Project Hades Out, Project Foo In

A couple weeks ago I talked about how I was thinking of restarting Project Hades, my wormhole planetary production venture. I logged in my little holding alt I have in that system and realized I had completely forgotten about Player-Owned Custom Offices. Sure enough, every planet was covered and had a 100% tax installed.

Well shit.

Fortunately, I was directed in the comments to that post to Foo's Eve Musings, a small industrial corp that might be willing to have my alt on board to do PI for them in a wormhole. I talked with the CEO and we worked out the details: he would ignore Kirith's murderous tendencies and allow my alt into the corp, and I would be able to do PI and sell it to him at a discount price under trade hub prices.

This works for me because it means I get access to good quality planets but don't have to stress over the getting-products-to-market or product storage which was the real killer for the original Project Hades.

So Project Hades is out, Project Foo is born.

First step is to get the command centers I will need and find out where the wormhole exit is next time I am logged in.

Project Hades Rebooted?

I'm strongly considering restarting my wormhole planetary exploitation operation once again, code named Project Hades.

Essentially Project Hades was a setup in a class two wormhole with a static high sec exit in which I produced Robotics and Coolant using my alt Kornielia. It made some ISK on the scale of 150-200 million per month for very low time investment. I shut it down last year as I didn't have time to run the whole thing and moved Kornielia and her Orca out of the wormhole, but since it was a nice system I left a probing alt inside.

Now, I find myself facing a problem in that I've given up my normal sources of income. I no longer work for the Eve Tribune or EON magazine so my income is now completely dependent on the ISK I get from Eve News 24 for articles they choose to syndicate and my in game activities; activities which tend to cost money and not make money.

So I need to do something to bring in more income before my bank runs out. PvE activities do not seem attractive to an anarchist like me, I prefer to do something more offline. I enjoyed the PI when I was running it so I think I will set that up again.

Now, how best to do it...

Project Hades Status Report

Yesterday I received my latest shipment from the wormhole and it marked 9 weeks of effort. I did a quick estimate of the value and combined with the sold value of the other loads I've picked up I've made about 440 million ISK in 9 weeks, or roughly 48.8 million ISK a week. That's with one character and five planets with advanced command centers.

My colonies have been streamlined and are only producing robotics, coolant, and oxygen with some surplus water being shipped out as well. My latest load had 1941 Robotics, 4435 units of Coolant, and 87189 units of Oxygen (water was negligible) which values around 160 million due to the rising prices of robotics and coolant.

I know there are people who are making more ISK with different strategies but I'm happy with the amount of effort and return I am getting now. I am considering dropping Oxygen production for more coolant factory lines, but its only a minor thought. We'll see what the new planetary interaction changes bring in Incursions.

It's Been One Week...

So its been one week of the colonies running in Wormhole Hades and its time to do a review of our progress.

I have five colonies setup using advanced control centres which is the max for my current skills (although I'm training now for elites centres and will train for a sixth colony). I do not plan to make another character doing PI as I don't want this to become a chore. I primarily log in before leaving for work in the morning and reset the extractors on 23 hour cycles, expect the Oxygen producing Gas planet colony which I put on 4 day cycles. This past week I have been checking in on the colonies in the evenings to make sure I don't overproduce or underproduce on the extractors so that I get a nice balance of not building up the P0 resources while not have factories sit idle too much.

Fig 1 - Week One Results

The week one results are above in figure 1. As you can see, one week produced about 37.5 million ISK worth of good at the best Jita buy orders sufficient to move my volume. That translates to roughly 150 million ISK per month. This does not include the the prices of the command centres or colonies themselves, but its safe to say they will be paid off after the first week of operation, while the ongoing cost of moving goods from the surface to the customs office (and vice versa) will be absorbed easily.

The next question is whether or not I should specialize and drop the Enriched Uranium and Mechanical Parts from my production chain as end products (since the Mechanical parts are used in the construction of the Robotics, I would still make them, just use them myself). I'm surprised the Mechanical parts are cheaper than coolant and enriched uranium actually because the latter are not used in tech II production like mechanical parts are.

Wormhole Colonies At 100%

I've got my five wormhole colonies working fairly smoothly now, although I realized to my horror this morning I forgot to set up some factories for making enriched uranium. Back to the drawing board I guess.

