Science & Industry

yes, an Improved CC has 21.315/17.000 cpu/pg units.

P4 fact = 1.100/400
P3 fact = 500/700

total should be 12.300/10.600 so you've plenty cpu and pg for those.

check my maths here: http://wiki.eveuniversity.org/Planetary_Buildings


eh! That's an hard question to answer. PI sucks because you'll never know before surveying your planets how much goo they have in their soil even if you can estimate it, but also the survey can be very far from what you'll finally get and the goo can flow quite distant from where it was when you started drilling it. Then, the depletion factor will indeed drive you nuts finally.

To make a long story short I'd go producing each P2's on a single planet, thus being able to produce the right quantity for the P3 factory, then double all these to feed the chain for the P4's. You could make more complicated combo, having some planet producing an excess of a certain p1, exporting it to another planet producing an excess of another P1 and make more P2's on the second planet, but you'll burn out very quickly and try to siege all your planets in a storm of dreads very soon!

So basically do you need 8 P2's? Use 8 planets (or 16 to be precise) + 1 factory planet and you'll have your P4 chain working with the minimum effort. This can work with Wetware Mainframes, but could not be working for other P4's, in this case just build your chain according on all the planets who can give you a P2 on their own and then manage the remaining ones at last.

At least that's how I would do.

EDIT: mmm.... I don't think the links are correct. I would have just linked each single one to the launchpad, in this way it can work as a storage. Alternatively you can link the needed P3's factories to the launchpad to take stuff from there and then link all of em to a single P4 but the P4 fact must be linked again to the launchpad cause it must deliver the shiny baby in there. Linking all to LP is just easier since you have no problem with pg (you'll spend bits of it anyway). Consider also that for some reason you could have some cycle interrupted and this will really screw you bad cause you'd have to stop the chain for a certain amount of time and wait for the buffer to be ready and start it again....... too long to explain: link to LP and you'll never regret :)

edit#2: my bad, the extra storage shouldn't be needed. The volume of a P4 is still slightly less than the one of the P3's so you shouldn't have problems, unless you want to fill up also the extra storage with P3's and leave the production going for days and days, which could not be such a bad thing.

So after, my final bit of playing and research I believe I've found the final setup for what to use. This is more for future reference and other people trying to get into this as I was. The forums and past history helped me a lot, so maybe this will help someone in the future too.
I made this plan specifically to minimize traffic and movement and maximize what goes on the planets themselves. Less having to fly to each planet, and more just tending my extractors each day.

ALL MY COMMODITY RELATION ARE USING THIS WEBSITE
http://picommodityrelations.comyr.com/pi.html

The final base requirements:
All assuming you have Level 4 skills for PI
This is designed for wetware mainframes, but will work with several other P4 productions.

(1) Production Planet to import P2 and change it to P4 to be exported
http://i.imgur.com/udoh7.png
Looking at the picture, you will notice (3) groups. Each one is capable of producing a P4 product. For simplicity reasons, I will refer to each set of 7 as a group.
Each group consists of (1) hi-tech processor, and (6) advanced processors for feed. As wetwares require 3 types of P3, and each processor produces half of the requirement, each cycle of the P3 processors will feed for a single P4 cycle (as there are two of each P3 processor).
(In all actuality, the three groups is a bit of overkill, but I had the extra CPU/PG so i figured no harm in putting them on)

This system will be fed by extractor planets that double as P2 production.
I found that it's best to group the planets into 9's, so you can split it up into (9) (18) or (27) extractor/p2 planets.
http://i.imgur.com/o0iN3.png
Each planet you have to choose specifically that it produces BOTH of the required P1 to create P2.
For instance the P2 Construction Blocks requires P1 Base Metal and P1 Heavy metals. The lava planet is the only one capable of producing both. Therefore to do the fast-chain to P2 on a single planet a Lava Planet was needed.

The picture above shows a set up where both ECU's mine a different R0. Then each ECU feeds (2) basic processors. Then the (2) P1 products are each combined with their opposite from the other side to go into the Advanced processor. The advanced then pumps out the P2 product and moves it to the launch pad for storage/pickup.

=============================================

I apologize that it's kind of a long read, and I did my best to include pictures to show my points.
I know that the system will need to be modified per each person's individual needs, but at least this gives a good starting point for others that are trying to get the quick learn for some PI stuff.

Hope what I've learned here can help others in the future,
~Sparks

once you do it and you have plenty of planets and 0% tax POCO, adding a single planet as a P3-4 factory doesn't give so much stess and more hauling. The produced P2's are to be moved somewhere anyway.


honestly, do you really use this setup? I do PI in lowsec and found this just not possible to sustain the production. The problem though is not where you do your PI but your skills. Having them at 4 like all the "normal ones" will give you 21.315/17.000 to use. Now:

2 ECU = 2x (400/2.600)
6 BIF (Basic Indy....) = 6x (200/800)
3 AIF = 3x (500/700)
LP = 3.600/700

TOT = 3.860/12.800 (not counting links and routes)

Not a problem for the cpu, but you'll have only 4.200 pg for your extractors and they need 550 each, so you could only have 7 heads drilling your 2 different P0's. Is it enough? To feed 3 BIF you want 18k units per hr, or 432.000 per day. If you use 2 BIF you'd only need 12k/hr or 288k/day, but you could be using more extractors cause you'll have 2300 pg more (6500 total, meaning 11 heads to spread). It means you'd need 3 heads extracting 18k/hr of stuff using your setup. Afaik there's just no way, it's already hard to let 3 of em extracting 12k and I mean almost impossible.

