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.