Market Discussions

Well, long story short, they used the same method they used back in the day they first introduced insurance (take perfect build material needs for each ship, assign a base value to each component, calculate payout as cost of all needed components), the only difference being in the values used for "base price" for each of the components.

For many years, those values were Trit 2, Pye 8, then 32, 128, 512, 2048 and Zyd 8192.
I honestly have no idea what exact values they used for the current insurance payouts (the stated rough values were supposed to be the recent market average for each, but I don't recall them actually listing the numbers).
I suppose you could just take 7 different ships, write down exact payout values from the insurance screen, pull down the perfect build numbers, then plug the 7-equation, 7-unknown system into mathematica or a similar piece of software and get a solution for the new mineral base prices (feel free to share).

By the way, the above is only really valid for T1 ships (and I think regular capitals and subcapitals too), because for T2, T3 and supercaps, there are different coefficients that get multiplied at the end depending on ship class (for instance, a stealth bomber supposedly has a different multiplier compared to a Marauder - allegedly, the multipliers were chosen based on number of PvP ship losses, the classes with the highest loss factors got better multipliers, or at least that's the official line).

One would expect the new insurance payouts to be included in the CCP EVE data dumps, like the old ones were (under "base price" for ships), and I could have sworn that at one time, they used to be, but that might be just my memory playing tricks on me, because when I search for it, I find nothing of the sort (and just the old values).

I have tried looking at the costs on Sisi and they are way out compared to TQ so it must scale depending on the current mineral costs.

"...ship insurance will now revalue itself periodically based on a trimmed mean of the ship's manufacturing materials global market weighted average prices. " - CCP Chronotis, DEVBLOG

I still wonder then why the insurance payouts for T2 ships are so crap. They are still nigh on uninsurable. Same for T3. I hope they aren't only considering the mineral costs. That would not be a working model.

Depends how you run said program.

If I want to pay the difference between the insurance payout and a new hull then it becomes relevent which is why I am trying to find how it is calculated so it can be dynamically updated.

Well, two reasons.
First, as far as I know, it doesn't revalue itself periodically. It revalued once, back then, when the devblog came out, and then no more.
I might be wrong though and another revaluation came around at some time, but I doubt it.
Can anybody give a concrete example of at least three (not just two) different T2 ship (platinum) insurance payout values ?

Second (and last), the market price of T2 ships is seldom close enough to the perfect build material cost (maybe it is, occasionally, for some especially crappy T2 ships, but still, the "seldom" is warranted).
Much more often, prices of T2 ships are significantly closer to no-decryptor invention breakeven instead (usually below that for larger ships due to decryptor overall saving ISK, but around that for smaller ships).

So, basically, take the perfect build value (insurance payout, if recently readjusted), add up to 40% in T2 component value, then add T1 BPC and datacore cost (divide by max-skills invention chance, which is a sub-unitary number) and that's very roughly and often enough closer to the actual market price rather than just a recently updated insurance payout (which, again, has probably not been updated since a good while ago and is therefore using obsolete component costs).

Sadly, that sounds very CCP-like. The new insurance payouts were introduced with Apocrypha I believe. So... hey that would be 18 months, right? So we must be due for the first revaluation.

Why don't you just get the value of the ship at the time of purchase? Get that info via api.