Jump Freighter Collaboration: Complete

Last night, the last Anshar of the collab between @K162space and myself came out of the oven.  This has been a fun project and a fun experience to play with the more intricate and rewarding realms of industry.

First, a breakdown of the numbers:

Ship	Build Cost	Sale Price	Profit
1	5.325B	6.200B	875.5M
2	5.375B	6.620B	1,245.25M
3	4.867B	6.540B	1,542.55M
4	4.900B	6.351B	1,452.20M
5	5.140B	5.975B	836M
6	5.345B	5.975B	630M

Final profit: 6.600B
Payout Per Contributor: 8,300B (5B buy-in returned + 3.3B profit split)

How Did the Project Go?

I'm willing to definitively state that this project was a success primarily because of some prudent purchasing right before Odyssey released.  My goal was to generate 1B/hull in profit, and in the end we hit that goal, but the last two ships sold for really pathetic margins.  For 28d build time, 630M really is peanuts for the effort/risk/cash involved.  But it definitely beats the Post-Odyssey alternative of near-zero margin

Other than some time setbacks on my end, I think we stuck to the rather aggressive production schedule.  This whole project was lubricated by Blake's generous BP donation, helping to augment my own production assets.  Also, despite the risk with this much cash on the line, things ran surprisingly smoothly.

Also, thanks to this project, I purchased the last ship off the line for my own fleet.  I would have loved to have upgraded the old Obelisk: Heavy Metal Queen, but the production cycles worked out that I had very-low-margin freighters already built, and T1 minerals continue to slide... so I burned those instead.

The reason the above is such a problem is that market price tends to follow the instantaneous build cost, without factoring in the real build times.

As the "closest to reality" chart I could build on short notice, I think the following really illustrates the project reality.  In essence, we were able to produce 4 of the 6 Anshars with the "old" material requirements, and milk that margin.  This isn't 100% true, but imagine the orange line converging into the red line near the end.

What Now?

We are suspending JF production until at least October, if not a little later.  There's a very tight bottleneck on generating BPCs, and producing with these margins is tantamount to throwing our ISK away.  I have some private plans on my own end to try and match Blake's BPC generating efforts, but I don't see those solidifying until the end of the year.  There will be a blog post this week about more industry plans.

Also, as has been ranted about, production margins are pretty poor across the board.  But, this is a function of the time of year more than anything economic.

Graph Courtesy Valkrr 

I have been taking a bit of an EVE holiday myself, running the manufacturing machine only on products that have exceptional margins AND low effort.  I feel bad idling my bread-and-butter builders, but the margins just aren't worth participating at the moment.  Without major conflict or major player traffic, it's not worth the effort to keep the production lines running.

As I said above, we intend to revisit Jump Freighter joint operation again in 4-8 weeks.  No quitting here... just taking it easy in EVE and working through my Steam library.