As you can probably tell by now, when I’m not out exploring the vastness that is New Eden in Eve Online, I’m sitting in my Mackinaw, an Exhumer or Tech 2 mining barge, stripping the universe of those pesky rogue asteroids. This often leaves me with a lot of downtime to sit and stare off in space. While not mining today, I did decide to visit one of my favorite stations in high-sec, an Athanor. These are medium sized Upwell structures used as refinery stations that are owned by other players. They’re used for blowing up reducing the cost of refining asteroid and moon ore, as well as ice. While visiting one for ore compression today, I thought it would neat to take a picture of one.

Another cool use for an Athanor is to blow up moons in 0.5 security systems so their ore can be retrieved and put in to the market. This one in particular sits in front of a Gas giant, preparing to blow up one of its moons so that the material can be sold on to other corporations and a decent profit made for everyone involved in mining operation. You might think that these operations are simple because it just takes a mining ship and some gear to do so. You would be wrong.

There is quite a bit of coordination that takes place in order to ensure a successful operation. Firstly, you need to ensure that a fleet can be formed at the appropriate time in order to scoop up the material before others can. Secondly, the fleet commander should ensure that an Orca can be in fleet with everyone so that the appropriate boosts and compression be provided to everyone. If not, the mining ships fill their mining holds up pretty quickly. Uncompressed ore takes up a lot of space. Lastly, everyone needs ships that appropriately configured to fend off both NPCs and other players during that time. Usually several members of the group are paying attention to their sensors so that the fleet can be alerted of any potential trouble before it arrives.