Continuing the first part of this guide, this portion explains the details of manufacturing tech two missiles from blueprint copies. Specifically, Scourge Fury Heavy Missiles, the invention of which has been described in a previous guide. This guide also takes a look at the costs and profits involved with their production, and offers advice for boosting your profit margins.

A Brief Recap

Briefly, for those that might not initially be interested in a missile-making project, the idea is as follows: Scourge Fury Heavy Missiles are the most popular tech two ammunition, with up to twenty million sold in Jita, alone, each day. Inventing and making them is a good way to use invention and manufacturing slots, particularly because tech two ammunition takes a long time to complete during the build phase. This means that you, the player, only need to check in every few days to keep the operation running.

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style="font-style: italic;">Scourge Fury missiles are such a lucrative and resilient market that you would have to be crazy to not make them.

This portion of the guide assumes that you have already obtained the blueprint copies necessary to build scourge fury missiles. For more details about the invention process and otherwise, check out the first half of this guide.

Skill Requirements

As an advanced ammunition type, scourge furies also have some additional skill requirements in order to make them, with some additional training needed if you want to earn the most ISK possible from the project.

In order to actually make the missiles from their blueprint, you need to train Graviton Physics I. But in order to make one of the ingredients (if you are into saving as many costs as you can, and you should be) you need to train that skill to level III.

You will also need the Industry skill trained to V in order to manufacture the missiles.

Special Ingredients

Like all tech two items, there are some unusual ingredients involved, beyond mere asteroid minerals. Let's discuss them:

Graviton Pulse Generator: A tech two component, made from several kinds of moon minerals. You can buy the blueprint original in order to supply yourself but be warned that researching it involves some painful skills. It is better to buy the part in Jita, or ideally, an already researched blueprint original off a contract. If you have the blueprint, the ingredient materials can be obtained in Jita easily enough.

Morphite: The tech two mineral, it is found in the rare Mercoxit asteroids, which are sprinkled sparsely throughout some parts of outlaw space.

Phenolic Composites: A material made from several reacted moon minerals. It can be bought in Jita easily enough. Be sure to use buy orders, rather than sell orders.

R.A.M. - Ammunition Tech: A special item that is damaged each time you use it. You will need several for each batch of missiles, and some will be completely consumed. Partially used R.A.M.s can be repaired and re-used. Buy a blueprint original for these, as you will go through them like candy.

Rocket Fuel: A planet-made commodity. You can buy these at a market hub, or make them yourself on a planet. They can be kind of expensive, so it might be worth looking into making these if you are interested in being a planeteer. Indeed, it can be produced with just a single storm planet, though multiple planets worth of production will probably be needed in order to supply your needs.

The Production Job

Checking to make sure that you have all of the ingredients assembled couldn't be easier. Just attempt a manufacturing job with maximum runs, and see what you come up short of. Your exact needs will vary depending on what your production skills are, but having "Production Efficiency" trained to V is not especially difficult, and will make the entire process so much more lucrative that it is silly to embark on this endeavor without it. All serious industrialists have trained it and this is a business model intended for serious industrialists. That being said, you can probably still turn a profit with production efficiency IV, but throughout this article my maths will assume that it is trained all the way.

Initial Investment Costs

Since the manufacturing is so straightforward, I think it useful to compile some shopping lists for the invention and production phases, and then to examine their costs vis a vis their profits.

Here is your shopping list to get started inventing and manufacturing scourge furies, and what I expect their price to be. I have not included very common skills like Industry and so forth. Please pardon my humble accountant shorthand of prices, which I think most readers will find more legible than strings of zeroes.

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style="font-style: italic;">Many of the expenditures involved in inventing Scourge Fury Heavy Missiles are one-time costs.

Skills:

• Hacking (550k)
• Caldari Encryption Methods (355k)
• Electronic Engineering (10mil)
• Rocket Science (10mil)
• Graviton Physics (10mil)

Invention Items:

• Esoteric Data Interface (850k, re-usable)
• x1 Datacore - Electronic Engineering (235k each, one used per invention attempt)
• x1 Datacore - Rocket Science (115k each, one used per invention attempt)
• x1 Caldari Navy Scourge Heavy Missile (1.2k each, one used per invention attempt)

10-Run Production Ingredients (assuming Production Efficiency trained to V):

• Scourge Fury Heavy Missile Blueprint Copy (you should have invented these)
• x135 Graviton Pulse Generator (23.5k each)
• x15 R.A.M.- Ammunition Tech (30k each)
• x450 Megacyte (2.3k each)
• x75 Morphite (4k each)
• x330 Nocxium (227 each)
• x180 Phenolic Composites (420 each)
• x1,260 Rocket Fuel (7k each)
• x151,680 Tritanium (2.25 each)

Optional Blueprint Purchases

• R.A.M.- Ammunition Tech Blueprint (330k)
• Scourge Heavy Missile Blueprint (825k)
• Graviton Pulse Generator Blueprint (4.5mil)

All ingredients are priced in Jita as of this writing and are rounded liberally. The optional blueprints are suggested in order to significantly reduce costs.

