Science & Industry

Hi all
im looking into building capitals of all kinds, bar titans.
As i get my kicks from knowing the things that i build will hopefully ruin someones day, its my current end goal.
To my way of thinking, buying minerals and importing them to the construction area is half arsing the job, so i want to mine my own minerals.
how long would it take, assuming medium mining and refining skills, to chew through enough rock to build a dread, carrier etc, on my own?

I dont want to buy them, im an industrialist, not a mission runner, i want to mine them and make it myself, i dont consider time an important factor, as its what i enjoy doing.

Most large scale industrialists don't mine. They buy minerals/ore. Mining the amount of ore that even a medium-scale industrial setup is capable of using is hard to without multiple alts.

With a perfect Orca booster and three perfect hulk pilots mining in 0.5 with a passive play style where you mine every evening after work until you go to bed while watching TV or whatever else you could probably mine enough for 3 dreads a month. A supercarrier would take literally forever. A Titan would take 5 forevers. The other option you had would be to use ISBoxer and run a 20-man mining fleet, but that will be going away on January 1.

Basically, people who produce a ton of caps don't mine their own stuff. Remember, unless you are in a null alliance with upgraded stations to work from you'll be building from a POS. That's 300-500 mil a month expense plus the risk of having stuff in space and either having your own corp or be in a corp that will let you put up a POS that you can trust the leaders of not to steal your stuff that's in it (directors and CEOs will have the ability to get into your stuff).

Since you need a certain amount of social setup and you'll have a certain amount of overhead the best way to get a good business going is to be able to meet a certain sales volume. If you buy stuff smartly and build well you can make 200-400 million ISK profit per cap with minerals/ore that you've purchased. So getting a situation where you can build and sell 2-5 extra caps per month will serve you better than playing Eve all day every day to be able to sell your 2-3 caps maximum that you've made from scratch.

I do know people that make caps from scratch. It is doable. However, it's usually just players who fly caps and aren't in an alliance that will SRP their caps and they lose caps 2-3 times a year so when they do lose one, they just go mine for a few weeks and make their replacement instead of buying it on the market.

So I mean what you want to do is definitely doable, but it has a lot to do with how you want to spend your time in the game, and how you want to meet your goals.

Cap builders who like making a nice passive living off of building caps do mine here and there, when they are in the mood, but generally the lion's share of their supply is purchased.

Watch for the markets to change next year as the bot fleets get banned and the ore supply dries up. Your idea may be a better option at that time. Does this help?

first off, I really hate this mentallity that a lot of eve players have. That to do anything in the game requires a fleet of alts and computers. I really effing hate that. This is an MMO, big part of whose enjoyment comes out from playing with others.

Yes, you can build caps from what you mine. But remember that caps are very much end-game ships both for the pilots and industrialists. They require funds that take a long time to accrue. If you are a very proactive leader of your corporation, have regular mining fleets with corp member you can easily build caps from scratch, assuming you have a decent amount of corpmembers. So, if you mine solo, it would take an unrealistically amount of time to build from scratch, but if you mine as a corporation with a handful of pilots, you can realistically build from scratch.

If you're looking at mining your own minerals to produce goods, I would highly recommend starting off small and working your way up.

You'll get to a point where you simply cannot mine fast enough to keep up with your production capacity, in which case you'll have to import minerals anyways.

If you really want to mine your own minerals, it is best to look at it as:

What can I make out of these minerals I mined for the most profit

Instead of:

How long do I have to mine to make this one capital ship?

Well, seeing as he doesn't want to buy the minerals, are you suggesting some kind of slave labor? What particular scam do you have in mind?

Perhaps but the OP didn't ask you or anyone else what the lot of you would do. When a statement ends in '?' and it gets anything but an answer, well opinions are like the lot of you.

Give it a try.....

You will want a Freighter, so pick which one you want to fly and obtain a BPC pack to build one.

Mine all the mins you want (use Anomalies for the more tricky Ores/Mins) and stockpile them in a station with a Factory; or, if you wished, go the whole way and put up a POS (you will need a Component Array and a Large Ship Assembly Array).

If you mine further away, then Compress and move the Ore - you could even refine it directly at the POS (or at the station itself) in a Reprocessing Array (easy to move stuff this way).

Build the Components, then build the Freighter (you will need a Ship Maint Array at a POS if you do it there).

If this becomes your thing, then Carriers & Dreads can be done in Low Sec - all the above can be done in High Sec.

Investigate and give it a try.

It's not a direct answer to the OP but I would personally say do what you enjoy doing in the game as regards industrial activities.

I would add a few caveats to that statement though:

a) Obviously you want to look to making a profit.
b) Try not to collapse markets and attempt to keep prices on an even keel.
c) Don't adopt a 'MIMAF' mindset (Minerals I Mine Are Free.) as this is bad for you as well as everyone else.

Google 'The Mittani' and look at his blogsite. There is currently an article on there comparing RL vs EVE economics which is quite a good read.