Nullsec Moon Mining
Posted: 2011-11-17 Filed under: industry, pos | Tags: dysprosium, neodymium, technetium 4 Comments
Have you ever wondered where the deep pockets of Alliances get created? Moon goo.
It has been almost a month in our new Alliance and we have started discussing setting up a moon mining network in order to bolster the corporation wallets. Since we have limited knowledge of the reaction chains, we have decided to start simple. Perhaps I will take the time to go up the reaction chain and see what items we can make that would truly be profitable. For now, we’re going to start small and just pull the Moon Materials and haul to market.
In an established alliance, the good moons are most likely property of the Alliance. The profits from Tech, Neo, and Dyspro often go to the Alliance wallets for programs such as ship replacement or war efforts.
Given this, our moon selection list is rather limited and we’re left to claim some of the lower profitable income streams. As with everything industry related in Eve, run the numbers first to see if it is even worth your time for the profit.
Recall that time is very important in this game. Why should I spend hours manufacturing a Drake to sell in a mission hub that nets me a 2-3% markup while I can go shoot NPCs for 100M+/hour (Incursions).
Here is the workup for a typical nullsec moon that we have available for claiming.
| Material | Profit/Month (M) |
|---|---|
| 1. Hydrocarbons | 13 |
| 2. Silicates | 122 |
| 3. Silicates | 122 |
| 4. Tungsten | 39 |
| +296 |
Using the new fueling price model in the Crucible expansion, running a Large POS is highly unprofitable as it costs 360 M/month to fuel. Income from harvesting basic materials will only be profitable using a Medium or Small POS as they cost 180 M or 90 M/month, respectively, to fuel.
A Small POS lacks the necessary Powergrid and CPU to run 4 Moon Harvesting Arrays and Silos so we need to setup up to a Medium. Even with Faction Towers, I was only able to get 3 Moon Harvesting Arrays and 3 Silos to run so we’ll have to not mine the Hydrocarbons.
180 M to fuel and 283 M profit means a 103 M/month or 24 M/week profit which in my book is hardly worth the effort. We will have to either get a better material to harvest or explore collecting these lower profit materials to react into Processed Materials or continue further down the reaction chain into Advanced Materials.
k162space 
You just made moon mining almost sound … easy. Granted, a lot of the headache is in the numbers, and then in the logistics, heh.
Very good point on ISK / hour, too. Saddens me when people fail to see that one.
The reason you could only set up three moon miners is that you can only mine each type of material once. Even if it is listed as being there twice abundant. CCP never made the T2 moon harvesters that could pull 200 units an hour. You need a med tower to run a simple reaction and a large for complex ones. Akita T did a really good excel sheet on the profitability of every reaction and posted it in the old forums. Here is the link: http://www.eveonline.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=1262712 Hope it helps. It should point you in the right direction at least.
The ISK/Hour ratio isn’t that good. What you should do to optimize it, is to look for moons that have ready made materials for Processed Materials. Like Silicates + Hydrocarbons = Carbon Polymers. That would take 2 miners, 2 coupling arrays, 1 reactor and 1 silo = 3310 CPU.
Hey, any chance to get your spread sheet or have you update the costs in your chart?