Science & Industry

What is ISK per m3 mining?

This is a system strictly for SOV Nullsec. Put basicly, all the ore mined across the entire corps is pulled together, some cases compressed, refined, then moved and sold to market. The logistics is done by the most qualified, active, and trusted pilots so it gets done right. Players get paid from the earnings based on how many m3 they mined.

This is a very purist way to run a corps. A way where the corps wallet can operate with only enough of a balance for emergencies and not much more. The corps only ever needs to tax miners based on what it needs are for that week and no more. The biggest point is that this allows members to directly affect the rate they are taxed. This motivates miners in all sorts of ways that benefit themselves and the corps.

How can miners affect their income and how does it benefit the corps?

A corps in 0.0 has a number of fixed monthly bills. If all the ore they mine gets taxed against fixed monthly bills, then the more ISK their ore is worth the more of that ISK they get to keep. Because of this fact, members become highly motivated to get the maximum potential payout back from the corps each week. Say you have a small industry corp and fixed bills are 100 Million and miners mine 500 Million. They are taxed 20%... ouch! What if they help to recruit more members, increase the index level a little so they get more high end ores, and next time they mine 1 Billion ISK. They just dropped the amount they are taxed to 10%, nice... Next time they continue to recruit, they get some full time Rorqual boosts, they help pilots get into hulks, and they gained another index level. Now their ore is worth 1.5 Billion. Through recruiting, members supporting members, and teamwork their corp was able to affect how much they can mine as a corps and now the tax just dropped to 6.6%. In the process the corps as a whole benefited in increased membership, membership capabilities, average member wallet size, regular weekly income, and overall corp activity. This can allow for the corp to expand corps assets to include towers, limited SRPs, more systems, or take on various other tasks with a greater ease.

Is it really better ISK than everyone mining for themselves tho?

In almost every respect and instance yes. One pilot can not sit in a system and mine the best ore in the game for very long. Asteroids in gravimetric sites are finite in quantity and capacity so this will not take long to do. You will almost always be sharing those asteroids with others so it will take even less time. You will almost always not have the correct ships, perfect skills, and RL time to take the ore mined and turn it into ISK without some type of loss. This is where the corps normally steps in and will buy your ore at 10-25% below Jita mineral value so it can pay bills.

Don’t forget all of those instances in null sec where you warp to the grav site and find that you were the last one to come to the table and someone ate all the fried chicken!!!

In an ISK per m3 scenario everyone gets paid the same ISK for every m3 of ore you mine. With activity, skills, and teamwork corps can increase how many m3 they mine. This allows them to offset the corps tax rate. That increased activity also increases index levels that spawn more grav plexes which in turn increase the ratio of high end ores. That too decreases corp tax. Eventually the average ISK per m3 value will be higher than over 90% of the ore in the game. At that point, you can feel free to come to the table whenever you want because “Oh Happy Days” the table is always full of nothing but fried chicken!!!

So, how does it work.

Since it is an all or nothing system all miners must participate in the program. If people are able to mine high end ores in the same solar system and sell it from outside the ISK per m3 system then it devalues everyone else's work. For this reason, this system works best from control towers in systems that have no stations. Far enough from refineries it would be impractical for pilots to safely transport ore, as they mine it, to a station with a refineries. This is to keep the honest people honest.

Large ship assembly array hanger tabs are assigned to players through corp roles. One person per hanger tab and 6-7 pilots per array. You may want to keep one array free for a Rorqual to use to compress ores. If you have more than seven people you can also give roles for the same seven tabs to others but assign them to another array. This will give all members access to the same tab in all arrays and stations that are not “based out of” or “headquarters”. For this reason read-only access is recommended. These arrays hold 18.5 Million m3 that is shared across all tabs in the array. It will take days for seven hulk pilot to fill the array. Or, much less time if you have seven multi boxers that have 2-8 hulks each. It helps to balance the hulks across the arrays so some do not fill too often while others take weeks. Once the array nears full then the ore content in m3 can be recorded in a screenshot and/or on a spreadsheet. At this point the ore is in the hands of the corp logistics group and the members can continue to mine while they wait for payment.

