Isk Per m3

22/02/10 10:55 PM
Jaspet 43.86
Hemorphite 49.76
Omber 54.21
Pyroxeres 62.98
Hedbergite 64.65
Spodumain 74.14
Veldspar 75.97
Kernite 80.27
Plagioclase 86.08
Scordite 92.41
Dark Ochre 99.29
Gneiss 105.88
Crokite 191.13
Arkonor 220.85
Bistot 230.63

Industrial Quandry

How do I balance my own progress with that of providing for my corporation and or alliance? As an industrial character who has spent a fair number of hours learning to build nice things, how do I remain profitable while supporting  those around me?

If I produce for the corporation and/or alliance, the expectation is that there is some kind of break in prices. As a conscientious industrialist, I am going to tell them how much it costs me and where it’s more than the market, suggest that they obtain it there. Where it is cheaper to build, I want to offer them the opportunity to get it cheaper and be there for the people that help make it possible. I have found that I am quite horrible though at maintaining the balance necessary between things produced for sales [the market] and those manufactured for consumption [the corporation/alliance]. Often then the result is a complete halt to my industrial tendencies.

This is often further complicated by my relative incompetence and disconnect with the sales and marketing side of things. I am quite comfortable in navigating the market, getting the resources I need, etc, but just as equally uncomfortable putting my wares up for sale. Finding holes, navigating gaps, incremental adjustments, market trends all tend to elude my grasp, leaving me with a very real sense of dissatisfaction with the sheer number of things I could be doing to maximise my profits, but are generally left undone. I envy both the selfless industrialist who is able to provide everything her corporation needs as well as the ruthless profiteer who is able to judge the market, jump into the fray and make obscene profits.

As a corollary to the above, there is also a push to be involved in corporate and alliance activities that are somewhat beyond my level. I am fairly competent at combat in sub-battleship roles, but could always use more experience and training in weapon systems. I’m quite happy to spend the time training for better weapons, drones, fittings, but have to balance this with a desire to also be able to improve my abilities to support my corp-mates with industry. Has anyone else figured out to do it all and do it well yet?

It is certainly something to work and think through.

Bring on the Bistot

[caption id="attachment_418" align="alignleft" width="64" caption="I Am Your New Master"]I Am Your New Master[/caption] [caption id="attachment_421" align="alignright" width="150" caption="Bistot Is Primary!"]Bistot Is Primary![/caption]

Quick note: It looks like Bistot has edged Arkonor out as the mineral of highest refined value. Due in large part to the fact that Zydrine hasn’t fallen in price as much as Megacyte.

How To Fail

Hip, hip, horrific are the words we sing
Hip, hip, horrific is our thing -(TMBG)

As I look around and back at the posts I’ve written for the last year or so, I am reminded how well things have gone, but also how spectacularly I’ve managed to fail. If you are looking for pitfalls to avoid – you’ve found them. If you want to see how not to train for something; look no further. If you would rather have less isk at the end of the day, then this is your lucky blog!I want to be there!

Seriously, the posts that inhabit these pages are filled with the heartache and misery of a pilot bashing her head against the same asteroid day after day after day. At the end of the day there is a hangar full of veldspar and tritanium, some trash modules and a ship that desperately needs a tune up. Along the way the pilot has learned that you shouldn’t trust another pilot but you have to trust the other pilots until they fail you. You can’t put 4000 m3 in a GSC and there’s no way to get a station container out of a station. Overheating missiles is not so effective and skilling up adequately for boosters is going to be very expensive.Little Hammer Forge

There are a few bright spots along the way. Namely, the ships and modules that have been opened up through a varied training programme that includes tech 2 mining equipment, logistics cruisers and some command ships. This is easily countered by the fail combat skills that barely allow for named heavy missiles on a Drake and some lame, unsupported rails on a Moa. It’s rather comical sometimes to be able to fit a full Tech 2 tank on every ship in the game, but then realize you still only have the equivalent of light weapons for armaments. Fear the fail firepower of 150mm rails on a Ferox! My heavy missile Drake of Dewm causes fits of laughter when people can safely orbit at 55 km and pick off my drones and then me.
Low DPS [Divide by 7]

Other suggest that I should be proud of the fact that I can invent nearly anything possible on the market, but even that seems to fall flat. I have consistently managed to lose money or break even on Tech 2 invention and production. My volume approach is low and slow, so as to be moving backwards in appearance. I can train people to use the towers, labs, production facilities, but seem to fail in doing so myself. What was I thinking! Science is for smart people. Production is for people who are actually motivated.Dreams Shattered Like Asteroids

So what have we learned from all of this:

  • Train all the skills you possibly can [let's start with 231]
  • Train a wide variety of skills to level 5 [53 is a good number]
  • Science skills help you store lot’s of SP [9.6 million and counting]
  • Collect ships [So you can collect dust]
  • Every 3-4 months spend everything you have on one ship setup and then poke a pirate.

