Optimal

Researched from 0/0. This took a while.

Unfortunately this doesn't mean that my replacement blueprint set is done, just that it's well under way. My perfect blueprints are this one, one naglfar, a phoenix, and three revelations. I've got a few more finishing up soon, and some others finishing up less soon.  After that some of my original set will be researched to optimal, and then the project will be done. Time to completion is probably about a year.

Praise Mittens

Just sold an ME1 naglfar blueprint for 4 bil.

Life is good.

[Reporting interval] financial report

People really like naglfar blueprints.

Also this reporting interval I bought all the tattoos and a synthetic arm. They're pretty cool, and unless they come from some other source at some point the price is only going to go up.

[Reporting interval] financial report

Pretty dull month aside from nice prices on naglfar blueprints.

Trade retrospective

So when I started my little trade project, the idea was to calibrate the items I stock so that I would only have to restock every 3 months, minimizing effort.

This basically worked. I gave up after two iterations of adjusting quantities, but it was dead easy and it made money to the tune of about a billion per month. That's three billion isk in return for taking a couple JF loads of stuff to null and setting up 150 sell orders. I never even adjusted the orders.

I gave up for a few reasons:

1. Buying things, recording how much I paid, and setting up sell orders for more than I paid is too much effort.
2. A billion isk is only a return of about 5% per month. Sure I have a bunch of isk sitting around, but less than 10% is kind of shit.
3. Null systems where you want to sell stuff are full of elitepvp scrubs who are super interested in killing cyno ships. I don't have the patience to wait for them to get off the station.

Anyhoo, I'm done so I thought I'd share the items and quantities I was stocking and how well they sold. To view the list, click this link, click the "save the current version" button, and open the file in a web browser. It will look something like this:

At the time the list was saved it was 67 days from the time I last stocked the system. Red entries are sold out. Negative entries mean I accidentally bought more than I meant to.

Some of the items sold poorly due to competition in the system. Items were put on the market for usually 10-30% more than Jita price, but more in the case of some cheap items. The total value of the items I stocked was I think around 20 billion.

Also, the list of items is a modified version of k162space's list of high volume pvp items.

In which mineral prices drop

First time in more than a year I've sold a ship for under a billion. Mineral prices are down 20%, presumably as a result of the recent (ish?) changes to high-end ore. This is bad for me; percent margins tend to be fairly stable, so lower prices mean lower profits.

Not that profits are something I'm super focused on at this point, but I am keeping my research process going and trying to add an 8-ship run to manufacturing every few weeks. On manufacturing I'm way below full production - I expect the ships from run 127 to finish selling before I even install the run 128 hulls - but NBD.

Financial report -- 6/1 through 10/11

Can't complain, I guess.

Edit: Though "ships carried" should be 0 and "research items sold" should be 44.

I appreciate the effort...

...but you're going to need more than 2 tornadoes.

It's semi rare for me to see a gank attempt, so having these chaps hit me twice in five days is noteworthy. Buggers are fast -- they hit me between the time I land on Jita 4-4 and the time my ship docks.

I'll make that trade

The profit isn't nearly as large as that rorqual from a year or so back, but I think it's noteworthy anyway.

I aten't dead.

Only mostly dead.

Mineral prices have dropped by 20% while capital ship hull prices remained steady-ish, so margins are pretty good right now. I've gone ahead and bought a batch of minerals.

I also did this:

Turns out the fast way to get there is to use data centers and COSMOS agents. Bonus points, most of their missions are either couriers or they just want you to give them items you can find on market or on contracts.

In other other news, I seem to have misplaced somewhere between 4 and 11 capital component blueprints. It's the weirdest thing -- they aren't installed as corp jobs, nor as personal jobs on any of my six characters. They aren't in corp assets, or deliveries, or personal assets, or in the holds of any of my ships. No doubt they'll turn up if I leave it alone for a few years, but it's unsettling that they can just disappear like that.

12 digits

My net worth was about that number when I started capital building, but I've never actually had more than maybe 40 billion in cash.

Anybody have a levi or rag for sale?

Winning eve

I'm starting to do it. The joke, of course, being that you win by not logging in.

The problem I'm having is that fun does not scale with income. Six zeroes, nine zeroes, eleven zeroes, doesn't matter. I have more money than I could ever possibly need, and it's not doing anything for me.

Right now I'm scaling down science-industry-trade because I don't really care. There are a few things I want to try to maybe get me re-engaged with the game, so I'll keep the interwebs posted.

