Science & Industry

If you are just seeking the cost of running such a POS for month;

Amarr Fuel block costs approx 12600 ISK to make.

Medium tower eats 20 of these per hour. 14400 blocks for 30 days. About 182 million ISK.

Look at the fuel block blueprint for the parts required in-game. One run with the blueprint puts out 40 blocks.

All non-faction POS hold 700 hours of fuel. If you are in hisec, you'll have 699 hours as you need room for charters.

0.5 to 0.7 security
Large: 699 * 40 = 27,960 blocks
Medium: 699 * 20 = 13,980 blocks
Small: 699 * 10 = 6,990 blocks

-1.0 to 0.4 security
Large: 700 * 40 = 28,000 blocks
Medium: 700 * 20 = 14,000 blocks
Small: 700 * 10 = 7,000 blocks

You should know by now that it takes at least 10 minutes for my posts to ripen

Amarr blocks are very cheap this week (the isotopes are below 500 ISK/u again). But I wouldn't count on it staying that cheap. In general, a large (no-faction, non-sov bonus) tower is going to run you 400M/mo in fuel. Give or take 20M, which has been how things are over the past 6 months. So a medium tower is indeed around 180M now, but could easily be 210-220M in a month or two.

(There's a lot of people who took "free" blocks as the christmas gift. Also there's a lot of stockpiled PI which was bought up in anticipation of Crucible requiring POCOs on day 1, which is temporarily pushing down PI prices. And when PI gets too cheap, people stop doing it, which drives costs back up.)

If you can't handle your POS fuel costs jumping up and down +/- 20% per month, you may not be ready to run a tower. Plan your profit margins around 20% higher fuel costs and make sure you can still turn a profit before making things. It pays to be pessimistic about your fuel costs (and to have a 2-3 month stockpile so you can buy when cheap and ride out price spikes).

As of this morning's costs:

Amarr: 93 / 183 / 364 - 12650 ISK/u
Caldari: 96 / 191 / 380 - 13186 ISK/u
Gallente: 140 / 278 / 554 - 19249 ISK/u
Minmatar: 99 / 196 / 389 - 13518 ISK/u

Amarr isotopes are around 495, Caldari at 550, Minmatar at 585 and Gallente at 1150 still. HW dropped back below 100 ISK/u finally, but LiqOz is still 430-500 ISK/u.

I'm still bullish and think most PI products will pickup in cost again going into spring/summer as the market sorts itself out from its hoarding in November. Which means I expect about 400M ISK/mo to be the magic number. Higher then that and I think people start doing more of it themselves, lower then that and I think a lot of people stop trying to fuel towers on their own.

"Towers will use 1 block/hour for small, 2 blocks/hour for medium and 4 blocks/hour for large."

http://www.eveonline.com/devblog.asp?a=blog&nbid=3029

Ah, thanks for the update. Nice work. :)

Cheers
Matt

Refining ice for isotopes also gives heavy water and LO.

If you are already buying isotopes, buy water and LO as well - they are not expensive. If you are already ice mining, they come on the side.

Most POS runners just straight up buy ice products and instead spend their game time on something more productive that pays for the costs.

If your POS operation isn't doing anything productive that would pay for the fuels, reconsider the whole plan of running the POS at all. You can use SISI for experimentation and testing with POS mechanics if you are just curious how they work.

Or just churn out 2400 a week. What you lose in profits is more than made up for with a simplified production chain.
Yes, you and everyone else will make less profit, but that is more than made up for in YOUR TIME. RL time that is. :D

Still a bit confused here about input quantities. For production and consumption the blocks are increased by a factor of 10. So a large tower will consume 40 blocks per hour. Now, the question: is it still the original input quantities of fuel, for example 400 (racial isotopes) per 40 blocks as it was with the original 4 blocks?