#YOLOSWAG: The billion-isk bomber

EDIT: This post is also out of date. There's a current one, but I can't be arsed to find the link to it at this time.

Please note that this is purely a proof-of-concept post, and I do not in any way endorse or guarantee the ships, fits, or methods used herein. It is definitely not meant for people who don't already know what they are doing.

That said, I have found a way to make dps bombers work in ninja exploration post-retribution. Make of it what you will.

• Note: This post is basically an update to this guide.

Introduction:

You know what they say: If at first you don't succeed, pile on deadspace shit until it works. Following that piece of advice is what led me to warp a stealth bomber with fittings worth, yes, nearly a billion isk, into a deadspace complex.

The plan was to do the same thing as the first time I tried, but with a stronger tank (more and better hardeners). And it worked; Running the 7/10 and 8/10, I never dropped below about two-thirds shields. The 6/10 should be no issue, and the only tricky bit in the ladar hacking site is a tackling frigate and two jamming cruisers. If I were to do that one, I would probably take those out first thing.

Happily, when everything switches to the bomber that includes jamming ships, so the tengu doesn't get jammed while the bomber needs RR. Just make sure everything with ewar on it is dead before they start switching back, because they do split fire.

Also of note, ships which do not aggro on warpin won't automatically all target the bomber when it comes in. This makes the 8/10 (and the 6/10) incredibly easy.

Sauce: The last room of the 7/10 (open in new tab)

Fits:

• Note: The tengu's RR repairs the bomber's entire shield buffer every 5 seconds.
• Note: Using an afterburner instead of a MWD means that you will have a hard time getting away from a sabre if it lands on a gate at the same time as you. Good luck with that.
• Note: You could replace the extender rig with something else; it's there because the bomber's shield buffer was smaller than the tengu's RR and I didn't know what to expect. You could totally do a damage mod and switch the ee-601 for an ee-603. You actually get more DPS out of it that way than my pre-retribution fit (albeit at slightly higher cost).
• Note: The shield regen here is reading 50% low because pyfa doesn't apply skills to projected effects. 600 is still pretty low, but the bomber has one-quarter the sig radius of a tengu so things works out fine.

• Note: The expensive mods on the tengu are mostly for lols. You can get away with probably a 900 dps tank just fine, it just means you sometimes have to use the afterburner to reduce incoming dps.
• Note: I got away with no inertia stabilizers because of my nomad set. You probably want at least one.
• Note: It might might very well be possible to remove the ECCM mod and replace it with a damge control or istab or something, if you're comfortable with the mechanics.

So, basically:

1. Use those fits.
2. Warp the tengu in and kill frigates.
3. Warp the bomber in. It orbits the tengu with AB on, tengu puts RR on it, they kill shit.
4. Die a horrible death.

Epilogue:

I did what I set out to do, and now it's time for me to GTFO from exploration for good. The ships I used here have already been torn apart and put on the market.

Yes, ninja exploration using dps bombers is dead

I thought I was being all clever, changing my ninja exploration setup so the bomber had some resists and putting RR on the tengu. Surely, I thought, the tengu could clear out frigate hulls, then the bomber could come in and, with the help of a little RR, easily tank the few ships which would switch to it every so often. Because as we all know, retribution AI rats definitely prefer to hit ships of similar size.

Nope. Every ship immediately switched to the bomber, and stayed on it for several minutes. It held up reasonably well against a mix of 16-ish battlecruisers and battleships, but it would never work in the last room of the 7 or 8/10.

Thanks CCP.

November monthly financial report

Delta net worth y u so low?

A number of reasons:

1. Gave away a rorqual (2.5 billion).
2. Pimped my tengu (3.6 billion).
3. Plex x 2 (1.1 billion).

Industry and science update: Pretty much as expected

Project 1: Capital manufacturing. This is fully funded and running at capacity. There may be some minor tweaks in the long term, but for now I'm leaving it alone. I am looking to add mineral compression to this process, and that should be up and running in about a week.

Project 2: Research capital component blueprints to sell. This is fully funded, and I currently have about 45 components in research.

Project 3: Research capital hull blueprints to optimal ME and PE2 to replace my current set. As of today this is fully funded, but most of the blueprints are sitting in a hangar waiting for my mineral compression blueprints to finish and free up some research slots.

With everything pretty much done, except for getting mineral compression running, there's a good chance that my posting volume is going to fall off a bit. On the other hand, there's also a chance that sometime in the next six months I'll start having more time for eve. Guess we'll see how it goes.


Nehow, with all my projects fully funded I am now generating actual surplus isk for the first time in something like a year and a half. I have a particular net worth goal in mind, which I should hit in a month or two, but I decided to mark this occasion with an upgrade to my blockade running tengu.

Changes:

Added nomad set.
Added SM-706.
Switched one inertia stabilizer for a warp core stabilizer.
Switched gistum B-type EM wards for pithum A-types.

Effects:

Align time decreased from 3.0 seconds to 2.6 seconds.
Warp strength increased from 2 to 3.
EHP increased from 164 to 180.

The nomads also decrease freighter and JF align time by about 25%, which will be nice.

Guys, guys, the eve blogging community is dying! Aaand...

Ship drawing winner

So hey, funny story.

Anyway, I have a bunch of those sitting around so I'll just contract one of them instead of actually waiting for one from run 100 to finish.

I didn't choose the mission runner life, the mission runner life chose me

No, seriously. This **** is ****ing tedious as **** and you couldn't pay me to do it if it wasn't going to make my life easier in the future.

Another 3-ish weeks and mineral compression should be up and running.

Giving away a ship

In celebration-or-whatever of my 100th run, I'm giving away a ship. Maybe I'll make it a tradition and do it again at run 200, though I expect that will be more than a year from now.

To take part, pick a ship from the selection below and post a comment with the ship you want and a character it can be contracted to. At some point in the next five days submissions will be closed and a winner will be picked at random. Some of the ships may take up to two weeks after the winner is chosen to finish building.

Ships available:

Rorqual
Chimera
Thanatos
Nidhoggur
Archon
Moros
Revelation

EDIT: New entries are closed and a winner has been chosen.

Break-even day

When I started building capital ships, my goal was to make enough each month to buy plex for my accounts.

This turns out to have been somewhat of a low bar to clear, but I still buy plex right after finishing my monthly financial report so that I can can see my change-in-net-worth figure turn negative, then positive again.

