Lifeblood Is Live

The age of Player Owned Starbase moon mining and reactions is over. Long live refineries!

Actually, I hope refineries are not long lived. I hope they die a lot. Because this guy is build Athanor Refineries and it's good for business if they keep dying.

Speaking of business, I've got a lot invested in Athanor production. I had previously purchased materials for 10 Athanor builds but I added another 5 builds to the queue after I got 7 orders for them in the weeks leading to the expansion. In order to minimize time to delivery I decided to bite the bullet and purchase two Athanor Blue print originals which takes up almost all the remaining capital the corporation had available.

In other words, I've invested ~15 billion ISK in materials to build Athanors, and 11 billion ISK for the blueprints. Do I expect to earn more than 26 billion ISK in return? Definitely. Once the initial rush is over I'll research one of the Athanor BPO to reduce build time and then sell the other one for minimal loss after that, recovering about 5 billion. The 15 Athanors I build will pull in at minimum 20 billion ISK I estimate, and at that point we are almost breaking even. Long term, we'll make our ISK back, but how long will it take?

Each Athanor build takes 3 days and 5 hours. Say 3.5 days to account for times I can't get them out and next one into the oven right away. With two lines going, it will take ~25 days to build the first 15, so say a month to sell them all assuming demand continues to remain strong.

Also, I have an audit coming up in November, but I might wait until later in the month to clear the baffles of all these structures for the most accurate picture of how we are doing.

Preparing for Lifeblood

With the Lifeblood expansion announced as arriving October 24th, and people expressing desire for refineries as quick as possible after they go live, I've began planning out based on information on Singularity what I need to prepare.

First thing is make sure I have enough ISK on hand to purchase an Athanor BPO. It looks like the Tatara refinery BPO will be too expensive, in the Foritzar range (40 billion ISK), but the Athanor will be in the Astrahus ballpark (5.5 billion ISK) and thus picking one up on day 1 will be easy. Maybe get two and try to churn out as many Athanor's as possible early on to get that early adopter price gouging.

Looking at the Athanor's BPO requirements, I saw that there was two new structure components: Structure Electromagnetic Sensor and Structure Acceleration Coils. I lacked original blueprints for either of those, and they are available on Tranquility server already, so I scooped them up and threw them in the lab for material efficiency research right away.

With those details taken care of, I went to my spreadsheet to update it with information about the blueprints and get an idea for the raw mineral and Advanced Planetary Interaction item requirements for building an Athanor refinery. Rough estimate puts it roughly on par with Astrahus as expected.

With that in hand, I looked at the wallet and decided to lay down ISK to buy minerals and components to build 10 Athanors right out of the gate. This is to satisfy my alliance mates looking for structures for the moon mining race, and for the open market. With those stockpiled, I can see how much liquid capital is left and start planning out the next purchases.