Trade: Syndicate pilot project, week 3

So I said I'd stop bringing it up if monthly average profit stayed constantish, but it didn't do that. Now it's up to 900.

Since it's still increasing, I decided to take monthly averages for each week, which came out thusly:

Week 1: 573
Week 2: 972
Week 3: 1130

If I didn't know better, I would say that people are starting to use my hub more because it's a hub.

In other news, I have a number of items out of stock because of price increases due to the T2 changes. The changes are causing the most problems with cov ops ships, which move pretty quickly in my system and which also increased in price dramatically after the patch. Prices on these are falling, so I'm temporarily holding off on restocking them.

Trade: Syndicate pilot project, week two

With a little more data the monthly average profit came up to 0.75 billion and stuck there, so unless it changes much in the next week I'm going to call that the correct number and stop tracking it.

The question now is how much time I have to spend per month to keep it going. It might take a few months to get a feel for this.

Also, I updated my stocking tool to show how many of each item it's set to want in addition to how many I'm short by. The goal of this is to avoid restocking items which are nowhere near being sold out, which will substantially reduce the amount of time I spend buying items and recreating orders.

Graphing my tiny little empire

This here diagram shows systems which are important to my various projects, the routes taken by the materials for those projects (and a return route if needed), color coded by project type. Systems are drawn to be vaguely related to their location on the map, but the network is not to scale.

Projects shown:
1. Capital ship production (white).
2. Stocking building system with capital mods (yellow)
3. Syndicate pilot project (yellow)
4. Researching component blueprints to sell (blue).
5. Researching replacement hull blueprints (blue).

Red represents a system where my corp has standings for jump clones.

Building capital ships with low startup capital

This post will be cross-linked with my capital building guide.

I am contacted regularly by people who want to start building capital ships and have some questions. Often they're interested in starting building with less than the 24ish billion recommended by my guide.

One of them, a longtime reader who has asked not to be named, actually got to production - a rare occurrence for would-be capital builders - and was kind enough to offer insight into his and/or her experience.

The tl;dr is that the recommendation I usually make - buying as many blueprints as you can toward a carrier set, so that you minimize overhead from BPC while still having enough left over to buy minerals - is wrong. Instead, what a new builder should do is build entirely from BPC, reducing startup costs to practically nothing but at the expense of increased overhead.

Here's a new, super minimal startup plan:

1. Find a building station. It, or a station in the same system, must have 50% (maybe as low as 40%, I don't really remember) refine rate. Get 6.67 standings with the corporation that owns your refining station. This step is free.
2. Buy and research compression item blueprint/s. 15m.
3. Buy a capital ship hull BPC. ~30m for a carrier.
4. Buy capital ship component BPC. ~115m for a carrier.
5. Buy minerals. ~1100m for a carrier.
6. Compress minerals. If you can't both acquire and compress your minerals in a highsec system adjacent to your building system, you'll probably want a freighter (1430m) to move things around.
7. Use a covert ops transport (~110m) to move the compressed minerals and the blueprints to the building station. Alternatively, contract black frog.
8. Decompress and build.

Reference my guide for the long versions of these steps.

This method gives a startup cost, for an incredibly minimal, somewhat inefficient, and somewhat pain in the ass process, of about 2.8 billion. I rather suspect it will have scalibility problems, but if you aren't trying to build 14 ships at the same time it should work just fine. Just be careful that you're making a meaningful profit after BPC; once margins on hulls return to normal, those could really eat into profits.

Trade: Syndicate pilot project, week 1

I'm doing profits by hand. It's a pain, but the number of transactions is low enough that it only takes a few minutes per day. Not sustainable in the long run, but okay for getting a baseline.

At the time of writing I've made a massive 133.6 million isk in profits, not counting any transactions from the 1st and the 2nd because of the attack. If this keeps up it will come to an utterly mind-boggling 570m/mo.

Which might be worth the effort, actually. We'll see how it goes; right now the data set is excessively small.

May monthly financial report: One-third trillion edition.

Monthly net profit is substantially higher than change in net worth for Reasons, and also monthly net profit is very high for Reasons. It's been a weird few months for that, but things should get back to normal starting next month.

Also this month my net worth broke one third of a trillion isk, a ~mere~ 7 months after reaching a quarter-trillion. I still plan to spend a bit on big-ticket items, but if I decide to get into trade that plan may be delayed until after 400 billion or so.

Trade: A little more thinking

I have established that NPC null systems are going to be a very low volume market. Extremely preliminary data indicates that average returns could be vaguely in the range of 5% per month, at which rate an investment of 10ish billion isk only returns 500 million. That is not a lot of money, so if I'm going to do this I need to reduce the effort involved to practically nothing.

