T1 Salvage

So I got thinking. Dangerous, I know. Wouldn't it be nice if I could make rigs in w-space out of local resources instead of having to ship them in...

Then my brain goes: wait a sec, player ships are salvageable...

You can see where this is going. But not being the cautious EVE industrialist that I am I decided to experiment first. I also didn't remember what was the salvage situation of shuttles. So the night before last I whipped up:

10 x Amarr Shuttle
10 x Caldari Shuttle
10 x Gallente Shuttle
10 x Minmatar Shuttle
10 x Bantam
10 x Burst
10 x Navitas
10 x Tormentor

Then using my Orca and an alt (to speed things up) I flew out to a safespot and started blowing up jettisoned hulls. Using drones. Pro tip: make sure you're using small drones - preferably T2. The main reason is that this DPS does burn through any ammunition.

A certain amount of time later (the alt can target 7 things at once and has 5 salvagers on my default dessy salvager fit. Having recorded the results...

Off to the spreadsheet Batman!

And the results after plugging in the numbers (based on last week's values for both ore and salvage), were interesting.

First up the Shuttles. I had forgotten that they only salvage to Metal Scraps. Exactly one per shuttle. End result: Shuttles cost me about 7900 isk per shuttle when built in batches of 10. Between the insurance (2000 isk by default) and the tritanium from the Metal Scraps (493 in my case due to tax at the station I was using). It worked out to a net loss on the shuttles. I won't be using shuttles again.

Then it was the turn of the frigates. Well! The results were not what I was expecting. I did get salvage. Not to mention Alloyed Tritanium Bars, Armor Plates and Melted Capacitor Consoles. The end result on this little experiment is I ended up with goods worth more than the goods I started with. Including the shuttles it was a 78% profit which is highly respectable percentage, if lousy per slot per hour. Sticking to Matari and Amarr frigates it could even be quite profitable depending on the final salvage percentage (I'd need to blow up thousands of frigates to get decent data to figure out the salvage percentages per salvage per specific hull). BUT, and it's a big "but", There were NO circuits...

The 4 circuit salvages are the bread and butter high quantity salvage from NPC rats. Should this pattern hold for larger frigates and, say, cruisers (and I think it will), then there will be no way I can build these types of frigates in wormhole space and get the drops necessary to build rigs. This is because every rig out there uses circuits as part of it's recipe. So although it's good that you can profit from blowing up frigates by the metric tonne, the lack of a reason to do so (except pure profit) mean that I won't be using this technique to fill my rig needs in wormholes.

I'm going to blow up a bunch more to see if the pattern holds or it was just stupid unlucky. I may try a stack of 10 Rifters and 10 Scythes at some point just to see if it also applies to larger Frigates and Cruisers.