Hello everyone!

In the upcoming Summer release we are making a lot of changes that we expect will impact player behavior surrounding manufacturing, mining and starbase use. We see an opportunity here to make some adjustments to the way that Jump Drives consume their isotope fuel that will hit a few birds with one stone.

The goals of this change are:

• Stimulate the isotope (and therefore ice) market to help cushion any drop in demand from players using smaller starbases after the science and industry slot changes.
it will more likely an increase, due to opening all systems for POS towers!

• Help encourage cost competitiveness for local resource gathering in nullsec.
probably won't happen this way, because people use "best" ship for their needs, not the "regional optimal" because you can the ice there

• Although we don't expect this change to significantly impact behavior around jump drive power projection, it should at least provide a small incentive change through higher costs for moving huge capital fleets often.

yes, it would be more expensive,but the big alliances give a "****" on higher cost of moving their fleets!
So it will mostly effect the small Alliances, and the usage of JFs.

The plan for this release is to start with a 50% increase in the fuel cost of all jump drives and jump portals, and adjust further if necessary once we see the results. This change applies both the the base consumption of ship based jump drives, as well as the isotope consumption per kg of mass on all jump bridges and portals.
IF you truly want to do it, please do it in the first or second point release, after that time it should be obvious, if this change is really necessary!

To compensate for the extra isotopes that ships will need to carry, the volume of all four isotopes will be reduced by 1/3, to 0.1m3. Thanks to Resgo for some excellent feedback.
this change becomes unnecessary, if the increased fuel usage doesn't come.

The storage volume of jump bridge starbase structures will be increased by 50% since Ozone volume won't be changing.
this would be also obsolete

For reference, this will increase the cost of running a max skilled Rhea from Jita to RIT-A7 (jump drive transit the whole way) from ~50m isk to ~75m isk.
with this announcement, the isotope prices are already rising, so when the change summer expansion hits TQ it will be more likely: price summer before expansion transit costs 75m isk; after change transit costs 112,5m isk
for those, who don't want to do the math: that's around 2,25 times the cost than now (125% more)