In theory I can interact with my trade hub/s as little as once every 90 days - that being the time that it takes for sell orders to expire - and that should probably be my goal. The process might look something like this:

1. Stock a system.
2. If you run out of an item, double the number you keep on market and restock.
3. Repeat #2 until you go upward of 90 days without restocking.
4. Every 89 days minimum, adjust orders by 0.01 isk to reset the expiration timer.

If I were end up using that method, it would be really convenient if my stocking tool could tell me which items I've run out of. This feature took all of 60 seconds to implement.

Trade: Syndicate pilot project

I haven't gotten around to finishing my trade profit tool, but I have made actual progress on the the trade front for the very first time.

I put together a list of items using k162 space's list of high volume pvp items, modified so that it provides only 150 items, so that it provides a few other items (mobile warp disruptors, capital fuel, etc.), and so that you can assemble a working generic pvp fit for all the ships it provides. With 150 items per hub I can theoretically operate up to 12 trade hubs with my 6 characters, jump clones allowing.

I picked a system in Syndicate that happened to have a decent volume of kills in the last 24 hours to set up in. There's at least one other real hub in the region, but whatever. Set up cyno characters (with jump clones, so I can jump back and forth to my building/research area).

The items total about 10 billion isk, and moving them in took 5 trips with a jump freighter. Now we just have to wait and see if it's worth the effort.

Regarding the capital market: It's back, baby

No idea how long it will last, but right now things are looking acceptably shiny for us builders.

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

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.

Trade: Putting the cart before the horse

Since I've got extra isk piling up, it's past time I got another investment going. Alas, trade is the only thing that comes to mind.

I'm not at all interested in hauling things between hubs or doing margin trading, so that leaves stocking systems. To that end I've written a handy program to tell me which items I'm missing in which system.

First run after deleting the database

Now all I need is one which will tell me if I'm actually making money.

~Epic crisis~ over

Tower stronted, labs are back online, and, most importantly, dickstar mods are anchored and I actually know what to do with them.

At the very least, I expect to attract a better class of nuisance.

War update

Yeah, they totally dropped the wardec. Now I just have to rep the tower and anchor dickstar mods.

Lesson learned -- when wardec happens, labs go offline, other things go online.

On a side note, in case anybody was wondering what the pos gunning interface looks like:

Oh snap

Remember, kids: Listen to your readers.

I hadn't quite gotten around to putting scary modules on my tower to ward off nuisance wardecs, and seem to have pulled one.

In theory just onlining guns should make it too much of a pain to bother killing, but I've contracted some mercs to make it a sure thing.

An post about the blueprint price increase

Prices have settled down, and it looks like almost all capital hull and component blueprints have increased in price by 11.15%. The exception to this is the rorqual, which barely changed at all. Because the rorqual price increase was small, my estimate that my net worth had increased by 21 billion isk was slightly high; the actual figure is 18.49.

Of course, at the same time that happened I have also had 7 naglfars worth of isk disappear from my balance sheet when I reprocessed them for components. That isk will reappear in a month or so when the runs built from those components finish selling, so the large gain on my financial report will show up probably next month.

Capital blueprint price increase?

The price of capital ship and capital ship component blueprints from NPC sellers has risen over the last few weeks, and I can't find anything in patch notes. Does anybody know why this is happening?

I'm not complaining or anything - if NPC prices stay where they are today the increase of 10.9% will have increased my net worth by 20 billion isk - but I am very interested as to why this is happening, where prices will stabilize, and what's going to happen next.

I said I wouldn't do it, but I did

Just bought 7 naglfar at 150-170m (8%) under mineral price for the purpose of reprocessing into components. This will save me ~1.2b over my next few production runs. I'm still not completely sure this little project is worth my time, but my next financial report is going to need that extra bit of profit.

Monthly financial report

"Is it march already?" edition.

This was a pretty bad month. Slow sales on everything, low margins on ships. My profits would have been under 10b (which has become my gold standard for my science+industry deal) even if I hadn't dropped 2b on a tower which won't start returning profits for another ~40 days.


EDIT 2012-3-4: It turns out that I may have understated my profits this reporting period by about a billion isk, but all of the above statements are still true.

Phoenix and naglfar selling below mineral cost

If you're planning to buy one of these, now is the time. If you're a capital manufacturer with standings for refining, you can make some isk reprocessing these for components.