Pilots can’t deal with readonly access to hangers?

If you need to restrict read-only to your array tabs to protect assets at stations, pilots may still want a location to store gear such as mods and crystals. I recommend they use anchored GSCs off the POS. If that is not enough, you can anchor corp hangers on a separate POS and allow their roles to give them access and have the running costs be included in taxes. If that is not enough, because one is a heavy multiboxer both pve and mining, then allow them to own and fuel a tower in system to store ships, mods, ammo, and ore they mine. Just give them very basic POS roles and set a shield password that logistics pilots will have access to.

Is mining in 0.0 worth it in the end?

Is it profitable????

Mining Scordite and Pyroxeres is worth 180-181 ISK per m3.
A perfectly well managed industry index of 3 yields 199 ISK per m3. A 9% increase in potential profit.
A perfectly well managed industry index of 4 yields 206 ISK per m3. A 12% increase in potential profit.

All this increased profit can easily be sucked up by the nullsec costs involved in doing business.

Pros of nullsec:

- You can get boosts from a sieged Rorqual witch is better then an Orca, but only if their is fuel available.
- You get standings and intel that totally gets rid of the destroyer ganking you have in empire.
- No war decs to worry about.

Cons of nullsec:

ISK wise
- Station 5-10% refine take can not be reduced by skills.
- Some stations have 35% refineries you lose even with max skills and implants.
- Corps have 2-10 Billion ISK of additional overhead they must get from members, one way or another.
- Costs & risk of the logistics of getting unused high end minerals to a market that will offer a reasonable price and buy it in short order (Only Jita offers this).

Risk wise
- Destroyer gankers get replaced by cloaky campers some with cynos fit to them that can sit idle for days.
- War decs are replaced by SOV war.
- You have the risks of assets in conquerable outposts and POSs you can be locked out of or can be destroyed.
- NPCs are a real threat that comes in waves of BC and BS every 20 minutes or less and can randomly lock anyone in the site. They can take out poorly tanked/skilled exhumers with ease.

We used this for almost 2 years and I could not find any other better or "honest" system.

There is no fighting about who got when online and who mined how much of high ends etc.

The only disadvantage is that this is not working when you share system with other corps. Because they can be cherrypicking your ore :)

The good thing for us was that we were far from high sec, so people were never "tempted" to move the ores outside on their own and sell it.

And you could "track" it when you see someone is mining like crazy and he don't put much ore into the pool.

Yea, that is the thing, if it is corp that is not mining, it is easy.

But we wanted to do some mining in Fountain for a while, and the rules with whole HBC was that you can't kick people from the system ... so if there is someone who just fly around the mining systems and mine only arkonor etc. you can't do anything about it. That could make trouble with this kind of payouts.

Yea, of course .... we had miner who was mining 60-70% of whole corp mining output, but .... we had a rule, either you participate or you are out of corp.

And since we did not take big cut from Jita prices and the service was good (all logistics etc. from corp wallet) people never had problem with this system.

But from the experience, those big miners were usually payed most accurate, since they mined a lot, they had to mine low end ores too, since there was not enough high end for them. So they payment was averaged. The people who "donated" most were the miners who just got online for hour or two and mined mostly high ends.

Also the high yield miner won't be able to keep on mining only ABC if he is alone, he needed help from the people who might log in after DT that will mine mostly low end ores to keep industry level up or to reset the large gravimetrics. And these people would never mine if they will never get to touch the high ends :) So this way people are motivated to mine the less valuable ores when needed (refreshing gravimetrics, farming up industry level, etc.)

Also as I said, we had the advantage that players who wanted to "trick" the system had no way how to get the ore out of 0.0, so it was not an issue in our case (5 capital jumps to nearest high sec was good for something :D )