Industry for Non-Industrials: T2 Ammo

The thing I hear a lot when I'm talking to people about my industry habits is "oh, but I don't like those spreadsheet thingies". And this shocks me. Not because they don't like the spreadsheets, because that's perfectly normal. But because they assume that the spreadsheets are entirely necessary for anything that you might do in an industrial setting, and this just isn't the case.
And no, you don't need a POS, either. Not for what I'm about to suggest.

There are possibilities out there for very stress-free moneymaking, if you're willing to take a little read over this. Before we start, though, I should address one question that gets asked a lot when I talk about this stuff-- "Why are you telling me this? Doesn't it cut into your profits?"

The Why
And the answer to that is very obvious. Whatever you choose to make becomes inherently cheaper (supply, demand, and all that), which makes my isk go further. And yes, if you choose to produce the same product as I, then I'll lose a bit of profit, sure. But I can always produce something else, or I can take the reduced value, if everything is cheaper.

The Skills
So, how can you go from not using your industrial slots at all to putting them to very good use?
Unfortunately, the first part involves training skills.
Production Efficiency V is necessary in order for you to be able to compete with the bigger industrial types, and opens a lot of doors that would otherwise be shut. At PE III, you make it almost impossible to make any profit on most items. At PE IV, your margins are slim. At PE V, which you train once and have forever, then suddenly your production slots become an ISK-producing tree of awesomeness, which we all want in our backyard.

The other part of the one good idea that I am going to give you here involves the science skills, which are a bit spendy (you also need the associated racial decryption methods skill, look at an ammo BPO to find out which one). Trust me, though, it will be worth it once you get your industrial machine rolling. Plus, they do double-time, as they also help you out with datacore farming, which is another way of saying free money.

[Future Datacore-Farming link here]

So, yes, in order to start this you have to straight up sacrifice 25M, and 20ish days of training time. Yeah, that sucks. But bear with me.
In order to take _full_ advantage of this, you also need to train up Mass Production. I recommend training it to IV for starters, and later to Advanced Mass Production III or IV (which requires MP V, and another 20M ISK).
Laboratory Operation, likewise, you could use LO IV, but ALO III or IV would be helpful to maximize your profitability. If you go to advanced with both of those skills, that's another 40M down the drain, I fully realize.

However, this is where it gets good.
Choose your favorite station near your home base, preferably in high sec, preferably close to a trade hub, and set up base there. Ideally you would have a laboratory and a factory in the same station, but this isn't strictly necessary. Buy a couple of BPOs for the Tech I versions of some kind of Tech II ammo that you think is cool for whatever reason. You can figure this out by sorting through the Tech I BPO's and looking at the invention tab. Once you have these, throw them into the copying lab (max runs, max number of them) with as many slots as you have. You'll want to build up a buffer at first. Later, then, you'll figure out how many slots to devote to copying, and how many to invention.

Grab a hauler, and grab a load of two things:
- The datacores you need to invent.
- The materials for the T2 production of the product.
Remember that you can get ganked in this kind of situation, so keep the sums small for now. Don't put more than about 100 million into a T1 hauler, and don't autopilot. Trust me, again, this will be all worth it.
Grab as many datacores as you can afford, and enough materials to make 5 times the number of datacore-runs you've bought (if you bought 200 datacores of each type, and it takes 2 per run, you want enough material for 500 runs of finished product).

Start inventing.

As the T2 BPC's come available, throw them into the manufacturing cooker. They will take a _week_ to cook. This is where you can start to sit back a little bit. Your copying runs will take 10 days+ to run. Your production will take a week. When you're playing a lot, you can throw in lots of invention runs. When you aren't, you can throw in lots of copying runs.

Once your T2 ammo starts coming hot off of the presses, haul it back to the trade hub of choice to sell whenever you are picking up more materials for invention or production. Then sell it, and profit!

The reasons this will work for you:
It is low maintenance, so you really only have to actively "do" things every week, to change over jobs. The more isk you are willing to have sitting around in raw materials, the less often you have to haul. I now haul approximately once a month (disclaimer, I do have the ability to freighter things around, but then again, so do you via Red Frog for a fee).