I'd do it myself, but eyeballing the forge market the savings from buying out ~8 below-cost hulls and moving them to my building system would only amount to about a billion isk -- which to me isn't worth the time and effort.

In which I have a research tower

Welcome to che rani, my corporation's shiny new research tower:

The numbers for this turned out to be favorable -- approximately a 60% increase in profits over using NPC stations.

It was a reader, once again, who pushed me into finally giving this a try. He and/or she was also the one who joined my corp to provide the standings, which is pretty chill.

Newai, the upshot of this is that I now have 45 personal material research slots (and 45 PE slots) with no wait times, which also run faster than NPC slots. I also no longer have to move blueprints through lowsec, faction warfare, and gatecamps; my research-replacement-ship-blueprints project will finish substantially faster; and I will spent a lot less time autopiloting back and forth to frick'n kourmonen.

45 slots is somewhat less than the 66 research jobs my characters can install, but I figure about a third of the research time will be spent on time efficiency research, so things should just about work out.

Helpful hint: Kourmonen has 100-125 research slots (depending on FW level), and I have 65 jobs running there. If you're looking to do research in an NPC station, that might be the place to go, seeing as how the wait times are going to drop substantially over the next few months.

Heavy industry 4

Last one of these, I promise. This is 126 jobs -- as many as I ever expect to have running at once with my current setup.

This is slightly more than last time.

January monthly financial report

"Super rich" edition.

A year or so back, when my net worth was somewhat lower than it is today, I decided to assign a precise isk value above which one is part of the "super rich". The number I came up with was 300 billion, that being enough to buy a titan, and then replace it, and still have a titan's worth left over.

Conveniently, this method can also be used to deliniate other wealth levels: Three supercarriers run 75 billion, or "very rich"; three dreadnaughts are 9 billion, "wealthy."

Anyway, this month I passed the 300 billion mark (not counting e.g. characters and implants, obviously). So, huzzah or whatever.

I guess the next major goal is 1 trillion, but I expect to hang out around 300 for a year or so as there are some purchases I want to make. Getting to a trillion would take something like five years at this rate anyway.


In actual financial report news, this was another very bad month for capital sales but I had a bunch of blueprints come out of research and make up for it. Unfortunately, I will not be producing this many per month in the long run; closer to 13-ish.

Mineral compression: An illustrated guide

EDIT 2014/9/7: With the release of Crius, this no longer works. Do not use it.

Introduction:

 

Some items which are built with minerals have substantially smaller volumes than the minerals required to build them. Additionally, some such items can be reprocessed with essentially no loss. Combined, these features allow us to move in a single run volumes of minerals much larger than the cargo hold of the ship we are using to move them. This is especially useful when moving minerals to lowsec or null.

Step 1: Acquire compression and decompression stations.

You probably don't want to compress minerals in jita 4-4, so find a highsec station with wait times low enough that they won't be an issue.

In order to decompress minerals without loss, the station where you reprocess your compressed minerals needs to have a minimum reprocessing rate of 40%, and you may need good reprocessing skills on top of that (see "refinery efficiency" and "scrapmetal processing"). Additionally, there must be no reprocessing tax. In NPC stations this means you must have 6.67 (or thereabouts) standings with the owning corporation. In player owned stations, you will have to ask your alliance.

Step 2: Research compression blueprints.

 

There are various blueprints you can use for this, but their functions are pretty similar. The only major difference I have been able to find is that some blueprints (e.g. scripts, ammo) only use a few types of mineral. If you are building ships, as in this example, a gun blueprint (e.g. "425mm railgun I") will get the job done. Guns are nice because compared to ships they use vaguely similar ratios of minerals.

For serious compression, I recommend researching 10 blueprints to some relatively high level. I went with ME 262 (because that's how much I could get in a month) and PE 20 (just because). Note that it is important for all your compression blueprints to have exactly the same material level.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Step 3: Acquire your minerals.

 

For this post I will be using my capital production run number 110 (2 chimera, 2 thanatos, 2 archon, 2 moros) as an example.  The minerals for these are worth 11 billion isk, and have a volume of 7.2 million m^3. This is equal to eight trips in a freighter, or 20-ish in a jump freighter.

• Note: There is some loss involved in mineral compression. It is very small - I measured it at one-fortieth of one percent at my material level - but it does exist. This is a nonissue for me, since I already round the third digit of my mineral quantities upward and do periodic corrections. This is easy to do, so you might be well served by doing something similar.

Step 4: Move the minerals to your building station.

I recommend using a freighter.

