I’m intending to open an Athanor somewhere in rural low-sec in the next couple of weeks. The thing is, I’m not a big miner, so I’m not sure what to do with the Moon Mining ability.
Is it worth scouting out a decent, unused moon, and offering to drill it and let some other corp mine it at their leisure? I can’t imagine it’d be worth solo mining it with my Retriever and T1s. But maybe someone else would think the mining rights are worth more than the fuel costs of running the drill, meaning it’d be at least a minor revenue stream.
If I’m not going to mine the moon at all, is it still worth sticking the Athanor near a moon, or should I just stick it by the sun in hopes of being lower value to the rare traffic in whatever backwater I end up choosing?
Why are you opening an Athanor if you’re not a miner? Not trying to be a jerk, I’m seriously asking. If you’re not going to take advantage of mining the ore, then you run a slightly higher risk of losing the station if somebody decides they want the moon as opposed to a different citadel or engineering complex in the middle of nowhere.
If you know folks in the area, it would definitely be worth reaching out- maybe even just giving them a heads-up on the belt spawn time in exchange for them refining in the Athanor so the taxes cover the fuel costs.
In NPC null on a good moon, maybe. I almost started doing this on a larger scale, but then realized all of the logistics involved, and I wouldn’t have a good enough response fleet if someone reffed one of them.
Depending on the moon composition, you could potentially mine it yourself. My moon has 12% monazite and using 2 accounts I can mine it out in 4 hours a week (400km3 of ore). For a single barge it would be around 8 hours.
If you decide to not do this and not put it on a moon, then you might as well get a raitaru or astrahus. Only reason that I can think of not using those is if you want the lowest fuel cost possible to keep it out of low power mode. In that case, find a trash moon that no one would want and install a moon drill on it. It uses 5 blocks/hour for approximately 80 mil/month for fuel costs.
Other question is why are you putting up a structure in the first place? Industry? Staging?
I’m planning on a Raitaru as well. For the Athanor my main interest is a Biochemical Reactor to make boosters. I’m not sure it’s economical to do just that, so I was looking for ways to generate a bit extra out of the site, be it selling mining rights or what have you.
Sounds nice, just remember to run the numbers beforehand. Back in the POS days I thought about this but it wasn’t profitable. But lots has changed since then so there may be money to be made!
Sorry to tell you sir, but you have a trash moon (Quite common)
The monthly value of that moon is ~2.7 bil and would take 240 barge-hours to mine out the entire thing, not really practical as that would require 20 people mining for 12 hours each averaging 3.75 mil/tick.
If you just mined the arkonor, you would be making ~1.15 bil and would need 83 barge-hours, with 7 players mining 12 hours each you would average 4.5 mil/tick which is still terrible.
it’s in an 0.2 system, so the refinery for boosters is still a possibility. I scanned every moon in system (almost 40 of them) and fuzzworks said this was the best, at 4664695 extraction pure hour.
There were two other moons that were close. I almost chose the one that was 20.7% Dazzling Spodumain, because I know that’s worth a bit more per m^3 than the Arkonor. The other moons both had Coesite in lesser amounts too.