Would you like PI with that?

I've continued to procrastinate on PI since my post last week but I have made small headway towards getting past this by doing some research and reading up on the finer points of setting up production planets.

I've still got more to read, I wish more people shared their setups and production schedules as seeing real examples really helps me learn, but I've know the following:

• what planets I have available to me
• what characters and skills they have
• no idea of what I can produce

I also really need to pay attention to my Factories and make sure I'm keeping them running at full capacity. This means making sure I know how much input I need and produce at least that amount elsewhere in plenty of time for my production planets running at full speed.

Planets

I try to keep all my PI actions within one system, this simplifies my logistics but also the increased security I get because I'm not flying between systems with cargo. An additional benefit is the system I'll be in has several friendly POS setup which I can make use of both to share cargo (the characters I have are in not all in the same corporation)

I have the following planet types available to me:

• Barren
• Ice
• Lava
• Gas

The lack of Plasma and Storm planets really limits my P4 production possibilities, I could use Gas/Barren or lava to make up the difference but with the characters I have I'd rather maximize what I can produce.

I'm going to setup production planets, that is planets dedicated to producing the final goods from intermediate materials that are produced on other characters and planets.

Characters

I have six characters available for PI in my chosen system. All have reasonably high skills in Planetary Interaction and can all fly the the same racial industry ships. Each character has, at minimum, Interplanetary Consolidation to Level 4 and CCU Level 4. 

Available characters PI skill levels

I really should spend a little time training them all to have Advanced Planetary to Level 3 at least and at some point I really should get them all to CCU 5 and IC 5 but this is what I have and it does give me the ability to have production spread over a total of 30 planets.

Production

Deciding what to produce using my planets has proven much harder than I thought. Originally I thought I'd make POS fuels because that's always been a good seller and I've done well with them over the years.

However everyone who does PI seems to make POS fuel components and the margins aren't great, especially as in order to do well I'd need to figure jump fuel into my costs. I did some more research but was getting nowhere so I decided what I needed to do was look at the price per item in Jita and then see what the 30 day average volume was in order to better see what would be profitable and what would not.

So I came up with this:

PI options with pricing and 30 day volume information

It shows the PI materials I can produce from Base to P4 along with the item price and 30 day volume. I've highlighted in purple the POS fuel PI for reference and looking at the 30d volume you can certainly see its a good item to make should you wish too, but I don't (if I can avoid it).

I'm ignoring Base, P1 and P4 PI items (P1 because profits are small and P4 because it's a low profit/volume item) so I need to find one or two item in P2/P3 that I can make.

There are a few of items in P2 that stand out as interesting and two P3's that will warrant further investigation for me.

Further Investigation

I'm not going to say for now what they are until I've run further investigation and worked out what my margin's will be.

My further investigation uses the Planetary Interaction Diagram to see what I need and how complex any manufacturing chain will be. The more chains I need the more maintenance my manufacturing will need and I don't want to be doing PI daily, I want two to three day cycling for optimum return.