blkmajik
ZiTek Deepspace Explorations Interstellar Alcohol Conglomerate
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Posted - 2008.01.28 17:55:00 -
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Chronotis, please do not overlook the problems with the current ice situation. Just fly to any highsec ice field, and look at all the macro miners. I suggest checking out Aakari (near Jita in Lonetrek). They fly in groups of 5+ macks/hulks like synchronized swimmers, 23/7. Then try putting buy orders up in system. They are even macro'd to each dock, reprocess and sell to the highest buy order in the sytem every cycle! Give me a freaking break... You cant catch this?
Then consider the affects of the recent startbase and production system changes on ice product demand. The starbase warfare changes and the introduction of invention have cause demand to shot through the roof since the pre-Kali days because there are now many more towers being used.
Before, only owners of several t2 bpos had much use for mining moons in any scale, with exception for a rare few moons that were profitable enough to be worth the hassle. Now with invention and the increase in need for t2 components to enable all the inventors, everyone has a reason for doing so. The number of mining and reaction towers has skyrocketed.
Before sov levels in 0.0, cyno jammers, jump bridges, etc, there was little reason beyond moon mining, outland refining, or safe spots to put towers away from outpost systems. Now, alliances have to defend their sovereignty levels all along jump bridge routes, cyno jamming areas, etc. Again, more towers.... more demand for fuel.
This is clear if you look at the isotope prices in Jita over the past year. Isotope values across the board have increased 60% - 150% since then.
The reason is obvious. Lets say a group has to run 10 large towers for what reason. A moon mining project, holding sov in a system, a jumpbridge network, or any combination. Whatever, 10 isn't a lot. Each of those uses 450 isotopes yer hour, combining to 4500 isotopes her hour, or 108,000 per day. In a max fuel cycle (18 days... do the math), thats 1,944,000 isotopes. At current market value on, for example, Nitrogen Isotopes (the cheapest), 911,736,000 isk for 18 days of run time, JUST IN ISOTOPES. Thats a big chunk, given all the towers themselves only cost 3.6bil. In fact, its over 25% of the towers cost, every 18 days.
So the obvious answer is to just mine it yourself. Besides the problems of isotopes being racial and not all towers being equivalent, Ice also requires a ridiculous time investment to harvest. 1000m3 and 10min base cycle time to harvest 300 isotopes? The 18 days worth for our measly 10 towers would take 6,480 Ice harvester cycles (10 mins each base). In a mackenaw, with gang bonuses and t2 everything and max skills, that would take about 135 hours.... for 432 hours of tower run time. About 1/3 of the entire uptime of the servers during that run time. Our friendly group of 5x macro gangs is pulling in about 1bil per day with 0 effort, and 0 luck. I'm lucky to make a third that working my butt of IF IM LUCKY.
Its clear why ice is mined by macro miners so much: because its a freaking grind and is impossibly to keep up with demand otherwise in any modestly sizable operation! The harvesting system doesn't scale with the other system introduced that influence it's demand! Please look into this, as it has gotten quite ridiculous and I think its being overlooked.
A simple solution would be to do what you did with Liquid Ozone and Heavy Water: put ice with 10x the yield in lowsec/0.0, similar to Dark Glitter. The current 'high end' isotope-based ice ores don't justify the risk.
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