Science & Industry

I earn 750m-1.5b a month from T1. I like it since I can make a tonne of it with low-skill alts, and not have to babysit it like T2.

But back to the subject at hand, my personal experience of living in w-space is that industry is a hugely bad idea there. It marks you as a carebear ripe for ransoming, and means your POS defenses are weaker.

I nearly lost everything, and moved my industry to a second tower in hisec.

WH moons are void of any materials, right?

What size tower are you proposing to set up? What class WH are you in?

In general, production in a wh is pretty much more effort than it is worth. On paper, you might make okay isk, but there is a ton of hauling in and out, and you are always at risk of being attacked. HS is just better for most production.

Lab(s)s are an okay idea, as long as you have a plan for getting out any expensive goods if you are sieged. Under worst-case scenarios, BPOs are small enough that you can just load em into a covert ops and log off while your tower is destroyed. The small advantage to labs in w-space is that you do not need standing with the local faction to anchor them, but you always run the risk of transporting BPOS into/out of the w-space system. Make sure you are very familiar and comfortable with all the details of running camps in cov ops.

Finally, the real question - do you really need your own tower? I *think* tower fuel is running 100/200/400 mil per month right now. If you share with another person, you cut the burden in half. The real money in w-space is PI and sites. The risk is that some other pilot steals your crap. Almost all the value in sites are from the 'bounties' and the nanoribbons, which can easily be secured in secure containers. For PI, you can kind of use your customs offices for storage, although we have a 'materials sharing' system that works well - we dump all P1 that comes from a planet into one hangar tab and allow anyone to take it. You take what you need to make your P2, P3, etc., and leave any excess. It does take a bit of tweaking, but everyone ends up better off and less hauling. Granted, on paper, P1 may be the most profitable, it is a PITA to haul out and sell so often. With POCOs, you can kind of keep track of who is importing/exporting, so you can identify anyone that is just leaching PI.

TL;DR:
One large tower in a wormhole is generally enough for a pretty good size corp. Additional POS get to be cost ineffective. Deal with security however best you can w/o resorting to multiple towers.

C1s might get away with a medium POS, but C2s pretty much require a Large, so you are looking at the right size (imho).

The next best 'natural' use of a POS in w-space is gas-polymer reactions; however, one Large POS can generally keep an entire C2 'clean' of gas sites, so this may be a moot point. Do you have any other statics? If you have a c1 or c2 static to farm, you 'might' be able to rationalize a polymer reactor train. When you look at the math, there is very little profit from gas reacting (some of the gases are more valuable then their products, even). IF you are running the tower anyway, you can write off the fuel cost and you might improve the profit calcs some. Finally, the more profitable raw gases are generally in C4s and above.

After that, you can look at the (previously mentioned) T2 material reactions. I have not checked in a while, but there used to be certain segments of this industry that you could profit from (again, esp. if you are assume fuel costs are already 'paid'). It is a bit of work and you have to learn a few ins and outs, as well as having the capital to sink into the process. On the flip side, if there are a plethora of towers in the wormhole, you could buddy up with some others to do pairs of reactions in parallel or higher level reactions in series.

Even if you are mining in the wh, you pretty much have to haul out to refine (refiners suck,esp w/ a HS static available anyway), so general manufacturing is (again) a bit of a nuisance; however, if you are living in the wh anyway, you can also manufacture a bit just of the hell of it. Hauling minerals back in after refining in HS can sometimes be easier than hauling from some random hi-sec to market. The usual problem is you have no low-level minerals, only the zyd, nocxium, and mega, so you have to actually buy or otherwise acquire the low ends to complete your manufacturing. Mining low ends in a wh with a hi sec static is rarely worth the risk, but with a big enough fleet, it might be okay.

Invention/BPC runs are your next best bet, I would think. The materials will be there anyway, and if you are going to have a POS, might as well use it. I would only do expensive ME BPO work in the wh if you had no access to HS slots, and even then, be careful during transport.

Btw, if nothing else, train to fly and then build a Rorq, just for the hell of it.

No one has mentioned reactions yet, and this is IMO a good low skill/low time option. Download eve IPH in my sig and play around with the reactions tab. With a C1 you can stockpile mats from Jita and ferry them in and out. I did this with a badger ii in a c1 but you could do this in an orca in a c2.

Yes. With hybrid stuff you can mine it for sale or react it for the profit seen there. I'm using the minerals I mine are not free rule. However, with moon mats I allow to ignore that since you can moon mine the mats and then use them again in a higher reaction.

So for your purposes, you can look at advanced moon mats and uncheck the ignore box to see how much profit you can make per hour to react. Approximate your fuel cost per hour and find stuff that makes a total profit and react away. I remember nano transistors being a good one.