Thusly:

October monthly financial report

My first 10-ship runs are starting to finish, so I guess that's news.

Readers might note that I only sold one research blueprint this month. The large numbers of blueprints I sold over the last two months were ones I was going to use in a second manufacturing process, and they all came up for sale around the same time. I then had to put minerals into my expanded process, which took up all my isk for a few months, before I could start buying blueprints to research again, so there is now a gap in blueprints coming up for sale. I expect to start selling more research blueprints around December.

Also note the new "compression items" net worth category. Just railgun blueprints in there right now, but the iso/py/mega I'm going to need to keep stocks of will run a billionish.



Also, it's been a while since I did one of these:

Mineral compression: Beta plan

Think I've got this figured out. Process should run as follows:

1. Buy minerals.
2. Haul minerals to compression station.
3. Work out how many units of 425mm railgun 1 you could build with the tritanium.
4. You will be short some other minerals. In a spreadsheet test, 16.8 billion isk of minerals for building a set of capital ships was short 19.2 million pyerite, 7.8 million isogen, and 850 megacyte. These missing minerals are supplied from a stock in the compression station. Record the quantity of minerals you took from that stock.
5. Build the 425mm railgun I. In my spreadsheet test, it took 3.5 days to build 8350 units using 10 manufacturing slots.
6. Jump the railguns (209,000 m^3) and remaining uncompressed minerals (35,000 m^3) to lowsec.
7. Reprocess railguns.
8. Remember the minerals you took out of the stock in the compression station to build the railguns, and recorded the quantities of? Set those same quantities aside to take back to the compression station.
9. Move the rest of the minerals from the reprocessing station to the building station.
10. Move the minerals you set aside back to the compression station to be re-used.

If it works like my spreadsheet says it will, this will cut my jump freighter jumps on a 10-ship manufacturing run from 30 to 1, saving me around 2 hours of effort per run and substantially increasing my profit-per-hour-at-the-keyboard. The railgun blueprints are in research now, and I anticipate starting mineral compression in about 2-1/2 months.

By the way, the waste when compressing 855 million units of tritanium, at railgun ME 525, is 159k units of tritanium -- something like one-fortieth of one percent.

Mineral compression items?

Related: Does anybody have a list of items which can be used for mineral compression? The ones I know about aren't working out the way I would like.

EDIT: On second thought, I think I got this.

Science and industry update

Science:

Back here I said my next two projects are filling my research slots with component blueprints to sell, and hull blueprints to highly research and then replace my current set with. One of my supercarrier BPO sold, which hurried this along, and at the time of writing I have 12 research slots available (out of 61), which is the same number I need to finish my set of replacement hull blueprints. Thus, I am switching to buying replacement hull blueprints. These will run me 15 billion, which should take a month or two.

Industry:

Nothing to report.


New project rumination:

Industry:

I have 10 manufacturing slots that I'm not using, and I should probably do something with them. I note that freighter hulls have had excellent margins lately, and with 10 manufacturing slots I could build on 3 hull blueprints. However, those margins seem to be shrinking. I'll have to watch what they do in the medium term.

I could also use these slots for mineral compression. There is a 50% refining station in my building system, and compressing minerals could  save me an hour or two per week. Probably going to go this route, though it will take a little research

Trade:

Of course, trade is where the real money is. It's not really my thing, though; I don't like adjusting market orders. I've been thinking of getting into a less competitive area, like stocking nullsec NPC systems or faction war systems. It probably won't actually happen, but I might eventually get around to doing some market research or something.

20 days

Miner bumping

Decided to give this "miner bumping" thing a try.

Marxus Meridius > Lmfao, really man? What a fucking loser, I could think of so many better uses for a machariel than bumping miners.

(it's okay though -- his OTHER account is running sites in a c4)

bojangles monty > what is ur fuking problem ?

Sato noKayte > hmm
Sato noKayte > i'm write a patition

yanshi > WTF!
yanshi > why r u bumping me?
yanshi > i'm going to report u.
yanshi > fucking ashole. go die in hell.
yanshi > again? YO. STOP IT
yanshi > go die in hell.
yanshi > u fucking griever.
yanshi > go boing ur mother.

It works.

Threat assessment: Miniluv

A couple days ago I heard something about "goons killing a bunch of freighters".

Today the tl;dr is up on mittens.com and reads: A gank squad has killed 200 freighters since August.

So how much danger am I in?

First, frequency. 200 freighters in about 2-ish months is about 100 freighters per month. For the purpose of this post, we assume that every freighter passing through jita 4-4 has an equal chance of being ganked.

The equation for my risk, therefore, is: Number of freighters which pass through jita per month, divided by 100, multiplied by the number of times I pass through jita per month.

To find the first value, I watched the jita undock for 3 minutes. 14 freighters undocked. I divided this number by 2 because my observation was done at a peak time.  7*20*24*30 = 100,000 freighters per month, divided by 100 equals a 1/1,000 chance of being ganked per run. I do about 40 runs per month, so my risk is 1/25.

My maximum cargo plus hull price is about 2.7 billion, so during an average month I will lose 108 million isk to ganks.

Note: This assumes that the gankers target jita, which apparently they don't.

19 hours

Yes, it's the same blueprint.

Industry and science update

Industry:

The transition from a 30 to a 50 slot process, and from 4 ships per run to 10, has been much easier than I expected. It has still been a very little bit rough because adding so many ship blueprints at once temporarily exceeded my (and my station's) ability to produce components, so some hull blueprints have been dropping out of production briefly, but this is sorting itself out.

I'm moving my fourth rorqual blueprint over to research. I hadn't planned for 4, and it was causing me to need more of some components than I could produce. This also means that my three remaining rorqual blueprints have the same material level, which makes things easier. The plan for now is to wait until things stabilize, see how many manufacturing slots I have going spare, and then add ship blueprints if I can.

I'm thinking of switching one of my two revelation blueprints for a third moros blueprint. The average margins on them are higher, and they sometimes spike very high, while revelations don't.

My fifth manufacturing character is mostly finished training, and I now have the ability to keep (almost) all of my blueprints in production simultaneously.

Science:

I mentioned a few weeks back that my next two investments will be to buy another set of capital hull blueprints, to very-highly research and replace my current set with; and to fill my remaining research slots with capital component blueprints  to research and sell.

