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And feed yet more profit into null where you didn't have to before...

If this is some attempt to make null sec more attractive to hisec players it won't work. This will also have a higher impact on WH players as fuel for running modules will become prohibitive.

and become a slave to the goons? id rather quit eve than be FORCED to join anything i dont feel like joining myself

There needs to be balance across all areas. Why as a WH player would I have any interest in joining any nullsec alliance? I'm not interested in that gameplay, but this change will damage my gameplay by feeding yours. That is a stupid idea, pushinv people towards only having one viable area to play.

Hisec players will not move to null, WH players have no interest either. All areas and playstyles need to be viably served by the game for it to remain healthy.

Adding strontium clathrate requirements to fuel blocks doens't force anyone to play a certain way. The only reason you feel that way is because you think that you need to produce fuel blocks from 100% self-sourced materials. This is an idiotic sentiment.

It's probably "cheaper" if they mined it themselves, but apparently not so since they feel annoyed about it

Structure skills and the component changes are listed to be introduced for March. Disregard our previous reply, we will also have the fuel block changes in March to see how consumption evolves before Citadel release so we can quickly iterate on it should we need to.

Not as far as I know...

The Citadel is supposed to be the 'Base' - hence having the majoring on defence - but therefore also Market, Clones, etc. However, it will also be able to fit some of the other modules that are, otherwise, intended mainly for other, later, structures.

If you have only a single structure in a system it will most likely be a Citadel. Therefore it is only reasonable that you can compress at it, for example; but also refine (but not as well as in a Drilling Platform, perhaps, just like a Minmatar Outpost would be better than the others for this); and, ditto, for even manufacture (Assembly Arrays née Amarr Outposts); and then Research/Labs, etc

Frankly, this is not a bad thing. These "decreasingly profitable areas of space" you mention are home to things like capital escalations, L5 missions, burner blitzing, highsec incursions, and FW, all of which are ludicrously more profitable than nullsec. (Okay, you can technically blitz burners in nullsec too, but not the kind of nullsec that you have to own to exploit properly.) Nullsec needs a shot in the arm, especially with the death of the basal line activity of carrier ratting on the horizon.

This is not at all how carrier ratting works. With no heavy drones, there is no carrier ratting. FAX will be able to field them (to the best of our knowledge) but with five max drones and no drone damage bonus, you'd be daft to do so.

Hi CCP Ytterbium, I'm hoping you'll be willing to go into a bit more detail on the fuel block changes. I've already posted a google sheet with my own analysis (which I'll repost: here) but the highlights are these:

First off, this is going to completely gut the ability for hisec to produce fuelblocks - with perfect skills/implant and a POS array, each hisec anomaly only produces about 1,900 Stront. Even with a maxed out Keepstar citadel, that only goes up to 2,170. That's enough for a grand total of nearly 11 runs of fuel blocks, per anomaly. Present day production caps at 436 runs per anomaly, so that's a drop of over 97% production.

Second, it doesn't exactly do good things to nullsec production either - the maximum fuel block runs per anomaly will drop from over 3000 to under 350 for truesec above -0.5 or under 800 for truesec below -0.5. That's a reduction of more than 88% for 0.0 to -0.5 or more than 78% for -0.5 and lower.

Third, it's going to gut the value of most types of ice, especially the only varieties available in hisec. The only way to increase ice production is to completely mine out anomalies, causing them to respawn after 4 hours. That means that all the production for isotopes, heavy water and liquid ozone is going to continue as it was before this change, just that 90% of it will be useless because there won't be enough Stront to turn it into fuel. Over-production will flood the market making prices for everything except Stront and Fuel Blocks themselves plummet. Hisec ice mining will drop from a max of 30-40 mil ISK/hr to maybe 3-4mil, and that's assuming that fuel blocks quadruple in value. I don't know what nullsec will cap out at, but they already find it hard to effectively utilize their ice because it pays less than alternatives like ore mining or ratting.

Fourth, the price of fuel blocks is going to rise dramatically - most fuel ingredients were produced in hisec, which will no longer be possible, and most of Null isn't interested in large-scale ice mining unless the price rises above ore mining or ratting. That will only happen if the value of ice products rises, which only happens if the price of fuel blocks rises. Which it will do, because until nullsec does go all-in on ice mining there's going to be a distinct lack of supply for fuel blocks. I'm honestly not even sure if 100% utilization of null ice would allow it to produce enough fuel to meet present day demand for moon mining/reaction/manufacturing POSes, let alone increased demand from Citadel construction/operation.

All of which brings me to this: The stated reasoning for this change is simply to preserve existing demand for Strontium in an era where it's no longer being consumed by reinforced POSes, not to turn it into Technetium 2.0 or completely re-shuffle the economics of ice production. Given that, are all of these follow-on effects of specifically going for 200 Stront/40 Fuel Blocks intended consequences?