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