Right tool for the right job

I think a lot of Eve is about having the right tool for the right job.  This goes for your choice of ship and fit for PVP as well as the inevitable spreadsheet for market/industrial PVE.  

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I often find myself thinking about topics for the blog in the middle of driving, and then I've forgotten by the time I get to my destination.  No problem, I thought, I'll just fire up my relatively new iPhone and ask Siri to write these things down for me.  What do I get?

"I had read out of market orders with Walt mart about that don't be something podcasts

Comparing next T-3's been delivered Sumiton the article or have for alternative to T4 is really?"

Umm, thanks Siri.

T2s - HAC and Recon
Recently I've trained in HACs and Recon.  Under the "T2 are specialists" mantra I was considering them for various uses I'd like to put them to. The contrast is the wormhole workhorse of the T3 cruiser.  I consistently hear about billion-ISK T3s, and that's right out of my range.  I think that a fairly barebones HAC or Recon (i.e. T2 modules, maybe a faction item here or there) running at 250M - 300M ISK could be acceptable.

So, are they the right tool?

• Solo Straight-up Roaming.  Nope.  If I drop into FW plexes in a HAC then I don't expect I'll get fights.  Ditto for cruising the belts and celestials.  I expect I will get blobbed eventually, if I stick around in one system.  For this application I think the T1 cruiser continues to be the better choice.
• Cloaky Roaming.  Yes.  I have not been successful in getting a fight here, though I've only spent a few hours on this so far.  The idea is to take a cloaky recon around the usual targets (tag rat belts, for instance) and look for targets I can take.  The part that I'm not as thrilled about is that I feel my maximum target is probably at the destroyer level, though I have a feeling that out of desire for a fight there are probably T1 cruisers I'd take on as well.  I hope to learn more about cloaky combat from this.
• Small Gang Roaming.  Yes, for the right gang.  The HACs can certainly bring the pain.  The price tag is one I will definitely have to think about though.  
• Small Gang Cloaky Roaming.  Yes.  Vult already posted about our little run with this.  I think there's more potential there, and in this case the Recon is definitely the right tool.  Now if only there wasn't local so people could see when we showed up...
• Wormhole Diving.  Maybe.  I said back at the beginning of the year that I was seeing Wormholes as a goal activity.  This is where the specialist versus generalist really kicks in.  In wormholes I expect to need to be able to do three things: probe, cloak, and kill.  As we could see in Vult's video of our roam, the Proteus was able to cloaky up on someone and then provide massive dps to quickly kill them.  My Recon could sneak up on someone cloaky, but not provide a lot of dps, so I'd have to be calling in the team.  My HAC could provide dps, but couldn't cloak or probe.  If I'm resigned to the Recon providing the point and some EW support then I could probably make room for a probe - which at least then is doing more than a CovOps.  But the real tool to provide all three still is the T3 (at least until the inevitable nerf).

Industry tools

So my industrial alt ran out of market orders while trying to both sell my goods and gather all of the components needed to start rolling out T2 ships.  T2 manufacture has been rough for me just in getting the pipeline going.  So what tools am I missing right now?

• The right spreadsheet.  My spreadsheet was working okay for T2 work.  Limited number of inputs and only one layer.  From using IPH it looks like T2 ships are only going to be profitable for me if I make the components as well, so I've bought those as well.  That means now there are two layers to manage.  The inputs for the components, then the components and other inputs for the ship.  Hmm... needs work.
• The right target market.  My T2 modules move very well.  I've got good places for them so I can move a fair portion of them without fighting the regional hub 0.01 ISK battle.  I try to balance the expediency of the hub with the profit margin of the outlying systems.  The problem is that having lots of stacks in lots of systems is the demand on my incompletely trained indy alt and my reluctance to take any training time away from Jakob.
• The right skills.  This is a recent pain when I maxed out my (not incredible) number of market orders on my alt.  I had to give in and pause Jakob for an overnight to get one more level of Trade in, then duck back to training weapons!
• The right facilities.  In other words, a POS.  This one I think I'll still hold off on.  The public slots are often queued up, but since I'm generally only cycling jobs once a day (or once every other day) then the T2 modules are going to be done before I get back to them with or without a queue wait.  The big thing that a POS would give me is no wait time on the various kinds of research, which could be nice but with a third alt feeding me copies I'm no longer bottlenecked by BPCs.

So my split life - Industry and PVP.  I may need to hook over to more PVE to bring in some additional ISK for a while though.  The Industry is still spooling up, though I feel it's about at the point where I can be throwing more things over to Jakob... like HACs...