Science & Industry

How sustainable and I guess profitable are these? I have the perfect system that I can also put a POS in but I've been a little hesitant in dumping a lot of isk (for me anyways) into something that would be better off suited for like a 10 man team.

Basically, what I want to do research and copy the BPOs that I have and also build like small things that I can sell and easily move. I figure I should start off small with things like ammo, drones, even capital construction parts. Just things that I can easily move and make a profit off of given the high volume of sales in my region. So taking into effect the cost of fuel and having to buy ore thru buy orders since I won't have the time to mine it myself, is it something I can do on my own or should I try and connect with several other like minded industrialists to perhaps share the cost a little?

I apologize if this was already covered in a previous thread. If you wanna link me to that one, I would appreciate that.

it really comes down to whether you can make the POS profitable. It's certainly possible, though it's going to be a bit of a wild ride until ice prices settle down.

if you're planning on doing a hi-sec pos setup, start with a small one and don't worry about spending isk on defenses. should you get wardecced, just take it down and wait for things to cool off. this will help keep the initial capital costs down, but the crux of the issue is whether you can cover your operating costs doing research. as mentioned before, this will be a little difficult in the near future as ice (and by default fuel blocks) prices are increasing considerably. you'll need to let the new ice changes work through the economy before you'll be able to put any realistic projections together. if you want to get started right away, just buy a month's worth of fuel for a small tower and test it out. as i mentioned earlier, it's certainly possible.

A small caldari POS can support 3 lab arrays. It takes about three characters to use all the slots those labs will provide, but this can be done on one account. It is not easy to make enough profits off the POS to cover the fuel costs, but at least a small POS is only about 7200 blocks of fuel per month. This cost can be offset further by running PI on all three characters.

If you need the ME/PE slots go for it, just consider the POS an expense while you run the research. When you run out of BPO's to research shut it down. Copy, invention, manufacturing, and even PE slots are easy to find in high sec stations. So a POS is only needed for ME research. However for invention having all the slots in one place can be well worth the expense.

minnie is fine, iirc you can still fit 3 mobile labs on one. that's potentially 9 ME research slots, 9 PE slots, 15 invention slots and 3 copy slots. a single char with advanced lab operations IV can run 10 research jobs alone i think, so two chars w/the appropriate skills should have no problem handling 3 labs.

Ok thanks for the advice. It's pretty daunting and I've been looking at different market trends on what would be a long run profitable industry to get into. So far I've made decent money off trading ammo and drones in local mission hubs. Crazy how much people willing to pay for convenience. But that requires a long time to make my money back.

Definitely with the spreadsheets, but you're quick to dismiss ammo and other small items. It's cheap to build, quick to produce, highly liquid, and almost always turns a profit. Being one of the few items that almost every player in the game consumes, there will ALWAYS be demand for it.

Really??

Trust me on this, you will struggle to find a profit on un-researched bpo's for the common items such as ammo, especially when you've only got 10 slots available to you with 1 char (max 11, but Adv Mass Production 5 is a rarity) as people have well researched bpo's for them, so therefore they can undercut you, especially if you're selling in trade hubs.

Look through contracts for things you want to make, see if you can pick up ready researched bpo's for the stuff you want to build, sure you'll pay more for them, but at least you will climb a couple of rungs up the ladder instead of just stood at the bottom.

Or plan things well in advance and buy BPO's off the market now and start researching them, yes you'll have to wait a while in queues unless you want to venture into low-sec and see what you find, or look through the Sell Orders forum to see if anyone is offering research services.

I wouldn't venture down the pos route to start with, it's a fair investment of time and isk for something you may not get full use from to warrant the cost of buying and running it.

Oh and one last thing, ignore anyone who says Production Efficiency 4 is ok, it's a dog-eat-dog market so every last isk you can save, especially on low cost high turnover items like ammo, can make the difference between profit and loss. Production Efficiency 5 is a must.

