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 |
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[caption id="attachment_418" align="alignleft" width="64" caption="I Am Your New Master"]  [/caption]
[caption id="attachment_421" align="alignright" width="150" caption="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.
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.
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.
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?
I’ve updated the ore-values-by-jetcan listing on the left sidebar. These values reflect relatively current buy-weighted, market rates for the refined products, assuming a 100% rate of refine and 0% taxes. The relative distance to market is not compared, nor are low-sec regions included. I realize again that this doesn’t fit everyone’s needs, nor does it take into account the value of Omber/Kernite on contract for mission runners. That said, it does offer a quick metric to see how profitable a certain ore is/isn’t going to be. I tend to just hit a belt or a deadspace site and work on everything from Veldspar on down. To each his own.
I also want to take this time to remind all of my industrial friends that CCP has pretty much stolen the old Doritos slogan, “Mine all you want, we’ll make more.”
Well, there’s been a complete dearth of posts from myself as I’ve had a very busy two weeks. Though I’ve been able to fly around a lot, I haven’t had much time to sit down and compile a coherent thought. [Those of you who are reading this, stop laughing at the last statement about coherence.]
We removed a couple of no-shows from the corporation. It’s always a tough decision to make, but after only popping in once after joining, you begin to wonder at their future potential. We’re about as laid-back as you can get in an industrial corporation, but we do prefer at least some warning that you might be scarce for the next couple weeks, months, years. On the flip side, we’ve had three new people join us that are shaping up nicely to be good support for the corporation.
In a comment to a previous note, someone asked about the exact difference that the training skills made in terms of skill training. I’m working on adding all of this up and will try to get a more complete answer calculated. I know for instance that training your learning skills can reduce the time to get into a Hulk from over 90 days to slightly less than 60 days [including time spent on the learning skills. Similar calculations are true for PvP, PvE and Market Mavens. I'll try to have a more complete answer for you in the future. Have to spend some quality time with my trusty calculator.
On a related note [calculations], I’ve managed to rebuild my spreadsheet [with kudos to Letrange for an interim sheet while mine was reduced to electrons] to a pre-crash state. It’s a good thing that the School of Applied Knowledge trained me well to handle this sort of thing before I started piloting around the rest of the galaxy. I can now reliably pick various BPO’s that we own and run the numbers to see if we will make a profit on them. Given that we mine almost all of our ore, the manufactured products are technically all profit, but realistically only if we make more off the pieces than we make off selling the minerals outright. We could undercut a lot of markets to move merchandise, but would only be hurting ourselves. By giving the inventory full market value, we cut into our profits as well as weaken the overall market by potentially providing a cheaper source of refinable ore. I’ve done the same thing to others by buying large quantities of items that were more profitable when refined and either resold or manufactured into to more valuable items.
I’m working at slowly rebuilding my wallet as well after spending a lot of getting some production underway. I’ve got a fairly decent supply of various T1 drones on the market and they are providing a steady [if somewhat low] amount of income. I’m also working on doing a lot of jobs for the FedMart corporation out in Everyshore. I need the ability to refine my ore out there more than I have loyalty to my Caldari upbringing.
More to follow…
I finally finished up what I considered a fairly good set of mining skills for a high-sec carebear-ette. All I’m lacking is the full set of T2 mining crystals. Additionally I thought I would start working on getting started on some production skills. I finally got that rolling along and realized I should be inventing as well.
I had decided at about three to four weeks into my pod-pilot career that I should focus on running any missions with one particular NPC corporation. I looked around at what I wanted and decided I like what Lai Dai had to offer. They covered a spread spectrum of endeavors and didn’t seems to rule anything else out. I wanted to fly for them as well, but it seems their rigorous application and acceptance procedures excluded me because of a technicality of my Achuran heritage or some such nonsense. I liked their spread of stations and coverage as well as the offerings from their LP store, not the least of which was the much vaunted ‘Highwall’ HX-2 mining implant.
So after specializing for a long time and even catching some flak from my then corp mates about not using ‘their’ corp and agents, I managed to get enough standings for a perfect refine. A couple of weeks later I was able to get a jump clone. And finally last week was able to afford my much coveted implant.
All of this to say, I have a lot of standing with them and was curious if there was a way to continue to leverage that to my benefit. Well, it goes back to one other reason I had selected Lai Dai originally. There are a lot of research and development agents within the Lai Dai corporation and they cover a large area of space and range of research endeavors. I looked at the spread and realized I have access to all off their R&D agents and was only lacking the prerequisite skill areas to begin earning research points for datacores. The datacores are requirement for invention of all kinds of various modules.
I started with Hydromagnetic Physics. Why? Well, my study of Ice Processing had required that I gain more than a passing familiarity with Hydromagnetic Physics and so I could immediately access high level agents by training Research Project Management. On a side note, RPM is a charisma heavy skill in the science field that for an Achura is painfully slow to get trained. I’ve stopped training it after four rounds as it will take another month to maximize it. In the mean time, I’ve also picked up Caldari Starship Engineering so that I can possibly work on some of the ship invention as well as sell some extra datacores.
