Science & Industry

Lauren,
Silos are used for moon mining materials.

If you are looking into producing modules, ammo or ships you need an assembly array for that type, which will hold all materials used for production.

I think a profitable production (only) POS is nowadays not possible anymore due to fuel prices. It would be much, much cheaper to use manufacturing lines on NPC stations.

If your not making enough profit to cover even the larger fuel prices now to run a PoS, you really should think twice about setting one up.

My advice would be to have 2 characters minimum with 9+ manufacturing slots each running as close to 24/7 as possible. Also if thye can do research, get BPO's researched for future use, or for sale/copy.

Also look into invention. You don't always need to actually build with teh BPC's you make to pull a profit. Hell sometimes you can make more profit selling the BPC's than the finished product...and save yourself a manufacturing slot for more profit making.

I would advice looking up the ISK Per Hour program here on the S&I forums (it's in the sticky for helpful things too from memory). It will help you identify what's a good build...and whats a lemon. Just be sure to double check the sell prices in game before you make it, there is sometimes a few hours delay between data dumps it imports and some markets can fluctuate ALOT in that time span.


TL;DR version: Use more than 1 toon to build stuff and you will be fine, just make sure it's profitable stuff :P

EDIT:

Also if your wanting to store stuff, just use your Labs and Arrays, chances are you will not fill them up with required materials for what your making (unless your making BS's or other big things) and it saves you PG/CPU for more arrays and labs, thus more indirect storage! Win win! It's what I do, I use my labs as warehouses as well as my arrays. Though I do admit to having a corp hangar array to store extra fuel, but nothing else.

Jack shows just how easily POS manufacturing can return a profit over station manufacturing. He even does it on an inflated cost to run the POS. Let me just break it down a bit and show his workings.

4M per day is the equivalent of 120M per month. You can do a small, even at the current prices, for closer to 60M per month, but we'll stick with the 4M per day figure since it allows a lot of room for POS fuel increases.

In a station you make 60 units per day, for example. (That's 2.5 per hour)

At a POS those 60 units now take 18 hours to complete because manufacturing arrays have a 0.75 time multiplier (24*0.75=18)

A manufacturing array at a POS can produce in a day the equivalent of 32 hours in a station. (32*0.75=24)

That means a manufacturing array at a POS will produce 80 units in a day compared with the 60 units in a station. That's 1/3 more or approx 33%.

Assuming the market can handle an additional 20 units per day without any large decrease in prices due to oversupply, or you can alternate what you produce, then you will gain the equivalent increase in profit.

In order for the POS to be worthwhile that extra profit has to be better than the cost to maintain the POS. We have set that figure at 4M per day so a third of the normal in-station profit = 4M. This means that a full day of profit is 12M, in-station. Divide that by the number of lines you are using (10 is common. That's Mass Production 5 and Advanced Mass Production 4) and you get the figure of 1.2M profit per line per day in station as the point where you should start looking at switching operations to a POS.


You can plug your own figures in as required. Daily fuel cost is 2M? 600k per line per day. Only 5 manuf slots? 2.4M per line per day. Both? 1.2M per line per day.

Ooop. Yeah, just replugged mine, higher than I thought Domain appears to be around 5.5M from sell orders. Which would up the per line per day profit to around 1.75M. Still, that's only a tenth of what I'm used to.

I think the bottom line is this:
Manufacturing in a pos is more profitable than using station NPC lines iff (if and only if) you manufacture enough profitable items per time period to offset the pos fuel costs.

I've had a pos on and off many times now. Each time, I go into it eager and devoted to invent/copy/manufacture enough to make it worth it. Each time, I eventually get tired of dealing with it and take the pos down.

Ofc, you can just manufacture fuel blocks in your POS, and use some to fuel yourself :). Or I assume you can, haven't tried it yet....

You can manuf the new fuel blocks in either an ammo array or a component array.

So which one is is it now? 60M per month or 120M - 180M per month for a small Caldari POS?

I'll answer: It's around 120M for a small Caldari POS and the costs are rising with fuel blocks and the current PI export charges.

I also assumed the OP was rather new to the industrial side, so I don't think that T2 invention or blueprint research is already in his reach. If so, then yes ... set up a POS on your own and research/invent/manufacture your stuff there.

If not, I stand by my statement that a pure production POS is not viable anymore. Buying T2 bpcs is out of question and building T1 modules or ammo at a POS ... come on (I don't say it's impossible - I just say not viable!)
Ships generate a good profit margin, but aren't worth building on a small tower. (you can only anchor ONE medium or large ship array - with only five production slots)