Science & Industry

There seems to be a big revenue cut between making refined components versus specialized components.

For example, refined components factories produce 5 units per hour and each has a value around 10000, for total value of around 50,000 per hour. But specialized components produce 3 units per hour each with a value of around 100,000 for a total value of about 300,000, which is six times as much.

Why do players even bother making refined components? Every time I compute it, it seems like I can make more with specialized and no wonder: the factors produce more value. Shouldn't the refined factories produce more units per hour, or at least have lesser CPU/Power requirements so you could make more of them?

Your hypothetical calculation is ignoring input and time.

Refined factory produces 5 units per hour
Specialized factory requires 10 units per hour (of that one component).

Let's assume you are producing a two-component specialized commodity, so that means 2 refined commodities required at 10 units each, and let's assume all are 10k isk each and the specialized is 100k isk.

Refined Commodity A Factory > 5 units per hour (50k isk)
Refined Commodity B Factory > 5 units per hour (50k isk)
Specialized Commodity Factory > 3 units per 2 hours (300k isk)

So that is an input of 400k isk, for an output of 300k isk, for a net loss of 100k isk. And it took twice as long for the Specialized factory job to run because it needs two cycles of a Refined factory to operate. You can improve on time by adding a second Refined factory ofc, at the expense of CPU/Grid and increased material demand, which makes finding a balanced scheme more difficult and interesting.

However with PI prices in such fluctuation recently due to devblogs on Citadels, these numbers aren't representative of reality at all, just trying to illustrate that you are not considering all variables when calculating.

There is something notable that you do gain as you go up the material chain, and that is storage space. 3 units of Specialized is 1.14m³ and required either 20 or 30 Refined (varies by which Specialized you are making) at 30m³ or 45m³. That's a compression ratio of 26x-39x!