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I have several concerns with the use of public facilities that seem to be repeatedly glossed over:

1. The more people using a facility, the higher the system's Index is going to be, and the less value will be found in that facility. Look at Jita as an example of what happens when you get a high Index cost: the Index cost can knock out a quarter to a third of the profit on an item compared to a system with a much lower Index.

2. The more people using a facility, the more desirable it will be to kill, as there will be more materials in use. You can use mercenaries up to a point, but eventually, if the facility becomes attractive enough (something easy to see thanks to the visibility of the Index cost), they're going to be wardec'ed pretty much constantly, and having mercenaries available at every vulnerability time is going to burn away significant amounts of profit, even with many people adding to the pot. People say "defend them yourself" but they gloss over that most people don't want to be spending that much time defending, especially when there's no guarantee that any action will even happen. I'll be damned and quit before I spend my time in the game being repeatedly blueballed again, and if the typical highsec wardec groups smell any hint of resistance at all, that's all that's going to happen.

3. You're at the whims of the facility owner, and if they decide to pull out without any warning, it doesn't matter if you're at 1% or 99% completion of a job, you lose all the progress and materials with it. My lines are generally going for a week at a time, and each one will have around a hundred mil on it. Risking 4 bil across 4 characters to get a 3.6% material savings isn't feasible. Losing those materials would wipe out my net profits for close to three months, all for something that I have zero control over. At least with a war, there's a warm-up period to allow time to get mercenaries set up and, if you're lucky, you can hold off on starting any new lines that complete.

4. You're still shuffling goods around, and it can be quite often, but now instead of moving them between Arrays inside the same POS, you're moving them between facilities that may not be anywhere near each other (see point 1 for why they're unlikely to be in the same system). Not every facility is going to have every set-up that you need, and the ones that do are going to be extremely attractive to people who can't afford to run their own facility. At this point, see points 1 and 2 for how that becomes a problem.

A person can choose to only work in the facility by a known entity, but that goes back to the first point, where the local Index is going to be very high, followed up by point 2 as it becomes a bigger and bigger lot pinata of in-use materials as more people flock to it for the believed safety of it.

Public facilities aren't the be-all, end-all that people are making them out to be, and considering it's going to take 4-5 Mediums, 2-3 Larges, or one XL to emulate what is currently done at a Small POS (and roughly double that if you get into a Medium POS), this change is going to push small groups out of the running once arrays lose their bonuses. They'll be relegated to NPC stations if they want anything more than short-term usability.


We're a small low-class wormhole group. We do PvP and have somewhat nomadic tendencies. We're not a part of an alliance, and we're not willing to join an alliance, either, because we've all been a part of nullsec at one point or another and we don't feel like subjecting ourselves to the politics of some egoist again.

So no, shoving my industry into my main corp isn't a feasible option.

Why are you going to need an XL to match the capacity of a small POS?

Just for reference on how much indexes matter

A comparison of ME research on an Archon going from 9 to 10

0.1% index blank no bonus system 34m (34,512,709.71 ISK)

1.3% index system would cost 443m (443,499,237.02 ISK)

10.9% index (highest system in EVE) would cost 3.8B (3,851,935,708.95 ISK)

This is why I don't want to share the system, much less the facility, I am doing research in.



Remove indexes may help this work better.


And people in Saisio: Why are you pouring ISK out the window???

I'll take you word for that.

You see, when my mining alt was in high sec, I compressed billions of isk worth of ore in an Astrahus. And I payed exactly 0.00 Isk for that service.

The Point

To be fair, you may not have paid anything for it, but somebody was. I think the point he was trying to make was that a public Complex with a working industry set-up is going to be significantly more expensive for someone than a public Citadel with Refining / Compression available. It's a lot easier to absorb a 60 mil cost than it is to absorb an 800 mil cost each month.

In all honesty, I have my doubts as to how common public Complexes are going to be, anyway. The ones that go public are unlikely to be ran by industrialists, because we really don't want a lot of people in our system due to how much the Index cost affects our work. Babbet Bunny provided an example a few posts back (it's a bit of an extreme example, but on a lower-end example, taking a Vexor BPO from 9 to 10 ME will cost an extra 4 mil in a 1.5% Index system to about 9 mil in a 5.0% system. In a 10.0% Index system, it costs 25 mil.

Building is along the same scale. Building in a 1.5% system has a 95k install price. It's 260k in a 5.0% system, and 886k in a 10.0% system. Those may sound like trivial numbers at a glance, but with the price of a Vexor in Jita being 12.3 mil, the jump from a 95k install price to 886k represents a significant jump. The cost is 0.77% of the hull in the 1.5% system, 2.11% in the 5.0% system, and a whopping 7.20% of the hull in the 10.0 system. The Index is a killer of profit margins.

Another thought is that, for the industrial groups large enough to afford and run a Complex of their own, they're probably capable of hiring mercenaries to go after any public Complex in the system with them. The cost of the mercenaries is going to be cheaper over the long-run for them than dealing with the higher Index.

If the industrial corp owning the Complex are part of a larger alliance, they probably won't even need to pay for mercenaries; the alliance would likely be willing to harass the public Complex until it leaves in order to allow their industrial group to produce at better margins, allowing them to provide to the alliance at lower rates.

the point is compression needs to be taxable -.-

Hard to say at this point. But there will certainly be some. The question is how do we ensure they are attractive enough. They have to be worth using for the guys running a small tower right now over stations. Ideally it would warrant the risks, and cost them as much or less than the fuel of their own tower did in the past.

The problem of usage taxes is that they are tied to the installation costs. Therefore the tax rate will only make the issue of index spikes more significant.

i think the medium industry complex should get slightly better defenses to be viable in null or wormholes

maybe give it 2 fighter launch slots. not OP but at least capable of defending itself from a greifer. maybe also add a restriction that fighters can only be launched when the vunerability mode is active

Can you elaborate on this?
An Azbel gets a base 10% reduction to build and research times. A high sec T2 rig gives a further 28.8% build time reduction. The hull itself increases the rig by 25% to a 36% reduction.

That is a net build time of 57.6% of base, or a 42.4% reduction.

I don't have a high sec station on hand to compare, but null outposts only get a 30% bonus. That's a hell of a lot more than 1% faster. The job also only costs 96.4% of the materials in said Azbel.

Most of the people I know who are involved in small wormhole corporations have an army of alts in known space to take care of "normal" industry and fuel acquisition. The activities in wormhole space are the this that have to happen in wormhole space: eg. reactions, reverse engineering. Then all the goop is shipped out while they shift new fuel in.

In your case, I would wait and see what comes down the pipeline for those activities. What we have now covers only a portion of the industry space.