Step 5: F yeah, spreadsheets.

Let's face it, this is what you've all been waiting for.



Your spreadsheet needs 3 columns and one field. The first column is the quantities of the minerals you want to compress. The second column is the quantities of those same minerals which you need to build one unit of 425mm railgun I (or whatever).

The single field is equal to the quantity of tritanium you want to compress, divided by the quantity of tritanium used to build one railgun, all rounded down to the nearest whole unit. This is the number of railguns you are going to build.

The final column is equal to [quantity to compress]-([quantity per railgun]*[number of railguns].)


Click here to download the tool pictured above (open document format).

Step 6: Fill in negative values.

Some of those numbers are negative. Wat do?

Write down the numbers in red. This is important. Then, buy those precise quantities of minerals and put them in your building station with the rest. These will be recovered later.

• Note: I recommend having a station container in your building station to keep filler minerals in, so they don't get mixed up.

Step 7: Install runs.

As you see above, we have 5,139 railguns to build. This number is not evenly divisible by 10, so what we do is drop the 9, giving us 513. We add 9 to the first run, and use 513 for all the rest. This gives us 1 run of 522 and 9 runs of 513, for a total of 5,139.

(See how having 10 railgun blueprints makes things so very, very, easy?)

If you do it right, after installing all 10 runs the stacks of minerals which were in red will disappear.

Step 8: Deliver railguns.

Pretty much self explanatory.  Building all these railguns from one blueprint would have taken most of a month, but by dividing them into 10 runs our production time is less than three days.

 

Step 9: Move minerals to decompression station.

Our left-over minerals this run came to 46k m^3, which is slightly more than normal; usually, the leftovers fit in a cloaky hauler. Still, leftovers plus railguns do fit comfortably in my jump freighter.

Note that the compressed volume is 1/23rd that of the uncompressed minerals.

 

 

 

Step 10: Reprocess into minerals.

Step 11: Recover excess minerals

 

Remember those numbers you wrote down back in step 6? This is where you use them. Split the quantities of minerals you added in order to build the railguns off from of the stacks of reprocessed minerals, and put them in your cargo. When you head back to your compression station, drop them off in the station container you have there so they can be re-used next run.

Subscription precession

I started paying for my subscription with plex about two years ago. At that time my subscriptions were due on approximately the 10th of the month. Since then, the day they are due has been moving - slowly but steadily - toward the beginning of the month. This month the subscription date finally fell over to the previous month, meaning I am buying plex at the end of this month instead of the beginning of next month.

This is expected behavior. A "month" subscription lasts 30 days, while a year lasts 365.25 days. This means that you "lose" 5.25 days per year. Below I have circled the day my subscription is due this year in red, and the days it will be due this month in subsequent years in blue. Note the 6 day gap between the 16th and the 10th, which happens because 2016 is a leap year.

 
We lose a month about every 6 years, and losing a full year would take place over a 70 year "grand cycle."

Isk per effort: Capital manufacturing (with mineral compression)

I did this a while back. Now I'm re-doing it with mineral compression and a larger run.

The standards used to track time are basically the same, but simplified: Only time actually spent interacting with the client (or my spreadsheets) counts toward the total.

This means that time spent in warp does not count.  This might seem strange, but it makes sense when trying to calculate isk per effort rather than isk per hour. I will also make an estimate as to the isk per hour, just for reference.
 
This time I have attempted to itemize the time spent:

Initial spreadsheeting: 4:19
Buying minerals: 5:13
Moving minerals to compression station: 1:48
Setting up compression runs: 4:32
Delivering compressed minerals, moving to lowsec, decompressing, and moving to building station: 13:24
Installing component runs: 7:54
Installing ships runs: 2:50
Delivering and selling ships: 5:00
__________________________________
Total time: 45 minutes.
 

• Note: Some numbers are based on good estimates rather than actual stopwatch time.
• Note: All 10 minutes the cyno was up were counted toward the total because I couldn't work on my second monitor during that time. This may be revised in the future.

I used run 109 (2 rorquals, 2 chimeras, 2 thanatos, 2 archon, 2 moros) to generate these numbers, and rather than waiting for the ships to actually sell I used today's hull price numbers to calculate my profits. This came out to a profit of 2,096 million, or 13%.

This is a shitty margin for capital manufacturing, but it still comes out to 2.8 billion per hour of effort (compared to 1.1 billion before mineral compression). If profits come back up to 30%, isk per hour of effort could exceed 6 billion.