I was planning also to start 1 man corp (+1 alt), my thoughts on this to make it profitable:

1- you need 2 alts at least to make it profitable (1 focused mainly on R&D with sub industry skills at least and the other one is vice versa)

2- you need to find solar system (or adjacent) with one or more station contains factory service (no need to for labs service)

3- the same system (or adjacent) must have at least 7-8 asteroid belts.

4- It's preferred that target system in 5-7 j away from ice belt system if you are planning to make your own POS fuel.

5- it's preferred also to be between 7-12 J away from main market hub, the more you get closer the more chance you will wardeced.

6- deploy small caldari POS in the target system including labs (2 x labs), ammunition arrays, drones arrays, equipment arrays and offline EW defenses.

7- you need in advance enough liquid ISK to start full throttle after paying all expenses of POS, arrays and fuel to start the first month.

8- before deploying the POS you need to make full study of the market and start targeting BPO, BPC of the items you are going to research/manufacture.

9- If you have enough ISK buy couple of researched BPOs ( not any but based on the market demand) and start copying them in labs for passive income.

10- try to occupy all your 2 alts slots ( 22 manufacture slots + 22 R&D slots) most of the time.

11- modules, ammunition, rigs and drones will be manufactured in the POS, frigs and above should be manufactured in the station factories.

12- the industry alt is preferred to be exhumer V and Tech II crystals, you need to provide Tritanium, Pyerite, Nocxium, Mexallon, and Isogen, depends on the location of that POS and the available ore in that region, taking into consideration that if you found the minerals sell order prices are profitable than using your own ore, then I recommend you to use buy orders and sell the refined minerals.

13- depending on the jumps away from the main markets hubs, you are suggested either to use courier contracts or make one of the alts able to fly orca or freighter (preferred the industry alt) to haul your products, try to synchronize your hauling jobs with your manufacturing/research jobs ( time spent for hauling your products < queue time for next available manufacturing/research job), or you can raise the supply chain management and scientific networking to cover enough remotely your POS system.

14- start building your assets of researched BPO, in mean time you will be selling max copies BPCs, 1 run researched BPC, tech II invented BPCs.

15- It's advised that both of alts to be level 4 or 5 in PI, to increase your passive income or provide you with materials needed for tech II manufacturing ( or manufacturing fuel), also the same comment no. 12 applies to the extracted materials from the planets.

16- when you get wardec you will have eventually to offline your labs and arrays and online your defenses till wardec is over.

17- try to put the researches, manufacturing jobs with long queues when you are not playing ( sleep, vacation, at work). unused manufacturing/research job means you are losing ISK.

18- use industry implants.

19- when you have the enough luxury and the ISK you can buy extra R&D/Manufacture character or upgrade to medium caldari POS.

You are mixing industry and mining here. If your goal is profit, then you can mine omber and earn isk for your time. If your goal is to maximize profit, then you really need to look at your isk/hour of different activities to figure out what is the best use of your time. For example, you listed having mining available for minerals. You go out and mine minerals to build a thorax and it takes you say 3 hours to get the minerals. Then you build and sell. I go to the market and buy them, build and sell and save myself 3 hours of time. You might have profited, but I did it faster. (Also, mining your own minerals is not free.) I did the ice mining thing for a bit till I realized that I could run missions or mine more isk in the same time as mining ice. Since isk is fungible, I transferred my earnings from missions to ice and maximized my isk per hour. Of course you might not have the starting capital to buy bulk minerals or ice products but you should always look to maximize your time to max profit.

Well thing is I have a combat toon that I run lvl 4s with and I easily make like 600-750m every three or four days just from bounties and salvage/loot. I use that toon to fund this one. I could actually use another pure research/indy toon tho. Hard to find one.

I was actually thinking about what I should do in between manufacturing and researching and what I've come up with is ice mining/playin the market. Mining for minerals will take me a while to even make enough capital to do what I want unfortunately the market is terrible.

Should I do some training for R&D on my combat toon AND buy a pure science toon as well?