Gearing up for manufacturing

So, today after doing my trade run, I finally found some time to do some initial set up for my manufacturing.

I created my new character for this on the 22nd, a week ago, and since then he has been doing nothing but training skills. He currently has Industry IV, training V, Laboratory Operation IV, Science IV, and a bunch of other general skills like warp drive operation.

All in all at the moment he has access to 5 lab slots and 1 manufacturing slot. Not exactly inspiring, but this will improve quite quickly. I'm not skilling in perhaps the optimal way, but I'll get there in the end.

Meanwhile I've done some browsing for what to manufacture. How I did it is pretty ad-hoc. I went to Fuzzwork's blueprint calculator and scrolled through some options.

I've decided that I'm pretty keen on building citadels and related modules, but building citadels requires the "Outpost construction" skill, which I do not yet have. As part of my trading however I've noticed that citadel rigs can be transported from Jita and sold at a good profit. I therefore had a look at those, and found that most can actually be produced and sold in Jita for a profit, at ME 0. This is pretty unexpected, but welcome. At ME 10 most of them pay for the blueprint with a single run! The blueprints are 100mil each, so not too expensive either. A Raitaru for comparison is 4Bn!

I've therefore bought 5 rig blueprints for medium citadels (the most common ones in highsec) and set them to research:

It'll take about a month each for them to hit ME10, so I might find something else to build in the meantime, but these seem like they'll be nice little earners until I get the skills to build outposts, and am willing to front the pretty high startup capital to build them. The good news is most citadels, despite the high start up cost, are profitable to produce even buying the components off the market. If you build your own they're very profitable! I definitely think this is the way to go for me, as I can't really guarantee a log on every day, or even more than once or twice a week!

In terms of accounting for these, I'm recording the NPC price of the BPOs on my spreadsheet. I know a researched blueprint can sell for more, but market conditions can change that, and I can always guarantee NPC sell price for them, so that's how I'm valuing them.

I've never found a blog of anyone building citadels, so I'll try and record my thoughts and processes as I go along, for posterity if nothing else. A new chapter for my money making!