Making Profits with Reactions

Posted: 2012-01-08 | Author: | Filed under: industry | Tags: , , , , | 9 Comments

A very popular way for starting an income stream at the Alliance, Corporation, or individual level is to become involved in the T2 production chain by reacting moon materials. The process requires you to set up a tower with Reactors in either nullsec, wormhole, or lowsec (below 0.4) space. Reacting cannot be performed in highsec space.

The goal is to take Reactants and by either a Simple or Complex reaction process, produce a product further down the T2 production chain.

Here is an example of the costs for setting up a Vanadium Hafnite chain.

Setup Costs

1x Caldari Large Tower (230 M)
2x Reactor Array – Simple (5 M each)
6x Silo (4.8 M each)
1x Shield Hardener – Ballistic Deflection (round out the Caldari tower resists)
2x Shield Hardener – Explosion Dampening
2x Shield Hardener – Photon Scattering
144k Vanadium (month worth of reactants for about 284 M)
144k Hafnium (316 M)

Hourly Production Breakdown

Reactants:
200x Vanadium – 400,000 + 200x Hafnium – 439,786 = Total Per Hour – 839,786

Products:
400x Vanadium Hafnite – 2,358,188 = Total Per Hour – 2,358,188

Profits

Reaction Net Per Hour (Products – Reactants) – 1,518,402
Reaction Net Per Month (Hourly x 720) – 1,093,249,440

Fuel Costs: 370,000,000 (est)
Tower Net Per Month: 723,249,440

Notes

Reacting moon materials is a new industry line for me and I have discovered a few items to take into account before you go out and setup your own reaction chains.

I picked a Caldari tower due to the stability of Nitrogen Isotopes as compared to the recent Oxygen Isotope spike caused by Goonswarm’s Ice Interdiction campaign. Yes the Caldari tower lacks the Silo bonus, but the costs of Oxygen Isotopes at 1,000+ ISK/unit drastically eat into profit margins.

You have to take into account POS defense. Hopefully you are a member of a major nullsec powerhouse with Alliance sanctions to run your own unregulated towers. If your tower were to become reinforced (always always always have Strontium Clathrates in your tower), you (hopefully) have the backing of Alliance members and Capital ships for defense.

No you say? For the non-Alliance aligned industrialist, you are limited to lowsec or better yet wormhole space. In lower class wormholes, such as C1-C3s, Capital ships cannot travel through wormholes due to mass limitations so you are limited to being attacked by Battleships or smaller. A popular setup is a C1/C2 with a static to Highsec as this makes getting materials and fuel around very easy. Remember with lowec or wormhole space to take in account the lack of Sovereignty, which will affect fuel consumption rates.

Another point to note is the wild nature of the Jita moon material market. Prices fluctuate as many people are heavily involved in price manipulation. A month after I started my reaction chain, the prices fell and then someone bought out and reset the price of Vanadium Hafnite in Jita right after I put my stock up for sale.

Note the 2M+ unit volume spike. This did work in my favor as my stock was all bought so I now have more liquid ISK but if I had some more Vanadium Hafnite being processed, I could have higher profit numbers as I would be selling at the new 4,300 ISK/unit price.

Real World Profits 

Due to my lack of attention to full Silos, and that I estimated my profits closer to a 4,000 ISK/unit sale price, my monthly profits were much smaller than expected. My estimation was about 723 M/month yet I only was able to produce about 384 M/month off of one tower.

The next time I setup a reaction chain, I will not go with one reaction and I will investigate not only Complex Reactions, but chaining your reactions. This is where you take your Resultants and put them into another Reaction chain. From speaking with other Alliance members that do reactions, this seems to be the way to increase your profits.

War is Good for Business

Posted: 2012-01-06 | Author: | Filed under: industry, market | Tags: , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Rule number 35 in the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition states that “war is good for business”.

In the world of Eve, major wars mean that shinies are going to get destroyed. Your Maelstrom going boom drives the economic engine. People, Corporations, and Alliance all need to be resupplied either from local production or hauls from Highsec (due to the current terribleness that is nullsec tech2 production).

The below graph shows my trading activity in differing regions based on the number of transactions per day.

I started recording trading data in November of 2010 and saw an increase in transactions until January 2011 as Evoke and friends were being pushed out of Cloud Ring by the Pure Blind locals.

From February 2011 into July of 2011 the amount of trade conducted in Pure Blind slowly faded as I took up more operations in Cloud Ring supplying Wildly Inappropriate and Goons on the war path into Fountain to remove IT Alliance.

A major shift occurred in July as I was called into Catch to assist AAA defend from the Russian invasion. On August 6, 2011, I saw the largest amount of transactions ever recorded in Catch. This was due to a large push by AAA against the invasion. After the fall of GE-8JV, the heart of Catch for AAA, the majority of people were on a full scale evacuation out of the region. This, combined with my disinterest in Eve at the time, caused my trading activities to fall idle.

In November I came onto the production and trading scene again in Pure Blind to help build up the war effort into Branch and that is where I currently stand. It appears that Vale of the Silent and Tenal are next on the list for invasion so perhaps I will get involved in those campaigns.

2011 Trading and Industry Reflection

Posted: 2011-12-30 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 5 Comments

Overview

Moved my operations completely out of wormhole space and into known space. Attempted to get into the 0.01 fast flip market in Jita and Amarr. My interested in Eve faded over the Summer with the lackluster expansion and Monoclegate sentiments. I eventually expanded into Capital production with the acquisition of Carrier and Capital Part BPOs. Later on in the year I attempted a Invention/T2 production line but ultimately decided it was far too click heavy for the effort.

Profit Summary

The start of the year, I found great market niches and was moving 35-40 B/month to achieve around 7-9 B/month profit. Later on in the year due to personal life commitments and a lack of interest in Eve, I wasn’t logging in as frequently; I found that I was moving about 15-20 B/month in order to turn a 3-4 B/month profit.