You can definitely do this on your main, even if you operate in Lowsec (or potentially Null, if you have access to a lab and a factory), as long as you take the proper scouting precautions (or just hop/jump clone to high sec to change your jobs every week...), but at the same point in time, you could pause training on your main for a month (*gasp*, I know...), and put the skills onto an alt. Yes, you'd be spending skill points on "not-your-main", but if those 2-3M of industry SP is easier to use on an alt, it's a better idea in the long run.

The reason that this "always works" is that people always want to shoot tech II ammo, but the production of this ammo is limited by the amount of slots that are dedicated to producing it. The same can't be said for T2 ships or T2 modules, as the limiting factor there is more often than not the manufacturing time. The long production time in ammo makes it so that the supply is the bottleneck, and thus is "always" profitable. Of course there are cases where this might not hold, but I haven't seen them yet, and I've been running the numbers on a lot of ammo for quite a while. Another final disclaimer, if you choose a T2 ammo that no one wants to shoot, it won't sell. This is obvious, but worth pointing out.

[math]
So, what kind of returns can you expect on this sort of thing? Well, I'll tell you right now that it won't be a windfall, but it will be profitable for the effort you put into it. Let's say that you only want to put in 1 set of manufacturing jobs per week. Let's also do this "per slot" and then we can multiply from there. Now, let's take something that "everyone" shoots, like Barrage M. You make 50,000 units per week. These sell for ~500 a round, which makes that 25,000,000 a week in gross. Take away the cost for making 10 runs of it (11,905,200), call it 12M, and you're looking at 13M without considering the datacores. Now, the datacores, you need "about" 2 runs of them, at about 1M per run (2 datacores of each type, and they run ~300k and ~200k), which leaves you with about:

11 Million ISK in profit, per slot, per week.
[/math]

Not too shabby. Risk, next to zero. Profit: Almost half. If the market were to tank to where Barrage M sold for 250 ISK apiece (about the breakeven point), then.... well, I hope you fly Minmatar, because you'll have a field day!

Let's say that you have 10 manufacturing slots that you use, this makes it about 110M ISK/week for "ever", for 20 days of training time, and 1 day of hauling a week, which if you set up in the right spot is only a few jumps. You don't even have to deal with the sell orders, really, because you can probably fire-and-forget those sell orders, they'll sell eventually... or sell to buy orders, and give the traders something to do.

Expansion:
Obviously this is expandable to different products (but you have to monkey with them more often) or selling to outlying mission hubs (but then you have to haul), but doing just the vanilla version of T2 ammo production is still way more wildly profitable than most people seem to think. And way less risky.

But Industry is Hard!
Those things you hear about it being hard, and needing decryptors, and needing one of the item you're turning into tech II, and needing a POS in lowsec to mine moon goo, or investing 3 billion ISK in and coming out with nothing, or any of the other things you hear for horror stories about Tech II... they just aren't that true. You can do minimalist invention to make some pretty sweet profits.
I don't like spreadsheets for a game. I honestly don't. I can do a little math here and there, but I don't want to have to be constantly updating something just to verify that, yes, whatever I'm doing is going to be profitable. This is why I like T2 ammo production, because it almost always is.
Tech II ammo production is a very safe and carefree way to get into an ISK-faucet, if you're looking for one. Think about it. You can spend a half hour a week running around with industry so that you can get a T2 cruiser blown up and not feel the impact. That's nice.

If you are really an industry noob, then I'll just point you to the EUNI class library, and you can listen about production there. Also, google is your friend, as there has been more than one guide written about "how to". This isn't a how-to article. This is a why-to. And why you should is simply because it's free ISK that you're refusing right now.

TL;DR:
T2 ammo production is a lot less time intensive than any other T2 production. You have to handle less than 10 commodities to make it happen, and monkey with production jobs once a week. You can make padding for yourself (in the form of T2 BPC's to manufacture) when you play more, and use this padding when you are playing less. You can make ~110M ISK/week in profit, without trying very hard.

-K'

Next up: I'm working on a few posts right now...
- Skill training, and why support skills rock
- Why I don't buy into "If you undock in it, it's already lost"
- Trading styles, from station to region-wide
- A look at the Ishtar

And I'm always taking requests.