I'm doing the second one first, because it earns more and because it starts paying off faster. I'm buying new blueprints to research with any spare isk I have left after buying minerals for a new run of ships, and this seems to be coming out to three new component blueprints for each new 10 ship run. Currently 28 of my 53 (current) research slots are still empty.

September monthly financial report

I suppose a quarter of a trillion isk is a milestone, but I have a different one in mind. Check back in a few months.

...actually, being able to refer to one's personal wealth as a meaningful fraction of a trillion is a pretty nice feeling.  
Quarter trillion.

Also this month for the first time, I have owned a stack of one billion tritanium.

...oh, and run bloody 74 finally finished. Huzzah.

Without further ado:

Vigil

"In EVE, really big internet spaceships require another player to 

set up a beacon so that they can jump between systems. 

 

The symbolism of lighting a bunch of cynos is that they are 

calling out to the pilot who will never come home again."

Source.

Moving forward

Now that my capital manufacturing process has reached a finished state, aside from some minor tweaks, and will finally start generating isk that doesn't have to be put straight back into it, it's time to find new places to put my money. There are several of these:

1.  Highly researched capital ship blueprints. This is a long-term (1-2 years), very minor upgrade to the manufacturing process. The goal is to buy a set of capital blueprints that matches my current set, and research them to optimal ME and PE2. This will take about 30 billion isk.

2.  Research component blueprints to sell, as described in my capital component blueprint income posts a few weeks back. After the new set of capital blueprints is started, filling my remaining research slots will cost around 36 billion isk.

3.  Buy plex for more than a month in advance.

If I could manage to sell my supercarrier blueprints for NPC price, they would mostly cover steps 1 and 2. Since that doesn't seem to be happening, though, I expect those steps to take a minimum of 6 months.

August financial report

A few things to note this month.

First, as pointed out by eve industrialist, I have been using the term "margin" incorrectly. Accordingly I have changed my old 'margin' column to 'profit %' and changed the elegant 'profit/outlay-1' metric to a filthy percentage.  Better than being wrong, I guess.

Second, merging my main manufacturing process and abortive second one has allowed me to sell off a number of component blueprints. Unfortunately, the liquidity from this went straight back into minerals for the new ship blueprints that the process merge added to my production line and I continue to have basically zero liquidity.

Also, with mineral prices possibly dropping I have decided to sell off some naglfars that I have been holding and waiting for prices to rise. Run 69 has finally finished, and 74 will too... if I can find a buyer.  My naglfar blueprint has been in research for 2 ME levels since the last time building them was a good idea. At this rate I'll have it in PE research before they're worth building again.

Oh, and taxes are starting to sting a bit. It might be time to work on that a little.

Server status widget

On the right sidebar you can find a new widget showing the status of my home server, and thus the availability of old screenshots and files.

Turns out making it was a simple matter of putting an image with the word "Up" on the server, then making a widget with that image and the alt text set to "Down".

Speaking of the server, I'm having loads of fun playing with virtualbox. I've gotten it to run invisibly in the background, and disabled the windowing system on the guest OS (ubuntu 12.04) so that it uses less memory. One of the nice things about linux is that it doesn't bloat over time like other operating systems tend to, and as you can see in the below screenshot it's running just fine on a whopping 64 MB of RAM.

Old screenshots are UP

A year or so ago my home server went down and all my screenshots from 2011-5-25 and earlier went offline. I wasn't playing much at the time, and didn't feel like fixing it.

On an extremely temporary and intermittent basis these are back online, being hosted via a virtual machine running on my work computer. My legions of screaming fans are encouraged to use this opportunity to review my lovely screenshots and pointed toward the screenshots tag. Also online are other files including old spreadsheets, source code files, teamspeak recordings, and old coalition maps.

At some point I may set up something more permanent, but this will probably last no more than a few days.

Capital manufacturing update

Minerals aren't falling as quickly as I had feared, so I'm back to buying mins to build with.


All my replacement and new component blueprints have finished researching and are in production.


All my ship blueprints have finished researching and are in production, except that:
-I decided to skip the third archon blueprint I was planning on getting.
-My phoenix and naglfar blueprints are not in production because the margins on them are low.
-I decided to add a fourth rorqual blueprint.
-And maybe a second revelation blueprint.

I finally got around to creating my fifth building character. I have been blagging under the name "parasoja" since 2009-ish and only now have a character with that name.


In previous posts I have talked about increasing the number of ships per run, which will lead to me moving more minerals less often and reduce some spreadsheet overhead. I have been doing 4 ships per run, and was thinking of changing that to 6 or 8. Then I tried a run of 6 and noticed something:

When building 6 ships, you need more than 80 of many components. 80 is the "correct" number of components at which to split a run between two blueprints, because 80 (actually 89, so there's some leeway) components takes the same amount of time to manufacture as a carrier or dreadnaught hull. So if you install runs in a timely manner and split batches of more than 80 between blueprints, things will run smoothly.

Now, when installing 6 ships you need more than 80 of nearly all components. This is obnoxious because of the way I format split runs, and because most of them were barely more than 80, like 90-some.

I decided to resolve this by further decreasing granularity to 10 ships per run and changing the split run formatting to a multiple-column arrangement, so each one color-coded cell equals 80 components (except for the rightmost cell). This means that I will have far fewer runs in production at a time, each run will take up more space on my spreadsheet, and I will move much larger amounts of minerals at a time.

The first 10-ship run was mostly carriers, and the minerals ran 12.8 billion isk.

Capital blueprint research income, part 5: Copying component blueprints

Seeing this post first? Start at part 1.

Index:

1: Overview 
2: Researching hull blueprints
3: Copying hull blueprints
4: Researching component blueprints
5: Copying component blueprints (you are here)

What is it:

If you own a researched capital component blueprint, you can copy it and sell the copies. However, due to the high volume of copies created you would spend what I consider an unacceptable amount of time dicking about with contracts. I would not consider this a highly passive income method, and only include it here out of a desire to be thorough.

EDIT 2012-8-21: Blake from k162space confirms this in comments.

Method:

The lowest priced non-outlier copy in jita is selected for the copy sell price, and 10 copies per month (actually 27.6-ish days, but I'm not going to bother to be precise here) is used to calculate monthly profit and monthly ROI.

Raw numbers:

Interpretation:

High effort, low ROI.

In practice:

Copy blueprint (10 copies, 5 runs per copy). Sell copies in jita.

