The Planetary Interaction Experiment

[Morganti]

What items are you extracting Robin? Stick with noble gases and aqueous fluids for the most part (oxygen and water) and you wont have to do much moving of extractor heads at all.

[RobinGBrown]

It was the depletion layer effect I think, I'd restarted my 7 day cycle after a few days and I think that draisn the resources quite quickly. I'm making POS fuels and T2 components for the most part - see the list of products in my previous post. My reasoning is that the P2 products are quite low volums so I can store a lot of them before I have to go and fetch them. I'm not sure it's the best plan however but it doesn't involve much effort other than setting up.

[Morganti]

Up to 42 planets, with 3 more on the way in a day or two. I decided to go for 5 planets on every toon (just an extra 3 days of training on each toon to get the extra planet...my mains had it already, so 6ish extra days for the other 6 toons (2 per account)). This takes total training time to around 9 days per alt, but gives you a planet boost equal to opening another account and running 3 planets on 2 additional toons. I currently have no plans to up the upgrade level for my command centers past 3, as it gives much less of a boost than the extra planet.

I sold a roughly 5 day haul of PI materials yesterday (220mil m3) for about 130mil isk. Once all 45 planets are up I'm going to go back and work on some efficiency setups I've found and also work out if I can squeeze more money out of some of my less profitable planets.

I have found doing resets, even for 42 planets, tends to go much much faster if you're not exporting and picking up items as you do it. You can log a toon on, sit in the station and rapidly fire through your planets doing minor excavator adjustments as you go. Being that a spaceport will (in general) hold 6-12 days of material for a planet you have a lot of leeway time to decide when you want to go empty the materials off the planets. I try and do all 9 toons in one sitting doing this just so I get more accurate sell over time figures, but I take and dump all my materials into a corp hangar (one in each system I'm in) and then go around and collect them all with the freighter when it's time to sell (usually in a different sitting than either resets or collects). So to sum up: split up the time you do all 3 parts of the process and it'll actually seem like you're investing much smaller chunks of time over a longer period of time.

[Morganti]

http://s227.photobucket.com/albums/d...PIExample1.jpg

Here's an example setup for those confused about basic PI setup post incursion. There's not a lot of info out there, but here's the basic idea. Notice that I don't have links from each processor to the spaceport (spaceport is in the middle, and acts as my storage container). You can save power/cpu by keeping your links short, and in this case that means the extractor (to the left) has to link to both processors (the orange circles second from the left), but then the bottom processor links up to the top one. This lets me use the underutilized link between the top processor and the spaceport to push all of my processed goods through and lets me get more extractor head out instead of longer links between my devices.

You'll also notice on the right side a link running from the extractor directly to the spaceport. This was because I ran out of power for an extra processor and links, so I'm just pushing the leftover raw materials (it's not much, but money is money) back to the spaceport. The downside of this is the raw product takes up a LOT more space than the P1 refined product (in this case I'm turning P0 level noble gas into P1 level Oxygen). But since I use a freighter to haul my products to my hub to sell I don't care about this extra space being used up, so I get to use an extra extractor head instead of a processor. Gas planets in particular really suck up the power when you use links between your processors/extractors/spaceport, so be as efficient as possible (I could actually move the bottom left processor closer to the extractor and shorten it's link there while maintaining the same link size between it and the top processor if I wanted to eek out every little bit of efficiency).

[RobinGBrown]

I'm very impressed with your setup Morganti, you've really got into the PI in a serious way. Some useful advice too. I'm not going to try to emulate the size of your setup but it is inspiring me to do better with mine. I'll try to bang up some screenshots later this week to compare.

[Morganti]

I'm like the humans in Avatar: strip mining the planets and killing the local natives off for fun and profit. As far as time investment, risk, and the ability to keep tweaking to make more money you can't beat PI imo.

[Morganti]

So...I opened my other 2 accounts up (total of 5 now) and am debating on going up to 75 PI planets. I estimate this would pull in about 1.3billion isk a month using my current system, but that's a hell of a lot of clicking. This leads me to thinking of how to increase my returns in PI for the effort involved.

A 0.0 (no jump freighter currently though) or wormhole setup would net me a lot more money from PI, but makes the logistics exponentially tougher. Low sec isnt an option since it's bad logistics combined with so-so return. So setting up in .5 systems is the best idea for staying hi-sec. Location is important, so the closest group of .5's near a good hub is the best plan (if they aren't already covered in command centers, which is doubtful).

While my research continues I'm still making money hand over fist compared to what I'd normally make sitting in hi-sec (for the time invested anyway). The search continues.

[Redbeard]

Im going to have to get into this on my 4 when i turn my attention back to eve.

Why so much clicking? And do you think you'd be able to take advantage of mouse broadcasting in isboxer at all for something like this?

[Morganti]

Broadcasting would be zero help as each setup is unique.

At the very minimum, resetting a single excavator on a planet (assuming your ex heads are still in a good spot):

Log in
Open science tab
Go to Planets Tab

Click first planet
Click view in planet mode
Minimize science tab
Move view to excavator
Click excavator
Click program button
Stop program
Start program
Click Confirm
Enlarge science tab

Next planet

This is assuming you have on excavator...I have 2 on many planets, and do some ex head adjustments also. Resetting all 45 planets is around an hour and a half (casually working) which I can do at work or while watching tv. More if I have a lot of ex head moving to do.

Picking up is actually faster. I can normally eject all materials from 4 planets before my indy finishes flying from my station to the first customs station outside the planet. Depending on your indy space and how long its been since you did a pickup I can normally get all the materials about ever 2-3 days in 1-3 trips per toon (hence why you want all of one toons' PI planets in the same system).

[RobinGBrown]

It's a lot better than the previous version though as you had to add an extra two clicks for each 'extractor head', and you might have as many as a dozen or so heads.

I actually like the fact that you have to occasionally reposition heads, it makes it more interactive rather than a simple stop start routine.