Science & Industry

Yes. 3 months is plenty.

The quickest way to make serious money manufacturing is through planetary interaction. And you don't need anything like 500 million to get started. You can have 5 colonies going in a couple of weeks, and 15 in a little over a month by training a couple of same account alts. But to make serious money through PI you will have to master travel and transport somewhere besides highsec. Highsec PI colonies have very low extraction rates and high taxes that limit profits. Lowsec is workable, so long as you can find planets o the types you need with privately owned customs offices (POCOs) that have reasonable tax rates set. In the regions of amarr space I am familiar with, 5% tax rates are common at lowsec POCOs, which is low enough to be usable. The NPC offices in highsec charge 10%. Note that the % tax rate is not a percentage of actual value, 10% taxes are likely to eat 20-30% of your actual profits. The best place for PI is nullsec. Wormhole systems can work for PI, but only on a limited scale: If you try to set up 15 colonies with 3 characters in a wormhole, you are either going to have to make a lot of different products, some of them rather low value, or accept low draw rates as multiple colonies extract the same resources on the same planets, increasing depletion. This because you only have reliable access to the planets of one system; in low or null you can use planets from multiple nearby systems, allowing you to have a ton of colonies all extracting the same resources without causing mutual depletion, because the colonies are on different planets. I feel i should warn you, though: PI eventually devolves into a very repetitive, boring routine of reset extractors, transport stuff between planets, reset extractors, move extractor heads to fight depletion, reset extractors... many players who try PI, even players who make serious ISK at it, eventually find it too tedious to carry on with eventually.

But with 3 months to work with, you don't have to settle for the quickest option. Another route would be T2 production via invention. It will take at least a month to train a character in the science skills needed for invention. With a careful training plan, you can probably have 2 characters on the same account ready for basic invention within your 3 month deadline. With your 500 mil budget you can afford a small lab POS with a couple of advanced labs to get you started, as profits roll in you will want to expand to a medium. You will find copying blueprints for invention difficult without private labs. Invention and manufacturing slots, on the other hand, are readily available at public stations in highsec. T2 prodoction is one of the quickest ways to grow capital in the game, but it is tedious and time consuming. You have to run a LOT more invention and manufacturing jobs for T2 production than you have to to produce T1 items. The profit margins are high precisely because few people have the patience. Blueprints are cheap, though. You can make a great variety of high profit T2 modules with BPOs that cost less than a million ISK each. NAd you don't have to research the blueprints.

Or you can try T1 manufacturing, but you will find growing enough capital to make plex money every month a bit difficult with only 500 million seed money. Decent profits in T1 industry are very hard to find without investing in multiple pricey BPOs. With 3 months to work, you can probably bootstrap yourself up to a decent set of blueprints before your deadline, but it will take a lot of careful research and judicious purchasing. Again, a POS for research would be helpful, as you can't do much serious T1 production without researching blueprints to cut raw materials waste, and public Material Efficiency research slots normally have long wait times.

I would say your safest plan is probably to plan on either PI or T2 manufacturing to give you reliable income and plex money, then use profits on that to build a library of usable BPOs that make decent profits via T1 production. after you accumulate a few billion isk worth of good BPOs you can ditch the tedious, time consuming PI or T2 stuff and just do the much fasterand less annoying T1 production.

Identifying high profit items for production can be very difficult on your own, you want to use a third party tool for that. I am fond of Eve IPH.

I personally would recommend starting with PI and then moving to T2 production and here is why.

1. A POS is an expensive investment. The tower, labs, arrays, fuel, BPO's, and components you will need will quickly whipe out your 500 million. You will also need to pay someone to boost your standings if you don't have good faction standings or buy a corp with standings to put up your POS in high sec. I have seen some people offer this service for free, but not many.

2. The science and manufacturing skills to successfully invent and build T2 components are expensive. You will spend at least 50-100 million if you do not have these skills already.

3. If you start with PI you can set up your PI colonies to build POS fuel products (enriched uranium, coolant), and some which are also T2 build materials (mechanical parts, robotics). By doing this you can offset the amount of liquid isk you have to have on hand to fuel the POS. I am not saying the PI are materials are free, they have value and instead of selling them at market, you are using them, but you don't have to have isk on hand to buy them. Buy a fuel block BPO and make your own fuel blocks, this is cheaper.

4. You can get into PI quicker than T2 production and you will be able to quickly make what you want to buy PLEX or GTC's and have surplus left over to put toward a POS and T2 invention. Once you get the POS going and T2 building you can set the PI on the back burner and focus on that.

All of the above is great advice!

The only thing I would add, to fill the time between PI runs and skill changes is what made me my first few billion isk as an industrialist:

Purchase pre-researched ammo BPOs (ME:50 minimum, ~300mil isk), mine the minerals needed, build (assuming Production Efficiency 5) and sell the ammo at mission hubs. Can make a couple billion a month easily doing this. This will provide the seed money for invention. My invention set up consists of a small tower in hi-sec, buy orders and negotiated deals with various mining organizations. I started with ammo and now produce t2 weapons and modules and carriers/dreads.

As the isk builds, remove yourself from the mining ship forever and start placing buy orders for minerals, unless you enjoy that particular kind of pain...

Also, make sure you research your market and know what the mission-nerds are going to need. Iridium S ammo isn't going to sell real well at all, ever, especially at a Lvl 4 Agent Mission Hub.

...or you could just mine your fool head off.