EDIT 2012-8-21:  Another idea is to assemble your component BPC into packs along with a capital ship blueprint, such that the buyer receives all the BPC required to make a capital ship. Examining this, I found that a rorqual BPC pack sells for 540 million, while buying the same blueprints off contracts only costs 411 million.

After some spreadsheet-fu, and assuming that the BPC pack in question is something which will actually sell, and pretending that the rorqual BPC was the same price as I could find one at the same material level on contracts, I found that this represents an 80% markup for the component BPC. This is almost significant, but it turns out that it only comes to an average monthly ROI on the component blueprints used to 5.5% -- still below the low end of what you can make doing something else which involves much less effort.

Conclusion:

Ha ha ha.

No.


This is the end of this post series.

Capital blueprint research income, part 4: Researching component blueprints

Index:

1: Overview
2: Researching hull blueprints
3: Copying hull blueprints
4: Researching component blueprints (you are here)
5: Copying component blueprints

What is it:

You can buy a capital ship component blueprint from an NPC seller, research it, and sell it on contracts for more money.

Method:

We look for the lowest priced, reasonably researched (minimum 100/10 ME/PE) blueprint on contracts, and use that and research time for 100/20 ME/PE to find monthly profit and monthly ROI.

Raw numbers:

 

• Note: Research time is for 100/20 ME/PE because that's what I, as a capital builder, would want to buy.
• Note: Although far too high to stay where it is, the current sell price for the propulsion engine is for real -- I sold one for 2000 just a few weeks ago.

Interpretation:

To someone who actually builds capital ships, there is a pattern here: Components which are only used to build one type of ship (e.g. clone vat bay, siege array) have very low ROI, while ones which are used in most or all ship types tend to have higher returns. I present you with a table of components, where they can be found, how much they cost, and which ships they are used for.

In practice:

Buy blueprints from the NPC systems listed in the table, research them (I do recommend 100/20, but you can probably get away with 100/10), and sell them.  Do NOT buy components in jita which are listed in a different system. Those aren't NPC sell orders.

Verdict:

Pretty solid numbers here. As someone who has actually done this I tend to suspect that overall you will have a better time researching component blueprints than ship blueprints, but I do intend to test this.


Next, part 5: Copying component blueprints.

Capital blueprint research income, part 3: Copying hull blueprints

Index:

1: Overview
2: Researching hull blueprints
3: Copying hull blueprints (you are here)
4: Researching component blueprints
5: Copying component blueprints

What is it:

If you have a researched capital ship hull blueprint, you can copy it and sell the copy.

Method:

We use the price of the cheapest reasonably researched blueprint copy available in jita, and the time to copy, to find monthly profit and monthly ROI.

Raw numbers:

Interpreation:

Only the orca, at 6% monthly ROI, even reaches the acceptable range; and with the recent mining changes orca BPC are probably for selling substantially more than we can expect them to in the long run. The rest of the numbers look pretty accurate based on my experience.

In practice:

If you wanted to do this, you would take a researched ship blueprint, make copies, and sell them. I disrecommend buying researched blueprints off contracts for this purpose, as it would take much longer to make up the difference than it would to research them yourself.

Verdict:

No.


Next, part 4: Researching component blueprints.

Capital blueprint research income, part 2: Researching hull blueprints

 

Index:

1: Overview
2: Researching hull blueprints (you are here)
3: Copying hull blueprints
4: Researching component blueprints
5: Copying component blueprints

What is it:

If you buy a capital ship hull blueprint from an NPC and research it, you can then sell the researched blueprint on contracts for more than you bought it for.

Method:

Sell price numbers are gathered by checking contracts for each type of capial ship (not including supercapitals) to see what price reasonably researched blueprints are selling for. The ME/PE numbers for the blueprints being sold are used to find research time, and sell price and research time are used to find monthly profit and ROI.

• Note: Capital ship hull blueprints are a very low volume market, and prices can vary substantially. The data used is a random snapshot of the market which we hope turns out to be somewhat accurate.

Raw numbers:

 

Interpretation:

Unfortunately, what we're probably seeing in the case of the higher profit blueprints are ones which are sitting on the market because potential buyers look at them and say "nah, not worth it". I think that figures in the 5-12% monthly ROI range are much more realistic. Selling a 2/1 archon for 2500 would be very surprising.

Also, note that at the time of writing profits from building ships are higher than normal. This could mean that increased demand has driven the price of blueprints upward; and if so, then in the long run we would expect them to be lower.

Still, this looks pretty solid.

In practice:

If you wanted to do this you would buy a ship blueprint from jita (caldari), vittenyn (gallente), amo (minmatar), bhizheba (amarr), or 4c-b7x (ORE), research it, and sell it.

It looks like the way to go would be to research the blueprints to the minimum level you can get away with (e.g. 2/0 for carriers), then undercut other sellers. Spending longer in research in order to sell at a higher price seems to have diminishing returns.

For your convenience, I present you with a material level table showing which material levels cause a reduction in mineral requirements, and how much the reduction is. Note that this is somewhat old, and with higher mineral prices at the time of writing the savings and ME0 mineral price will be somewhat higher. Ignore the color-coding, which is for building purposes.

Which ships to research:

I would recommend starting with any and all carriers. I can tell you from experience that their blueprints tend to move more quickly than other jump-capable capital ships, and that they tend to have solid margins, if not quite so high as we're seeing here.

I would avoid freighter blueprints; although they would sell quickly, the ROI isn't great. Sort of like building the hulls -- enough people do it that the profits are sort of pathetic.

In dreadnaughts, avoid the phoenix. Everything else is fine. Naglfar blueprints might be quirky and slow to sell, but since it's extremely rare to see one on contracts you can set your own price.

With ORE, the orca looks like a very good possiblity. As for the rorqual, the demand for the blueprints is high, but the high cost of the blueprint and longer research time leaves the monthly ROI merely solid. Note also that ORE blueprints can only be purchased for NPC price in NPC nullsec.

Verdict:

The numbers here are higher than I would have expected.  This is probably an activity which I will get involved with.


Next, part 3: Copying hull blueprints.

Capital blueprint research income, part 1: Overview

Index:

1: Overview (you are here)
2: Researching hull blueprints
3: Copying hull blueprints
4: Researching component blueprints
5: Copying component blueprints

Introduction:

Doing research on capital blueprints is a highly passive income method. Although the per month profit on a single blueprint is not huge, running around 6-12% with good blueprint and research activity choices, the barriers to entry are low and the player only needs to interact with the blueprint about once per month. This makes it perfect for someone with a little isk sitting around who wants to turn it into more isk without having to spend time or effort.

