Wormholes

Give me a shout ingame and ill give you a few proper tips in regards to both mercs and other things.

1 billion a month is crazy. You can buy a replacement citadel for 1 billion.

If you have some alts, train one of them into an orca. If someone comes to bother you, pack everything you own into the orca and then 1 minute before downtime undock. Everyone will DC, your orca with ~500k EHP will take some hits (if they camping you which, they likely aren't), but will warp off.

Wait a day or half a day, use an alpha account to scout out the hole, and log the Orca pilot back on. All your **** is safe except for the citadel and any rolling BS that may be too large to carry.

Some variations on this would be a Bowhead, Freighter, or Jump freighter. It's all the same idea though

Foget paying the Mercs, not worth it IMO. I think Citadel is the way to go and would advise you to just first get set up with a small pos then deploy your Astra when you have hole control (roll all holes before starting), then just keep watch and prey you arent found. Also if possible log in a lot during the deployment window and roll any hopes that pop up. You want *no* traffic in/out at all if possible (impossible but set that as a goal). Once its deployed, unless someone freakin hates you in all likelihood you will be fine.

I did the solo C3 thing just to see it i could do it and I was very rewarding but i found you really needed a lot of ships to 'Do it right'. Doing it right to me meant always having the right ship(s) for several activities;

1.) Three separate accounts all able to be logged in at same time for PVE ops
-2 Scouts in cloaky T3s watching your static and any other holes
-C3 fit passive Rattlesnake to run the sites
2.) Three Hole Rolling ships of your choice to get rid of unwanted holes
3.) PvP ships for proper hunting T3s, Stratios, maybe a battleship
4.) Bombers for explo frigate hunting
5.) Smartbombing Proteus for explo frigate hunting because its just...awesome
6.) Hauler for running out loot (I used DST)
7.) 3 Ventures for C5/6 gas huffing
8.) Epithal(s) for doing your PI
9.) Covert Ops/Scanny ships for scouting prey and also running relic sites (why the fk i didnt put this first on the list is beyond me...)

Getting all that **** in took a while but led to a very comfy experience. I could do pretty much any activty and I felt safe 'Bearing' with two combat ready cloaky scouts. Rolling wormholes is a pain in the ass but necessary. The way I did it was to make sure there were no entrances un-scouted, so i only rolled when I had to and sat my scouts on the static and if there was one other hole.

You haven't mentioned your PI plan yet but are you planning on knocking over pocos or do you already own them? If youre truely solo i think you will find poco bashing to be a ****** experience. It takes two days minimum and invloves a lot of risk. I did it but hated it due to having to meet the Reinf. Timers and always having the timer come out at a ****** time for me.

C3 living is excellent ISK-wise if you have all the tools. I set a "100million ISK nightly benchmark" for whether an Eve activity is efficient or not. C3 living blew this little yardstick away almost all the time.