When we last visited Project Vulcan, aka my capital ship building enterprise, I was working in conjunction with my partner Ragelle of the Manufacturing Confusion blog to produce Orcas; I'd build Cargo Bays for both of us and he'd produce the rest, to the rate of two Orcas a week.
Things were going well enough that I took over my own personal production of construction parts and my liquid ISK had grown to a point where I was able to buy all the minerals ahead of time and I was considering what BPO to invest in next.
But I was recently contacted by Ragelle and told he was taking a break from EVE. He contracted me his stockpile of parts and graciously lent me his BPOs to make use of while he was away. After a quick reorganization to clear the backlog of parts and minerals (building four Orcas the past week), I am getting back into a new routine and plan to continue producing two Orcas per week myself.
So, after 46 Orcas sold since the start of Project Vulcan (aka Phase I) my average profit per hull was 74.865 million ISK and a total profit of 3.444 billion ISK (before the capital investment costs of the BPOs).
So what's the next step? Well, I do want to expand into carrier production and for that I need enough liquid ISK to afford the BPOs I still need which turns out is quite a few. I might be able to get started with some BPCs for the smaller quantities of parts but I still need to do the math.
I've toyed with the idea of seeking investors for the next step up but I like being my own boss and not worrying about keeping someone else happy. Still, if there are any readers looking to be a silent investor, let me know and we can work something out.
For carriers, you want to have a hard look at the ratios of BPC's that you need. I have my Archon BPO to PE 3, and need 127 capital components to build a ship. Of that 127, 45 are Capital Drone Bay components. The next closest quantity of any particular capital component is 10. So you need at least 4.5 times more Cap Drone Bay's than anything else. That means a lot of buying of BPC's from the market, which can hurt, or you end up buying more of that BPO. I am certain that the smart cap manufacturers who are in for the long haul have a complete set of BPO's, with extras of Drone Bays, Construction Parts, to name a couple that I remember.
ReplyDeleteOh, and the spot price for an Naglfar BPC is flat nuts atm. You can thank the goons at making some people a real nice profit on just copying the BPC and selling it if they have a well researched BPO.
I used to build caps, and it is not exactly a fun business. I am sure you are aware by now that you buy your mins at price 2 or 3 weeks ago, but the spot sales price of the capital ship is based on current min prices, not the logical price of what the mins cost you 2 or 3 weeks ago. It is not logical, but that is the market.
So you essentially have to be a mineral price speculator as well as a manufacturer, unless you have pre-orders, and the buyers will hold to then agreed upon price.