And I think I’ve rambled on enough for all of us today. And that is how to fail.

New Orca Work

Words fail
Buildings tumble
The ground opens wide
Light beams down from heaven
She stands before my eyes

– (TMGB)

Because I’m always a bit distracted and doing 20-30 different things at once, it often means that I hit things hard and hope I get enough to keep the project afloat until I get back around to it again. One of those projects is the ongoing Orca development project that manages to be purely theoretical in nature. All this means, I don’t actually produce Orcas, but I come back and look at their production costs in relation to the current ore/mineral prices. In update to a post of long ago [Orca Production Calculations], the following changes have been made:

An Orca can currently be broken down into its component pieces and then sub-costed into their mineral components. The overall picture doesn’t include any of the manufacturing costs and assumes NO Material Efficiency research. I am putting the picture of the calculations in this post, but I’ll try to summarise the numbers for brevity as well.Spreadsheet Breakdown of Orca

To produce an Orca requires 7 component blueprint and one ship blueprint that all average around 1.1 billion each to purchase from the market. Each of the seven components will cost approximately 4 million in minerals on average [3.2 million - 5.5 million]. Combined with the total number of each component, the cost to produce an Orca is currently approximately 310 million. Since I’m not selling Orcas, I feel comfortable in suggesting that market prices ought to be around 350m allowing for profit margins, research costs and capital paybacks.

If mineral costs continue to fall, Orca prices could stabilize as low as 325 million. Adding rigs to them will still push them up over 400 million. The cargohold optimization rigs are still running over 30 million each. The addition of the ore hold has drastically improved the Orca’s flexibility and original role performance.

The Big Big Whoredom

No, no, baby I ain’t convinced it ain’t so bad as you paint it
There’s plenty more heads of hair for us out there – (TMBG)

In case you don’t regularly look at minerals on the market and in case you might not noticed the prices of ore across the board have fallen sharply. In some cases, the minerals are lower than they’ve been in over a year. Things like tritanium are now abundantly available and no longer cash cows that they had become. Even the high end minerals that have historically been expensive are coming down. I don’t have a picture for the greater market as a whole as I just don’t keep up with everything, but I do keep a fairly close eye on minerals [the ore chart keeps getting updated].

I’ll refrain from speculating on the causes. Causality is a slippery slope that eventually leads to politicians philandering and your milk turning bad.

The results have not yet begun to filter down, but a cursory analysis [scribbling on back of an Al Abd picture in my pod] indicates that it could affect Tech 1 production costs by as much as 15%. While this good for the producers, I doubt we’ll see a corresponding change in consumer prices anywhere near that much, if at all. Maybe it will finally pay off to make T1 things again?

Asteroid Value Chart

I like to be able to quickly evaluate a set of asteroid choices and decide what I want to mine. It can be confusing to me to have to get out the spreadsheet and calculator to figure out how much it’s worth to mine such-and-such if I refine it and sell it. To that end, I started the Isk Per Jetcan calculation that were originally posted on the front page. I’ve modified that a bit now to just be the Isk Per M3 calculations and then to know how much I can get relative to the others.

The combined Isk Per M3 and Isk Per Jetcan table is listed below. I try to keep these updated on a weekly basis for my own usage, but you are welcome to refer to them as you like.

Omber 61.83 1,700,364.81
Jaspet 63.20 1,737,866.53
Hemorphite 76.66 2,108,249.00
Pyroxeres 85.09 2,339,987.41
Scordite 93.35 2,567,046.59
Hedbergite 95.51 2,626,552.05
Plagioclase 103.01 2,832,832.01
Kernite 103.60 2,848,914.30
Veldspar 105.10 2,890,386.05
Spodumain 176.06 4,841,549.30
Dark Ochre 183.82 5,055,147.06
Gneiss 196.46 5,402,750.49
Crokite 363.37 9,992,732.56
Bistot 492.13 13,533,464.57
Arkonor 504.03 13,860,887.10

Through the Veil

And so it happens. There is the past that is always with us. There is the present that is always running away from us. And finally there is the future that never quite manages to get here. There will always be another ship to build, another system to swim, another skill to train, et cetra. From my past I have trained to be a good scientist. For the present I am working on a few small projects, but the future draws my eyes to the misty veil of time. What then shall I do and where shall I go? Do I need this or that skill to get it done and how best to proceed in that direction? The future is always full of questions.