There is more than one way to make money researching capital blueprints:

• Hull blueprints can be researched and sold.
• Researched hull blueprints can be copied, and the copies sold.
• Component blueprints can be researched and sold.
• Researched component blueprints can copied, and the copies sold.

This guide-ish thing will cover each of these four items.

About this guide:

This guide exists because I don't know what the numbers are and want to find out, not because I'm highly experienced with all of these methods and want to share my experience with you. I have accrued some experience with the first three more or less by accident, though, and will be able to tell you if the numbers I find seem right.

Caveat emptor.

• Note: All price and profit numbers are in millions.
• Note: Research times assume you are using an NPC station. Wait times for research slots are not factored in calculations.

Supplemental material:

Rather than write new posts about how to research and transport blueprints, I give you links to earlier posts on the same topic.

Researching blueprints.

• Note: I do not recommend using a tower for this. It would make the activity less passive, and fuel costs could cut into your profits.

Moving expensive blueprints safely, including through lowsec.


Without further ado, part 2: Researching hull blueprints.

Capital manufacturing update: Getting there and oh bugger

I'm still short one building character (haven't gotten around to creating it...), but as of now all four of my current building characters have their manufacturing slots full. The blueprint sets I chose seem to be working out pretty well; it's been slightly bumpy, but components are finishing before the hull blueprints come available, and 12 out of 13 current in hull blueprints are currently building hulls. I'm still short one archon, 1 nidhoggur, and one drone bay blueprint from my goal blueprint set, but I expect those to be taken care of within the next few weeks.

Also, the station I'm building in currently has wait times on manufacturing slots. This was expected; my goal is to drive the other builders away.

Unfortunately, with the mackinaw buff it looks like there might be rough times ahead for manufacturing. If low-ends follow the example of isotopes at all, they could be in for a dramatic drop in the near future. I currently have 56 billion isk of minerals-and-things-made-out-of-minerals in my manufacturing process, so that could end up sucking. It may be necessary to put a hold on buying minerals for a while.

On a related note, profits since minerals went up have been substantially higher than pre-inferno. If they drop back down, I might expect profits to return to that baseline as well. Which will also suck.

Isk per effort: Capital manufacturing

I'm a big proponent of non-grind professions, and of maximizing isk per effort.

To illustrate this concept, consider PI. Supposedly, a plasma planet makes 500m/month. That's not a huge amount of isk, especially over a month of time, but if it only takes you one hour per month to keep it running you are making 500 million isk for one hour of effort.

Traditional grind type professions - mining, exploration, etc. - make numbers like 15-150m/h. In these cases, isk per effort is easy to measure: Work for an hour, and see how much isk you've made. You may have to factor in LP, if you do missions or incursions, or take an average over many hours with exploration, but the principle is the same.

I decided to do this with capital manufacturing. It's a little harder to measure time spent, and there are some grey areas which require consideration. I decided to tally it thusly:

Only time when I have to be at the keyboard counts toward the total. This includes time spent playing with spreadsheets, setting up and modifying buy orders for minerals, jumping minerals to lowsec, installing and delivering jobs, and setting up and modifying sell orders. It does not count time spent autopiloting, but does count the few seconds it takes to drag minerals to/from my cargo on each end of the autopilot route.

Using these criteria I measured the time required to build and sell a 4 ship run consisting of two tier 1 capital ships (carriers) and two tier 2 capital ships (dreadnaughts, rorquals). This came out to almost exactly 1.5 hours. Then I found all the 2x1+2x2 runs since mineral prices stabilized a few months back, which turned out to be only two. That's a very small sample, so I also filled out two 2x1+2x2 runs which are in progress with current lowest sell order prices for their ships.

Averaging the 4 runs returns an average of 1648 million isk in after-tax profit, or 1100 million isk per hour of effort. This is a fairly ballpark figure, but feels approximately correct.

So, newai. That's how I roll.

Capital manufacturing update: Process merge

Last update I mentioned that I was thinking about making one large manufacturing process instead of starting up a second small one. I am going to do that.

Thus, I need to identify what blueprints I want to build on. The goal is to balance ships and components so that (a) my manufacturing slots are filled, and (b) I don't flood the market with hulls of one type.

I picked the following:

Chimera: 2
Thanatos: 2
Nidhoggur: 2
Archon: 3
Phoenix: 0-1
Moros: 2
Naglfar: 1
Revelation: 1
Rorqual: 3

Using my handy component tool, I can see that I need the following components:



In all, this will be 52 blueprints. Since most of the component blueprints will have some downtime I could probably add another ship blueprint or two, but since this will be quite a large expansion in my output I'm going to wait and see how things go first.

Next I need to work out what blueprints I have, so that I know which of the ones I own I need and which I don't. The blueprints which were intended for the second process should more than fill the needs for the expansion of the first, and indeed I found that in some cases where I would have needed two of a blueprint for each process (intending them to each be 30-slot processes), I found that only two blueprints are needed for a single 50-slot process.




Newai, the rest is just a matter of playing with spreadsheets and moving blueprints around.

July monthly financial report

This month the seven billion isk which disappeared from my net worth when I reprocessed the phoenixes came back. Otherwise, nothing interesting happened.

By the way, I totally take orders for capital ships

I get them every so often from friends, and it occurred to me that I might want to, you know, advertise. I love getting orders, because they give me a quick sale instead of having a hull sit on the market.

If you order a capital ship from me, you get the following:

• A hull for the price of the lowest sell order on the forge market at the time the contract is made, minus 1.36%.
• Any mods and fuel you want, delivered to the building system for jita price.
• An itemized receipt.

I currently build rorquals, moros, revelations, and all carriers. To place an order, eve-mail character "ispia jaydrath" with the hull you want and a list of any mods or fuel you would like. All ships will be delivered in otanuomi, in northeast forge. Time from order to delivery will usually be less than 10 days.

Capital manufacturing update

Over the last month or so I've been thinking about this "start a second manufacturing process" idea, and I'm becoming increasingly less happy with it. Sure it would double my profit and open a second market, but I'm just not sure if I feel like it.

