Science & Industry

For me, it all comes down to what I need to extract with just a tad overages, and nothing more. It depends on your setup and just how much P0's you need to feed your hoppers. Look at your production bldgs, how much they need per hour, and then adjust your extractor head times and locations so that you get just enough, plus a bit more.

I'd say the most important factor is to configure it to your lifestyle(available gametime). There are some things that any PI industrialist should consider when doing a new Planet setup.

Extraction cycle:
- 15 min
- 30 min
- 1 h
- 2h
- 4h

Distribution of resources:
- flat
- hotspots

Materials needed to fuel a processor:
- 6000 units per processor

Available storage space:
- Storage facility
- Spaceport


I'll just put out some numbers from my ass:
- 15 min cycles will dig a hole into the planet. I expect a HighSec planet to last about 3-5 days before the resource extraction drops by 50% if not moving the extraction heads. The whole ECU area will drop by 25% if its a flat distribution of resources or by 50% if it was shaped like a hotspot.

- 30 min cycles will eventually do the same but will need about 2x more time to make a nice hole.

- 60 min cycles. I have no idea how it will react, but suspect that many WH/Null planets have an enough strong regeneration power to counter extraction. So I suspect it might never fall under 10-15% of when you first start extraction.

- 2h and 4h cycles. No worries here, but remember that stooping a program will still deplete the full amount of resources(probably). With this I actually managed to get from white to a blue surface in 2 days only.



At this point in time I still don't know if planet resources are affected by sec status or just the resource bar you see while scanning. My theory is that they are all predetermine and have a set base value. (All WH planets are in -1.0 sec status, but I still found a planet that contained less Aqueous Liquids than a HighSec planet)


I have no evidence that what I write is true, but if anyone has solid data then pls send it to me




And to answer your question:
I use 2 day programs which enables me to sustain 6 processors in a WH. I only need to move the ECU on the ****** planets every 2 months. The ECUs on the good planets have depleted the resources by 10-15% in the first month and should not decrease by 5% for the next 12 months.
/endWALLofTEXT

4/3 or 4/4 would be optimal. 3/0 if you are the only person on the planet and have a good understanding of resource locations on that particular planet(which actually means that you had extractors on that planet at some point and still remember the layout). 0/0 would be optimal for all Factory oriented characters ^_^

I typically run 3 day cycles, I have a lot of other responsibilities in corp that makes logistics more of a challenge so this works pretty well. There is also the concern of burning out the resource area and having to move. I use 10 extractor heads spread as far apart and evenly as I can over the target area. I do sometimes move the heads about if it looks like I’m depleting one area more than another. If it looks like production will exceed the demand and buffer space I will cut down the number of heads accordingly. I only run the basics (a lot of them) on the harvesting planet and move everything to a factory planet where I build multiple items.

I will never forget the joy the first time the system told me I had to upgrade the link between my harvester and my buffer storage because it couldn’t accommodate all the materials.