Tech, the market, and reactions

[ReallyMatter]

Lets talk about Fullerides for a second.

The recipe is

100 tech + 100 Plat = 200 Platinum Technite per hour.
100 Hydrocarbons + 100 Silicates = 200 Carbon Polymers per hour.


100 Units Carbon Polymers + 100 Units Platinum Technite = 3000 Fullerides per hour.

6000 Fullerides per hour at 720 hours per 30 day cycle is 4320000 units per month.

4320000 X Jita average 2670 = 11534400000 potential isk per month.


Now lets talk raw tech.

You will need 720 hours worth of tech before you eve make the first isk.

720 X 100 = 7200 units of tech. Tech is selling at 124968.00 per unit.

That is an initial investment of 899769600.00 before you make the first isk.

Lets assume you can get the Carbon Polymers from some random ass moon in the middle of no where since you have to have at least 1 tower anyway to react the stuff to Fullerides.

Now to get full potential of your reactions you need 2 Caldari Large towers.

Fuel Costs per tower is lets be nice and say 115375000.00 per month X 2, because you have to have 2 towers to get full production line going.

So we have an investment of 9 billion 232 million in hopes you can earn 11.5 Billion that will give you a net gain of 2.2 Billion per month. Which means you will need 4.5 months to make your initial investment back before you start making profit.

This seem like a hellova lot of work and risk for so little return considering I can run level 4 missions for 1 - 2 days a month and make about the same isk with little to no risk.

What am I missing here?

Not to mention Fullerides is an easy reaction as far as keeping up with it. And how the hell is anyone gonna undock from Jita 4-4 with almost 9 billion in a freighter without someone ganking them, let alone make it home with that freighter remotely safe.

So help me out, how is anyone making any isk with reacting tech? Unless you do it in the NC and deliver it to Jita.

Am I wrong in thinking you can even try to do it?

[Jean Leaner]

And how the hell is anyone gonna undock from Jita 4-4 with almost 9 billion in a freighter without someone ganking them, let alone make it home with that freighter remotely safe.
?

This is the only part I can speak to. Neutral freighter, Courier contracts, general freight containers. If you put the plastic wrapped item into a container, it can't be cargo scanned.

[Jacabon Mere]

your fuel costs per month (in non sov 0.0) is very optimistic. I calculate 300mil profit per week using 3 large gallente towers, which only need checking every 3.5 days. Rather then every 44 hours.

In total you will probably be doing 4 hours of actual work a week. so thats about 75 mil an hour. Albeit with a very large startup investment.

[Brooks Puuntai]

Nvm read your post wrong.

Iam assuming you are talking about buying everything raw and doing the reactions? If so nothing is really worth reacting if you have to buy all the raw mins, especially with the way fuel prices have shot up and will continue to do so.

Not to mention Fullerides is an easy reaction as far as keeping up with it. And how the hell is anyone gonna undock from Jita 4-4 with almost 9 billion in a freighter without someone ganking them, let alone make it home with that freighter remotely safe.

When I had to move large quantities of moon mins/reactions to and from empire. I switched between neutral freighter alts, used insta-undocks out of jita 4-4, would have rapier alt ready to web along the route, and if I was really paranoid I would do the container/courier trick. However I never moved 9b at a time and usually only ran 3-4b max at a time.

[Calderus]

As discussed above, there are ways you can reduce risk of hauling. I never buy or haul a full month of inputs or output at once. I actually tend to do a freighter run roughly twice per week - so my working capital is a fraction of what you're citing above, not saying your math is wrong at all, just smaller, more frequent turnover. I keep the cargo value <3Bish and live in moon tz, so substantially less likely to get ganked; freighter runs are afk, so not much work really. The risks that worry me more than a freighter getting ganked are (1) someone shooting your towers and (2) market risk - although this is somewhere in the future - I'd rather not be holding 5B in Tech/tech dependent outputs if/when CCP announces they're 'fixing' tech.