At the same time, it occurred to me that there is a compromise which can be made. I can easily expand my existing process to 5 characters (50 slots) just by increasing the number of blueprints in it. Conveniently, I have enough blueprints in research right now to do this.

The downside is that, since stations only have 50 manufacturing slots, it would be impossible to use 6 characters. However, I have a half-baked plan for using one of my characters to do evil, which would require it to be in a different corp, so that's okay. As for the problem of other people building in
my station, I figure that will resolve itself once I start filling all the manufacturing slots.


As for the current manufacturing process, it's continuing to expand. I recently added a second moros, thanatos, and archon blueprint, which puts the blueprint load at or slightly above what can be manufactured with three characters. Nearly all the duplicate component blueprints it needs are finished researching, too.


A few posts back I wrote about how I was having gaps between runs where component blueprints weren't being used, and how expanding my process to keep three of each ship in production at all times instead of two would solve this. I have arrived at a middle ground here, too, where component blueprints can be kept in production without putting so much more isk into minerals, by keeping two of each ship in production, plus one additional run (4 ships). I started implementing this a few weeks ago, and it seems to be working well.

If I do decide to go with a single 5-character process, it may be necessary to increase the number of ships per run to 5 or 6, just to keep the number of times per month I have to buy minerals down.

Systems visited map

Haven't had one of these since my home server broke. Overlay of my three most-traveled characters.

June monthly financial report

Buying researched ship blueprints, along with the standard background plex and a character transfer, ate nearly all my profits this month. Other than that there's not much new or interesting. I did move some things around in the 'net worth' columns, most notably moving my supercarrier BPO from the 'ship bpo 1' category to a new 'research ships' category. This means that the ship and component bpo 1 and A categories contain only the value of blueprints which actually have some bearing on production.

Two manufacturing runs are stuck long-term while I wait for naglfar prices to recover -- during the big capital ship price spike they were the last dread to come back down, and during the time where they appeared to be by far the most profitable dread, more people than the normal me-and-one-other-guy-in-the-entire-game built them. Now the market is flooded.

Without further ado:

Apathy revolution and capital manufacturing status update

My favorite thing about building capitals is that I don't have to be at the keyboard for most of it. If I don't feel like logging in for a few days, I just don't; even if ships are finishing or I should really be buying minerals for another run, skiving off just delays future profits; and I'm at a point where money is pretty much meaningless so long as I make my 2 plex per month.

Trouble is, I'm spending more and more time not feeling like getting things done in eve. At the same time that extra component blueprints are finishing research and increasing my capacity to build ships, I'm not feeling like moving minerals into place to take advantage of those blueprints. Neither am I thinking about eve at all in my spare time.

Hum. Odds are it's a passing thing.

As for capital manufacturing:

Process 1 (running):

Rorquals have historically been a very good ship to build, so I added a third rorqual BPO here. Spare component blueprints are finishing research and coming available, which should increase my manufacturing capacity. Thinking about adding a second archon and second moros here as well.

Also, nearly all the poorly researched component blueprints in this process have been replaced with well-researched component blueprints.

Process A (starting up):

Still looking for 2 archon and 2 moros blueprints. The first component blueprints here are starting to finish research, but I don't expect to install the first manufacturing run for about another 2 months.

In which eve bloggers are weak, stupid crybabies

So I don't log in for a few days, and suddenly the blagosphere is going crazy over something something mittens something something. Apparently, mittens decided to wardec a few bloggers who don't like him. Or something.

The response from the community is varied, of course. Mabrik, one of the actual targets, decided to take the radical step of watching local once the wardec went live. Three days later, he eventually saw one war target. The rest of the blogosphere, sadly, has not been so reasonable: Yuki Onna, one of the other targets, quit the game and closed down his and/or her blog. Mord fiddle, formerly respected nullsec commentator, has elected to sperge about mittens "silencing and driving out" dissenting voices, and even went full tin foil retard over the "Oh hey, we didn't actually mean for it to be possible for an unlimited number of entities to be at war with another entity forever for free" changes.

Get some perspective, people. Mittens has no ability to shut down your blog or make you stop playing. Yuki was not silenced or driven out -- he and/or she decided to ragequit instead of making the effort to adapt.

Since it apparently, somehow, falls to me of all people to be the voice of reason, I do hereby welcome the rest of you delicate flowers to eve online: A game in which sometimes people do bad things to you. The basics are as follows:

1. Sometimes people do bad things to you.
2. Use your damn brain and adapt, you pansy.

As for "standing together", I can stand perfectly well on my own, thanks... and from where I'm standing, I can see the rest of you running around like chickens with their heads cut off. It's hilarious.

I didn't get to where I am without being petty and vindictive

Be forewarned, there is no real purpose to this post. It exists because I feel like gloating.

One month ago, to within a matter of hours, somebody on r/eve asked if he and/or she should invest in zydrine. At the time the post was made, zydrine had fallen from the initial peak of 1900 down to 13-1400. The reasoning was that it would rise in the long term.

He received conflicting advice:

Hedging my bets as strongly as the english language allows, I told him not to buy.



In no uncertain terms, another person told him to buy.



So what ended up happening in the intervening month?



I'm definitely not always right, and I don't trust myself enough to put my money in something even when I am confident, but somewhere out there somebody is very glad he took my advice instead of the other guy's.

Of course, the price is still higher than it was before the announcement, and it may well remain so. Assuming Guilane cashed out today instead of continuing to chase a sunk cost, he has made a net profit of around 2 billion.

May monthly financial report

"Yes I forgot to change the name of the month on my spreadsheet again" edition.

This is a weird one.

•  The triumph of my "when to hold" plan can be seen in run 67, in which I made 4.3 billion in profit on 5.0 billion worth of minerals. It would be more visible other places aside from 66 and 68, but some things didn't work out quite the way I'd hoped.
• 59, 62, and 64 I reprocessed the phoenixes because fuck phoenixes. This took 7 billion off my net worth figure, which will reappear at some point in the distant future.
• ...which means that my net worth and change in net worth are both reading low, and that I made 12 billion this month despite higher than average off-spreadsheet expenses (shinies and researched blueprints).
• 12 billion is less than the 18 which is showing under monthly profits. That figure is reading substantially high because many ships (18, to be precise) which actually sold last month fell over to this month on the spreadsheet.
• Runs 71 and 72 we expect lower than average profit because they were bought near the peak of the mineral speculation and mineral prices, and ship prices, fell before all the ships could be sold. Special 72 is just doing its own thing, though, because rorquals are awesome.

