Science & Industry

Hypothesis: It is possible, given careful planning and selection of lowsec system, to set up a mining operation that will outperform a hisec mining operation.

Outcome: Nope.

I was careful in my selection of lowsec system: no more than two jumps from high, a terminus system (only one gate), no station, not on a trade route, no links to null, very low traffic and a minimal history of ship-kills. I snuck into the system with a black-ops frigate just to take a look around, make some safe-spot bookmarks, etc. Everything looked good. So I brought my POS in-system and set up shop. The only difference between this setup and my hisec setup was the mining ship: I chose the Skiff over the Mackinaw due to the improved tank.

After a week, it was painfully obvious that even in this ass-end of lowsec nowhere, it is pretty much impossible to run a decent mining op unless you have a ton of armed escort. Roaming pirates and gankers fly through the systems all the time; the logistics hurdles of getting your minerals through the game-camps (even in a transport) are excruciating. Had I been rocking any mining vessel other than a Skiff, I'd have lost it more than once (I love the tank on that little beast!).

The roids in low really aren't worth the extra effort. You get bigger rocks and the Hemorphite and Jaspet are good roids, but it's impossible to get a steady mining op going when you have to get safe every ten or twenty minutes and then wait until the bandit(s) leave the system. And there's always that one cloaky spy just sitting out there to spread the word when a miner pokes his head out of his safe-spot.

Lowsec is a waste of time if you're a miner. Hisec's ores are just as good, and it's a hell of a lot safer and more profitable to mine them. I gave it a fair shot because I honestly thought that there would be a way to work the angles on lowsec mining, but unless you have a lot of armed escort or have complete control of a lowsec system, it's nothing but a time and money sink. Just focus your efforts on making your hisec ops more efficient, or make the move out to nullsec.

Ever been fishing? If you are in a low sec belt, you are the bait.

Really the low sec POS is for research/moon mining/PI collection. The fact that you can occasionally , cautiously mine while you are there is just a tiny bonus to give you some way of defraying the logistical costs of dragging everything over from High Sec to operate.

yes. this has been known for years.

one of the ways to minimize your exposure though is to get to know the local pirate groups. you will see roamer gangs from the same few corps many times getting to know their ceo's or individual pilots is a good way to make inroads to people who will buy your manufactured goods. or to fly cover when you have a nonlocal resident roamer gang around. Its not the easiest way to mine nor is it the most profitable. but can be another good inroad to nullsec as many lowsec roamer gangs are part of know nullsec operators.

However, because many of the larger nullsec alliances setup shop in lowsec for reactions or supercap storage or jump points, you will not be able to get blue status with most of them. CCP really hurt small holder lowsec operations when they removed the granulation of security standings a while back. Its harder to show the correct levels of friendly when the two that are available are taken by more important levels of access in nullsec. (safe travel but not dock, dock rights for nonalliance)

Site security is also a reason that NPC null is not mined exhaustively. for the same reasons as lowsec. being able to control who has access to an area is essential for a miner who expects to be exposed for hours on end. In lowsec no one can give you that.

I'm going to be the one to disagree. I successfully ran a mining corporation in Amarr low sec in a dead end system with an ice belt for about 2 or 3 months.

We supported our mother corp with the ship replacement program. We just made friends with the local pirate group and we did have the occasional neutral come through but they hardly stayed very long knowing they weren't going to get any easy kills.

We had 5 miners, 1 hauler, and 1 Rorqual pilot. Only mineral we didn't have access too was Megacyte. So we had buy orders up in the stations a few jumps away and we even got lucky with the occasional Gravimetric site that had some in it.

Very true. The only reason you want to mine in low sec is if you're passing the time waiting on targets to come through.

You did make a couple mistakes that may have caused a nightmare. Pick a low sec point off of a high sec island with stations. When you are in your pos someone can still see barges on scan that look like they could be in a belt or grav site so you'll get much more attention from roaming guys. When you get traffic swap to pvp fit ships and a skiff brick. Bait with the brick then kick someone's teeth in for messing with yo rawks. Do that a few times and you may not have much more trouble from the scrubs...but still even this way most of the time it will be 50/50 mining and fighting off intruders until you make friends that like your cheap minerals.

