Alt hauler & PI

[Daltaren]

Hi all,

I took advantage of the recent MTC promotion and now have 4 months of training for a second character. My intent is to have an alt hauler with the ability to fly Transport ships, and maybe do some Planetary Interaction. So far here are my skills (I left out things like Gunnery and Missile because it doesn’t really apply):

Armor
  Hull Upgrades                   L3
  Mechanics                       L3
  Repair Systems                  L1
--------------------------------------------------------
Drones
  Drone Avionics                  L3
  Drones                          L3
--------------------------------------------------------
Electronic Systems
  Cloaking                        L3
  Electronic Warfare              L1
  Propulsion Jamming              L1
--------------------------------------------------------
Engineering
  Capacitor Management            L3
  Capacitor Systems Operation     L3
  CPU Management                  L4
  Electronics Upgrades            L3
  Energy Grid Upgrades            L1
  Power Grid Management           L4
  Thermodynamics                  L3
  Weapon Upgrades                 L2
--------------------------------------------------------
Navigation
  Afterburner                     L3
  Evasive Maneuvering             L3
  High Speed Maneuvering          L1
  Navigation                      L3
  Warp Drive Operation            L3
--------------------------------------------------------
Neural Enhancement
  Cybernetics                     L1
  Infomorph Psychology            L3
--------------------------------------------------------
Planet Management
  Command Center Upgrades         L4
  Interplanetary Consolidation    L4
  Planetology                     L3
  Remote Sensing                  L3
--------------------------------------------------------
Production
  Industry                        L5
--------------------------------------------------------
Resource Processing
  Mining                          L3
  Salvaging                       L3
--------------------------------------------------------
Rigging
  Astronautics Rigging            L2
  Jury Rigging                    L3
--------------------------------------------------------
Science
  Science                         L4
--------------------------------------------------------
Shields
  Shield Management               L3
  Shield Operation                L3
  Shield Upgrades                 L1
  Tactical Shield Manipulation    L2
--------------------------------------------------------
Social
  Social                          L2
--------------------------------------------------------
Spaceship Command
  Amarr Industrial                L3
  Caldari Industrial              L1
  Gallente Industrial             L3
  Mining Frigate                  L1
  Minmatar Industrial             L1
  Spaceship Command               L3
--------------------------------------------------------
Trade
  Contracting                     L1
  Marketing                       L2
  Retail                          L2
  Trade                           L2
--------------------------------------------------------

So I have a few questions:

1. Which skills should I focus on for hauling? I assume Navigation is important, and shields/armor for survivability? Any skills in particular I should pay attention to?

2. I know Gallente has pretty nice specialty haulers, but which race’s Blockade Runner / DST is best? Don’t want to waste 20+ days training for sub-par ships.

3. For a player that sometimes goes stretches of time (a week or more) without logging in, what is the best way of doing PI with not too much time investment? What products should I be looking to extract/produce, and which regions of space should I focus on?

In the end, I’m not looking to get filthy rich. I just want to have some decent passive income, and the ability to transport my own ships/goods with a relatively good skillset.

Also, any other opinions on industry endeavors that may be good for a player with a lot of “down” time?

Appreciate the feedback!

[vr0p]

Some variables to ponder about:

You’ve got like 2.5 months of training to go before you have a T2 hauler and a “serious” PI production + processing operation.

Lower security and null/WH means much higher yield. Lower tier materials sell just fine, but take up more volume. Some (most?) Tier 4 products follow this material scheme, if I’ve calculated correctly:

1 Tier 4 - 100 m³
18 Tier 3 - 108 m³
180 Tier 2 - 270 m³
2880 Tier 1 - 1094 m³
432000 Raw - 4320 m³

So depending on which tier of material(s) you intend to produce, there are major logistical implications. Nullsec and WH have those planets with legendary amounts of raw materials yes, but look at how much that balloons the volume to haul (and therefore the danger involved and time investment of travel). If you are very far from market, then Raw becomes very tedious, and you may want to start processing them to cut down the volume. You just have to try for yourself I think, to find which tier has a sweetspot of profit, passive time (extracting/processing), and active time (hauling inputs to factories, hauling outputs to market).

Regardless of your operation however, I would recommend Gallente industrials. Epithal for moving the high volume stuff between factories / around highsec, and a tanked and stabbed Nereus for moving the processed low volume stuff to market. Personally I don’t bother with the tech2 transports because the cloaky carries too little, and the tanky ones are still subject to suicide ganks.

[Zoltan_Irvam]

A stabbed, moderately tanked, T2 cloaked and MWD capable Epithal goes quite far for PI hauling in unfriendly environments. Search for Epital Null/WH PI hauler for a good fit.

If that is not safe enough, an Occator can also be fit with T2 cloak & MWD, some stabs and quite a bit more tank. Another option is an Impel but that would mean training Amarr Indy too.

All of these fits need quite good fitting skills to work.

Regarding the original posters question on PI with long offline phases, I would recommend Null/WH extraction P1 stripmining planets on long cycles and then use one or more factory planets to refine as far up as you like (P3 or P4 is preferred for volume reasons).
This can be set up for 1w cycles - it will not be as efficient as the same job on shorter cycles.

[Daltaren]

Thanks for the great info! Guess I’ll stick with Gallente Industrial and bring it up to 5.

Would you suggest “training” PI in high sec? Is it even worth doing? If I choose planets relatively close to market, could it yield any worthwhile profits?

Also @Zoltan_Irvam - you mentioned the need for good fitting skills. Would this basically be CPU and Power grid management, and perhaps rigging? What other skills should I focus on?

[Zoltan_Irvam]

The Epithal fit from Uni Wiki needs Shield Upgrades 4, Tactical Shield Manipulation 4, CPU Management 4 and Power Grid Management 5.

You can of course set up some extractors in hisec and eventually they will recoup their cost and make a bit of money with one week cycles. But the real money is with factory planets (look for barren and temperate planets with 6% POCOs at CCE 5) producing P1->P4, P1->P3 or P2->P4. But these need frequent attention - once a day or every 2 days (for P1->P4).