The Economics of Badgers

Some weeks back I put up a post about how long material efficiency was going to take for my new venture into ship building.

Eventually the 49 days elapsed.

My blueprint was in hand.

I had materials stored away for production

I was ready to commence production.

I was going into the business of Badgers.

I chose that lowly Caldari industrial ship, the first hauler for so many people, because:

• The blueprint original (BPO) was cheap for a ship
• They seemed to sell well
• The price seemed to be stable and at a level where I could make a profit

The last bit was, of course, the most important. If I was going to invest in a BPO, I wanted to be able to make my money back.

The BPO itself was 3,138,750 ISK.

Researching to Material Efficiency level 12 on the BPO added 2,278,836 ISK to the investment.

So my initial investment was 5,417,586 ISK, plus 49 days of waiting.

Fortunately, the market stayed stable while the research went on.

Materials and manufacturing cost per Badger, based on current mineral prices:

ME 0 – 348,720 ISK
ME 12 – 306,196 ISK

So the 49 day wait was worth over 40K ISK per Badger produced, which ends up being a pile of tritanium on a production run of 15 ships.

My selling price for Badgers is 540,000 ISK, which turns a tidy 231,104 ISK per ship sold.

Which meant that I had to sell 24 Badgers to get back my initial investment.

I have already sold 40.

So, if nothing else, Badgers have made me some money.

Of course, there have been some challenges.

I only noticed after my first production run that a packaged Badger is 20K cubic meters in size. That is more space than any of my haulers can handle.

The next size up in hauling from an industrial is a freighter. While I am a mere two hours training time from flying a freighter, the cost to buy both the ship and the skills runs to the 1 billion ISK mark. I just have to sell about 4,400 more Badgers to get there.

With a freighter not an option for now, I have had to improvise and build where I plan to sell.

I load up the BPO and all the materials for a 15 ship production run, fly off to the neighborhood in which I want to sell, and start producing on location.

I have thus, established myself in the ship building business. Plus I am sure I could sell the BPO for quite a mark up if I tire of production. There seems to be a pretty steady market for BPOs with some material efficiency research on them.

I wonder though, with the removal of NPC sold shuttles, if I should go into the shuttle business as well?