Eve Planetary Interaction

So the different ways that you can setup your PI structure in EVE are fairly varied but there's something I've noticed.

It seems there's little (no?) reason to do PI on anything other than Enriched Uranium right now... At least at the, "I'm going to built a tier 2 item from scratch and sell it" level. Enriched Uranium can only be built on Plasma planets and requires Heavy and Noble Metals. In high-sec, there's generally enough to keep 1.5 Advanced Processor's going non-stop (technically, you'll be running 2 non-stop then 1 non-stop etc). You need to be able to log in twice a day and do 12 hour cycles (there's some leeway here depending on the planet and if you can pad your output with a couple 1 hour cycles at night or something).

Running 1.5 on 5 planets (what most people have the training tolerance to handle) results in output of 5*5*24*1.5 = 900 enriched uranium per day. At about 10k apiece, that's about 9mil per day or 270mil per month. About half a plex. In theory, you could do that on all three of your characters on one account and fairly comfortable generate a plex per month (even if you dropped down to doing 24 hour cycles and thus were only doing 1 advanced factory non-stop, you'd still be at ~540mil per month which essentially covers a plex.

The yields for everything else are pretty poor. Particularly alarming are the stupidly low prices on Polyaramids, Silicate Glass and Microfiber Shielding. Those three require two planets to produce (making them less productive and incurring higher import/export costs) and yet they cost about half as much as enriched uranium (they also rely on P0 inputs that are the rarest in hi-sec).

With some work, you could probably find a cluster of plasma planets in low-sec that could yield 2-3 advanced processing facilities simultaneously (note, to get to 3, I think you need Command Center Upgrades 5 which is upward of 20 days). A hypothetical "master" PI person could have (again, in theory), 3 characters, 6 planets, 3 advanced processors for a combined yield of about $2billion per month. Those kind of numbers would take a lot of work (short cycles managed relatively frequently as well as jumps into low-sec to grab the goods every few days) but they illustrate the point remarkably well. Enriched Uranium is where the action's at. Unless you've found a working model with high end PI, stick with the low-end stuff and help make everyone's POS's just a little bit cheaper (btw, the market for enriched uranium is enormous. There are 3.5million buy orders in Jita with the regional hubs also showing over 1million each).