That's more or less why I gambled about 1B ISK on this little venture: to see if it could be done profitably and on a reasonable scale. The answer (emphatically) is NO. The sharks that cruise lowsec constantly will not leave miners in peace long enough to make mining profitable. Mining requires hours and hours of uninterrupted time, and that's the one thing you never have in lowsec. The other hurdles I can deal with easily enough: I can set up a medium intensive refinery at my own pos so as to avoid running bulky ore; I can pimp out my deep space transport for running blockades; I can use my covert ops frigate to find nice hidey-holes and alert me when bad guys are on the prowl. But I can't simply manufacture peace and quiet for my barges to work. In any small-to-medium sized mining op, I need to dedicate the bulk of my crew to gathering ore, not to patrolling the gate in combat ships. (And reimburse them for their expensive ships when they get blowed up.)

In the end, system security is everything to a profitable mining op. You have to provide enough protection to allow your barges to collect ore unmolested for hours at a time, or the op is just not worth doing. The efficiency hit you take for all the lowsec rigamarole make the whole thing a waste of time -- my yield out of my lowsec adventure was about half what I'd get out of a decent 0.8 hisec system, and that's just pathetic. And I only did that good because I did a ton of planning, scouting, and prospecting first.

I lost money on that little adeventure (would have lost a lot more had my transport been caught in lowsec hauling POS components, let me tell you). But it was a valuable learning experience -- for a miner, lowsec is a complete waste of time. Either stay in high and carebear away, or join a null alliance and grind up rocks in some deep-blue EVE backwater.

One additional point about industry in lowsec: I can't imagine what would make hisec industrialists want to live there.

You can mine moon goo and do POS research in lowsec, but for mining and manufacturing lowsec is a loser. The logistics headaches are even worse than in nullsec.

I've long wondered if it would be possible to have a mechanic where a corp could "rent" a lowsec system in return for a temporary bump in security status. This isn't a sov mechanic; you'd just be paying your Empire host a fee to provide CONCORD response in the system you're renting. The security rating of the system would stay the same, but aggro would be punished by CONCORD as it is in high as long as the rent has been paid. And these arrangements would be strictly of limited-time duration: as short as a day, maybe. And it would be expensive -- 100M to rent a system, per day. (That's the risk-vs-reward thing.)

I'm sure pirates would despise this kind of arrangement, but if CCP is serious about wanting to get industrialists into lowsec, that's the only way I can think of to make it worthwhile.

Not for mining. That's just a longer logistics chain to get your minerals up to hisec, which means more trips in a transport/hauler, which means a (lot) more opportunities to get ganked. And pirates keep track of who's coming and going, you know -- a miner making regular trips back and forth is bound to attract their attention. The shorter your route from lowsec to high, the better chance you have of getting your minerals to market.

Remember: mining efficiency isn't about how much ore you get into your warehouse. It's about how much you deliver to market.

1. You can't count on a grav site spawning in your home system (at least not outside of WH space). Out of the week-plus I was in my lowsec system, I never got a grav spawn. And there's no way I'd go hunting for a grav site in another system -- that's just more hauling and more gank opportunities.
2. Grav sites don't generate enough minerals on a weekly basis to make a permanent op pay off -- a decent crew can clean out a grav site in a few hours.
3. Grav site mining will buy you at most a few minutes until the pirate scans you down. You still have to get safe when a bandit comes in-system; grav mining just gives you a bit more time. (And in my experience, pirates probe. They're bored and looking for kills; it's not like they have anything better to do. If they don't find a bunch of fat-assed miners lurking in a grav site, they'll plex or run sig sites.)

Believe me, I've thought about this stuff. A lot. There's no way to crunch the numbers on lowsec mining unless you can bring a whole fleet with you, armed to the teeth.

Maybe the issue is that you treated low sec like a high sec alternative. It's really an alternative to nullsec because a corp could 'control' space without alliances or sov costs but the troubles and issues you have are very similar to null. Finding a high sec island for staging/logistics/manufacturing might be an alternative to your setup two jumps from high but ultimately you'll likely need jump capable ships to move product. For instance I mined this weekend and it cost me 14mil just in fuel costs to go back and forth to a 40% efficiency station with 10% tax all to make a few ships. I could have saved that 14 mil I guess by using amy freighter but...5 jumps with hostiles? No thanks. But in the end you an see the pain of industry in low/null...and thats just T1/caps...forget about T2.

Props for giving it go though.