Science & Industry

You need to be more specific. Are you talking about installing assembly arrays to make T1 items faster? If so, it is very unlikely your time savings will repay the POS fuel costs. Highsec POSes are usually research oriented, stuffed full of labs of one sort or another. You want one if you are doing blueprint copying and/or ME research. Other activities associated with highsec industry are normally more economically done at public stations.

If you do want a research POS, get a small, medium, or large caldari tower, figure out how many labs you can cram in the cpu limit, and with any leftover cpu set up jammer batteries to discourage wardeccing attackers. Non-caldari towers are pointless for a research POS because they have less cpu than caldari.

You're having trouble finding NPC manufacturing slots in highsec???

Move a couple jumps from whichever major trade hub you're at and have another look, there's hundreds of stations with manufacturing services and very seldom (at least in Gallente space) are all lines in a system full. Even when there are, move a jump away and there are lots open.

You're unlikely to break even on the fuel costs with just manufacturing T1 items in a POS

POS -- s/m/l as your needs dictate. Though expect to want to expand at some point, so perhaps anchoring 2 towers (any configuration, such as sm / med, med / lg, sm / lg, etc) will be beneficial, especially if you want to open your corp to more people at some point. POS take 40 (lg) 20 (med) or 10(sm) blocks of fuel per hour.

fitting is rather straightforward ... since I've set up POS since before they reduced the timers got reduced, I tend to set things up as "never taking it down until I'm closing the corp, and wardecs be damned" ... so I'll have this at a minimum (note, I solely use lg towers, you may need to adjust for your fitting capacity):

• 5 or 9 hardeners in "2/2/1" or "3/3/2/1" configuration, matched to the tower's "0/0/25" and "0/0/25/50" resists.
• 6 batteries of 7 modules (guns, ewar, points, webs, etc), set in a 3-d '+' pattern at the top, bottom, and cardinal points of the equator. Because of differences in targeting, ewar modules are spread out amongst the batteries to provide best overall coverage.
• offlined (though loaded) spares of all the guns and other mods.

After that, it's just setting up the assembly arrays and labs that I'm going to need. In general, the POS are about the same (Caldari are best for labs though, forget which is best for assembly arrays).

If you're making 100,000k isk per hour, per slot, you can make a profit using a POS with a single equipment assembly array.

Hourly cost for a small POS is: 180k (Substantially over stating the cost, acquiring expensive fuel blocks)

Equipment Assembly array: 6 manufacturing slots.

Cost per slot is: 30k isk, per hour.

the 25% reduction in manufacturing time equates to 33% faster production.

So where you'd make 100k, you're now making 133k. a 3k profit, per hour, per slot.

It's peanuts, but it's there. If you're making a larger profit, then the extra cost is smaller in comparison, increasing your margin.

If you're making less than 100k isk/hr, it's not worth it that way.

A caldari small tower can support 7 equipment assembly arrays. Which, if you have enough people using it constantly (unlikely) (4 people) reduces the slot cost to 4k an hour. Which means you need to be making around 15k isk/hour for it to be viable.


Of course, there are some risks involved (wardecs, mostly), and more shuffling of materials around. And this one is limited to modules. Ammo is a different array with 1 less slot. so it costs a bit more per line.

Your market also needs to absorb the higher volume.


As for defence:

If you never run jobs taking more than 24 hours (or are willing to cancel them) And are willing to tear down the tower at the first sign of a wardec, then you can skimp on defences. You /may/ lose the tower when you unanchor it (being bumped and it's then stolen). That's just life in EVE.


Additionally:
You need to be in a PC corporation, with a standing for the faction whose space you're trying to anchor the tower in equal to ten times the sec rating of the space. The corporation needs the standing, not you. so no skills apply.

I would highly encourage you to investigate the manufacturing you want to get into. How easy is it to get the materials you'll need in the quantities you'll require? What is the daily sales volume for those goods? How many are on the market? Factoring in fuel costs, can you make a profit selling them? Without assessing profitability, you're fumbling around in the dark.

But all that only tells you if it's financially feasible. You also need to look at how much work it takes to make that profit. T2 manufacturing can be incredibly profitable, but holy goddamn does it take some serious logistics. You need to collect datacores, run invention jobs, shuffle BPCs, buy components, build pieces, build the product, etc. It's a LOT of work for that ISK, but the challenge can be rewarding. Weekly resource runs cut down on the tedium of freighter trips, for example.

Lastly, you should ask yourself what your ultimate goal is. If all you want is ISK, there are other ways to make a LOT more. Most of them involve shooting things and other adrenaline-charged activities. At a certain scale, mining even overtakes most manufacturing for ISK/hr. If, like me, you have Builder's Disorder and just love to craft things, well, there's a support group for that. We meet at the bar.