Crystal Simulation

Someone asked how long mining crystals last in EVE Online, and one answer was "a few hours", probably based on practice. The crystals degrade over time and eventually break, which might be what the "Volatility" and "Volatility Damage" are about, 10% and 0.050 damage, against a base of 1 HP.

With various assumptions we can model this: given a 10% chance of damage per activation, how many activations does it take to break a crystal? The cycle time on the module is 180 seconds (ignoring implants, etc) so with some idea of the activations to breakage we can multiply out for the duration in seconds. Roughly, as the RNG could hate you.

    (require :asdf)
    (asdf:load-system :statslite)

    (defpackage #:sim
    (:use #:cl)
    (:import-from #:statslite #:statslite #:statsmore))
    (in-package :sim)

    (block nil (setq *random-state* (make-random-state t)) (return))

    (defun sim (&key (volatility 0.1) (damage 0.050) (hit-points 1))
      (loop with n = 0 while (plusp hit-points) do
            (incf n)
            (when (< (random 1.0) volatility)
              (decf hit-points damage))
            finally (return n)))

    (defun trials (n)
      (loop repeat n collect
        (sim)))

    (format t "~&~a~&" (statsmore (trials 100000)))

This produced something like

    #

or about 200 activations before breakage, down to as low as 80, or so, if the RNG hates you, but more likely somewhere between 170 and 226 activations, unless the RNG hates you. Something like 10 hours, give or take. This seems longer than what the other person implied, so maybe something is off about this simulation, or they were using some other crystal type that breaks faster, type B maybe, or they also have fancy implants and fleet boosts that increase the activation rate? None of my characters are that much into mining to know. What is life, without a Porpoise?

    $ sumtime $((170*180))s
    8h 30m 
    $ sumtime $((200*180))s
    10h 
    $ sumtime $((226*180))s
    11h 18m 
    $ sumtime $((77*180))s 
    3h 51m 

P.S. I finally helped someone kill Dagan, after having been helped back in 2009 when flying a totally inappropriate ship for the task. An Atron, probably, maybe fit with random guns from random belt rats. Trade hubs, what are those? Dagan is a storyline threat you need so-and-so DPS to drop, which is trivial if you know what you're doing and have the skills and ship and fit, the sort of things folks just starting out tend not to have. They do give out lots of skillpoints these days, so it's no longer weeks before you can fly something not terribly.

P.P.S. the "smart" NPC with the fancy AI that warps 400km out but then sits there is annoying, especially when the fastest ship involved is a Brutix that can move at 1,261m/s and has an effective weapon range somewhere below 10km. The NPC are, in theory, supposed to warp back, or maybe they won't warp back if there are too many players waiting to murder them (smart) but given that two of them in different rooms sat out there and didn't do anything besides blow up when I finally reached them leads me to suspect that it's a bug. Or maybe that site was just cursed. The "Shangri-La Frontier" series captures some of these game frustrations.