Building capital ships like a boss, part 8: Moving minerals

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 (you are here)
9. Actually building stuff, finally
10. Selling your ships


So let's say you have your blueprints in your building station. Now you need to get minerals there. There is more than one way to do this.

The simple way:

You have a freighter, a jump freighter, and a cyno alt. You move the minerals to the adjacent highsec system with the freighter, light a cyno with your alt, and jump them in with the jump freighter. This is what I do.

This is almost completely safe, since while in lowsec you're always in jump or dock range of something you can use to escape if a pvp scrub shows up.

It is possible to move up to 3 JF loads of minerals per 10 minute cyno activation, or 108 million units. It takes me about an hour to move minerals for 4 hulls from highsec to low, and I do this about once a week.

One advantage of this method is that you can build in a 30% refining station, while people who use mineral compression presumably need a 50% station. This means that it's easier to find stations where you won't have a lot of competition for manufacturing slots.

A disadvantage is that it requires a second account. And a jump freighter.

Mineral compression:

   

EDIT 2012-2-1: I now have a mineral compression guide up.

 

If you don't want to do it the simple way, you need to use mineral compression.

Mineral compression is not a topic with which I have personal experience. The short version is that you can take minerals, manufacture them into certain modules which have a much smaller volume than the minerals required to build them, then move the modules to lowsec and reprocess them back into minerals with almost zero loss.

This allows you to compress minerals to 1/28th their original size, allowing you move 30 million units in a cloaky hauler (3 loads for a carrier; 5 for a dread), while a jump freighter plus mineral compression could move about a billion units -- enough for 7 dreads.

Thus, you can move meaningful quantities of minerals to lowsec without needing to own a jump freighter and a second account. You can move them yourself with a cov ops hauler, or contract black frog freight, who will charge you 90 mil for a jump from jita to in-range lowsec with 5b collateral.

However, there are several downsides to this:

• You need to manufacture the items you use to compress the minerals. This means you have fewer slots available to build ships.
• You need 7.0 standings to reprocess the items without 'we take' loss. If, like me, you refuse to grind standings, you could buy a character with standings from the character bazaar.
• A station with 30% reprocessing rate will probably have unacceptable refining inefficiency.

Details about mineral compression, such as which items to use, can be found in the following posts at:

K162space
Jester's trek
A scientist's life in eve


Go to part 9: Actually building stuff, finally