Overall though, I find spending 1-2 days running endless L4s to be utterly unpalatable. Been there, done that. I'd much rather make my 3-4B per month (using more than just a pair of towers) doing <5 hrs of work a week than try to grind that in missions.

[Petyr]

The answer, like most industrial activities in EVE, is scalability. While it may not be a profitable use of time to run 2 reactions compared with other activities, if for almost the same time investment you can run 20; then it is an efficient use of time, (although perhaps not capital, depending on what other activities are available). Just as running missions is more profitable for the single-account or dual-account player; this activity does not scale well adding additional accounts past that point; while less profitable per-account activities such as mining can scale well with 5, 8, even as many as 10 or more accounts. So too reactions. It is not much more effort to run 20 (10 towers) than 2. You should calculate this based on however you're doing your logistics - 1 full jump-freighter (or whatever conveyance you're using) of products is a good metric as most reactions are expansive.

Using your fulleride example, 2 towers worth will produce 900m3 per hour in products and will need to be emptied every 44 hours (although you can run a less fuel-efficient operation and chain multiple product silos together to raise this #, allowing you to do say, weekly empties, instead of every-other-day). Every 388 hours you will have a full Rhea's worth of fullerides and be ready to go to market. Adding more towers means you go to market more often - no matter how many towers you run, you're still emptying silos about every other day if you run the most efficient setup possible. Therefore you can scale this activity 8 more times (16 towers) and do essentially the same amount of work.

It does not make it any more or less profitable to buy all your inputs or obtain them through other means. Things are worth what someone will pay for them; therefore the profit or loss inherent in the activity of reacting should be calculated using sell orders for all inputs and POS fuel, and buy orders for all end products. Any profits made from buying inputs via buy orders, or selling products via sell orders are in fact trading profits, and you can obtain those whether or not you choose to run the reactions at all.

If you are able to obtain at least some of your inputs via mining, through space/moons your alliance controls, that will aid your logistical efforts greatly. As will being diligent and finding out which reactions are genuinely the most profitable. It make no sense to run 2 simple reactions and 1 complex if one of those 3 reactions is more profitable than the other 2, (and there is a sufficient market for you to be able to sell your product). Simply concentrate on the most profitable step, and do more of those, (possibly until you exhaust that market, at which point then yes, do diversify into the next most profitable reaction).

I make no claims regarding risk or efficient usage of capital, I merely wished to remark on the issue of scalability which is often overlooked when people run these back-of-the-envelope calculations.

[ReallyMatter]

Thanks for the replies and help, I think I can get some carebear on without losing my mind. However it still scares me a little dealing with that much of an investment, I got rich off tech earlier when I was able to see what CCP did to tech when they nerfed Dypso and Promo.

I bought it like it was going out of style a few weeks before the patch hit and made some serious bank, I still have quite a few billions worth in Jiita that I release to the market every weekend so I dont crash it :P

I guess it wont hurt to give it a go and throw a few billion in there and see what happens. I have never ever run any reaction chain ever, so it will all be new to me.

Any tips and tricks are welcome.

[Petyr]

If you don't have other people you can rely on for some of the logistics involved it's a soul-destroying experience and you might want to consider just using your isk to do arbitrage trades or buy some cap component BPOs and run monthly builds. Reactions require that someone logs in every other day and at least empties silos. While you may do this anyway with EVE - I think you'll find that being compelled to do it for such an unfun thing will quickly kill your interest in the game. You need to spread this task out on a few different shoulders to avoid the inevitable burnout. If you don't have some people you can do that with you won't be running very many reactions for very long.

[Phey Onat]

I disagree that running 8 reactions compared to 2 is "essentially the same amount of work". It's true that multple reactions can piggy back logistics but the actual maintenance of the towers is additive. If it takes 10-30 mins to empty and reonline a POS (depending on if its fuel day) then adding more towers adds 10-30 mins. This can be nullified by additional operators but the the work has increased.


Your assumptions on the reaction are mostly correct. The ROI for Fullerides is around 15%


Also, god help you if you miss a day of emptying silos when you're reacting shit that expensive.