Science & Industry

Hi all,

I'd like to ask some tips and help on a 2 men team to start a legitimate business plan.
We are putting together some toons with some good skills in mining, pi, research and production.
We are thinking to set up a pos in highsec, since we don't want to risk too much and search for a relative gain to use this on small pvp dreams.
We could help eachother, maybe getting the fuel from PI, mine some of the minerals needed to produce, or maybe start a small net to aim to a bigger one.
Maybe we possess the idea, but we lack of the know-how, and some real tip from people who actually handles this kind of thing daily. If this is worth the time, or everyone should just focus on their best sector.
I don't know if the older guides are out-dated or maybe still viable.


Any help will be really appriciate.

Thank you for your answer,

when you talk about the capital to invest in the initial efforts, u mean the BPOs right?

Hey, I just made a long post and apparently it didn't get posted...

Basically all I wanted to say is that you can manufacture with a POS as well, I make about an extra 2 billion/month by manufacturing in a POS just because of the 25% bonus you get from the assembly arrays. It is a huge difference when you run a POS with 5 toons... the key for this to work though is to be able to time your production with the time you can be online so that you can active the next production line just minutes after and not miss out on a couple of hours.

and as the above people mentioned, to run a pos you will need lots of isk ( I started out with 2.5 bill ), you will need to spend a lot of time at it and you will need to be well prepared.

I make more then 10 billion on my pos per month, If I would manufacture ships I could make more but it would be to much of a hassle to offline and online arrays all the time. People say its **** to manufacture in a POS well I say its **** never finding slots for all your toons, its **** not having all slots at the same locations and it is extreamly **** NOT getting the 25% time boost. It can make you billions if run properly.

T1 manufacturing on any scale -requires- ME research to be profitable for almost every item. This means to get started with it you're either going to need a POS or a research oriented corp that you can pay for access. I don't know which is more expensive to do as I've never used a research corp. A POS is obviously more costly in capital, but this can be recovered once you have the desired blueprints.

It is absolutely possible to make a highsec POS profitable on T1 manufacturing alone once you have the blueprints researched. Be aware that this is by no means free money and you're going to have to spend a lot of time researching the markets and hauling stuff around. There are some easy calculations that can be done to know if your manufacturing is beating out the cost of the POS. These calculations are dependent on the market price of the fuel.

I'm going to try to make the text for this bit as short as possible while still being thorough. Hopefully I can be coherent. Remember that the word profit refers to value gained by the manufacturing process over its materials. It is not the sale price of the item.

Fuel to run a (medium) POS for an hour costs as follows, based on current Jita prices:

Amarr - 14349 * 20 = 286,978 isk per hour
Minmatar - 14947 * 20 = 298,946 isk per hour
Gallente - 14993 * 20 = 299,867 isk per hour
Caldari - 16994 * 20 = 339,880 isk per hour

Manufacturing at a POS happens 25% faster. So if an item takes 1 minute to build at a station, it takes 45s to build at a POS. If that 1 minute item nets 1800 isk in profit, it would net 2400 at a Pos. The difference between these is 600. This is either 33% or 25% based on which number you calculate from. Let's start with the former, basing our number from the station profit. To know if you're beating fuel costs, calculate your total profit per hour from a station. Divide that number by three. If what you get is higher than 286,978, you are outpacing the fuel cost of an Amarr medium POS from your manufacturing. (This tool is really useful/accurate for calculating profit on an item. AFAIK, the prices are based on Eve-Central, which is updated by players using auto-upload tools like Eve-Mon. If you want complete up to date accuracy you will have to update them yourself)

You can then do a projection of how long it will take to pay back the capital investment. Say your net benefit over fuel costs is 200,000 isk per hour. Just figure out what it costs to buy all the POS parts, and divide it by the per-hour net. So there was a 1b investment at the beginning, 1,000,000,000 / 200,000 = 5000 hours, or about 6.7 months. 6.7 months to make a billion isk is pretty terrible, so obviously you're gonna want a much higher margin than fuel costs + 200,000 per hour. For reference, this is a reasonable assessment of a single averagely profitable item. (500-600k profit per hour)

Invention and RE add another layer of possible gains. The volumes are much lower, though, so you have to learn a lot about how these work, and they typically aren't as easy to calculate in terms of profit per hour. But with the fuel cost as a compass you should be able to sort out what's going on.



None of these processes scale well with more High sec stations because you are limited by your factory/lab slots per character. Low sec/no sec POS scale better because you can run reactions. PI has the same problem as high sec stations. Once you start factoring in the PLEX cost for further industrial characters, margins are worse. The mundane nature of hauling/Invention/PI will drive you nuts if you go all out with it, imo.

One last thing that every manufacturer would tell you. Do -not- try to mine everything yourself. Not only does it lead to the fallacious assumption that mined minerals are free, but there is just no way to keep up with manufacturing. It is supplemental at best, and it's -the- weakest use of your active play time. It would be better to run missions and buy the minerals than to mine the minerals. It would be better to do exploration and buy the minerals. It would be better to do Incursions and buy the minerals. It would be better to do FW plexes and buy the minerals. It would be better to research more profitable manufacturing and buy the minerals. The list goes on.

Good luck!

A pos manufactures 33% faster than a station. For your 60s item, it would take a station 180s to produce three. In those same 180 seconds, a pos can produce four of that item (a 33% increase). A 33% increase in the rate of manufacture means a 25% decrease in the time to accomplish the same task.