Interesting to see moon minerals on one the Odyssey announcement slides at PAX East 2013. I hope that a serious look at industry balancing is going to take place now that the general population seems pacified by the content in the Crucible, Inferno, and Retribution expansions.
The icons shown are for R64 moons, which have concentrations skewed towards galactic quadrants as shown by data analysis. I can only imagine what they have planned as they have stating their intention is to remove passive static resource fountains such as the current moon mining system.
With two major collations forming cartels to control the flow of raw moon materials, I wanted to take my database of moon minerals and cross reference that with sovereignty data to see just how much control each cartel holds on each respective moon type.
Consider these numbers a back-of-the-envelope calculation.
OTEC: Organization of Technetium Exporting Corporations operated by the CFC.
I’m showing that 22.7% of all Neodymium moons are under TEST’s direct control, meaning that the moons are in HBC space. If we expand the coverage to the CFC and their allies, this group has 50.7% of all the moons.
The OTEC grip on Technetium is much stronger, with 81.1% of the moons under CFC and ally control.
Geographically Neodymium is far more dispersed with moons covering 36 different regions. Technetium is mainly concentrated in the North and only spans 23 regions.
CFC’s control over Technetium is much stronger than HBC’s over Neodymium.
In a previous post, I detailed the concentration of Technetium and Cobalt moon locations because they are of particular political interest due to their distribution and the recent rework of the Alchemy reaction for Platinum Technite.
Now I wanted to use my entire dataset to plot out all moon minerals to see if there was any pattern or promise of future monopolistic cartels due to the geographical distribution of the moon minerals.
My dataset contains information on 32,162 moons with a lack of data for Evaporite Deposits; I don’t consider this alarming to my analysis as it is a very common moon mineral.
Since my master dataset was pieced together from a few independent sources, I am not surprised by the inaccuracies or missing data points. As I have stated before, sanitized moon scanning data is usually a closely guarded piece of information by large Alliances and Industrial corporations as a large amount of time and energy has been spent gathering the data.
The raw numbers show that I have very poor coverage in many regions, but we need to consider that not every moon contains a mineral. If I knew the density of moon minerals (how many received minerals versus not in the seeding process), I could get a better feeling of my coverage levels. For now just consider the Green regions having a strong coverage and the Red regions showing poor coverage; ignore the coverage percentage values.
Despite the alarming Red portions that indicate major holes in my dataset, we can see interesting visual results from the initial galaxy seeding process. These seeding trends can help us explain the prices of certain minerals given their location, political atmosphere around specific areas, and weight necessity in the Tech2 production chain. *cough* Technetium *cough*.
The low value of these types of minerals is due to the sheer amount and distribution of each type. These common minerals are contained in almost every region.
With these types, we can see a definite skew in the regional location of each type. There are major pockets with a small scattering around the universe.
With the Rarity 16 minerals, there seems to be an even spread across the universe with no major points of concentration.
With these moons it seems like each type is dominant in a specific quadrant of the universe. Ceasium in the West, Hafnium in the South, Mercury also in the South, and Technetium having the majority of its concentration located in the North.
The rarity of these moons is shown with the lack of points on the scatter plot. We can see that they are spread around the Universe, but the lack of quantity keeps each type rare.
In light of the recent Devblog that outlines changes to moon minerals, I wanted to quantify the scale of income streams that are going to be changing with the Inferno 1.2 patch slated for August release.
Large alliances [in the North] thrive on Technetium income. It pays for ship reimbursements, sovereignty, incentives, and POS fuel. Imagine if you had a 19.3 B/month bill to pay and you could put up a structure to collect valuable goods, a weekly Jump Freighter run to collect the stock from each tower, and a few weekly shipments to market to supply your alliance with billions of ISK per month of income.
If you do some searching, you can find budget sheets for large alliances such as TEST and GoonSwarm. These
leaked documents might be a little stale, but can offer us some insight into the scale of income that Technetium contributes to its holders.
TEST Balance, Best Balance
On paper they have 253 B in and 86 B out for a net balance of 167 B per month. Not bad, but consider how much of that income stream comes from moon ownership and then how much of that moon income comes from Technetium.
An enormous portion of TEST’s income comes from Technetium. As a younger alliance, I imagine that their holding account doesn’t have nearly as much ISK idle as our older GoonSwarm friend; TEST’s summary page shows 162 days of operating capital.
Scrooge McDuck Money Vault of GoonSwarm
Haven been around for a long time, they have massive amounts of ISK reserved. I’ve been in on a few conversations that have revolved around the GoonSwarm market group and they are working with vast amounts of liquid wealth.
Their budget sheet shows a income of 762 B in and 547 out for a net balance of 215 B per month. Not surprisingly, a large amount of their income comes from Technetium moons.
Accidently All the Moons
On paper TEST has 16 Technetium and GoonSwarm have noted 76. So how much of the total nubmer of moons do these two and the rest of the Northern powers control?
There doesn’t seem to be an exact number of moons, only speculation with a high concentration ‘in the North’. Market Forum warrior Akita T has noted that there is somewhere between 360 and 450 moons with a conservative guess around 400. Taking the conservative 400 number means that only 23% is under TEST and GoonSwarm control so there still is a large amount of income not going into these alliance wallets.
It has been almost a month in our new Alliance and we have started discussing setting up a moon mining network in order to bolster the corporation wallets. Since we have limited knowledge of the reaction chains, we have decided to start simple. Perhaps I will take the time to go up the reaction chain and see what items we can make that would truly be profitable. For now, we’re going to start small and just pull the Moon Materials and haul to market.
In an established alliance, the good moons are most likely property of the Alliance. The profits from Tech, Neo, and Dyspro often go to the Alliance wallets for programs such as ship replacement or war efforts.
Given this, our moon selection list is rather limited and we’re left to claim some of the lower profitable income streams. As with everything industry related in Eve, run the numbers first to see if it is even worth your time for the profit.
Recall that time is very important in this game. Why should I spend hours manufacturing a Drake to sell in a mission hub that nets me a 2-3% markup while I can go shoot NPCs for 100M+/hour (Incursions).
Here is the workup for a typical nullsec moon that we have available for claiming.
Using the new fueling price model in the Crucible expansion, running a Large POS is highly unprofitable as it costs 360 M/month to fuel. Income from harvesting basic materials will only be profitable using a Medium or Small POS as they cost 180 M or 90 M/month, respectively, to fuel.
A Small POS lacks the necessary Powergrid and CPU to run 4 Moon Harvesting Arrays and Silos so we need to setup up to a Medium. Even with Faction Towers, I was only able to get 3 Moon Harvesting Arrays and 3 Silos to run so we’ll have to not mine the Hydrocarbons.
180 M to fuel and 283 M profit means a 103 M/month or 24 M/week profit which in my book is hardly worth the effort. We will have to either get a better material to harvest or explore collecting these lower profit materials to react into Processed Materials or continue further down the reaction chain into Advanced Materials.