EVE General Discussion

Yes, you can

Of course you can turn a profit. However, it will be somewhat hard to use all of the slots a POS is capable of alone, I believe. If you do construction and research there, you might be able to max out a small with one character.

2 research alts for copying and material research will help you use the pos more efficiently. Otherwise you will never keep all your slots busy...

this - I had an alt with a highsec POS and managed to make a very, very good living a single char inventing and manufacturing - I then trained up a couple of my alts and put them to work (copying, inventing, etc) and my profits increased exponentially. What I did find, however, was that it went from being a fun little distraction/endeavor to a lot of work and so I finally closed down my POS and moved on to other things.

Datacores is the only thing that benefits from multiples. It accumulates in real time and if you have 12 chars with datacore accumulation it can only be better.

Most everything on the POS per say is manageable by a single char. The bulk of the SP on this char are R&D and production POS gunner 5. I can manufacture everything up to Golem and Paladin. Can make Titans and can make alliances and Sov a system. Of course obtaining all the resources and ISK for much of that to happen? Go find that Army or make it.

I find it quite consuming at first, getting the standings high enough to get access to lvl4 R&D agents.

Words of truth. Copying alts don't need much skills, if there's empty slots in account. And invention doesn't really take too much time, at least compared to mat research and copying. So if you do all yourself, you end up always having 3-5 of the max11 jobs occupied. (Or max 10, because there's so much else to learn than that crappy adv lab lvl5...)

But then again, if you do invention, you don't need to material research them, since original ME doesn't matter and you get more free slots for inventing.

Anyway, you can really make decent money with just one char, but you need to know what to manufacture, since you can't mass produce huge quantities.

You can run a medium Caldari POS with 1 account nicely with 52 slots total (14 copy/14ME/6PE/18 invention) "general" configuration.
Assuming you've got every character trained, you'll have 30/52 active slots at any one time doing various things.
Profits depend on what you do with those slots, but it's not too difficult to achieve break-even.

Hardcore S & I with multiple accounts and hundreds of alts is just a matter specializing and scaling (up) that basic business model.
If you're not into that sort of thing, 1 account is perfectly fine .. though to be honest, I find a minimum 2 accounts necessary to get around most things.

The only major bottleneck requiring more than 1 account is manufacturing .. though, keeping in mind the cost of maintaining a 30 slot manufacturing account against the returns that it brings, I doubt it'd be very atttractive for smallish schemes. Always measure it to how much time and effort you're willing to commit. The bottleneck shouldn't be an issue for your particular case.

no, you don't need an army of alts to maximize profits. you only need to identify which step is most profitable and do that step.

running a POS you always have this nagging feeling that you have to be busy 200% of the time to make the POS earn its keep.

Which can turn an 'alt' into a 'main' if you arent paying attention.

also... managing buy and sell orders is a pain in the butt