The two gas planets pumping out Oxygen at one and Coolant at the other are pretty much working alone without much fiddling required. I've got one plasma planet getting two resources and one lava planet getting the other two resources required for Enriched Uranium, Mechanical Parts, and Robotics, I just need to get the factories sorted and ratios of extractors proper. No biggie. I am doing basic manufacturing on the plasma and lava planets, but I export the resources and move them to a temperate planet with dedicated advanced factories.

Eventually when I get Elite command centres I'll rebuild the plasma and lava colonies, and maybe the others too, but that won't be for a month. Once I get all my colonies functioning as I want (including some Enriched Uranium lines), I will calculate my daily income.

Trust? In my Eve?

Last night the PvP channels were quiet and the corp chat was low numbers of people mostly plexing for ISK to pay for the next shiny PvP ship. I checked my channels and my partner for Project Hades was online which was good because I hoped it would mean he could help me get my probing alt and Korneilia with an Orca full of Command Centres into the Project Hades system (herein known as Hades Prime).

He agreed and pulled me into a channel with the current original residents whom I shall call the Fish People like my partner Nhi'Sidaris does on his blog. Apparently Nhi has worked with the Fish People more closely, even going so far as exposing his own Orca to danger to help them close wormholes. Our non-aggression pact has been upgraded to mutual cooperation pact.

The static high sec wormhole was in deep Amarr space, somewhere in Devoid region which was 20 jumps for my prober in her frigate and 25 jumps for Korneilia in her Orca. Yuck. Nevertheless, I decided to make a run for it. While I was busting my ass we chatted with the Fish People in our shared system channel and talked about things like the new salvage ship being released in the next expansion (I take credit for that due to my scathing editorial in the Eve Tribune about how the gift ship Primae was a wasteful shame ;-) ).

My probing alt in her frig got to the high sec system first and one of the Fish People provided a warp in to the wormhole. No funny stuff, but who wants to gank a tech 1 frigate when an Orca is on the way?

Half an hour later the Orca arrived. I warped to the womrhole and the Fish People CEO says in chat, "My Broadsword is going to lock you on this side of the wormhole, but don't panic. Its for webs."

Alarm bells start ringing. Should I trust him, this guy I don't know from Adam? Should I decline and stay in high sec? They had plenty of opportunity to get Nhi'Sidaris' Orca... but this is Eve. Trust no one.

So what did I do? Does anyone remember me saying that the super carrier made everything else seem cheap and expendable? Yeah, I jumped. Without hesitation.

Sure enough, the Heavy Interdictor locked me up as I started to align, the bracket turned red as the webber took hold... but no bubble or point. I aligned and warped out without a problem. There are good people in Eve after all.

With that I logged Korneilia out and back into Kirith to help clear out a plex with a Tengu I had. Nice PvE ship it is, lots of DPS and agility with good tank. This week I shall begin setting up my colonies in Hades and see if we can't make a new decent revenue stream.

Project Hades

So yesterday I talked about how my universal alt was causing problems as I sought to send her off to wormhole space. Well, here is post where I describe the reason I'm trying to ship her off to unknown space.

My low sec planetary colonies were doing well after I mastered the art of colony layout for efficiency, but I wanted to increase volume of production without adding a second character with colonies. I would have liked setting up shop in null sec but didn't want to break my alt's neutrality to null sec politics so that high sec remained safe, nor did I want to deal with hostile gate camps at crucial pipeline systems.

The perfect solution appears to be wormhole space: null sec resource volumes with possible easy access to high sec with diminished threat of gate camping. Working with my long time former mentor Nhi'Khuna from Drone Mutiny blog the search began for an appropriate wormhole system.


What Defines Appropriate?

My goals are to produce POS fuel for my corporation and alliance. I did some spreadsheet calculations and came to these rough numbers:

In essence, the ratio of needed POS fuel items was roughly equal to the ratio produced per cycle (ignoring the different cycle times as you go up the chain, some fine tuning will be required as time goes on) so I am quite confident that a system with Plasma/Lava planet(s) along with some Gas and Barren would suffice, with Storm filling in for Gas in a pinch.

My associate located an excellent C2 wormhole with a static high sec exit that suits our purposes perfectly, with a plasma and lava combo and some gas and barren to fill out the needs. He's started colonization and I'm working on moving into system this week as the stars align and I get some time.

Dicey Negotiations

Of course, the system is not unoccupied already. A small corp is living there and is hesitant about working with us, but have agree on paper to a non-aggression pact. That doesn't mean we'll be safe or even safer, but its better than pure hostility. As long as we don't infringe greatly on their resource gathering which appears more directed at harvesting sleepers than planets, we should be OK.