I have three accounts. i created the other two shortly after realizing, if i was going to start my own corporation, that i needed blueprints if i was ever going to fulfill my ideal corporate mission of logistical support.
I'm still not sure if it's a viable niche market to break into. lol
Never become a CEO. All your ingame profit gets sucked down this blackhole...this maw of cthulhu like proportions. madness.
To make a long story short, i came upon a low sec system about 10 jumps from my main center of operations which was also a great NPC commodity trade hub for electronic parts. That's another story. I'm pretty much out of that business, even though i've had a freighter for over a year or two.
Kourmonen system (near Mynxee's hangout in Amamake) had the good fortune to be a pirate haven. Good fortune because the MuffinFactory [TORY] corp kept all the lazy carebears away, which means great commodity prices and cheap laboratory slots. Of course, then along came Faction Warfare and the muffinmen left in a huff. Luckily, nothing has really changed for prices/lab slots.
Hourly costs for most of the stations there are 8-10isk (that's massively lower than what you'll find in high sec) and wait times i usually find for material efficiency research to be a week on a good day, with copy slots having less than a week wait.
Time is the killer, so 3 accounts = 9 characters = 90 lab slots going at once. It's enabled me to upgrade a portfolio of tech1 BPOs any industry carebear would drool at.
Sadly, i don't have any battlecruiser BPOs to my name yet. I'm torn between a harbinger and a prophecy. Harby for just plain building it for use, or the prophecy for invention purposes. I'm new to invention, but that's yet another story.
When i first started upgrading blueprints i first found myself lost as characters flew between stations to upgrade or 'deliver' blueprints and i started delivering other characters' bpos and forgetting who had to begin more upgrading.
My second attempt had characters focused on one station, which failed because i only had so many blueprints and got lost in the minutae of what blueprint to put where (sometimes the best way to upgrade was to start your ammo/drone bpos first and work your way up to ships.) Not to mention corporate security loopholes made multiple station keeping a nightmare if you wanted to shift blueprints around at times.
My third try at keeping myself sane was to move all the blueprints to one station and make it my HQ (thus securing my BPOs from potential corp thefts)...that worked out okay since i found i really didn't spend the time to check up on my lab jobs that often, so having increased wait times for upgrades really didn't matter that much (besides it was always dirt cheap)
This evolution took about 3 years..i ended up moving the HQ to the bottom station and creating a rather large petition as completed blueprints disappeared during the change-over.
My final (hopefully) iteration happened about 2 years ago when I shifted my HQ to it's current location in Amod and locked down my entire blueprint collection. The irony is that i know the exact date i did this on because CCP decided in it's wisdom to screw up a patch note that fooled me into thinking this was the perfect time to try 'lockdown', and ended up creating a huge petition mess.
Eventually, everything got sorted and it's fine now. All my original blueprints are locked down in 4 of the 5 stations in the system. I now simply fly my labrat characters between stations upgrading as i see fit. I know enough about pvp and pve now that i can make educated decisions on what and how much to upgrade/copy.
It's even at the point where i have my 'mains' researching my newly purchased BPOs at low sec POS labs i have at my deathstars in Fua. i found the temptation of just one basic mobile lab per tower to be low enough that i'm not painting a big bullseye on my towers (i avoid advanced mobile labs, maintenance bays and corporate hangars like the plague)...besides, my idea of POS defense has evolved enough that i should be good enough to deter most folk from even trying for my large towers.
Besides, it's fun to play with Scientific Networking skill finally (i'd avoided it in the past simply to keep me from delivering a 'job' in one kourmonen station, that i wasn't at currently, and then forgetting about it)
One day i hope to start buying BC and above blueprints...i think my short term goal is to get the prototype cloaking device bpo.
Oh, and i find ME 100 on ammo, ME 50 on ships...with PE of 20...to be just fine for my uses. to be honest, i've never even tried figuring out "perfect ME" for my blueprints. Nor have i really looked into what blueprint would be best to manufacture for sale...I would like to research which blueprints need what type of minerals. that would be fun.
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