Science & Industry

Just from experience of ppl who earn their ISK by invention, how viable is this without actually owning a PoS with laboratories?

I find manufacturing slots and even invention slots on NPC stations not a very big problem. But BPC availability kills it all. Just when you find something you can invent for a nice profit, you also find that T1 BPC's for the invention are either unavailable or cost too much. So, you think about buying a BPO and copying yourself, but copy slots are in such a great demand that waiting for them to actually copy something will make invention pointless.

So, if I will not own a POS, should invention be concentrated on very few very available items? Or if I do own a PoS, will invention justify 100 mill ISK/month maintenance cost of a small tower?

That being said (and being true), I also say that I owned a POS and hated it. Keeping the thing fueled and safe was a nightmare. I lost sleep over it realizing if it was lost, I stood to lose almost any profit I may have made from the thing. Some low sec NPC stations have very short waits for copy slots (sometimes less than an hour). I simply used a POS to get a head start in copying and ME research and ditched the thing at the first opportunity.

Never have a shortage of BPCs to work with, now that I've got a nice buffer. Invention without the fuel costs of maintaining a POS? Very nice.

Up to you. There will be expenses either way. One person keeping up a POS by himself can be downright dreadful. Take a vacation too long? Poof! The thing goes offline and someone blows it up.

I make out fairly well with invention and don't have a pos in high sec. I just use alts to do copies. If you are a solo account, of course that'll be harder but not much. Just find the low sec stations that have copy slots or que in random high sec places. You can fly a shuttle through gate camps (no bubbles!) if you aren't on auto.

Low sec is an easy solution but everyone seems to be scared of it or something.

Just use a crap alt without a lot of training. Fly a shuttle. Easy.

If you're not going to use a POS to make BPCs, I suggest sticking to the lower BPC requirement stuff like ships/large artillery to make the best use out of having a 1x time copy slot available once a month.

The 100 mil is peanuts.

I did T2 invention/production for a while and never had a POS.
Made somewhere around 25K T2 Modules of whatever the spreadsheet told me was hot at the time.

I did the invention/manufacturing at a high sec station and slots were almost never an issue. Each station can handle 2 full time production alts, so if building with 6 alts you will need to find 3 stations in the same region that are suitable. Make sure to rent a corp office at each one so that your alts can share resources.

Then you need a copy alt just for copying a low sec stations. One copy alt can easily support 2 production/invention alts.

Make sure all your offices and copy locations are in the same region so you can update everything from a single station. I did this in the region where I ran L5s so that I could update the orders while I was PvE.

You have to update your invention/production twice a day, your copy alt can be only logged in once ever two weeks and bring in the copies every month or two. I still have a backlog of over 20K max run BPCs if anyone is interested.

In the end you will find that it's just not worth your time (with or without a POS) to go large scale production unless you have T2 BPOs. The user interface is just TOO HORRIBLE. You can easily make 2 Bil per month per production alt, but you can make that in an afternoon of PvE. And at least PvE is more interesting that clicking the manufacturing window. 240 times/alt/day

-FM

Invention in NPC stations is auctually MUCH easier to do then using a POS.

If you are using a POS you need to move datacores and the meta items to the lab/corp hangar as well as the data interface. This basically means if you have 10 labs at a POS (and are using all 10 for invention) you need 10 of each data interface, which adds up very fast. You also need to make sure the BPC's are stored in the came corp hangar as the POS lab.

Also you cannot see which items are in what lab / corp hangar, which means doing trial and error of each invention with each lab, basically making invention a much bigger pain in the ass.

While if you are using an NPC station you simply have a huge pile of BPC's data cores, interfaces, metas etc. all just piled up in the station.

The one down side will be the BPC creation, which can be done in HS NPC stations if you like to fly around everywhere and can deal with the 10-15 day wait times.

So overall you are better off doing invention in an NPC station, and using the POS just for copies.