Top 30 Items of 2011

The image on the right shows the top 30 items by profit for the last year. This was definitely a breakout year for me as I experimented with the market to find what Ships, Modules, Implants and other items produce the best profit.

#1 Large CCC’s. The best performer as these rigs are used in Capital and Battleships to reduce the Capacitor recharge cycle time.

#2 Capital Shield Transporter I. Producing Capitals in lowsec and keeping these items on the market was a great cross sell.

#3/4 Large Rigs. No surprise here as these are put in every Battleship.

#5 Maelstrom. I was slow to move into the Maelstrom market but after looking at the standard 2011 nullsec Alpha fleet doctrine, I quickly realized that I needed to be trading these heavy hitters — pun intended.

#6 Ishtar. This HAC was a surprise performer for me as they kept getting sold. My theory is that they are great AFK mission ships.

#7/8. Capital ship and the popular module. Easy cross sell like the Shield Transporter.

#9 Noctis. Everyone wants one.

#14 Oxygen Isotopes. I did not make any profits from the GoonSwarm ice interdiction. I was working through a stockpile of about 2-3 M Isotopes before the announcement hit. I was trading all four racial Isotopes but due to the popularity of Gallente towers, Oxygen Isotopes traded better than the other three.

#19 Hulk. Surprisingly a good performer. The majority of Jita flips came in at 5-6 M profit each.

#21 Dominix. The Space Potato is a great mission ship.

#22 Anshar. I wanted to build one as the project was a end-game build for an Industrialist. Details about the build costs and profits can be found in this post.

#26/27/29 Blockade Runners. This item was also a nice discovery once I started trading them.

#30 Dramiel. With the nerf in Crucible, I have seen a slow down in sales.

#12/13/18/20/24/25/28 Implants. People die.

SQL Profit Query

If you have your own wallet table, here is the query I used to pull up the stats for the year. Granted I took the output and made a nice table with it using PHP, but you can easily work with this query.

$sql = ('SELECT typeID, typeName, sum(profit) AS totalProfit, sum(quantity) AS totalVolume
				FROM wallet
				WHERE DATE(transactionDateTime) > DATE_SUB( DATE( :eveDate ), INTERVAL 365
				DAY )
				AND personal = 0
				AND transactionType = "sell"
				GROUP BY typeID
				ORDER BY totalProfit DESC
				LIMIT 30');

2012 Prospects

I’ve found a new, painless method for moving around large amounts of minerals using compression techniques. The new Tier3 Battlecruisers have great market potential not only in the ship hull, but the associated Large guns and modules.

I have been considering shutting down the Capital operation and venturing into different areas. This will move about 20-25 B worth of BPOs into liquid ISK. More spreadsheets are needed to illuminate my path.

Not the Olive Branch I Expected

Posted: 2011-12-21 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline, screenshot, ships | Tags: , , | 2 Comments

As primarily an industrialist, I don’t have a large array of skills placed into Gunnery, Missile Launcher Operation, or rusty buckets such as the Maelstrom Battleship. I can, however, pilot a T2 fit Hurricane. With Triathlon season over and my Swimming team on winter break, I had time to fly in the current CFC Branch Campaign. (Side note: check out this thread and see if you can find me).

A call for Alphafleet came out on comms and I suited up in my Hurricane.

After staging we were out running around Branch and blowing up towers. Our FC for a fleet of about 100 was calm and collected. I can’t tell you how much I do not enjoy FCs that yell and spam commands, “GO GO GO GO LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK LOCK PRIMARY BLAKE PRIMARY BLAKE PRIMARY BLAKE”. I really only want to hear the order twice for clarity.

Jokes were had, outlandish pictures were posted in local, and while waiting for a a Tower timer, we all started up MS Paint and made drawings of our FC.

Our Maelstroms will blot out the sun!

Disillusioned at Eve

Posted: 2011-12-15 | Author: | Filed under: eveonline | Tags: , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Don’t worry, I’m not disillusioned, but I wanted to highlight a recent topic on reddit.com/r/eve called Disillusioned at EVE. Can we talk, /r/EVE? If you haven’t been exposed to the r/eve or r/evedreddit you should spend some time reading over the content. The discourse is far more productive and insightful than the pitchfork wielding masses on the Eveonline.com Forums.

The poster talks about his experience amassing a lot of ISK, grinding out in PVE sites, and becoming involved in large-scale nullsec fleet warfare yet still not finding anything truly rewarding. When I started playing Eve in 2008, the end game for me was a Nyx Mothership (this was before the name/role change to Supercarrier). It was a beautifully designed hull that seemed to my virgin eyes as the end game of Eve. Once you pilot that ship, nothing could destroy you. How things have changed…

I have lived in highsec, wormhole space, and now I’m making a home in nullsec. I’d like to reiterate the line that ‘Eve is what you make of it’. Right now I am finding solace in managing corporation financials.

The poster talks about how large-scale nullsec warfare is a lot of warping around, blobbing, and hot dropping. I have no rebuttal to that as being involved in nullsec at the moment, this is what we do.

From reading a lot of opinions over the months, I have come to the conclusion that the PVP experience in wormhole space is keeping a lot of people interested in the PVP aspect of the game. If you look at the numbers coming out of CCP, activity in wormhole space has been increasing since it was introduced.

The mass limitations in the lower classes keep capital ships from traveling between spaces while higher classes limit the capital ships that can be brought for an engagement.  The design of this mass mechanic is truly brilliant and it is what has kept the spark in veteran and newcomer PVP’ers alive.

A few people have suggested to the poster that he should find an active WH Corp so perhaps he will go with that suggestion and find a new passion.

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