Tech II Manufacturing for the Week - Stiletto

This weeks analysis shows that the highest margin on Tech II ship hulls is the Stiletto with a margin of 35% over build costs.

To acquire this margin, all manufacturing needs to take place at a POS using Component Assembly Array, Small Ship Assembly Array and Advanced Small Ship Assembly Array.

I have just delivered 20 jobs at 4 runs each across two of my characters.  This resulted in 80 hulls which sold at Jita this morning for a total profit of 320 million and change.

Based on the recent margins with specific hulls, I am spooling up two additional characters to take part in T2 manufacturing and eventually T3 manufacturing.  When I train characters like this, I tend to focus on one ship race at a time, this way they can assist with T3 manufacturing if certain skills are at V.

There is a very interesting margin on a certain module that I will run this week and possibly make the focus of next weeks post.

Tech II Manufacturing for the Week - Hound

This post and the hopefully weekly variant of it will focus on Tech II manufacturing.

Tech II manufacturing relies on skills which you need for Tech I manufacturing, however it also relies on additional skills in the Science category.  This can be as few as two skills for things like modules or ammunition.  As you scale up the item you are manufacturing, the skill requirements will increase.

Tech II manufacturing also requires different inputs than you are used to in Tech I manufacturing.  You will need the Tech I item which your Tech II is a variant of.  In addition, you will need some ore (Morphite), Planetary Interaction items (Construction Blocks), R.A.M. (miniature bots that assist in manufacturing T2 items) and finally Components (think of these as high grade inputs which come from moon mining).

With the basics of the manufacturing out of the way, you will also need to have a Blue Print Copy.  There are Blue Print Originals in game, but they are outliers and honestly are challenging for use in order to gain a return on investment for purchasing them.  We will focus solely on BPC's.  You gain the BPC by inventing one.  Here is a great guide by Neville Smit.  I will not go into detail here on how it works.  Read Neville's post.

Our corporation has explorers going out and acquiring loot.  We purchase the loot off of them in our wormhole for 90% of Jita Buy Orders.  We will export the loot and sell what we do not want on market at Jita.  However, items such as datacores, decryptors, and relics we keep for invention and reverse engineering.  This is important, as the invention I did earlier this week was on Breacher BPC's using Optimized Attainment Decryptors.  The resulting T2 BPC for the Hound that was returned yielded me a 3 Run, ME3/TE2 BPC.  I spun off 20 of them.

First is a screenshot from ISK Per Hour (IPH) which shows the breakdown of the build for a single BPC:

A break down of this as follows:

• Upper Left Quadrant - This is where we choose the blueprint to be used.
• Upper Middle Quadrant - This is where we enter the ME/PE and runs of the blueprint.  We also identify where the manufacturing is taking place.  We manufacture our items in array's at a POS.
• Upper Right Quadrant - This is where the financial breakdown occurs.  Market price is total price on market for the item.  Total Component Cost is our build cost for either purchasing the inputs directly or the necessary goods to build them.  Component Profit is the total profit we are looking for with this single BPC.
• Lower Left Quadrant - This is the Build/Buy List.  Items we are building are highlighted in yellow.  All of the components are being built.  The green are items to but, and this is only the Morphite, Construction Blocks, and the R.A.M.
• Lower Right Quadrant - This is the listing and line item cost for every necessary input.

With a build cost of 41,555,198.33 and a profit of 17,034,801.37 we are looking at a margin of 40.99%, which is very nice for a T2 hull.  This was one of the more profitable ones this week when the analysis was prepared last weekend.

We build T2 hulls for two purposes in New Jovian Exploration Department.  The first is for hulls we need to stock our Ship Replacement Program (SRP).  The second is that we sell hulls to alliance members as cost plus a small percentage.  The remaining hulls are sold on market to capitalize on market conditions.

If you have the skills to manufacture the components and the hull, start cranking out Hounds.

Something Does Not Compute

In the past few days I have been gearing up for the Tiamat release, specifically the Svipul.  My main will be training to fly the ship and commit space violence on others, but the focus of my analysis has been on the industrial side of things with building the Svipul for sale.

I have a few Confessor BPCs that were reverse engineered, and I took a look at the inputs which were necessary to manufacture those.  I also plugged the blueprint into ISK Per Hour (IPH) and was shocked.  IPH showed a build cost of 25 million and change ISK for a build.  As of this morning, Jita 4/4 has Sell Orders at 52 million per hull.  This is a 100% markup on each single hull.  Something could not possibly be right here.

So, I logged in the Jita trade alt and took a look at the inputs.

Outside of the R.A.M all of the components came out to a cost of 25,800,000 to procure.  There clearly must be some other factors going on that would lead to a 100% markup and the most shocking part is the sustained levels at those Sell Orders.

When the Confessor originally was released, the first few hulls were over 100 million.  It took about 2 weeks, and then the prices started to come down to 70 million.  But, this ship was released with Rhea in early December.  To be nearly 2 months later and have the Sell Orders still at 50+ million is astonishing.

Yes, you need to reverse engineer the BPC and there are limited ways of doing that, but a POS with the Array for Reverse Engineering does not require that type of markup on the end product.  Yes, the supply of relics is not overwhelming and that could be leading to a markup, but again it is not logical that it is worth 25 million ISK per hull.  Especially when you generally get multiple runs on a BPC when you reverse engineer.

One of the benefits of being an exploration/wormhole corporation is the ability for members to sell their loot to the corporation.  That is where we initially received the first batch of Small Hull Relics.  I am thinking now that we will come up with a new reimbursement system for those which will generate increased interest in corp members going out and finding those relics, but also be a benefit for the corporation on the ISK side of things.

I am very glad that one of the builder alts has Minmatar Starship Engineering V in training now.  Clearly there is a huge opportunity to make some serious coin on these builds.

The other huge benefit is that I can produce both Confessor's and Svipul's in mass quantity at relatively low cost and re-sell to corporation and alliance members for far less than they could purchase on market.