Capital manufacturing update: In which I run out of research slots

I've been trying to clear out product, with a fair degree of success. This has left me with quite a lot of liquid isk, so I decided to buy the remaining component blueprints for my second capital manufacturing process. There were seven of these.

Turns out, though, that between all my characters I only had 6 research slots open. I haven't really thought about that as a limiting factor until now, and I still have 7 ship blueprints to buy.

Nbd though. In this job I'm used to waiting.

The answer is "51", in case you're wondering.

Capital manufacturing update

Process 1:

(the one that's already running, in forge)

This is ticking along just fine, aside from some product that doesn't want to move lately (phoenixes and naglfars). The additional component blueprints which I have been researching for this process are finishing in the next month or two, which should eliminate the component bottleneck that I'm experiencing right now.

Once that's finished I should have some spare capacity, and plan to add some new ship blueprints -- a third rorqual and second moros for certain, followed by a second thanatos, archon and possibly nidhoggur. In the long term the goal would be to balance my blueprints so that nearly all my manufacturing slots are in use at all times.

Process A:

(the one that I'm starting up in domain)

There are still months to go before I install the first runs for this one. Currently I have at least one of each component blueprint (though I am 7 component blueprints short of the set I'm working toward with process 1) and am in the process of acquiring ship blueprints. Currently I have two each of rorqual and thanatos, and one each of chimera, naglfar, and revelation, all of which are in research. The reason for the second thanatos blueprint is that I intend for process A to get up to speed much faster than process 1 did, since I now know what to expect.


Something else that I'm looking into for the non-immediate future - say, a time when I have spare liquidity that isn't earmarked for blueprints - is expanding my mineral buffer to a point where I'm keeping minerals for three runs of each ship blueprint in production, instead of two. Right now I'm keeping a two-run buffer on the theory that I'll get to build the components for the next hull while the current hull is in production, but in practice this has turned out to be a bumpy process because I wait for 4 ships to finish before buying a run of minerals, and components can fall out of production in the meantime. Efficiency is pretty good now, but by expanding my buffer I can increase it further while simultaneously decreasing the pain-in-the-ass factor.

Why the unified invintory is objectively bad

Before inferno:

1. Dock.

The corporate hangar is now open to division 1.

After inferno:

1. Dock.
2. Click on the 'unified inventory' button
3. Click on the 'corporate hangars' dropdown
4. Shift-click on division 1.

The corporate hangar is now open to division 1.


tl;dr the unified inventory would be great if it weren't fucking horrible.


Liking the price estimates, though.

Because fuck phoenixes

Oh, phoenixes. Phoenixes, phoenixes, phoenixes.

They're toxic assets right now. There are 8 of them on the forge market for less than they cost to build, and still nobody's buying. I have four phoenix hulls gathering dust right now, and the time has come for me to give up on waiting for the market to recover and put that money back to work. Fortunately I'm not a complete moron, so I won't be selling them for less than mineral price. Instead, I will be reprocessing them. It works like this:

1. Phoenixes are reprocessed into capital ship components. This entails a 5% loss (EDIT: Assuming no standings), or 1950*4*0.05 = 390 million.
2. Launcher hardpoint components are further reprocessed into minerals, since I don't expect to have any use for them in the immediate future. This entails a negligible loss.
3. The components (and the minerals from launcher hardpoints) are used to build ships on which actual profits can be made. Since everything except the phoenix has margins much larger than 5%, I make a profit from this.

This, of course, begs the question: If reprocessing phoenixes to build other things is a good idea, should I buy phoenixes off the market to reprocess? To which the answer is "yes, but I'm not going to." tl;dr is as follows:

1950*0.95=1850, so reprocessing a phoenix which is selling for less than 1850 million is cheaper than buying minerals. The cheapest phoenix on market is 1725 million, which is a savings of 125 million. Taking advantage of this would entail spending liquidity on ships, moving the ships to my building system, reprocessing them, and playing spreadsheet-fu. I currently have enough liquidity to buy 4 phoenixes, which would save me 500 million isk and involve hours of work. In short, I would be expending actual effort in order to make the sort of money I usually get from the sale of 1 to 2 hulls. This is unacceptable.

Somebody else might consider making a go of it, though.


Anyway, the personal effects of this will be as follows:

1. Three runs (59, 62, and 64) will show phoenixes sold for 0 isk, because tracking their value would involve effort.
2. The runs which receive the components and minerals will show silly margins and profits, because tracking the value would involve effort.
3. 7 billion isk will disappear from my net worth, and only reappear when the ships built from the recovered components and minerals are sold, because tracking the value would involve effort.

Phoenix sellers, so wacky

You see this shit? This is what happens when people have a price war in a market that shouldn't ought to have price wars in it. Mineral cost for a phoenix is 1950; I guess I'll be holding the ones I have for a while more.

That, or reprocessing them for components. At this point I could totally do that and still make a profit, since I built them at 1700.

On a related note, most minerals stopped decreasing after an overall drop of 5%. This may have something to do with highsec mining being down by 45%.

So, mineral prices: Oh snap edition

Over on r/eve somebody (hi Johnny) asked the question "What do you think is going to happen with mineral prices because of the drone alloy nerf?"

Discussing the issue caused me to look at some market graphs, and I noticed something in the short term which is giving me the screaming heebie-jeebies.

Here's a timeline:

March 3-ish: Drone alloy removal announced. Massive mineral price spike, entirely from speculation. See: Zydrine price history.
April 4-ish: Prices of commodities built with minerals catches up to current market mineral prices. See: Raven price history.
April 8-ish: Market volume for commodities built with minerals drops sharply. See: Raven price history.
April 20-ish: Market volume for minerals drops sharply. Mineral price drops sharply. See: Pyerite volume history, isogen price history.

My crystal ball is extremely murky, but it looks to me like mineral prices hit a point where demand for mineral-built commodities dropped in a significant way. People stopped buying ships, so builders stopped buying minerals, so now mineral prices are dropping.

I don't feel like speculating about the long term, and I really hope that the drop in demand is a temporary thing while people adjust to higher prices, but right now my "mineral prices going down will really suck for me" sense is gibbering about a possibly-significant crash happening right now. That sense is a little overactive, but I don't like to ignore it so precautions of an undisclosed nature are being taken.


