level four missions spices up the mission running every now and again, also granting greater standings increases, but I'm still mostly delivering package A to point B.

I think I can blame the mindlessly repetitive nature of courier missions for forgetting to bring the package with me sometimes. But eventually I gain access to higher quality Lai Dai R&D agents, and when one of them turns out to be fairly local I think it is worth the short trip to swap research from my current agent to the new one. It is particularly good timing, as the current research point tally can be exchanged for datacores to leave only a few points abandoned when the research is cancelled.

It is only after making several jumps and I am warping through the adjacent system to my current Lai Dai R&D agent when I remember the crucial information that not all agents research all engineering disciplines. I quickly pull up the information panel for the potential new R&D agent to find that he doesn't research Caldari starship engineering, which is what I require. I dock at my current R&D agent's station and call it a night.

Although I am a little disappointed that I don't have a higher grade of Caldari starship engineering research running, I am pleased that I don't end up cancelling the current research wastefully, even if I made what is essentially a pointless journey. Oh well, back to courier missions!

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