Estimating isk per hour, I get a total time elapsed of about 1 hour 50 minutes (this may be revised in the future). This comes to 1.1 billion isk per hour (2.5 billion at 30% profit). However, do note that most capital builders reprocess in the same station in which they build. If I could do that, this estimate would be approximately 50% higher.

An comment reply

Regarding why capital ship prices have gone to shit. Figured this deserved its own post.

>Is it increased competition or like Anonymous above might have attributed to with new players in the Capital Manufacturing market place?

It's possible, but I haven't really noticed anything tangible in this regard. It could be that the new builders are doing it in faction war zones (which the forge isn't) and faction war types are buying ships there instead of coming to forge.

>Has something changed in Null Sec to make the demand for some the Capital Ships no longer as much in demand?

This would be my bet. It has been my observation that higher demand for capial ships usually happens when there are wars on, and over the last few months the only "wars" have been more like police actions. I would bet that a real nullsec war would cause things to pick up.

However, the exception to this rule is rorquals, demand for which rises when there aren't wars on. And roqual prices have crashed. This is worrisome.

>Do you believe that the publishing of the series of How to Guides for Capital Ship Manufacturing have played some role in the process of attracting new players into the arena as well that may now be affecting your own profits?

That I know about I have inspired half a dozen people to start building, but I very much doubt my posts could have a measurable impact on the overall market. I personally represent (IIRC) slightly less than 5% of the forge market.  Forge is only one region, most builders have smaller operations than I do, and most people who try to start capital production give up after their first ship.

Though, I am the second search result for "eve build capial ship".


tl;dr I have no idea.

Science and industry update

"Well, shit" edition.

Capital ship prices decided not to come back up after all, and it has become necessary to place a hold on my rorqual blueprints, which have long been the backbone of my manufacturing project. 5 of 9 capital ships are not worth building at this point, accounting for 9 of the 17 hull blueprints I own (to be fair, though, nag and phoenix have been out of production for more than 6 months).



The buildup of hulls sitting in my hangar instead of selling has caused a liquidity pinch, and I haven't been able to replace capital ship component blueprints (which I research and sell) as they come out of resarch.

My plan to deal with this is to start pricing unsold hulls to sell rather than waiting for profits to come back up, and to use the liquidity from that to buy component blueprints to research -- putting the isk back to work for me.

In order to mitigate this problem in the future I intend to have extra capital ship blueprints, so that when one hull isn't profitable I can replace it with one that is. Have to stop revelations? Add moros blueprints. Have to stop nidhoggurs? Add a chimera and an archon. My plan is to finish getting my replacement set to "highly researched" levels, then put my current set in until they're at the same level, and keep both sets.

Project status:

Capital ship manufacturing: This is technically still operating at capacity, but that will cease to be the case over the next few weeks as my nidhoggur, revelation, and rorqual blueprints fall out of production.

Component blueprint research: In progress and making solid profits, though I have about 20 research slots going free. This is being dealt with as noted above.

Replacement capital ship blueprints: These are in research, ETA 1+ year.

Spare capital ship blueprints: Waiting on replacement capital ship blueprints. ETA 2+ years.

Trade: This is still in pre-planning. It's not something I'm particularly looking forward to, and I can't afford to start it up right now anyway, so ~whatevs~.

Ten ships in five minutes

This sometimes happens.

Suddenly, railguns. Thousands of them.

One run worth of railguns. One of the smaller runs -- most end up producing slightly more than one jump freighter worth of rails.

This is nominally fine, since I also move mods and fuel to sell, but I am thinking of reducing the number of ships per run from 10 to 8 for this reason. Also because they would compress a little faster (the latency is higher than I'd like, since I'm doing compression in jita), because I wouldn't have to split jump drives into 2 manufacturing runs, and because 8 is 2^3.

I should have a post out about compression sometime in the next month.

December-ish monthly financial report

December was the worst month for capital manufacturing that I can remember. Low demand resulted in prices of practically everything collapsing while at the same time ship hulls built up in my hangar instead of selling, and I have had to put a hold on 4 hull blueprints. At the same time mineral prices rose by about 14%, squeezing profit margins from both directions. At the time of writing it looks like hull prices are increasing to match minerals, and minerals have just dropped back down by 8%, but the market could really use a good war.

My change in net worth figure this month is very low for those reasons (many of the ships shown actually sold last month, fewer ships carried because of slow sales, and the ones that did sell had worse margins), and also because putting this report out a few days late means I bought 4 plex this reporting period instead of 2 like usual.

This is what happens when I don't log in for a week