Science & Industry

Have been searching high and low for definitive answer to this question via spread sheets/tools but can't seem to find any. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Was that a question? Looked like a statement.

Well I'm confused. "T1 Ship building v Mineral profitability" isn't a question. It might make a half-decent title for a chart though.

take jita as a guidline though.

If you can sell it in jita for a profit thats good. And sell wereever you feel fomfy.

If you cant sell it in jita with a prifot (making a loss) your better off buying up the items and then ship them to wereever you want to sell them. But then your not manufacturing but your trading.

The ship construction market in highsec is one of near perfect competition, the only thing giving anyone an advantage is the number of pos'es they have available. The market is pretty saturated up there, so you can expect the ship costs to closely mirror the mineral value

In order to make real ISK off of ship construction you will need to transport your goods to an area of space where the market is less saturated. This means lowsec and NPC nullsec. Player owned nullsec will have lots of ships for sale transported there by the owning alliance and their indy corps. Ships pop constantly in low and npc null, meaning you can charge a slight premium due to the higher demand, as well as people not wanting to fly too far to reship

Even then, transporting the goods in question is likely to eat all or the majority of the added profit margin for the new area. This is one of the things I hate the most about industry in the game. Too much competition.

We have a huge library of BPOs that we've completely researched and there isn't much margin in T1 ships. In fact it is not unusual for us to find ships selling bellow our costs.

So we have to be pretty agile, monitor the ship markets and build based on frequent calculations of profits. Now on the T2 side, there is more meat on the bone. We do pretty well with some T2 ships.

I can't say its not worth the effort to build T1 but be careful that you are watching your costs and the market constantly.

Issler

It depends on what capital you are working with, and your login frequency. IMO the spread on hulls if you have a selection of BPOs is usually better than the spread on mins, and hull orders usually start just slightly higher than equivalent mins orders, but you expose yourself to manufacturing delay reducing the number of times you can work your capital through, and bpc's eat secretly at your spreads, and BPO has opportunity cost in reducing your capital available for working in the market

If you have 20mil, then its better to trade, as your orders will fill quickly, and you can work the mins with the largest spreads, and you can run your full capital through the market multiple times per session for decent compound effect

I am currently running 1bil for mineral and stock, and some 2 bil in BPOs (recovering from an acquisition). I'll be running 2 bil BPO and 2 bil working capital when I sell some stuff and work the capital through a few times. ie on my current plan I'd have to acquire 4bil in difficult to acquire mins per session to work that capital through as a trader, or 2 bil of mixed minerals including predominately easy to acquire mins as a manufacturer - ie I am much more likely to actually succeed in working a decent amount of my capital manufacturing.

if the market moves against you really badly (ie your specific hulls tank and mins go nuts), then YOU REPROCESS OR WAIT, you don't sell hulls at below current minerals price

Its essentially scamming the members, and particularly your most productive members - tends to chase out the people that can do maths when the unit of time is involved, and thus bias your memberbase towards the dumb.

Also if you are creaming 25% and making stuff that requires the creamed 25% as the "profit" margin, you might as well just sell the mins.

personally I'd get to grips with Google docs,
find the ME calculation formula
bung some figures in and see what comes out.
what this does is enable you to understand :-
ME levels ,
opportunity costs,
why minerals I mine a re not free,
skills with google docs - this is very useful for a lot of things in eve and the RL,
you can download nicely made sheets / programs etc but the one you understand best is the one you make yourself.

Main reason for that is empire being too 'small'. There are still some highway gates like Niarja-Kapuutenen and the aren't many low-sec 'moats' separating big chunks of empire.