EVE New Citizens Q&A

New player here.
As a fresh omega player I was recently trying Planetary Interaction. I had a plan to make some P3 commodities and sell them. For this I set up colonies on 3 planets, where I'm making P2 commodities needed to produce P3. I wanted to produce P3 commodities on 4th planet, as with my current skills I don't have enough power. I was waiting till today to train 3th level of Interplanetary Consolidation (had more urgent skill training) to be able to colonize 4th planet. So I gathered P2 commodities from my 3 planets which have been produced there for over a week and took them to freshly colonized 4th planet. But when I wanted to transfer all my P2 commodities to planet through Customs Office, I get message "You don't have high enough standing with *corporation_name* to use the facilities."... I've heard that corporations can take over Customs Office and get tax from using it, but I've never heard that they can block using it. So is there any way to send my commodities to planet, or am I just screwed as I lost a lot of ISK (for a new player) to build installations on planet that I can't use? And if it's how it works in this game, how can I be sure that if I colonize other planet, corporation that owns it's Customs Office won't some day block access for me to this planet?

Plus collecting POCOs can be fun in and of itself, and often attracts extra PVP opportunities in the future.

Generally, you want to avoid P3 manufacture until you have five colonies. Until then, P2 production is more efficient.

This is because you need at least four different P0 sources for your final P3 product. Five planets gives you one for each P0 and one for the factory planet. At fewer planets you are asking some of your planets to harvest more than one resource, which requires multiple extractor control heads. These are VERY resource intensive, and not having to have multiples is what makes the standard five planet arrangement more efficient than simply making P2.

Remember - a factory planet means giving up an entire planet worth of resource harvesting in favour of refining, and that only works out when the overall effect is to allow your other planets to harvest more effectively. And as soon as you add a second extractor control head, you are better off ditching the factory planet and just working on P2 production.

Here is a comparison of P2 v P3 production, and you will see that the numbers are very close.