Science & Industry

A properly organized corp can do almost anything - from frigates to Outposts, even capitals (component assembly only in High, though the person that brought me to Eve also did final assembly in Low). This will depend solely on the strength and skills of its members.

Costs, I would have no clue (since I mostly do charity work for whatever corp/alliance I participate in - yes, such people do exist ). My best advice is to scan the Sell/Buy forums, in particular looking for a [service] tag in subject. Expect a markup from Jita costs in most cases, but some may justify that value in various ways (like shipping to your station).

Also, be aware that sites like EveWho show corp memberships, and is very easy to do research now (with the right mindset). This will help you if you want to background check a contracting corp, but it may also harm you if you're the contracting corp (and something happens like a corp theft or 'killmail issues').

Good luck, whatever you plan to do.

The vast majority of independent industrial corps are operating on their own terms and can very much be thought of as the backbone of the markets themselves, buying up raw materials and turning them into more useful things for public consumption, making a profit in the process.

As you move from high sec to null sec, you'll probably be more likely to run into scenarios where making some sort of special agreement or contract is useful for big ticket items or providing a local convenient source of finished goods, but you are also more likely to just have a corporation within your alliance that specializes in something like that.

Industry is often about specialization for mass production of a limited number of different items so you will often have different industrial corps form agreements with each other to provide components in more complex forms of production. This can be about keeping prices lower, but is also about keeping a steady dependable convenient supply of needed materials coming in. One example is a corp that specializes in blueprint copies to supply another corp that invents off of them and manufactures the finished product. Another scenario might be a mining corp or trader that has agreed to deliver bulk minerals to another corp at a set price and location. Another might be a capital component blueprint copying corp that provides complete sets of blueprint copies needed to produce capital ships, purchased in high sec and brought to low/null for construction, avoiding the capital investment needed for a complete set of BPOs.

You can find a lot of the service oriented industrial corps advertising in the forums.

The sort of service contracts you're thinking of are also quite common in different areas of the eve economy, outside of industry. Here are a few off the top of my head:

• Mercenary Corporations
• Third Party Services
• Tower Anchoring / Corp Creation Services
• Recruitment and Training Services
• WH Real Estate Brokers
• Freighter Services (RedFrog)

Gonna toss this in:

Bulk Trade Mailing List
http://wiki.eveonline.com/en/wiki/Bulk_Trade_%28Mailing_list%29

I've known corps to just specialize in bulk. There are even services that offer bulk manufacturing for the purpose of mineral compression (some items have a favorable volume to mineral content volume ratio, so they can be hauled and reprocessed at the destination) used by supercapital manufacturers.

Many industry corps are a collection of people doing their own thing though.

y u no longer make combat boosters ? :P