Manufacturing: Full stop (is now over)

One of my secrets is that I'm actually pretty bad at my building things. My process is good at keeping itself running, but  it relies on me to keep track of what's actually in it. This means that if I e.g. install a manufacturing run and forget to mark it as in progress, I can easily end up with things -- minerals, components, ships -- in the process that shouldn't be there. And it's really hard to identify these without bringing manufacturing to a complete-ish halt and waiting for everything to finish.

It has been over a year since the last time I did this, and capital prices have been fairly stagnant lately, so a few weeks back I put a hold on new runs. I've just now gotten to a point where I'm pretty sure I've identified what extras I have in the process, which are as follows:

0.9 billion in excess minerals (not bad)
1.47 billion in excess components
2.38 billion in excess ships (2 nidhoggur)
____
4.75 billion total

tl;dr I can lose track of multiple capital ships and not even notice.

Anyway, with that over I guess it's time to get things moving again.

April monthly financial report

"Frankly, I'm shocked I broke even" edition.

I'm RL busy, and barely logged in this month. Unsold ships and blueprints are building up in my hangars because I haven't been putting them on the market.

I still managed to turn a profit, though, even after 4.3 billion in off-spreadsheet expenses from plex and from pimping my proteus.

I'm putting a temporary pause on manufacturing. It's been running for more than a year without a real audit, and I'm pretty sure there are some things in there that I've lost track of.

Elite solo pvp

I keep a proteus (and a falcon) docked in my building system for those times when people feel like being nuisances. Usually I'm either substantially outgunned or they run away as soon as I undock, but this time one of them and his friend engaged.

Of course, they then used a bait drake to get me to engage, undocked three battleships, and neuted me all to fuck, but ~fully passive tank~ and I was still above 50% armor when the docking timer wound down.

March monthly financial report

This month was a semi-okay month.

Actual profits were around 8 billion, but a bunch of things happened which resulted in that number being different from the change in net worth.

Also, I'm still using the old 'buy' prices for capital blueprints. This is because I bought them at that price. This will continue for April, with the approximately 60-day turaround time my tower gives, and be updated to the new prices for May.

EDIT: "Research items sold" should read "8".

I wasn't even carrying anything...

...and I came back from afk with 69% shields and kill rights on 19 people.

My fit has some faction and A-type mods on it, but they're only worth about 700m.

EDIT 2013-3-31: Context -- apparently this was a Brave Newbies for-luls op, which is p. chill~

Trade profit tool (very beta)

Since I needed a tool to tell me if trade is actually making money, I started working on one. What I've made so far is something that takes these transactions:

And returns this output:

Which are correct*.

If I delete the database and re-run it, it initializes correctly.

If I then run it with only the first two transactions, it returns correct values (0 on market, -0.02 profits).

If I then run it with the next two transactions, it returns correct values as you see above.

These don't quite add up to it definitely working correctly, but they are encouraging signs. I'll plan to give it a real test run soon(tm).


*It took longer than I would have liked to be sure about this.

Sigh, trade

So it occurs to me that before I can actually make a list of items to stock systems with, I first need to decide what sort of systems to stock. There seem to be several options:

Highsec: No. Just no.

Lowsec FW area: Putting a bunch of people in a clearly defined volume of space and having them shoot at each other should make for a wonderful trade opportunity. The downside is, I'm pretty sure everybody else knows this too. I would tend to anticipate a lot of competition, and getting in on this would probably involve first learning about FW.

Non-FW lowsec and NPC nullsec: Access to sov NPC stations would be optimal, but I don't have that. These areas should give me larger margins, but one expects the volume to be much, much lower. Bonus points, though, for less frequent restocking.

Nullsec entry systems: One expects stocking these could result in higher volumes and higher margins than many other highsec/lowsec systems.

Incursions: I don't at all feel like chasing these around.


In theory I can stock between 6 and 11 systems, depending on how thorough I want to be, so I'm not restricted to only one of these options. Lots of research to do, I guess.