Science & Industry

I would suggest training Supply chain management to level 3, I think you would need it to do jobs at a POS, and it'll allow you to start jobs a few jumps away. Also I feel that setting up a pos for manufacturing is unneccessary, there are sufficient slots available at stations within a couple of jumps of Jita.

A useful trick I sometimes use to is start the jobs towards the end of subscription, let it lapse and then reactivate when the jobs are finished. You can save a fair chunk in Plex costs if you do this.

In theory this should work, you've planned out the manufacturing pretty well, but the problem is that because rig materials are so available, and are mostly sold by mission runners / fairly new players there are all ready alot of people buying up these material goods, making the buying of these items very cut throat.

Also since most rig BPO's don't require ME research this means it is the easiest manufacturing to get into for new players. So because of this there are so many rigs being manufactured that the possible profit to be made is very minimal.

Using medium cargohold optimizations I as an example, as they are a very popular rig, and use materials that are common in other rigs:

....item........................amount..jita sell....total cost
Alloyed Tritanium Bar 20 - 104,900 - 2,098,000
Fried Interface Circuit 24 - 3,139 - 75,336
Tripped Power Circuit 14 - 108,200 - 1,514,800
Cost to manufacture: 3,688,136

Jita price: medium cargohold optimization sell: 3,677,929.99

Jita price: medium cargohold optimization buy: 3,650,000.11

Profit matching jita sell order: 10,206isk

So not even counting fuel costs or time involved manufacturing and selling 100 of these would _MAYBE_ net you 1 million isk profit....

Now naturally if you setup buy orders for the material requirements and sell them in other regions that do not have major trade hubs you will increase your profit and decrease the costs per item, but you are now looking at having to train social and market related skills, grinding corp standings to decrease broker/tax fees and much more travel time.

I would suggest that instead of going with a POS for now find a few stations that have low activity and utilize those manufacturing slots and just take over several stations and see how much profit you can make before investing the 300M + per month fuel costs and 1B + cost of a POS setup.

If you remap your 2 same-account to maximize INT and spend the rest of the points on MEM, and buy +3 implants for INT and MEM (requires Cybernetics trained to 1), you can get 10 production slots (Advanced Laboratory Operation 4) in 9 or 10 days, plus about half a week for the remaining skillz (Laboratory Operation to 5, Science to 4, Research to 4, Metallurgy to 4).

So about half a month per account, if you're willing to spend about 16M ISK in implants, and make do with Science/Research/Metallurgy at 4. If you want to train them to five, figure half a week more per account, approximately.

edit: Okay, my figures above are for research alts, not production alts. But I presume you'll need research alts too, to improve the BPOs you purchase.

Not at all. A vast majority of people who buy stuff instead of manufacturing it themselves fall into the category of lazy or stupid. Lazy being people who dont want to fly 10+ jumps to save 100K isk on an item at a trade hub, or stupid being people who don't know about external websites to view prices of items in other regions. They simply pay the amount for the lowest priced sell order.

To give you an idea of the lazy/stupid concept I constantly buy for example T2 ships in trade hubs and sell them for 20M +/- mark ups, and I do this with like 10 to 15 ships per week, and I am only limited by my available isk. Also you are not going to be selling massive volume because you are not buying items and re-listing them to make .01 per sale. You don't want massive volume, you want massive profit as a manufacture. If you want to make 1000isk per sale get into station trading. If you want 1M, 10M, etc sales get into manufacturing and seed stations / regions.

Another thing is, I think it sounds like a huge workload, having to juggle around 1 main and 11 alts to continously produce stuff.

My plans involve getting my main and my alt fit to research BPOs and produce from them, and creating 2 research alts whose only job is to improve and perhaps copy BPOs. But I don't envision using the research alts for production, simply because it's too much hassle. I may change my mind, of course. But my current plan is that I want to own a huge selection of researched BPOs so that I can choose what to produce, based on what's profitable. And it even includes the possibility of retiring my "primary" alt (not renewing his subscription with PLEX) if I feel like it, since the 2 research alts are on my main's account.

Not sure if they removed it or not yet, buy you used to be able to send out a buddy invite and request for a plex as the reward so you could create infinite amounts of 51 day alts that can be discarded later if they don't turn out to be what you are looking for.

You could start 2-3 alts with the skills in training and 'test out the waters' with 1-2 production characters. If it's not what you wanted, just let their subs expire and later on you can reactivate them if you wish.

Also... instead of trying to aim for 100 slots at the start, why not get a few assembly arrays to provide 20 slots and use the rest of the space for research? If you are starting manufacturing and don't want to buy the bpos off the forums/contracts, you are going to spend half a year at least researching the bpos you want. More if you diversify your manufacturing goals. Rigs on their own... would take a few weeks/months only tho.

Your major concern will be to obtain all the input components aswell as getting rid of the output in a way that wont be cumbersome for you.

Also handling the whole buying, producing and selling point on a project of this scale will likely be way too much for a single person to handle.

One thought that has been mentioned here is to find markets outside of hubs aswell as putting up cheap buyorders in not-so-busy areas for people to sell at. While this is all fine and good, it also takes alot of hauling and organisation to handle. The production step with POS, handling manufacture jobs aswell as possibly researching bpo's makes it a question if it's not just more easy money by simply re-selling the rig components at a higher (jita) price.

In many cases, on the popular and easy-to-build stuff, it's more efficient isk-income by doing the trade profession than the manufacturing. However, if you have a good network of suppliers and customers that deal in bulk, your life could be quite alright as a manufacturer.

I would definatly recommend you to start low-scale and take small steps at first, before banging the big drum and going fullscale, so you don't end up having all your isk tied up in slow-selling rig parts.

Selling can be a PITA, and something that's easy to forget when stuck in an excel sheet.

Good luck though, and more importantly, have fun :)

"Not at all. A vast majority of people who buy stuff instead of manufacturing it themselves fall into the category of lazy or stupid. Lazy being people who dont want to fly 10+ jumps to save 100K isk on an item at a trade hub, or stupid being people who don't know about external websites to view prices of items in other regions. They simply pay the amount for the lowest priced sell order."

A lot of people are neither lazy nor stupid, in the time it takes to fly 10 jumps there and 10 back, I can make millions in rat bounties, and pass that 100k on to you.

Quibbling over 10 isk difference for a missile is pointless unless you are buying in the millions.

Remember that building them is not the end of the line, you need to sell them as well. How good are the markets and can they support selling these massive quantities?

I was waiting for someone to point out the .01 issue. It goes along with the fact that finding the right market location for your items is more important than having the items up for sale. And when you enter a new market, expect prices to steadily drop, solely for the fact you are one more producer of the item, and that increases competition and lowers profits.

Its all about supply and demand. More supply does not modify level of demand, so your profit decreases. As has been stated, find a less competitive market, it may be slower turnoaver, but id rather make 30% profit on one sale than 1% on 30 sales. Less logistics, less isk tied up in goods, and less slots to handle and turnver, and less of the Jita .01 crap that can result in 0 sales for 18 hours per day.