Fun, semi-related fact: I personally account for one-ninth of one percent of mineral volume moved in the forge market.

Capital manufacturing update: Process A, go!

So, funny thing. I have two accounts, which gives me up to six building characters. I have three currently, and I've been training the other three.

Now, stations have a maximum of 50 slots. My current building station has one or two other people building in it, and on rare occasions can run out of free slots. Also, three characters is more than enough to keep one of each capital ship blueprint in production constantly.

I'd like to build with all 6 characters. To accomplish this I will start a second capital manufacturing process, hereby named process A, in a different station. Also a different region, which should provide valuable data, let me station trade ships in twice as many regions should I decide to get into that, and mitigate the small amount of downward pressure on prices that I exert.

A will take a while to get running, because I need to get component and ship blueprints for it.

I already have many of the component blueprints, fortunately. I'm in the middle of researching replacements for the poorly researched component blueprints in my current manufacturing process (now known as process 1), and the originals will become blueprints for process 2. I'm also researching a bunch of component blueprints to sell, and some of those those can be used to fill in many of the gaps. Alas, there are three component blueprints which I own no spare copies of, and these will be my first priority for buying.

The state of process A component blueprints is thusly:

Ships will be the hard part. Clearing out stock that I've been holding because of the mineral price increase should free up quite a bit of liquidity, and I can hope that I sell a supercarrier bpo, but odds are I'm going to end up putting all my spare change into ship blueprints for several months.

April monthly financial report

Well this'll be a weird one.

 

The reason that no ships are showing up under the manufacturing section is that during this month, no builds (which consist of 3-4 ships) sold all their ships. This is the result of the whole "holding on to ships for hilarious profits" thing, which - as you might guess from the fact that I increased my net worth by 13 billion isk this month without doing any actual work - is going pretty well. Most ships are currently at reasonable margins above the new mineral price, with the notable exception of the phoenix. Thanatos is selling a little low at 18% over mineral, but that's still a profit of 200 million.

The revelation blueprint in the science and trade section was only researched to 1/0, in case anybody was wondering. I had gotten an NPC blueprint to research a few months back, but somebody finally put up a 6/1 for a reasonable price. Now I'm using that and my old 3/1 is in research.


In unrelated news, as of about two days ago I have been playing eve for half as long as the game has been running

In which I am number one

Stat counters are ever so wacky. Every so often you find out something completely unexpected but strangely appropriate.

Check this out.

(likely to stop working next time google's crawler gets this deep)

Easiest 800 million I ever made

I'm not a trader. Sure there's money in it, but the idea just doesn't appeal to me. On the occasions when I do trade, I strongly prefer to add value; station trading is anathema to me, but making a little isk stocking my building system is fine.

There are times, though, when it has to be done. When you can make actual isk on a sure thing with no effort.

What's that? People are selling naglfar for mineral price?

*facepalm*

When to hold, part 4: New record edition

Waiting for all the rorquals that some asshole dumped on the market in akora at 2.64 to sell has finally paid off. The minerals for the lovely item you see above cost me 1.7, for a single-hull profit of 1.55 billion, a quarter billion more than my previous record.

In the meantime thanatos have also caught up to the market, and I sold one for 100% profit. The only hulls which are still selling low are chimera (100m above mineral price), phoenix and naglfar (both below mineral price).

Something I'm noticing is that most ships seem to have a psychological break point for how high people are willing to go even in the brave new market. For dreads this seems to be about 3 billion, and carriers around 1.5. Ships have been sold above these values, but only a few (three, to be precise), and when the only ships available are above that they tend to sit for days without selling.

I'm not sure if this will hold true for the rorqual. My suspicion that it could stabilize above 3 billion without another mineral spike is very low, but unlike carriers and dreads it's an infrastructure investment rather than a disposable combat ship, so people may be less reluctant to pay very obscene prices for them. And ooh, lookit all them suckers people suddenly getting into 0.0 mining....

When to hold, part 3: Mocking laughter edition

Three days ago I made this post, in which I mentioned that I had sold a moros for 2.96 billion, when two days earlier they had been selling for 2.2

When that hull sold, there were zero left on the market. The next day, there were 5 on the market.

When there are zero of something on the market, the first person to put one up gets to pick whatever number they like. There are two schools of thought about what to do in this situation:  One is to pick an obscene highball figure, just in case somebody goes for it. Something like four billion, in this case. The other is to pick a number that is within the realm of sanity, hoping to sell before more units come on the market at a lower price. Say, 3 billion. Maybe 3.2 or 3.5 if you really want to push it.

The five individuals who put up moros hulls subscribed to a third school, a school of non-thought. They actually lowballed, picking a number which was only 400 million (18%) above mineral price.

While their hulls were still on the market I finished a second moros hull, having held the previous one nearly 10 days before it sold. I put it up for 3 billion.

Today?

 

By way of illustration, here is the market graph from the last 10 days:

 

Counting two sold to buy orders, seven hulls were sold between my own two sales. The drooling morons who sold those hulls pissed away around four billion isk between them, just because they couldn't be bothered to put any thought into it.

In conclusion, it is your duty as a person who likes money to highball in a seller's market.


...also, in the meantime I've sold two carriers for 1.44 each, a profit of about 90%. Oh, and I suppose the second moros sale ups my largest profit on a hull to 1.3.

Building capital ships like a boss, part 10: Selling your ships

Seeing this post first? Go to part 1.

Index:

1. Introduction
2. Ship blueprints
3. Component blueprints
4. Researching your blueprints
5. Moving capital blueprints safely
6. Spreadsheets
7. Location, location, location
8. Moving minerals
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships (you are here)

Another easy one. Put them on the market and wait for somebody to buy them. There are a few things I've noticed, though:

• Capital ship prices vary quite a bit over a matter of weeks. If you think the market price for a hull is low, consider hanging on to it for a while. Odds are you're right.
• Sometimes a bunch of one hull will get dumped on the market and the price will fall to barely above mineral price. When this happens, just wait it out.
• Sometimes it doesn't pay to be the lowest sell order on the market. If the lowest sell order is 100m below the next lowest, odds are you're better off undercutting the second lowest rather than the lowest.
• When mineral prices go up, not everybody who sells capitals has the presence of mind to reset their sell orders to somewhere above the new mineral price. In this situation I recommend holding and waiting for the market to catch up. This can take weeks, however.

...and that's all I have to say about that. This is the last post in the series.