Science & Industry

As a starting place, have a quick read over:
http://www.fuzzwork.co.uk/2013/04/16/manufacturing-101/


It won't help with targeting what to make, but that bit of cheese is always moving.

The where isn't too important, though it will eat small bits of your profit, from having things shipped around.

I would only suggest mining if you need to build some seed money to get things rolling. Otherwise only do it when you do not have the ability to pay full attention to the game as the mechanic of mining is soul draining for most players in the long term. Most importantly YOUR TIME IS NOT FREE!

Production Efficiency 5 is the most important skill you need to train. I would suggest looking at small rigs or low end pos modules BPOs to start off as they require no research to be competitive, they are cheap, and offer good margins most of the time. They do not offer large value returns but they are a nice base to start from.

After Production Efficiency 5, train up trade skills to fill out some slots that you will need for acquiring goods and selling what you make. Train broker relations, and accounting to 4 or 5 and begin running missions with the NPC owner of the trade hub that you will be working out of. This will reduce your transaction costs and increase your faction standing which will help later on with putting up a POS.

As you build up your working capital from REINVESTING YOUR PROFITS into larger production runs, begin to branch out when you notice that you either have filled your production capacity or your production is negatively affecting prices. When you are at this point you might have the standing to consider anchoring a POS to help with BPO cooking. You will also probably have the capital to look at BPOs that utilize more capital.

At some point after you begin producing either look into making a basic spreadsheet or use the numerous tools that amazing capsuleers have built to figure out margins and research requirements.

After that the sky is the limit. The biggest cost will be time/planning as in the beginning the returns are meager, but over time that small return over a large pot will dwarf almost all other professions from an income to effort viewpoint.

Hope that helps. Good Luck

Fly Profitably

Another thing that I don't think anyone else has brought up is... well... ISK. You're going to need a ton of it! It takes money to make money. If you have real life money, I'd buy some plex and sell it. Get some BPOs and start making Tech 1 stuff.

This is not WoW where you can easily earn gold by crafting. In Eve manufacturing is dominated by spread sheet wizards who are engaged in brutal trade wars with razor thin margins. To compete you would need to spend months:
- Training up skills
- Training up research skills
- Researching Blue Prints
- Increasing faction

Then you'd need massive amounts of isk to:
- buy Blue Print Orginals
- buy up enough minerals and the like to produce something


Sure you could mine the minerals yourself, build something simple like ammo, and sell it in a mission hub, but you'd make more isk
- mining and selling your minerals (As you can't refine as well as experinced industrial players)
- Buying said ammo in a trade hub and hauling it to a mission hub
- Running mining or hauling missions

I'd look at the following:

- PI it's basically free isk.
- Run non combat missions
- Join FW and run sites
- Run normal missions

Anything you use a lot, or that you know others use a lot.

Ask for fitting advice in mission hubs, and take notes. Ditto for incursion fleets.

Sit on a trade hub warp-in, and cargo-scan ships to see what other people are making.

Yeah I agree with this, WoW's crafting never made me any real money. I actually made more farming the materials for the crafts.

As for EvE's Manufacturing. I too just recently started it up and while I am making isk doing it I however, find myself bidding trade wars than I do manufacturing. Makes me wonder if I should just be a trader only since that's what I am doing anyway. Perhaps it gets better once I start making T2 products, but I doubt it.