The final skill endeavor has been to get some exploration work done. I had learned enough Astrometrics to use all the various exploration probes and some of scanning speed training, but knew that at some point I would need to move into a tech 2 ship to take full control of exploration. So I embarked on a journey to train Electronic Upgrades V I could train for a Covert Ops frigate. On a somewhat related side note, it turns out I need that for something completely unrelated. Manufacturing. Really, Manufacturing? Apparently you need various encryption methods for invention which require some skill at hacking which in turn relies upon… Electronic Upgrades V. So coming full circle, I’m training for scanning again so I can invent the T2 mining crystals so I can train for level IV of the various ore refinement skills to be able to use them in my modulated strip miner 2’s. Whew. I sure hope I don’t need to train any other skills along the way… 
Quick update to the price per jetcan of mined ore. I’ve dropped Morphite from the list as well as sorted it from least valuable to most valuable. Kernite has edged slightly back in front of Veldspar for value, but Omber is still lagging. Low-sec and 0.0 miners can still make a mint from picking up the truly massive Veld-roids that no one else bothers with.
Still scanning for some more gravimetric sites.
Gah! Argh! Crap! Good Grief!
It all runs through my head and makes my want to scream at all the little wires coming out of my head. Surely in this modern age of reason, enlightenment and more importantly interstellar, faster-than-light space travel, we could avoid something small like a software glitch. Right? Wrong.
As is more often than not the case, when something goes wrong, it goes Completely, Utterly Wrong™. This happened when I was working on my lists and calculations for mining, research, manufacture and what-not. I was merrily bouncing back and forth from my research data to the calculations and all of a sudden. Poof. The calculations were gone. Gone as in no apparent trace of them being open. Logs weren’t helpful as it merely said, “Something has gone wrong,” and no other details.
So, I started over from semi scratch. I had a backup from 3-4 months ago and some data from Letrange to begin building with. I’m no so terribly upset about losing the spreadsheet as it can be rebuilt. I am terribly upset, however with myself for not having a more current backup of it and for losing all the BPO information I had just hand keyed. I’m sure there is a way to automate the process and just have to note the current ML/PL on a given BPO and have it spit out the mineral list and costs, but I’m just not up for that. Hopefully I’ll get something sorted out in the next couple of days and be back at work.
In the interim, I’ve been running some missions for my R&D stand-bys, Lai Dai. They’ve been good to me and I try to repay the favor when ever I can. Note: I’m not all that fond of running missions, but they help generate a little side income, some LP for the store and increase standings.
[EDIT: This didn't get posted when it was written on 13/1/2009 for some reason. Apologies to those who might have been wondering what happened to me in the interim.]
Just as a quick post, the price of Tritanium has skyrocketed over the last week. Prices in some areas have broke 5 isk/unit and many low-sec areas easily in the high 4’s. In high-sec hubs there are regular orders of 3.8 isk/unit. The price for a jetcan of Veldspar then has broken 3 million and is rapidly approaching 3.2 million as I write this. Currently it takes amost twice as much Omber to equal Veldspar. I’ve updated the sidebar to reflect the price changes. Interestingly enough, the other minerals have mostly fallen in the wake of tritanium’s climb.
In other mining news, my corpmates and I have noticed that there seems to be an overall decrease in the size of asteroids available. Due to heavy mining, many belts are being kept in a perpetual state of regeneration and only about 50% full. It means more work as we try to keep up with production demands and resource management.
On an unrelated note: shout out to Kyle Langdon and his Journeys In EVE who recently stumbled across Our EVE here. Update the Isk/Jetcan and you misspelled my name!
It’s been a busy last couple of days. I have been perpetually thwarted by every attempt to undock. First it was a family emergency that required more than my passing attention to the information being fed down the hardwiring. Then there was a business trip to meet with a potential client for ongoing mineral sales. He was wanting to buy consistent quantities of certain minerals on a guaranteed schedule at or above market rates. The problem turned out to be the client’s backers were slightly less than reputable or even honest. It wasn’t shaping up to be a good time. 
I managed to get back into the Lou Ferrigno and get several million units of Veldspar, Scordite and Kernite mined. Now that I have the standings with those Tash-Murkon Family posers, I can refine for more than I can sell the ore for. I don’t have the manufacturing skills yet to produce much with it, so I go for the profit. As I was making trips back and forth to the station, I would check the available mission ops for something interesting. The next to last trip in I noticed they were offering a chance to retrieve some minerals for war and knew the area would offer some Gneiss as well. I’m all for working through kind of ore I can get, so I pulled my records on the area and saw some battleship sized baddies.
I have been putting this off for some time, but I finally broke down and fired up heavy missile training. I hoped this would help it go a bit more smoothly. I checked my training times to make sure I could get it finished before the mission offer went away. Knowing that it was going to work, I flew off to make the last couple of jumps on the last sales trip. I’ll have to let you know how the heavies work out in real world practice. I might miss the missile-per-second firing rate of my seven little assault launchers.
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