Trade Log: Planetary Interaction Part 2: The Factory Planet

So, when I took over management of the planets I decommissioned two of his Hek based colonies. They were a flawed idea, but one of them is salvageable.

The reason I chose this planet, is simply because of the tax offered by the owning corporation. Really, if you have a planet in a hub system, keep the tax low. People will flock to your planet for factory purposes, and your profit will be huge: factory planets can host many capsuleers, since they don't compete for extraction.

It's a pretty much standard factory planet. P2 materials go in, P3 comes out. Have  look below. I've annotated the factories so it's easy to see how it's set up. Not that it's complicated...

Looks pretty right? It's current set up is wildly optimistic though.

It requires 120 Mechanical Parts, and 120 Consumer Electronics per hour to run full time. From this it can produce Robotics at a rate of 36 units/hour.

At conservative market values off 55,000 ISK, that would net about 1,980,000 ISK per hour in sales. This leads to 47 million/day, and  total of 1,425,600,000 ISK/month.

Not bad, huh?

Of course that's not the reality of the situation. Import and export taxes cut heavily into this, and if you're buying raw materials from the market, you'll be working with market forces... which usually are as fickle as the sea. Or so I've heard. The sea's the big open air water tank on planets right?

So you're probably wondering, why are we starting with the final product? Surely it'd be easier just to work out what we can harvest and produce from that right?

Well, if you're a miner, then yeah, you can do that. Life is simple. Go out, get rocks, sell rocks, and money is as good as the number of rocks you get.

Planetary interaction is a bit trickier than that. You could follow that plan with raw materials, buuut, you'll be better off hunting the low grade hoodlums in Hi-sec. Hek, you'd be better of mining.

Factories are the limiting factor in P.I. You can extract all the raw material in the world, but you'll only end up with warehouses full of junk whilst your factories chew through the material. Hence, we start with the final product, and work our way back.

In this case, the final product is Robotics. Why Robotics? Because everybody uses them, from POS fuel manufacturers to those dedicated Tech 2 production guys. Markets good, volume traded is high, and high volume usually means steady price... exactly what you need when you don't want to spend to much time messing with your mud ball.

We'll start by filling up this factory planet. Is that possible? Well, I don't know yet. We need to hit the spreadsheets.

Next time we'll look at the spreadsheet I created to wrap my head around the production line, and explain the step I went through. Then you can copy it and compete with me.

Why am I doing this again?