A recent post from Jester, which was a nice bit of populist Greyscale bashing even as he embraced the changes, has a ton of comments that rather nicely encompass some of the reactions to what people know so far about the upcoming industry expansion. TL;DR: “Nullsec is going to take over everything, fuck this, I quit.”
So here’s the short version on rebuking that. The devblog on all this mentioned right off the bat just how many characters use industry on the daily basis – right around fifty thousand. If you read that, and your reaction was not “wow, that’s an awfully large number, there’s no way enough production can happen in nullsec to support that” but rather to skip through the blog, take it all in, fly into a melodramatic rage and threaten to quit unless all the advantages were returned back to you… well, great. Get out. You won’t be missed, and your less hysterical peers will be happy to pick up your slack, and profits.
I could stop here, and almost feel silly having written everything below this line before doubling back to do an intro that encapsulates the issue nicely. Still, I went off on a bit of a rant on Twitter about why this wouldn’t happen, throwing out some numbers, coined the title, and some people asked for a post. The short version is that “what’s built in EVE” totals tens of thousands of production days per day.
HOW MUCH STUFF GETS BUILT
CCP is generally pretty shy about giving out statistics and numbers, these days, but that wasn’t always the case. There are devblogs floating around with various what gets built numbers, but our prime source is the now-defunct Twitter feed of CCP Diagoras. While the numbers are often a couple years old, that’s fine… the game’s grown since then. Things have also been nerfed, or buffed, but I’m going to not attempt to ‘correct’ them.
With the source in mind, here’s everything I can find on how much stuff that can be built in highsec – and thus mostly is, these days – actually is built per day.
Hulls
378 Covops
47 Electronic Attack Ships
440 Assault Frigates
643 Stealth Bomber, 504 Interceptor and 1280 Covops Cloaks
A generic statistic, but 9400 Tech I and 1950 Tech II frigates
220 Logistics
263 HAC, though it’s undoubtedly the Ishtar coming in #1 these days
315 Tech III Cruiser
Around 245 Battlecruisers (all classes)
About 1450 Battleships (counting only the Tech I)
42 Marauders
15 Blackops Battleships per day (note that this was well before the buff that exploded their popularity)
53 Freighter and just under 7 Jump Freighter
Ammo, Drones and Stuff
29.5m Cruise Missiles and 4.5m Torpedoes
28,300 Trauma Fury Heavy Missile, which gives some insight into how much of a Tech II ammo is built in general when popular.
42 million Trauma Heavy Missile
324 million rounds of ammo, collectively
11,400 ECM Drones of various types
30,200 Hobgoblin I and 15,220 Hammerhead I
11,300 Hobgoblin II
158,000 drones.
14,800 Interdiction Probe
A little over 27,000 scanner probes of all types
960 anchored bubbles, of which the majority (496) were small. Exercise to the reader to decide how much that’s risen given the proliferation of renters since that tweet.
Modules
Nearly 5,000 Damage Control II
4300 Gyrostabilizer II, surprisingly beating out Ballistic Control System IIs
Over 40,000 425mm Railgun I, though that’s for compression… figure those go away.
62,300 Tech III Subsystems
4900 Expanded Cargohold II
Miscellaneous
13.5m Fuel Blocks, though with 2.8m of them in nullsec and 1.61m of them in W-Space, the actual count would be more like 9.11m units.
This devblog has an additional series of numbers which are generalized but nevertheless useful. Convert them into hourly numbers and we get:
495 Shuttles
9400 Tech I frigates and 1940 Tech II Frigates
2640 Tech I Cruisers, 811 Tech II Cruisers, and 315 Tech III Cruisers
2530 Tech I Battlecruisers and a paltry 96 Command Ships
2050 Tech I Industrials, 163 Tech II Industrials
1420 Destroyers, and an additional 154 Interdictors
1450 Tech I Battleships, 57 Tech II
712 Tech I Mining Barge, 288 Exhumers
Plenty of stuff missing here as well, such as “almost every module.” No matter, we’ll work with what we’ve got. For Tech I ships assume PE5, for Tech II a generous PE-1, with the Tech I ship removed from the build time for the Tech II.
That winds up being 9,021 days worth of production per day churned out, as it happens, just for the hulls. And since we’re pretending everything is going to be in nullsec now, throw in as many as three Supercarriers and two Titans, as well as 65 carriers, 22 Dreadnaughts and 6 Rorquals a day. There’s another five thousand or so production days per day.
Ammo adds, collectively, around six thousand days (and that’s assuming all ammo built in the game is Tech I), drones around 440 days (ditto). We haven’t even tried to account for modules yet and we’re up to almost twenty thousand production-days per day. Speaking of modules, how long do you suppose it takes to build the fit for, say, a CFC “Baltec” Megathron? 2 days, 9 hours, if we assume PE0. That’s 17 times longer than the hull itself. Make the (absurdly incorrect, I will grant) assumption that every Tech I ship built also has a set of Tech II modules built at a similar time ratio, and you’ve got a ballpark for modules: over 25,000 production-days per day.
That’s pure supposition, though, so we’ll just focus on the hulls, ammo and drones. What’s it take to move all of this product that’s supposedly moving to nullsec?
THE LOGISTICS
Moving the finished products for all the subcap hulls above is 283,018,000m3. That’s 717 trips per day in a max skill Rhea, roughly one every two minutes, all day, every day. If your typical trip is two jumps as mine is, that’s 30k isotopes per round trip, about 21.5m units per day or roughly a quarter of what was mined around this time in 2011 assuming nothing but Rheas… of course, that quantity was before CCP nuked ice in highsec and changed the mechanics. 21.5b isk a day of fuel, though considering the product being moved is at least 600 billion isk in value, that’s not really all that much.
Incidentally, it’s fortunate that slots are going away, seeing as occupying 18,000 slots 24/7 to build everything but supercaps might actually be more build slots than nullsec has, total.
Let’s Talk People
All these numbers are great, but how many characters are actually involved in industry? Putting that another way, just to remind you of who I’m ridiculing here, how many characters are the whiners & lunatics claiming will have to move out to null?
One could argue that since one character is good for ten-production days per day, as they’ve got ten slots. Thus, a mere two thousand characters can build every hull, round of ammo and drone in EVE, if they keep their slots active 24/7. Given the unwillingness or inability to stop and think, some of the hysterics might even try to claim this is a trivial feat, so as to make their position seem more plausible.
Unfortunately for them, there is plenty of evidence that far more characters than that are involved in industry. Hell, Tech II BPO owner count alone suggests that’s a silly idea. And of course, that last devblog that was mentioned earlier.
WHAT REALLY HAPPENS THEN
Simple. Plenty of industry continues to happen in highsec. In nullsec, alliances fighting on home turf or with access to the infrastructure to make it worthwhile will build some of what they need, most notably battleships. On a non-official level, industrialists willing to build in nullsec find their profit margins considerably larger. Some who consider themselves market savvy might even try to use that to control their niche in the market. Some may even succeed, especially in particularly small niches. On the other hand, attempts to take down & control markets will be opposed by traders in Empire, who will see the undercut markets as a profit center. By and large, life will go on as it always has, minus, perhaps, the few mewling quims who actually follow through on their threats to quit.
Eh. Nah, we won’t be so lucky as that. Almost no one actually follows through.
Note: This post is written in the full knowledge of every devblog yet to be posted. None of them change a damn thing I wrote here.
The Third N 