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.
Wednesday, August 15, 2012
Thursday, August 2, 2012
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
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.
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
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:
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.
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.
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, July 2, 2012
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:
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:
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