Some Totalled Costs

The total for the initial one-time investment items, including skills and the data interface, is 37.76mil ISK.

The total for each invention attempt (excluding blueprint costs) is about 466,000 ISK.

The total production cost 10-run of scourge fury heavy missiles is 14,269,290 ISK.

Invention Cost Analysis

All right, so you have seen that there are some annoying skills to train, and a number of expensive ingredients and now you want to know about the bottom line. Let's talk about the invention cost, first. The formula is as follows:

• (BPC Cost + Total Datacore Cost + Additional Ingredient Cost) / Success Chance = Cost Per Invented BPC Run

The success chance should be mathematically expressed as a fraction. So if you had a 25% success chance, it would plug into the formula as .25 in order to get an accurate result. Sometimes math is weird like that.

If your skills are trained to level IV, as I recommend, and you include the extra missile in the ingredients, you will end up with a 52.69% chance of success. So your cost per invented blueprint copy will be something like the following:

• (10,000 + 350,000) / .5269 = 683,242 ISK per 10-run blueprint copy.

This is pretty cheap, compared to many other invention jobs.

The Many Maths Of Profit

We have seen that each blueprint copy of our missile of choice costs about 683k ISK per successful attempt, under reasonably ideal circumstances. It has also been shown that fully manufacturing said blueprint will cost about 14.27mil ISK for all ten batches, though this can be reduced greatly through additional blueprint purchases that are not especially expensive, by re-using spare R.A.M.s, and by using buy orders to obtain ingredients rather than purchasing directly off the market.

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style="font-style: italic;">The final result of all this is an income stream nearly sufficient to pay for one's EVE subscription (via PLEX cards).

Each run of the blueprint copy will produce 5,000 scourge fury missiles. Thus, creating a 10-run blueprint copy and bringing it to full fruition, assuming no savings in any of the areas above, will cost about 14.95mil ISK and produce a total of 50,000 missiles, plus negligible production costs.

This all results in a final cost of about 299.06 ISK per missile. The missile itself retails for about 480isk per missile, in Jita, which is a pretty hefty profit for such little work. That price can be inflated by selling on-site in mission hubs, popular null-sec stations, or other areas that are a bit off the beaten track.

Of Dollars And Sense

It should be noted that all of the prices above assume a more or less worst-case scenario, where things are bought off the market at unreduced prices, and no savings are achieved at all. Even under these circumstances, you should still be making a profit of about 180.94 ISK per missile, or 9,047,000 ISK per 10-run batch. Not too shabby considering that all you need to do is train the skills and make sure that you do not run out of the ingredients or pay too much for them. Because of the huge demand for them, it is unlikely that the market will become saturated, even with the publishing of this article.

Furthermore, assuming that you had nine production slots doing this, more or less constantly, that would turn out a profit of 81.4mil ISK every four days or so. Even if you take a more lackadaisical attitude and only turn them over every week, that is still an extra 325.6mil ISK each month with very little real work involved, aside from moving ingredients and selling the product. Not too shabby, when you realize that most of your EVE time is still freed up and available for other ISK-generating (or fun-generating) projects.

Final Thoughts

EVE Online is an ever-changing game. The price of ingredients for these missiles could go up, or demand could go down, especially if too many people decide to start making them. The ISK is just too darn good, and the process too darn easy, for it to stay so lucrative, indefinitely, even with the absurd amount traded on the market, each day.

The hard parts are not in the production itself, but rather in spotting the opportunity (I did that for you), training all of the initial skills, and assembling all of the ingredients. With some thoughtful market analysis you should be able to spot some similar opportunities along the same lines, though perhaps with not quite so high a demand. Get creative, and don't be afraid to make a spreadsheet and follow some hunches or at least do the math involved to see whether you have noticed a gold mine or not. EVE Online is all about those hunches, take it from me.