Clone jumping sounds incestuous
10th June 2009 – 5.32 pmDissuading a ranking Gallente officer from taking a position best suited to a friend of my Caldari Navy agent, with the liberal use of heavy missiles, was the last mission I accepted before heading back to mine some ice for Core Complexion, Inc. Not only was it quite a lucrative mission, both in terms of loot and reward ISK, but it also coincidentally and serendipitously increased my standings with the navy to 8.00. I only realise this when I am taking my Drake and Cormorant back to the Core Complexion, Inc. mission base, idly wondering what my recent work accomplished for my standings, so I'm not in the right place to take the new opportunity of installing a jump clone.
However, I already have the skill trained that lets me cope with having my personality transferred occasionally and so now that I also have the required standing with the navy it seems like a good time to dunk some meat in a vat and duplicate my gorgeous self. Needing to hop around a few systems for refining and manufacturing I pop in to the Caldari Navy station, which is on my route anyway, and take advantage of the medical facilities there. I upgrade my medical clone, as I am nearing fifteen million skill points now, and install a jump clone. Now I need to work out what to do with my new meat.
A bit of a chat with the corporation hopefully has cleared up some of the confusion I have been suffering about jump clones. My previous corporation were heavily in to PvP and suggested using jump clones when out on sorties to preserve any expensive implants in your main body's head, which made it sound like jump clones were used as cannon fodder. I got the impression that your implanted self was safe and you eschewed implants in your clone so as not to waste millions of ISK when podded. But it was never made clear about how this affected your abilities, and thus skill training times, nor could I find information about it.
I'm not sure if my PvP corporation fully understood the implications of using jump clones as protective fodder, they simply didn't mind, or if I'm still missing something important. From what I understand, the whole point of jump clones is the convenience of being able to 'jump' across vast reaches of space quickly without having to traverse the distance physically in laggardly spaceships. You install a clone in a handy location, take yourself off to another location many jumps away, and you can switch between the two depending on the function you want to perform, albeit only once per day. A jump clone just happens to be a regular clone that is available for use, rather than only activated upon death.
Everything about the clone is, as expected, just like you. And without implants the clone's abilities will be as impaired as you would be without them. I can only assume this means skill training times will change depending on what implants the clone has compared to the alpha body—although depending on how many clones you have and the various implants used the whole business of 'who is the real you?' gets muddled to the point of becoming nonsense. I'm only quibbling about implants and skill training times because the implants are expensive and training is important to keep ticking over at an optimal rate. I don't really want to jump in to a clone only to have my training times increase by a few days, and fully implanting a new me will cost tens of millions of ISK, so soon after building up some substantial profit.
I could probably make good use of a clone, though. I am still based up in Caldari space, working with Core Complexion, Inc. slowly towards Tech II manufacture, as well as explointing the markets in the region, whereas my corporation is deep in Amarr space, and I know I really ought to try to get myself more involved with other capsuleers to get the most out of my time in New Eden. With a jump clone, I can continue my manufacturing and production whilst being able to spend more time with my corporation colleagues, without having to spend a fair amount of time making the journey between the two distant regions. I will probably need to maintain two ship hangars but as long as business remains profitable it shouldn't be that much of a burden. I just need to work out what to do about implants.
2 Responses to “Clone jumping sounds incestuous”
I have several jump clones.
I have two "main" clones with +4 implants that I spend most of my time in, one in deep 0.0 and one in High sec.
I also have two "pvp" clones for when I know I'm likely to die. They only have +3 implants which are a lot easier to replace. I like having the +3 implants so that my training time is not increased a lot when switching.
To see the effects of implants versus none or less quality ones, use EveMON. In a plan it has a Implant Calculator to see the effects of upgrading or downgrading.
That's all excellent information and clarifies a lot, thank you. I shall look in to getting implants for my jump clone, depending on what I do with it. Are clones 'it's? Maybe until you've jumped in to, um, it.
I shall look to see if I can run EVEMon, but the last time I looked there still wasn't a Mac client and I could get it running under Crossover because of a dependency requirement.