One of the things that has changed radically within the universe that we all swim through is the way new capsuleers join us. As technology has improved and the cloning and pod-pilot technology matured, we arrive at our current place where not only can you improve yourself towards any desirable end, you can also improve and train in what would seem like no direction at all. Now a pilot can not only improve her ability to learn skills that improve her ability to pilot ships that improves her ability to learn/earn/kill/thrill, but that same pilot can utilize the new technology available to rearrange the very fabric of the brain to enhance certain basic attributes or reduce others.

The veil around my own future has grown quite thick, and I am left without real pictures of what it will look like. There have been some things that I have always wanted to do, but given the lack of direction, I let them wander. I also know that sitting here in this present and expecting to get a clearer view of the future will never cause the past to go away or said future to become clearer. I have decided then, to walk off into that veil of mist. I have been to the new technology, and drank deeply of its mind altering draught. I am now as balanced in ability as any and only break down and cry a little about my slightly slower skill training in science on days that end in “Y”.

Moving Forward Through Time

Greetings from the past. I have arrived here to continue what was begun with a previous post on perspective. I wanted you have some background as I looked back at some of the things that have been going on lately, as well as what will happen in the future.

To some extent, we are all fellow time travelers. We do not exist here and now, independent of our previous self or actions. No matter how much we would like to be unassociated with what we might have done, or reconnected to a prior success, we are temporal creatures, bound by our own definitions and limitations of time. Now that was an incredibly long way to say, we can’t change the past and must proceed to the future while living in the now.

I have made some questionable decisions in my past. I live with the ramifications and know that my ships will someday all swim with a captain that has made those same mistakes in her past. But the ships all keep swimming. They have no mistakes made, no past memories, no baggage brought forward. Her Abbadon swims in the same space that her Burst does. Thankfully your Typhoon doesn’t regret not getting the mission time bonus any more than my Drake does.

I studied long and hard to learn how to invent things and do it well. I managed to pick up a few ships along the way, but not nearly like others have done alongside me. Most of my corp-mates can fly battleships [and a few of them even know how to fit them], while I am very happy in a battlecruiser sized hull. I don’t have much ability to deal damage, but most every ship I fly can soak a lot of it up. I have a lot of my training invested heavily in science and I have loved every minute of it.

Some Perspective

From an early age, listening to my parents wax eloquent about the physics behind their Micro Warp Drives and the best way to insure success when inventing various tech 2 ships, I was hooked on science. I received my first home-datacore set when the rest of my playmates were still tinkering with frigate models. I was far from the only Achuran to be born to in Inventor enclave, nor the only one to like science and pursue that as a career. But on the other hand – I also had a great passion for the way the universe was knit together and was determined to understand it all!

I quickly graduated with advanced degrees in a broad range of science fields related to capsuleer endeavors and knew that to continue to learn and explore I would need to get out of Saisio and be able to visit the stars. I managed to barely scrape through training and prepare for the transition into the life of a “pod-pilot.” Don’t let anyone lie to you, the necessary pseudo-suicide, transneural burning scan to jump into the waiting pod-clone was painful [and it still is]. However, now I was free to swim through the stars in a super-massive space fish.

My parents, through good investments with and years of working for the megacorporation, Lai Dai, had managed to accrue a significant sum of interstellar credits and fitted me with a modest Bantam frigate and some direction to pursue. I headed for the stars and began working toward my dream as a free-lance inventor. I left the construction details to various station-side facilities, sales were done by other representative and I left the ship in the care of the knuckle-draggers. I knew how to fit a mean scanning ship or mine with the best of them, but even the thought of combat was something that was endured as a means to an end. To that end, I was spending every last ISK that I could generate on buying the skills to train and learn.

A Monumental Decision

I’ve decided to take the plunge and jump on the wormhole bandwagon. Several corp-mates and I are going to try to make a go of it and see if we can’t make some isk, have some fun, shoot some Sleepers and generally do some things we haven’t done before.

We planning to take a tower, fuel, ships, modules and ammo with us to see what all we can find. We’re still working on what exactly that will all look like when we actually jump through. I’ll try to post some of what we’re taking and why.