Science & Industry

BPOs need to be in the facility where you want to do copying whether that's a mobile lab or a station.

"Copying

The headline here is that, during EVE’s summer 2014 release, we're going to change base copy-time on all blueprints to be the same as base build-time. With Industry giving a maximum 20% reduction in build times, and Science giving a maximum 25% reduction in copy times, this ends up meaning that (with maxed skills) copying takes 6.25% less time than manufacturing from a given blueprint.

The primary reason for this is to try and unify T1, T2 and T3 manufacturing around being dominated by build-from-copy rather than build-from-original. This gives a more unified experience and allows us to make more liberal assumptions about how much risk people are prepared to make with their build jobs. To give a concrete example, this makes us much more comfortable about removing the ability to build from a starbase using a blueprint in a station - when you're only risking the copy, this is a much smaller concern than when you're risking a BPO.

For comparison, currently the trend is that T1 blueprints take 20x longer to copy than to build, and T2 blueprints (for those lucky few BPO owners) take 100x longer to copy than to build.

Speaking of T2, this change is obviously very relevant to invention. We've had a good look at the numbers here and are currently of the opinion that this ends up being much less significant than it at first looks. The majority of invention work currently seems to be of the invent-to-build variety rather than invent-to-sell-blueprint, and on a character with the same number of possible research and manufacturing jobs, the bottleneck is pretty much always in the build time rather than the copy or invention time -- and frequently there's a further bottleneck in that invention anyway takes longer than copying. Unless this leads to a major expansion of invent-to-sell, the actual throughput of invention should not significantly change as a result of shorter copy times."

The point is you don't have to expose your BPOs. If you copy them in a station and then ship the copies to a POS for manufacture/invention/whatever then they don't have to be in space.

Once you've run a job once (as long as you're not changing settings) running a job with the same kind of blueprint is 2 clicks