Imho the 6BIF/3AIF setup is just not efficient and not profitable at all. If you have PI skills at 5 that changes everything.

no if you make your chain work..... as intended, meaning that all the P0's are reprocessed into P1 and the P1's into P2's. Which basically means that you have to extract the right amount of P0's to feed the number of P1 installed since the P2's are perfectly chained to the P2's by the 2:1 ratio of P1:P2 factories (2 BIF will sustain exactly 1 AIF). This way you'll have quite some time before filling up your 10k m3 Launchpad. Assuming perfection you'll produce 10 P2 units per hr or 240 per day, since their volume is 7.5 m3 it makes 1.800 m3 per day. You'll take 5 days and 12 hrs to fill up your LP with 2 AIF. If you have 3 AIF it makes 2.700 m3 per day, and 3 days and 17hrs to fill up your LP.

The problem is: if you produce less than the minimum to "keep the chain alive" you should have some waste meaning some cycles that eats the incoming resources without giving anything back at the end of the cycle. I can't be totally sure of it (and I don't wanna check) but It should work this way: let's say you have 15k/hr P0 extraction rate and 3 BIF. Both ECU and BIF work on a 30 min cycle, so ECU delivers 7.500 units per 30 mins (well that's not true but it's just an example), BIF-1 will eat his 3.000, BIF-2 will eat his 3.000, BIF-3 will eat his.... damn only 1.500...... the cycle goes on till the end but BIF-3 will not deliver anything and you have lost those 1.500. In practice it could be more complicated than that but I'll let you figure out why.
Having only 2 BIF will leave you an excess of P0, so your LP will be full earlier than said 5-ish days, but you could like to stop your extraction from time to time ( or just reduce it) in order to avoid the depletion factor which is a real pain in the a.

That being said I would check your production chain. It looks like you have some waste somewhere if you haul only once per week :) ..... unless you have storages. And this is also why I like to link everything to and from the LP, ans to start the chain this way: first the ECU..... make them run a couple of hrs..... then the BIF..... make them run a couple of hrs...... now you have some buffer in the LP and you can start the AIF. If for some reason your cycles are not perfectly syncronized you could have the mentioned waste. This must be done once in the life when you start your production then you should be fine forever if you don't break the chain somehow.

What I mean is that overkill doesn't work well with PI. You just have to make it flawless and possibly with the minimum effort.

Hauling every 2-3 days in null where you have SOV is not such a big deal.

p.s: hey look at the nice wall of text a filthy miner can produce while afk-mining lol

oh ok I was wrong on the volume thing, I don't have my planets handy now, but I was reading that


and didn't get it was talking about "batch" and not unit. So since each batch is made of 5 units, there it is the 1.5 m3 you were saying. Cool, no production loss for you and lots of time to fill up the LP :)

Personally I empty my planets every 2 max 3 days so I never had to really face the LP being filled, but that is just because I need to move some P2 to the P3 factory planet. Other setups could work better in terms of how often to haul but the final result in the amount of P3 produced should be the same. Of course less hauling is better, especially in lowsec damn ebil piwates!

Do NOT import P3 into a P4 factory planet unless you are dealing with a 0% tax rate. P3 has the worst tax rates of any PI mat. You will also be wasting resources on your mat planets trying to build P3 while extracting mats that your overall yield will be awful. The only time you should ever bother with P3 manufacturing is for fuel or selling of P3, never import it.

Example:
18 P3 to make 1 P4. Export of p3, import of p3 costs: 189,000
120 P2 to make 18 P4: Export P2, import P2: 54,900
1,920 P1 to make 120 P2: Export P1, import P1: 48,050

As you can see using a P1 factory planet will save you 140,950isk PER p4, which is over 10% or more for each P4 item. Or if you are making a control tower for example it's a savings of 25,371,000, which again is about 10%.

Also by only doing P1 (or at times P2 if it dosen't affect your yield) will increase your daily yield by a huge margin. From my experience of trying to do P3 single plant manufacturing I am making well over double the yield doing single planet P1. There is also no way you would keep a p3 to p4 factory planet running 24/7. You would need almost 8000 P3 per day.

For maximum yield, least amount of tax payout have your planets manufacture P1 goods. Export and import these into a factory planet. The factory plant should be able to handle all the conversion of P1 to P4 and yield 22 P4 per 24 hour cycle. 5 planets can fuel 1 factory planet so you would be best off with 25 material planets, 5 factory. This is my current setup using 60 planets (10 are factory) which yields roughly 250 P4 mats per day.

Remember to empty your space ports of P4 every 100 hours or so. That's when they fill up. Your maximum P4 factory planet run time is 100 hours unless you reroute the output to a Silo or another Port. Do not route both/all P4 factory outputs to the same port, that just makes the problem worse.

Drox