Hellcamp Day

Yesterday from downtime to about 20:30 UTC, I was in the hellcamp fleet in 1-SMEB. That's a little over nine hours. I was afk for about twenty-five minutes in there to get some food, and of course there were occasions where I was not at the computer for a few minutes at a time.

Several FCs rotated through command, each of whom brought a different personality to the job. So at one point we had a rather active and piratical tone, being warped about as various parties moved through nearby systems. During another, we had long stretches of silence on comms as people attended to whatever else one is doing in such a fleet. For a while we had a division of labor, and I was in a wing that remained on station.

Very little occurred, and I would say nothing of consequence. The sole exception might be the escape of an enemy Archon when we had poor bubble coverage at a weak point. I didn't even see it happen. 

The rest of the time was trying to lock the occasional interceptor or capsule, or an infrequent visitor to a neighboring system. I did happen to be watching when system sovereignty switched over to GSF, so that was cool.

I was attending to other business as well. I had some software work to do, and I've also been trying to learn more about Data Science and R. I've been planning to set up a standing desk, so I spent some time looking at ways to try that out cheaply and researching a new monitor to put on it. (The page I started with is here. I found in the comments that there is a Lack coffee table that's much the same but twice as long, so I made 8:1 scale flat paper cutouts to try different configurations.) My early 2013 rMBP won't drive a 4K display with doubled pixels since it lacks ThunderBolt 2, so I'm thinking the BenQ BL3200PT QHP 32" would be a good compromise to last me until I upgrade the laptop. I can then migrate the monitor over to the gaming PC, where higher resolution is very much a mixed blessing, and go with something 4K in a similar size for the new work machine. 

Overall, it was a good fleet. We accomplished the goal of making it very difficult for the enemy to evac assets from their former staging station. Many things are available at fire-sale prices. As long as we are a coalition of people willing to do this exact sort of thing when needed, we will always defeat groups who stop showing up once the action dies down. 

The PAP thing is pretty funny. In part, it's us gamifying ourselves, hooking into that just-one-more competitive pathway. No one wants to leave a fleet right after a PAP is given out, and then you're a chunk of the way towards the next one and don't want to "waste" the time. But in a real way, tracking participation adds a lot of value even discounting any effects it has on participation. (Which may also be negative, there are real effects where rewarding behavior disincentives it.) Knowing who is doing what, when helps measure morale, the effects of communication, the different types of engagement of different groups, or of the whole group at different times of day or of the year, etc. Having the ability to predict that a AUTZ cap fleet at 04:00 UTC on a Saturday in June will likely be well-attended has to be invaluable. It's helping you understand what your capabilities actually are, at any given moment in time.